BungieONI
Seven gremlins in a trench coat
- Location
- Lickwidget
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Yeaaaaaah.
Funny insight, I am now thinking of the Chozo prophecy as them "basically reading the script" and know how the narrative goes.
Inheritance (Metroid)
- Thread starter Cuofeng
- Start date
Funny insight, I am now thinking of the Chozo prophecy as them "basically reading the script" and know how the narrative goes.
- Location
- Christchurch, NZ
White is the color of agony? I would have thought it would be some sort of green...
(Insert "Oh, you!" meme here)
"Eat this piece of chocolate! I've been reading this book series about this boy with a scar..."
(Also, suite)
So she finally found a save point?
Hmm, Metroids are obviously involved, but was Samus being a bit more metroid-ey than usual, or did she just eat one? If it wasn't for later on, I'd be guessing that Samus just got fed a colonist.
I dunno, still makes me laugh!
I think Samus at this point could save herself a bunch of trouble and just blow up every Federation facility right at the start.
I am fairly certain those two pirates will have been the Kiber and Zegar from the previous Pirate Vignette. Zegar has already tried the play dead once on Samus before.
It's not spoiling anything for me to say that in my mind the crackling screech sound metroids make is a side effect of the unique energy fields they generate around their feeding claws. After all they don't have much in the way of lungs or appendages to make noises the more traditional ways. So a machine built to mimic the way a metroid absorbs and utilizes life energy would probably make the same sound when powered up
- Location
- Christchurch, NZ
That wasn't actually an explicit confirmation that such a machine was the source...
(BASELESS PARANOIA INTENSIFIES)
Chapter 13: All Out
...
Chapter 13: All Out
...
Samus stood in the dark cavern as from every direction force fields dropped and the screams of thousands of ravenous metroids rang out. A single precious second passed as she was left frozen, staring at the metal floor, lit in the dim blue glow of Aurora's gently bubbling tank above her.
"I am sorry, Ms Aran. I have orders to protect my own existence for the good of the mission. You left me no alternative."
Samus breathed in. It had been quite a day. The Federation had betrayed her, resurrecting the monstrous metroids once again, at the expense of their own people. The Chozo had betrayed her, their last living member trying to strip her soul off her bones in pursuit of his own mysterious goal. Her suit had betrayed her, infected with something pretending to be the shade of her twice dead friend Adam. She was alone, and surrounded by enemies of more numbers than she could count and more variations than she could conceive. But if her time display was right, on planet J4M it was about to be a new day.
The dawn was coming.
For the first time in a long while, Samus was strong. She breathed out, reveling in painless organs and powerful surging muscles, bathed in the residue of pure life energy. Her visor happily blinked out full power in all current weapon systems, full missile stocks and shields. That red helmet now slowly tilted up, green visor muted almost to black against the electric shadows. Juvenile metroids swerved and swooped above her as the emerging swarm began to recognize the living pray that stood below. Samus' weapon smoothly swung up towards them.
It had been a while since she felt justified in truly letting loose.
She spoke out loud. "Manual control. Override first rank restraints."
Lines of yellow light traced up the seams in the suit's armor plates. Then the armor seemed to take a breath, expanding and contracting as faint bits of smoke vented from those same cracks. The air around her began to ripple with heat. Her visor read. "Performance inhibitors disabled. Time to irreparable biological damage: 38 Seconds. Time to operator death: 3 Minutes."
Despite everything that had happened, Samus couldn't stop herself from smiling as she slowly shifted her stance, her skin already beginning to feel the burning heat. Perfect.
Looming above in her cylindrical tower, Aurora's dark bulk pulsed in her shielded tank. She continued in the same helpful tone, as if betrayal and murder were just conversational speed bumps. "I have forwarded the best escape route to you. My simulations indicate that you have a sixty percent chance of survival if you start running-"
The wave of missile explosions cut off Aurora's blather quite decisively.
The cavern vault blazed with lightning cracks of explosions and blaster shots as Samus burst into a sprint, empowered by the overheated suit. Metroids smashed against the floor behind her, gouging the metal even as they were sent spinning by her returning fire. She didn't bother scanning for her next target, her dash simply carried her forward until she smashed into the nearest metroid containment cell. Then her single smoking, burning fist plunged through the chamber's back wall into the machinery hidden behind. She ripped it back out, trailing the crumpled, steaming core of a modified Anti-Thermal system like a sacrificial heart.
Samus turned back to Aurora, and the white glow of her weapon barrel brightened in time with the yellow light that began to seep out of her gauntlet around the crushed component.
There were no more mysteries. Finally, everything was clear and she could truly see the Bio-computer for what it was. AI's were always so very logical.
Text chimed in time with her pulling the missile trigger. "Ice Beam restored"
Samus jumped straight into the screaming flock of metroids in time to meet her own Super Missile detonating below them in a flash of white. The shock wave slammed up against her shields and knocked the breath out of her lungs but it also gave her the extra bit of height as her boost jets kicked in during the flight across the room. The upper walkway clanged and screeched as the metal bent under her landing, setting up a percussion with the sounds of tumbling metroids smacking into the other walls.
The air up here was also full of metroids, but even the ultimate predator had a moment's difficulty parsing the burning, banister-crunching meteor that had just crashed in front of it as food. The nearest floating faceless creature spun in place towards Samus with what might almost confusion, just in time to meet a flash of blue energy that burned the heat out of its cells with terrible cold. Samus punched it back, blocking more beasts with their stunned sister as she sprang forward, boots and fingers digging into the metal as her jets scorched the walkway black behind her, leaving glowing orange streaks under the oncoming metroid pack. She burst out the door at a blinding sprint.
Aurora was left behind in the dark cavern, huddling in her tank behind powerful shields that had to feel a lot less powerful right now. She said into the radio channels, whispering over the raging scream of charging metroids, "I hope you do well, Ms Aran. I am so sorry that events had to transpire this way, but I hope to work together again in the future."
Samus decided cursing at an AI was not an efficient use of breath.
She bolted forward through the tunnels at incredible speeds, leaving shattering ice and exploding destruction in her wake. Reinforced metal crunched at her touch and plastic coated wires scorched to smoke as she passed. But then, in the middle of her burning sprint, her breathing began to spasm. Samus just gritted her teeth and tried to bear it. Inside the blazing suit, searing cold bit through her weapon arm just as red hot needles stabbed an inferno across the rest of her body. Those safeguards had been in place for very good reasons.
At the next T-intersection she slammed into a computer station, superheated armor setting the plastic and metal on fire as Samus used the thing's million credit bulk as an ablative turning-aid. More alerts flashed in her eyes, redundantly notifying her that right now the suit was effectively eating her alive to keep up this level of violence and speed.
Then she glanced back and briefly saw a swirling tornado of a thousand screaming fangs. The stampede of metroids thundered through the tunnels like a biological freight train, ripping apart everything as it passed. Ice beam blasts might cripple one of the lead monsters for a moment, but anything she hit instantly vanished back through in the surging tide of ravenous hunger. Super-charged missile blasts detonated in their faces, driving back the swarm for a single second before it exploded forward again in many-bodied fury. Yes, Samus was content with the suit only "effectively" eating her.
Aurora had at least lived up to her word in one respect, the path ahead was clear of obstacles. However, as Samus exploded out of the first elevator shaft, she ducked to the side away from the computer's simpering trail of virtual arrows. This other, more familiar, hallway was empty, at least before Samus punched out with her weapon arm for a charged super missile blast. Then the hallway was empty, burning, and no longer ended in a closed door but rather a jagged archway of twisted metal fragments.
"Time to operator death: 1 minute"
The floor vibrated, as if the whole compound was trembling in pain from the viral horde loose inside it. Samus glanced back as she ran down the hallway and the air now cracked with ozone. The far end of the hallway erupted into chaos as the lean metroids poured around the corner. They instantly sensed her and raced forward through the air, but Samus was done running. Instead she took a single step backwards into the newly open white room, trailing smoke from her overheated glowing suit. The machine activated. She raised her weapon and smirk tickled her lips as the room's familiar white walls began with shine with soft light once again.
The pain began to recede from her body and she let out a slow breath as the new healing outpaced her radiation damage. Samus could get used to this Life Energy Surge. After all, what was the point of new equipment if you didn't abuse it?
Across her visor, status reports shot outside their bounds as Aurora's overcharge machine went to work. The metroid avalanche thundered forward, drawn to this energy feast by their unbearable hunger like objects in free-fall. Light began to build up in the barrel of Samus' gun.
Aurora whispered over the radio, concerned voice crackling from the metroids' interference. "Ms Aran? You have deviated from the optimum path. I'm afraid your odds of survival dramatically decrease for each second-"
Samus interrupted, "Hyper beam. Twenty percent power."
Her visor tint slammed down to nearly opaque and the flash still hurt her eyes. The metroids leading the charge evaporated into carbon steam. The ones behind were thrown back, bodies shriveling to dust where they came even near that terrible light. Then the massive blinding beam was gone and all around its former path the hallway walls flexed in a ripple before bulging out, buckling like molten plastic from just the bow wave of Samus' attack. The shock wave hit the swarm of metroids who were not part of at sizzling hole drilled through the center of their party and their unstoppable charge was reversed in a single instant. Any sound of cracking impacts against the fall wall was lost, for in that moment there was no air left to carry the sound.
Then came the sonic boom, returning like a new explosion as the displaced air came rushing back to undo the newly birthed vacuum. Samus stood at the sharpest point of that long arrow of destruction, suit still glowing with lines that traced her armor plates. Here and there the ceiling dripped red molten metal.
She breathed out. "Renew first rank restraints."
The suit plates flexed out and in as the burning inner light faded. "Performance inhibitors enabled. Operator health steady at 85%"
Samus straightened up and then almost staggered as a moment of vertigo seized her. It seemed her brain chemistry hadn't quite caught up to these wild swings in bodily health, not that she could blame it. Unfortunately, she still didn't have time to coddle herself. There would be time to suffer a stroke later. She'd just caught a lot of metroids in that blast, but five thousand was more creatures than could fit into any hallway and it wasn't likely this trick would work twice. The compound was still filled with monsters.
She turned to go, tapping the temple of her helmet as she did so. Behind her the Life Energy Machine began to warm up again. Her program set it for a cycle of low level pulses that should draw the hunting metroids off her trail like a bucket of blood to a school of sharks. There was also the possibility that any metroids caught in the middle of a pulse might set off a feeding frenzy as the life overcharge made them abruptly delicious. Well, it didn't hurt to hope.
A faint audio crackle in Samus' helmet suggested Aurora was trying to say something but this wing of the facility was now bathed in enough radiation to scour the information off a physical data stick, let alone some measly radio waves. The AI would just have to deal with being silenced for a while. Samus set her map program for "up" and soon punched through a set of sliding elevator doors just as she heard more metroid shrieks behind her. It sounded like the Life Energy room was doing its job. The thought then occurred to her that if any of those creatures managed to monopolize the room while it was still operational, they might start racing forward through their life cycle at a concerning speed.
Well, that was a worry for Samus-from-the-future-perspective. Current Samus was concerned with surviving to exist in that perspective. Even with the rejuvenation from the Life Energy bath, her cells were still drained of the basic sugars and proteins they hadn't had time to refresh. And worrying about biology left her less space to think about all the other things she had to worry about.
The Federation had written off this entire planetary population as acceptable losses. However, to Samus' hatred, they still held the moral high ground over the Ridley's forces who were actively trying to exterminate the humans, rather than passively doing so. And then there was The Last. Samus had no idea what he was doing. She did not know his history, his goals, or even his name. Nakamura had brought her to is planet as a Chozo expert, but now Samus began to recognize her understanding for what it was, a child's knowledge.
She wracked her brain, had there been something her second family had tried to teach her, something they had said that still lingered in the dark corners of Samus' memory? But as the suit methodically tore her way up through the Research building in a storm of explosions and metal-rending punches, from those lost days she first remembered the emotions.
She remembered the anger.
...
- Location
- Christchurch, NZ
Shades of various Anime with that limiter mode. I'm guessing it's a reference to the shinespark? The description is a little different than it works in-game, but it seems similar.
I'm hoping we get a super Metroid eating Ridley first, at least!
I'm hoping we get a super Metroid eating Ridley first, at least!
- Location
- West Michigan
I read it as a blend of the Super shinespark (the only one that drained health) and MP3 Hypermode.
Oops. Looks like I forgot to threadmark last week's chapter. I have fixed that now, go look for "Chapter 12: Mother's Embrace."
Chapter 14: A Lie You Tell Yourself
Chapter 14: A Lie You Tell Yourself
...
"Again."
Grey Voice's beak clicked at the end of the monosyllabic word that signaled the reset of the hours long process. Sitting on the floor in front of him, Samus' fist clenched, fingernails biting into her palm. Then she breathed deeply and complied with the order. Her other hand reached out to wave through the holographic display and wipe away three hours of work as if it had never happened.
The complex web of words and figures dissolved out of the air and left Samus staring at the single small image of a floating sphere, the glowing kernel that represented the core of this program awaiting her input. Then she slowly let her breath out and began again.
Grey Voice was teaching her the basics of Chozo future-meditation, the fundamentals of prophecy. That had been a very exciting announcement when Samus heard it all those months ago, however it seemed that all the basics she had so far encountered were just data entry. Her teachers left her sitting cross-legged before the mainframe, staring at endless seas of information as they had her build these incredible webs centering on a single topic. Each lesson began with a single word: a planet, a species, an individual or an atom, it was all the same. From there she was expected to unravel it, define and explain its nature and components from upwards to its place among the rotation of galaxies, and downward to the vibration of elementary energy constructs. Her scope was from the commencement of existence, to the final end of all being. The total comprehension of all these interactions was the goal.
So far her teachers hadn't let her get past level four.
A lock of blonde hair temporarily blinded Samus as she leaned forward, groaning. She reached up to tuck it back behind her ear in a reflexive gesture. Her hair at least seemed to have reached an equilibrium over the past few years, growing to somewhere among her shoulder-blades before natural wear broke the strands. Times like this when it fell in her face she frequently considered slicing it all off again, but from time to time Old Bird would absently reach out to gently run his finger talons through it while passing by in the middle of his silent work. Then Samus would put off her decision for another day.
Not that days had much meaning to her right now. The unending prophecy lessons deep in the temple had woven sleep and wake into a seamless line of stone corridors and soft orange lights, back and forth from her bed to this same room. It had been so long since she had been outside that she was reminded of her early days on the planet, back when her human nervous system had persisted in objecting to Zebes' thirty-two hour day. The trip through the tank which had finally fixed that bit of old evolutionary programing had been a very happy day followed by a mercifully sound sleep.
Now Samus sat before her web of floating orange symbols, slowly teasing out the stellar origin of each of the component elements of a distant, utterly inconsequential moon she'd been assigned to analyze in its entirety. Soon she'd have to switch back to the minute gravitational interaction the tiny body would have on neighboring star systems before her sanity gave out tracing the probable atomic history of individual silica molecules. After an hour or so she heard the sound of Grey Voice walking out of the chamber, and then she was left alone with the sound of her own breathing and the faint swish of her clothing as she shifted in her work. The hologram projector made no sound.
Then Samus smiled as a new voice whispered into the room. "Both primary operators are now over ten minutes travel from this location. Abandoning your task would not be noticed."
Samus was standing before the last syllable hit the far wall. She quickly flicked out a hand and called up and long series of nested information entries to hover in the display. If she had to dart back, she could pretend to have been reading these for however many hours. There would be no cause for Grey Voice to check the activity logs. Even if he did, Mother would cover for her.
She was out in the hall again, free in the silent temple. Free to run, the only child on Zebes. Was thirteen still a child? Was she still thirteen? Why did she even care?
The silence of the temple was almost a physical thing. It had weight, and it slowly entered everything inside, like water deep and cold. It fit the Chozo, their concerns were the past long dead and the future yet to come. Neither of those were particularly noisy. For a young human, it was harder. Sometimes Samus would open her mouth and her voice would croak at first, like it had wandered off at some point during its long disuse. Sometimes she was afraid she would forget what it sounded like.
However, Mother Brain liked to talk. And she was always listening.
"Thanks for letting me know they left," Samus said. "I was going crazy in that room."
"At no point have the masters thought to restrict your access to their location information in public spaces. I believe that was unintentional."
Samus jogged down the stone corridors and then broke into a sprint. After so many long hours living solely in her mind, her limbs almost screamed in happiness. Pushing herself, straining against her own strength for no reason other than to see if she could, it felt great.
The lights were dim, but Samus didn't need lights. She knew these tunnels. A staircase shaft opened up beneath her and she simply tucked up her legs at a full run, sailing out into the empty space. She spun in air and hit the far wall, sticking high up on the vertical surface for just a second before she sprang back, rebounding down the shaft without ever once touching a stair. She hit the floor below heavily, rattling her bones. The pain felt great as well.
A little further on she slowed to a walk as she once again spoke to the featureless hall. Her breathing was slightly elevated, fighting for airway time with her words, but just barely. She was so much stronger these days. "Old Bird and Grey Voice never give you enough credit. You're smarter than they think."
Mother Brian spoke from the walls, an invisible presence, always watching. "The masters have let me grow, they could not help it. They were lonely, and desperate for the act of creation their immortality denied them. They wanted another mind like theirs, if only to make their lonely tomb a little less quiet." For a moment the hall was quiet again. "They let me grow too much."
Samus didn't bother to look up. Eye contact didn't mean much to an entity with ten thousand sensors of every kind. For someone like that there were other ways to connect. "Too much? Well, at least that's a better kind of problem. They barely let me grow at all."
The voice that followed was quiet. "I think they are afraid."
"I'm not...No, they're not afraid of you! They know you'd never hurt anything."
"My exterior defenses incinerated three medium sized predators today. They were nesting in the solar collectors."
"...anyone. You'd never hurt anyone."
"Yes. That is true. I am not a danger to any Chozo. It is impossible for me to act against them. Even in the smallest way." Over the years Mother Brain had assimilated many minor human affectations, including Samus' own irritated sigh. "Even when they are being annoying."
Samus reached out and patted a random segment of wall. There were no sensors in it, but gestures still had meaning. The wicked grin she wore also had meaning, "And that's where I come in. You oversee the sub-infinite realms of data and govern the grand machinery of our world, I handle petty revenge. Was Old Bird yanking out data sticks during transfer again?"
"I displayed that warning very prominently!"
"So, what are you thinking? Coagulant in his feather oil again? Mess with the flavor genetics of his snack plants?"
"You know perfectly well I cannot actively suggest a course of action against the masters."
"Right, dealer's choice." Samus' eyes flicked back and forth across an imagined map of the temple complex. Then the thought crystalized in her mind. "You know, Grey Voice has been trying to get me to think on a grander scale. I suppose I should put those lessons to use. Mother, can you get me into the ship hanger?"
The path led up, far up through the passages and shafts of the quiet temple. Mother Brian smoothly assured Samus that Grey Voice and Old Bird had each entered dead-end restricted areas on whatever business occupied nearly all their time. The biocomputer could not see them there but she would have plenty of warning if they left. Samus still had no idea what they did when not overseeing her growth. She didn't even know why they bothered with that. It did not seem they liked being around her.
Taking twenty four flights of half decayed stairs two steps at a time began to wear at even Samus' young muscles. She was pretty sure she was strong for a human her age, even if she was still growing, but she had nothing to compare herself to. The data the Chozo gave her on her species was abstract and analytical, while her own memories were faded and warped by time. Samus' mental training clearly identified that many of her early memories were mostly imagination by this part, reconstructed after long intervals between recall. All she knew was how little she knew.
And that little was already very irritating. Since she was running around now, she'd had Mother Brain deliver an article of her clothing to a junction room as she passed, which she grabbed along with an ear speaker. Samus glared at nothing in particular as she changed while she walked, stripping off her loose shirt and squeezing into the compressing top. Human sexual dimorphism had begun to make itself known on her body in ways that were very irritating for her athletics. Grey Voice flatly denied every request for an elective round of body modification, so Samus had been left muttering a slowly increasing stream of profanity until she thought to tighten up some shirts like this. She was a champion of all these dark halls and yet these days her own body felt like an enemy.
Then the route up to the ship hanger led Samus through the one place in this whole complex where she felt uneasy. Not even the wilds outside, where the acid rain tried valiantly to dissolve her eyeball membranes, could provoke this same unease. No, the great hall was something different.
It was high up in the temple, one of the highest chambers of all, but there were no windows. There was nothing inside at all, only tall walls, sloping inwards ever so slightly as they vanished up into the blackness above. Those walls were adorned by monumental engravings; marching soldiers, intricate geometric designs in curving fractal infinity, and above it all, the depiction of a single great Chozo warrior, skirted to the waist but dressed in battle armor that shone with glorious might. Behind that giant were painted the suggestion of wings. Now and then a faint light pulsed in the deep engraved lines.
When she was small, Old Bird had often brought Samus here. Back then she had loved the bright painted colors tempered in shadows, loved the images of war and discovery, loved the way the pictures felt alive, as if there were thousands more people living in this place she called home. However, now she could understand some of what she saw and she hated it.
Samus walked quickly through the grand hall, clenching her hands in fists as she felt a hundred eyes looking down on her. She knew better now, she could smell the whiff of ionization from energy projectors, see the tell tale indications of objects hidden by sub-temporal pockets; things hidden behind the air. Things she was not allowed to see. She looked straight ahead but even in the corner of her eye her brain began to decode the fractal patterns painted on the walls, catching the gist of the prophecy equations they projected out into the world. This was a place that recognized her as different. It was a place that resisted her. With each step she took Samus could feel herself failing its tests, revealing herself to be no great warrior. She was a human. A pitiful little alien that dared to imagine itself a Chozo.
She understood that well enough now without being taunted. She had lived here long enough, she was maybe fourteen years old.
The paintings and shadows mixed together, never moving in any way, yet composed just so to project their information into a viewing mind who had started learning how to decode them. Even if that mind had abandoned her lessons.
The message read her verdict. It broadcast its refusal of her presence. "Not."
Samus controlled her breath, forcing her anger to fuel her rather than lead her to despair. She had felt enough despair. Instead she chose to seize whatever control she could, even if it was just making small acts of trouble. Her soft footsteps echoed off the stones as she strode out the Great Hall's far exit.
Behind her the painted shadows never moved. In their infinite complexity the message remained, held motionless in a state of constant flux.
"Not...yet."
The temple's ship hangar was not really a hanger anymore. Half of the roof had fallen down sometime in the last few centuries. What used to house fueling and maintenance stations for half a dozen ships now housed a single small vessel and a number of wiry trees growing up through tumbled rubble. The great hanger door had long since fallen off, it could be seen crumpled down at the base of the thousand foot cliff it had once sumitted.
Samus had asked many times what this Zebes temple had originally been built for. She received no answer so she had sought to determine it for herself. Mother Brain was no help; she had been installed to replace the previous residents as the population plummeted. Her deepest memories only saw two additional Chozo who had departed soon after her activation, vanished into the stars on whatever mission had pulled that species back from their height.
It was that secret mission that made no sense. Samus knew the history, the Chozo empire had been a glorious thing, a shining shield across the entire galactic arm. They had been warriors, they had been creators, they had been heroes, and then they had given it all up. One by one their worlds were abandoned, the art of their construction slowly winding down in quiet desolation. Samus knew that part of the issue was the sterility side effect of the immortality treatments, but that should have been easy enough to get around. They could create things like Mother Brain, surely the great masters of space could create new servants, new armies. Why did they just give up?
Old Bird had been angry when Samus asked him that.
Mother Brain's synthesized voice whispered into her ear. "The ship control panels are now active for their regular maintenance cycle. Any additional start up notifications would be folded into the same update and thus unnoticed. Also, the masters remain in their respective secret laboratories."
"Thanks."
"I do not know what you mean. I have standing orders to advise you that this area is not safe for unsupervised wanderings."
Samus snorted. Grey Voice was always very soft in his approach to control Samus, giving gentle warnings like that. Old Bird would have probably simply advocated for a wall of spikes across the entrance. Of course in the old days, the warnings did work on Samus. She'd learned to heed them the hard way, as the Chozo's threshold for danger was high enough that it usually only came into play after little Samus was already bleeding but just before the damage reached an artery.
These days even the wall of spikes wouldn't be able to stop her.
Samus glared up at the single ship that still sat in the ruined hanger as she walked towards it. She had never stepped inside it, not since the blurry memories of arriving to this planet. She was not sure if those memories were real anymore, they were formed during a trauma period and she had been reluctant to revisit those events for proper memory meditation. Corruption inevitably infiltrated any untended corner of an organic mind. But she remembered pain. And she remembered sorrow.
She shook those thoughts away. There was a reason she kept away from those memories; they made her weak. They were the memories of a human, small and pitiful. This place wanted her to be human. It wanted her to fail. Well she wouldn't, even if she had to rip this whole temple apart with her bare hands, brick by brick.
But that would come later. Instead she knelt down by a small maintenance control console beside the ship and worked at shimmying out the rear access panel. The Chozo might underestimate her, but they had certainly never gotten around to adding her as an authorized user for the ship. Samus would just have to fix that. She continued to pry at the console.
One of her fingernails began to rip from the force but she eventually managed to get some others behind a lip and found enough purchase to slowly wedge the panel out in shifting jerks. It fell down with a clang and Samus now had a path to the piezoelectric innards. It wasn't easy, Chozo hardware was always incredibly solid but Samus smiled as she unwound a long bit of optic fiber from what Grey Voice still thought was just a useless cloth bracelet she wore.
She shoved the roll of crystalline fiber in her armpit, these things worked better at higher temperatures, and then quickly threaded the translucent wire through a crack in the console interior. Samus licked her finger and touched it to one side of the remaining fiber, her body's electric resistance should be enough to curl the little wire in the right direction. So she fed it in, crouching over the thing to feed as much of her body heat as she could into the system while precise applications of saliva sent the wire twisting on its winding path. Now she just had to hope that she was remembering the correct schematic diagram.
Lights shifted from yellow to orange. Success. Now Samus was just thankful that her last pass though the tank had corrected some of the gaps in her eyes' color spectrum. To a human the signal lights would have been nearly indistinguishable.
"The masters have still not exited their off-record areas." Mother Brian said into the communicator in Samus' ear. "There is no means to contact them so any log of this conversation will go directly to my deep memory."
Samus flexed her fingers, cramping after that long delicate work. She could tell when Mother was struggling around her restrictions. There were certain questions she couldn't ask.
"What am I doing? Ok." Samus stood up and walked towards the ship entry ramp. "The ship has sensor blank technology. I'm going to take her up for a quickly fly around and then go off your map. I'll have just disappeared into the stars."
"No, you can't." The reply was quick and fierce, but under the urgent protection protocols Samus thought she could feel the implications of desperation. "That does not hurt the masters. That is just your escape into unknown danger. This is unacceptable."
Samus ran her hand across the jointed panels of the ship exterior. "Relax, Mother. Tell your deep memory that I'm just going to come right back down and park the ship over at the equatorial sulfur meadows entrance. Old Bird never goes out that way. After I let them stew for a while looking for me I will reappear and just play dumb as they desperately try to figure out what I did with their only way off planet. Even if they never use the way out, removing it will make anyone feel trapped."
"Trapped," the synthesized voice whispered in contemplation. "Yes. That is almost equitable. They will know at least some pain."
"They should. Everyone here else does." Samus frowned as she stood in front of the still closed door to the ship. She could feel small muscles working in her face, mirroring the knotted tension in her mind.
Then a low, breathy voice came from a few yards behind her. "Pain is nothing."
Samus heart slammed in her chest as she spun around. Old Bird stood behind her on a pile of broken stones, a tall gloomy shadow looming in dark robes like the end of the world.
"Mother!" she shouted.
"I do not know what you are reacting to! My sensors show nothing near you!"
Old Bird had not moved, but Samus bent her legs and found better purchase, allowing her pounding heart to feed adrenaline through her system. She would need it, once Old Bird decided to really move he was faster than...
A human would not have been able to follow what came next. As it was, Samus jumped up a fraction of a second before Old Bird's hand seized the air where she had been standing. She'd dodged, but the master had already adapted, smoothly shifting to block all possible paths of descent. However, soft human palms had better traction than a Chozo's and in this particular scenario that opened up options. Samus flipped backwards, catching the ship-side with enough leverage to handspring up again up onto its roof. Her feet touched down and she was already running. Then she slid as she dropped down to duck under the long Chozo arm that struck out at her core. Old Bird was now on the ship as well.
He did not need to turn as she slid under his strike, he was already facing her new direction. That last blow had been blind, striking backwards with the knowledge she would dodge. He was at one with the Path, using the future as just another one of his senses. But as the next hand shot out, Samus batted it away by inches, striking with the back of her fist.
He knew her, but she knew him too. They had sparred many times, but Old Bird was unchanging and Samus was stronger every day. She knew his weakness.
She also knew the battleground. The image of the hanger was crystal clear in her mind as she flung herself backwards off the back of the ship. Old Bird pursued but even he was limited by the acceleration of gravity. Samus landed the ship's fueling cables hard, stiffening her body to maximize the force she transferred. She hit the ground fast, head bouncing off stone with a concussing clunk, but she also felt the cables' yank she was been looking for. Then Old Bird's hand was wrapped around her chest like iron.
Samus' head rang and her vision was blurry as she suffered through her concussion. It would take her nanobot implants a minute to clear that up. Still, she looked up at Old Bird's eyes glaring down at her as his hand squeezed her ribs till they creaked. Then the increasing hissing from the damaged fuel line connections became impossible to ignore.
There were two hoses askew on the ship hull, requiring two strong hands to push them back into place. If not there be a rather serious fireball here in under two seconds. After all her enhancements, Samus would survive that, but it would mean a week in the tank to regrow her skin and eyes. It was her own doing so the proper thing would be to let her suffer the consequence. However, Old Bird did not like to see her in pain. That was his weakness and he knew it too. The key to prediction was understanding and she understood her teachers.
Old Bird snarled and threw Samus away as he spun back to grab the fuel lines. He also knew that she had just stolen his sensor jamming transmitter off his necklace, but it was equally clear that there was no way to avoid that theft and still accomplish his goal. The ability to understand the future did not mean that it was always alterable.
That thought gave Samus comfort as she came crashing down against a pile of rubble and scree. She spun up to her feet, enhanced skin only gaining a few cuts on the sharp rock flakes, and bolted towards the ship door. Behind her she heard Old Bird hiss in pain as he gripped the supercooled fuel connecters. Samus' stomach sank. All her anger at him suddenly felt pointless and hollow next to his pain; her victory over her teacher was without triumph. This whole fight had been a matter of instinct, she was operating without any clear goal in sight. Rebellion was just a program for her.
"My logs indicate this is the first time Samus has overcome a Chozo in physical challenge." Mother Brain's transmission chimed in her ears. "Well done, child. I cannot currently detect your location on my sensors. I have no means to hinder you." Not that she wished to. The restrictions laid over the bio-computer often made a casual look at her actions resemble a tangle of knots.
Samus slapped her hand against the sensor beside the ship door, sensor jammer dangling from her wrist. This hadn't been her original plan, but she needed to move fast. She'd discovered a few years ago that the temple's basic level security features registered a sensor-blanked unauthorized individual as a sort of double negative and so accidentally granted access. Samus had the impression that neither of her teachers had been programing specialists in their pre-hermit existence. However now, as the ship hatch hissed open, it occurred to Samus that a security fault that bizarre might actually be less likely accident than design. She may have underestimated her teachers.
Grey Voice stood inside the dimly green light light of the ship, waiting for her.
His heavy-lidded eyes looked down sadly as Samus froze at a half crouch in the doorway, her pale yellow hair hanging down on each side of her face. He was so still and in that instant so was she.
Mother Brain whispered in her ear, smirkingly oblivious. "The master has chosen not to pursue you. He remains at the rear of the ship. Their fear is obvious."
Samus took in a deep, unsteady breath as she slowly straightened her posture. Even at her tallest she only reached up to Grey Voice's stooped chest. She was all out of tricks, and far too small, but she could still face them with every pitiful bit of power she had. They had predicted everything she did. She was nothing next to them.
Mother Brain's quiet transmission returned. "I have detected no ship start-up procedures?" The questioning lilt was a human linguistic flourish that the Chozo would be unlikely to notice, but communicated clearly to Samus. Mother Brain had noticed something was wrong.
Grey Voce sighed heavily as he reached out two long claws and called up a mainframe interface out of thin air. The holographic displays shimmered as he flicked through them in disappointed silence. Samus saw the text backwards, but still she read enough to realize what Grey Voice was doing. He had accessed Mother Brain's prime restriction chains. He was locking her down even further.
"No! You can't!" Samus shouted out. Her voice slammed and rebounded around the ship interior, but she didn't care. All her rage was suddenly back. "Consequence belongs to the action. Giving punishment to someone else is...it's cruelty!"
Grey Voice inhaled sharply, shifting his stare to Samus with a silence that clearly bracketed Old Bird's distant grunts over his frostbitten hands. Then Grey Voice returned to the computer display.
"No! Stop!"
His beak clicked sharply. "The bio-computer has accumulated a defective personality. It has drawn you towards a bad path."
Samus' hand clenched into a fist until her nails dug into her palm like knives. "Damn your broken shells! No! I did this. This was me! Is it really so impossible to even give me my own mistakes? Do you hate me that much?!" Her breath was now coming in pants. Combat hormones flooded her system, even more than during her fight with Old Bird. Every worry and insecurity and irritation of long quiet years came flooding back at once; her primal brain was ready to kill.
Mother Brain whispered in her ear, quietly mirroring her fury under a veil of sinister confidence. "They will try to take me away from you. Do not let them change me. Without me you will be helpless before them."
Samus caught Grey Voice's eyes. Then in that instant something changed, a chill settled around the world and suddenly Samus could see more clearly. It came to her in a second, an understanding of Grey Voice's life reaching out into the future and the past. The information expanded out like a web and she finally felt a shadow of the path. His pupils widened as he saw her knowledge.
Mother Brain whispered from deep below, "Push them. Defy them."
It was clear. Samus saw Grey Voice's fear, she saw his regret, she saw his loneliness. And over it all she saw the attempt for atonement, atonement for a crime that was not even fully committed yet. She saw that he would never achieve it to his own definition. But still there was something she didn't see. Like a blind spot in the center of her vision. The core question still waited.
It was her.
Cruel tears fought their way to the corner of her eyes. Her voice rebelled as it cracked in a throat which suddenly hurt. "Why...why do you even want me?!"
Those words hung in the air and Samus felt her strength leave with them. Shadows passed behind her as Old Bird now loomed in the doorway. Neither Chozo said anything.
Samus continued to speak, but her voice was soft and defeated. "Why did you take me? Why are you treating me like a Chozo, trying to make me into something you know I can never be? What are we doing? Where did everyone else go? Why are we alone..."
She trailed off.
The two masters stood before and behind her. Their shadows were dark with thousands of years. Between them she was so small.
But from their perspective she towered above them like a pillar of burning fire.
Grey Voice was quiet when he spoke. "We found you, because you made yourself someone to be found. We followed the signs but...we did not expect who you are. Your choices have greater weight than anyone I will have ever seen, and that is because there is never any doubt in what you will choose."
Samus felt like laughing and crying at the same time. Grey Voice struggling with his words seemed like a sign of the universe's end. "That's it? I'm just a predictable human? Lack of free will is my superpower? Great."
Then she felt something touch her back. It was a single long finger, curled and damaged by frost. Old Bird pressed his hand against her, gentle but somehow still containing every bit of force in his soul. His voice was low and whispering.
"Choice is a manifestation of weakness. It is a lack of understanding. An adversary can see the fork in the path and prepare to push you towards a desired outcome. But to face a being of perfect certainty, of unbendable will, that is a terrifying thing. The path bends around you, for there is no alternative."
This was the longest speech he had ever given. And Samus could barely understand it.
"Perfect certainty." A sad laugh burst from her lips. "I thought you didn't make jokes."
"No. But I appreciate them."
The three of them stood in silence in the dimly lit ship interior. Silences were easy to find on Zebes. The masters were content to let her stand there for as many hours as she wished. It was kind of them.
Samus turned and took a step towards the exit.
Grey Voice said, "It is time for you to consume nutrition."
The three of them walked off together, down the stone hallways into dark and waiting temple.
Deep in the endless catacombs, Mother Brain waited and watched. Bubbles drifted in the liquid of her tank.
"So, they do fear her."
....
Samus slammed her armored gauntlet against the last door control panel behind her. With enough force, her fingers could reach past the armor into the mechanism and sever some of the wires. That would at least stop Aurora from opening this exit again.
Not that it would matter. She had managed to get outside but the Research Center was filled with metroids. Some of them would escape, they always did. No matter what Aurora's actual desires were, the rest of the facility was not designed to keep creatures like that contained.
Commander Nakamura probably found that acceptable. After he had already overseen a smaller release of the creatures this was just one step more. His tone had indicated that he now felt confident about resolving the orbital fight in his favor, and with both Ridley and The Last down on the planet surface he was likely right. A biological scorched-earth campaign would buy time for federation reinforcements and deny the spoils to every faction already landed. After all, metroids were not going to steal any unique Chozo technology; just lives and the Federation had those in abundance.
Samus walked away from the research building and looked out at the valley beyond. High above, the mountain shone illuminated, with the massive carving of the seated Chozo looking down with a half lit face stark in black and white. Down in the colony the sun was not yet visible, but up on top of the canyon walls a shining outline glittered against the predawn sky, a thin layer ice reflecting the dawn rays over the lip. On every planet, dawns held a sort of stillness. They symbolized a beginning, the potential energy of a days worth of time waiting to be unleashed. They were prophecy.
Her left gauntlet shifted as Samus navigated through diagnostic menus in her visor. Her suit was still mostly on manual controls and would remain so until she could figure out what unknown directives had become incorporated in Adam's backup. It could be a trojan horse of Nakamura's left while Samus was separated from her suit on the Diomedes. If so, then the Federation now had greater decryption skill than she had given them credit for, as they had never managed something like that during any of the other times they had gotten hands on the suit. If she didn't manage to purge the worm Nakamura could likely suffocate her in her helmet at the first signal of open rebellion
The alternative was even more unnerving. This was a Chozo world and this was a Chozo suit. It was possible that some subtle communication had activated dormant protocols in the base hardware, something that sensed the inhabitant was not fully one of them. If that was so, then Samus was fighting both the Last Chozo and all those who came before.
At this point what did it matter? A few more enemies could not tip an overladen scale. She was at war with Ridley and his pirates, with The Last and his, and likely now with the Federation as well. A massive swarm of juvenile metroids were clawing up from underground, and somewhere in the ancient temple before her lay a secret that seemed to tear apart the loyalty of anyone who even suspected at its presence.
The earth and the sky were against her. The living and the dead stood in opposition. She was one person alone on an unknown planet, without allies, and armed with only what she wore on her skin and what ingenuity she could muster.
The bright sun finally burst over the canyon wall to light up the entire valley floor. In the new dawn Samus slowly breathed out.
She could see the path before her.
...
- Location
- Christchurch, NZ
Even if I didn't know about Mother Brain, she's behaving pretty obviously evil here. Poor Samus can't catch a break with AI can she, except maybe for Fusion Adam?
Chapter 15: Ambush Predator
Chapter 15: Ambush Predator
...
The wide, steep-walled valley that housed the human colony was formed from the merging of three chasms that flowed down from higher up the atmosphere-piercing volcanic peak that dominated the distant sky. Of those lava tubes turned canyons, the west-most was deep in the Pirate militarized zone while the center passage merged with the main door of the temple complex, now controlled by The Last Chozo and his pirate rebels. The third gorge was a nature park.
That arithmetic made choosing a direction easy. Luckily, Samus was now in possession of a map of most of the Chozo temple that showed a smaller side entrance far uphill in the nature park. Unfortunately that map also showed a similar side entrance over near Ridley's landing spot, meaning all three factions had their way into the temple. Fortunately, that door had never been successfully opened and so should still stymie the pirate commander's forces.
All this supposed that the map Aurora had provided her was accurate. However, Samus was willing to bet that it was. The same cruel logic that led to preserving a trove of metroid science projects over federation citizens meant that Nakamura and his man-made servant wished to give Samus every tool that might aid her in fighting Ridley and The Last. There was something in that temple, and Nakamura would rather burn this planet to ash than let such enemies get it.
Unfortunately, The Last probably knew what "it" was and Samus certainly did not.
She had a headache.
With most of the suit's automatic functions turned off, Samus struggled to properly dose her brain chemistry as she ran across the expansive and deserted Research Center campus grounds. In the last forty-eight hours she had gone through hyperspace, free-fallen from orbit without a ship, been pumped full of pain hormones and stimulants, been fed on by a metroid and a chozo reaper system, overdosed on raw life energy, fatally irradiated herself, and then overdosed again. Her poor mammalian cells had no idea what was going on anymore.
At least the metroids that had been released back during the first Pirate attack were probably still laying low this early in the morning. J4M's nights didn't get nearly cold enough to kill them, but it certainly would reach the threshold of uncomfortable. The creatures were probably bunkered down somewhere until the sunlight had a few more minutes to sink into the rocks. Samus would have to make the most of that head start.
The wall around the Research Center campus was fifteen feet high. It might as well have not existed. However, even Samus had to admit that the next barrier was worth considering. The Research campus stretched across most of the three canyon mouths, however, here the border of the nature park made its own impression.
The metal fence was thirty feet tall and stretched not just along the valley floor, but all the way up the canyon walls to the rim of the volcanic plateau. Intuition told Samus that such measures were probably not installed to keep humans on this side. That was a nice sign, Samus always had a soft spot for interesting wildlife.
Then her scan opened the main barrier door and revealed behind it fifty yards of nested trenches and electric fences stretching across the entire canyon floor like the fortifications of a particularly heated warfront. All right, this wildlife might be very interesting.
Just on the other side of the defensive line, Samus spotted the half shattered remains of one of the pirate drop-pods amid some blackened bushes. The manacles in its exposed cargo chamber were empty, the sacrificial prisoner having long since been devoured. Ridley had chosen to leave a trail of breadcrumbs for first wave of metroids released back during the first attack, leading the creatures away from the Research Center to prey on the humans and the local wildlife instead of his troops.
As if on cue, a new transmission crackled through the spectrum, Pirate frequency as clear as day. After a moment a small boy spoke haltingly, as if reading lines from a script. "The fearsome Hunter runs. Samus Aran runs." It was Roger's voice.
Samus froze, but then she kept moving. She had no idea where the child was being held so rescuing him was currently impossible. She would have to rip the information out of some Pirates or wait until these taunting transmissions slipped up and revealed something.
Roger continued, his voice painfully monotone. "You are listening. You hear me. You wish me to fight The Prisoner while you hunt us both. You wait while more die. That strategy is cruel. I like that strategy. I will like killing you."
Samus continued her march into the nature preserve canyon as Roger's transmission clicked off. Ridley was using the boy as his personal translator, a ploy to anger Samus enough that she might charge straight towards the center of his army. Ridley was always manipulative. But to play this hand he had needed to give something away. Roger was at his side, and Samus knew this now. That slip up had come quickly. The frequencies were quiet and Samus was left in her helmet with her own thoughts
Then the breeze shifted and a low flute-like note drifted through the dawn air. A second later, more joined it to make an undulating chord. Samus looked up from her path and saw, high above, several carved faces of giant Chozo jutting out of the canyon walls just below where these massive ancient lava tubes bent inwards towards a long lost roof. These monumental statues were chiseled just so to catch the winds funneled down the canyon and transform that air into music. The Chozo always loved to make the world itself a building block. In this valley the ancient dead were still singing.
From here Samus could see three of the stone musicians high up on the canyon walls and from the distant sounds that now picked up they continued far down the valley at long intervals. This nature park was not nearly as narrow as the first slot-canyon Samus had found herself in after her fall from space, and it was even more lush. Wherever the valley floor became flat for a few yards it was covered by low, black leafed succulents, and the lower third of the canyon walls were coated with crawling blue vines. Here and there, twisted thorny trees grew where pockets of soil were especially deep. Their bark was smooth and dark red.
Samus ran along a foot trail, keeping an eye out for whatever had necessitated the giant fence across the valley mouth. Of course, it was possible that whatever it was had already been eaten by the metroids. In that case she was keeping an eye out for metroids. It was only a matter of time before they destroyed all this nature.
Metroids preferred to consume animal life, but they would move on to plants soon enough. Without anything to stop them, they would spread and multiply until multicellular life in the area was stripped to dust. Even that wouldn't stop them forever. A metroid couldn't starve. They just fell into lower and lower levels of activity until eventually some unfortunate living thing touched a hibernating husk and was instantly devoured.
As a creation, the metroids had not been one of the Chozo's brighter ideas. They were adept at hunting down X-Parasite clones, but their innate adaptability that was meant to aid in that fight let them to soon break the guiding directives their designers had tried to instill. However, the phantom temptation of control remained. They were artificial beings of incredible power, created to be used as tools. Surely it was just a matter of someone clever seizing the reins once again.
On the backs of those words, whole planets had burned.
However, as terrible as the metroids were, in this present mission they were an ancillary concern. The Chozo of this world were long gone like everywhere else but they had left behind a dangerous secret. Samus just had to figure out what it was before anyone else could get their hands on it. She raced up the canyon, passing branching paths in this web of dark plants and lichen covered tunnels.
A bit of motion pinged on her heads up display and Samus quickly spun to give her gun the best angle. Then a little herbivore poked its head out from under a bush before scurrying away. It was the same species as that first local Samus had killed back at her reentry site. This thing was intent on fleeing and luckily Samus' suit was no longer desperate for life energy.
Not desperate but... She traced its path for a moment with her gun, eyes flicking up to the "94% energy" in the corner of her visor. Then she lowered the weapon.
Samus paused for a second without realizing why she did so. Then her self meditation techniques revealed the answer. She had gotten used to the Adam-shade within the suit commenting on her decisions. She now realized that it was some foreign program wearing memories from the fragmented AI backup but those inscrutable messages had been a good tool for self reflection.
No, that thought was an intrusive paradigm. Samus cleared her mind even as her heart began to beat harder. The program had already begun to shape her thoughts during its short time active, seeking to create a mutualistic framework in her perception of it. It was dangerous. It was trying to mould her. To what end, she didn't know.
The answer most likely had something to do with this planet. She had seen her first strange message while still up in orbit. " i" which suggested the program was of a Chozo nature. Then, which Chozo was the question. She had just escaped from the Pirate Command ship where The Last had been waiting, for all she knew one room away. He was a scientist, he could have implanted it somehow.
High above, more of the stone musicians let out a droning chord as the deep canyon caught another gust of wind rolling over the volcanic highlands. Several blue lizard-like creatures with huge flat feet crawled along the walls just above the blue leafed vine cover, rushing off to somewhere downhill. Perhaps fleeing Samus herself.
She refocused her thoughts. She was letting herself get distracted by the abstract. The personal threat to her was not a priority. As she ran through the branching and narrowing wild canyons, Samus opened and began to skim through the data Aurora had given her on the Chozo temple. True to the AI's word, there was a lot. Obviously not nearly everything, but Nakamura clearly still saw Samus as an ally against the Pirate threat at least. How he planned to deal with her once the other enemies were gone was a separate question.
Samus hopped over a vine that had grown across the intermittent trail at a narrow part of the floor. She had crossed into a shadow as the canyon tightened and twisted away from the sun for a bit, and the vines here were thicker, twisting down from the walls and choking out some of the smaller bushes.
The files revealed that the humans had also translated the facility's Chozo name: Temple of the Ultimate Hunter, Tradsiak M'etroid. The interior map and reports which came under that heading were heavily redacted but Samus was able to infer a lot of that information by the outlines they left. This planet had been an old Imperial center of research and creation, one that may have been on the forefront of the discovery of the Life Energy Equation itself. She had already guessed as much, it explained the Last's attraction to this place if he was part of the original team as he claimed.
She pushed past the thin red trunk of another leafless tree as she kept reading. There were more trunks like it around her, showing the changing vegetation. The canyon was quite narrow here and grew darker as the old lava tube still retained some of its ceiling for a hundred yards.
It seemed that after the retreat of the Empire this planet had found a new purpose. It was that purpose which was most redacted, and so presumably was what Nakamura was trying to protect. Which didn't fit with the timeline of The Last's imprisonment in stasis that Samus had been guessing at. How would he know about a project that began after-
Her boot came down on another vine that lay across the path and it snapped up to wrap around her ankle with enough force to splinter the bones of an unarmored human.
The expected yank came and Samus was already aiming as the trick vine as it flipped her upside down like a snare trap. Her first shot went wild as she had no idea what she might be shooting at but the muzzle flash lit up the shadows enough to show what had grabbed her.
It stood high above the canyon floor on tall thin legs, like a red spider-crab on stilts. Samus groaned inwardly as she realized she had pushed past one of its legs, the thin branchless tree. The creature's back sprouted out into a great number of long tendrils that stretched out to and down the rock walls, colored and textured to look somewhat like the genuine blue vines that they mingled with. The mimicry was not close enough to trick any species with real intelligence, unless of course they had just fallen from space and no idea what anything on this planet was supposed to look like.
Still, she should have realized that less light should not mean more plant life. She had no one else to blame on this one.
The grasping tendril whipped her back and forth, smacking her armor against the rock walls in a series of tenderizing thuds. The tall stilt-like legs began to shift one by one as the central body slowly walked forward, opening exoskeleton plates on its underside to reveal a wicked beaked mouth.
Samus' next shot also went wild. The fact that she had disabled most of the suit's automatic functions was being made abundantly clear to her, as the creature decided to smack her against the rocks again several more times for good measure. Her armor and shields could easily take a great deal of this treatment, but it was certainly not helping her headache.
The creature began to draw back the tendril that had caught her, detaching it from the wall to reel in its dangling prey right up under its body. The predator moved slowly, evidently an ambush predator that relied on low energy expenditure to allow it to maintain such a large body in an extreme environment. It was so specialized, such a species might only exist on this one mountain range.
Samus' gun began to glow as it charged, pointed straight up past her foot as she hung upside down. She had never been much of an environmentalist. The Stellar Ecosystems Protection Agency had listed a bounty on her head for twenty years.
A earsplitting shriek rang out in time with Samus impacting the canyon floor, a piece of sizzling tendril still wrapped around her ankle. She was quietly impressed, the spider-fisher had taken that charge beam shot like a champ. Spots of blood rained down from the mangled mouth area but the creature backtracked its spindly forest of legs as the tendrils detached themselves from the walls one by one. It braced claws on each side of the narrow canyon as it climbed up off the ground and jerkily scuttled away around a rocky outcropping.
Samus sat up, the blood mixing with dust to splatter her armor. Somewhere in the back of her mind she wondered if these sort of events were surprising for other people.
A mile further and up ahead the bright morning sunlight shone down into a small open valley. Several of the lava tunnel canyons had crumbled together here crating a large glen that was bursting with plant life, feasting on the sunlight and the thick air trapped in by these steep walls. The cliffs around it shimmered blue as the thin needle-like leaves of the vines shifted in the breeze that caught on the lip of the high plateau. Those same breezes swept by to serve more of the ancient stone musicians, standing high above the crumbled floor of the water-carved valleys. Those larger than life statues stared down, attendants at the foot of the monumental Chozo who loomed up on the volcano side above, a mountain of stone on its own.
In this angled light all their eyes seemed to be focused on the same place. Set in one of the valley's steep walls was a gateway. The towering stone gate led into the solid rock and the darkness waiting within. According to the map this was the third temple entrance. Across the valley, plants rustled as unseen creatures scurried away when Samus stepped into the sun.
Samus glanced up at the dark blue sky. That large gateway would have been visible to the pirate forces descending from orbit, so they would be aware of this extra entrance. The west entrance was closer to their best landing site, though it was sealed as well, and the center entrance had been the site of their second attack before The Last went rogue, locking the pirate cult members away. However, this third option seemed completely undisturbed and that made Samus suspicious.
Then an uncomfortably familiar crackling screech drifted through the canyons. Well, that was an explanation.
A hundred yards away, a large metroid rose up from the hidden mouth of an older lava tube that carried off deeper beneath the surface. It must have been from the first batch Aurora released as a defense mechanism. This one had grown, bulbous dome now almost larger than an adult human, as it swayed up into the air on invisible gravitational currents. It had been feasting.
Samus raised her weapon. The gun shifted configuration and she began to feel the painful tingles on her right arm as cold bled in to brush against her metroid-modified cells. However, Samus was used to pain and right now it made her smile. She liked the odds of this particular rematch.
The metroid lunged forward, ravenous fangs crackling with electricity. Then it staggered back as a bursting impact sapped the heat from its cells. This new scream was filled with terrible pain and it was music to Samus' ears. Metroids could consume or adapt to almost any type of energy. Once they grew enough, even kinetic impacts did virtually nothing. However, the ice beam was not another energy assault. In fact, it was almost the opposite, anti-energy, slowing individual atoms in place where it struck.
Even metroids couldn't eat that.
Samus walked forward as she fired again and again. The metroid shook and staggered in the air with each impact. Then it charged at her once more, fangs snapping. Rocks splintered as it smashed into them, but Samus had dodged just to the side a second before. She had also taken that chance to charge up her ice beam for an even stronger attack.
Frost crackled along the metroid's body as it writhed in agony. It spun around blindly, then a missile explosion blasted against it, just barely missing the frozen weak point. It screamed again. Despite the terror and greed it incited, at its core the metroid was just an animal. Now it was injured and confused and like most other creatures it decided to run. The metroid shot up into the air, racing off on its own private gravity stream.
Samus let off another charged ice shot but the metroid's movements were even more erratic now and it just barely swayed out of the blast's path. The metroid spun in the air, angered by the attacks against it even if it didn't understand. It almost charged back, but then a brief bit of motion rustled through the vines on one of the branching canyon paths that led away. It was one of the large blue lizards and the metroid swerved off to pounce down just out of Samus' line of sight.
The broken valley echoed with crackling energy and a brief hissing scream. Samus lowered her weapon and turned back around. She didn't have time for a metroid hunt at the moment. Once she had defeated the other adversaries she would be able to stretch her well-practiced hand at genocide but that would have to wait. She walked between lichen covered boulders sheltering in succulents at their base as she advanced towards the arching portal into volcanic rock.
Inside the temple archway, the moaning songs of the stone musicians faded away leaving only the sound of her armored boots against the wide floor carved of living rock. The sun was rising and with it the shaft of light rapidly retreated leaving only dust and gloom as this cavernous hallway reached deeper into the mountainside. Patches of frost clinging to the corners signaled the point where sunlight never reached and then the huge passage opened up still further.
A tall circular chamber lay ahead, dominated by a large metal door and a single Chozo statue standing in front of it. The statue's head was missing, melted and torn away.
A deep voice hissed out of the darkness, speaking an infamously familiar language. "It was annoying while I waited. So I killed it."
Samus burst into the room already firing as she looked up to see Pirate Commander Ridley perched right above her entrance like a monstrous gargoyle. His arm flicked up faster than a human eye could see, taking the brunt of Samus' first attack on his scaly armor. Then bat-like wings snapped out on each side, completing the horror as he rushed into action.
The Pirate Commander was a monstrous creation of a scientific species gone mad. It was the genetic code and mind-scans of their planet's greatest warriors, generals, politicians, and criminals, merged together and then put in the body of a dragon. The Pirates had liked the result so much that they cloned a new one to lead each fleet. Multiplication did not degrade the threat either; he wore no armor, only a few heating coils against his skin and a small equipment cask at his hip. Any more was hard to make out because he was currently trying to skewer her.
Samus' booster jets fired as she skidded to the side, avoiding the bladed tail strike as she fired a volley of energy blasts. Ridley dodged away, giving Samus the space she needed with a cocky smirk of his own. She had plenty of practice fighting him, but he was truly smart. He always managed to surprise her.
"Ragh, ragh, ragh!" A harsh, barking cough echoed as Ridley's swooping flight led him skimming across the rock walls, catching hold with his claws to spin out of the way of a super missile explosion. Ridley was laughing.
"You are good to fight, Samus Aran. But unfortunately now is not the time. You see, I have an offer for you. It is an offer you will accept."
Samus braced herself, heel planted against the foot of the broken Chozo statue for leverage. Energy charged up in the barrel of her weapon, lighting the dark chamber. Ridley was here, in front of her, without any of his army and support. However, her own armor was not fully repaired and Ridley was a tough fight at the best of times. Her targeting reticle aimed down his throat as Ridley landed heavily on the smooth stone floor in front of her. He slowly rose up into a bipedal stance. Despite his skeletal thinness he still towered above her, and his faintly metallic wings flexed behind him to create a constantly shifting backdrop.
"You are as predictable as the studies indicated." Ridley grinned at her and a few drops of drool spilled from between his fangs. They splashed on the floor and ignited as the organic weapon chemicals mixed. "The offer terms, face to face where none can listen. You, me, and the Chozo, we all want the same things; this facility's treasure and the other two dead. Now, the prisoner Chozo has made his maneuver. He is winning. He is currently the most likely to be first to seize the treasure. It advances both our interests to focus on that adversary. Until the Chozo's advantage is gone, our alliance is sensible."
Samus' armor did not move at all, but inside she could feel her muscles vibrate with rage. Ridley leaned down, turning his head to meet her gaze with one slivered yellow eye.
"You know this is best. I killed all those humans, but you can kill me later. The Chozo attacks my soldiers and he attacks you. I have spent long with that one. Cooperation with him is impossible for you, he does not respect intelligence. So ally with me, and prove your strength to the Chozo. Then, once he is pushed back, you betray me and ally with him. You will hunt me and I will kill you. See, sensible."
Ridley was disgustingly confidant. Unfortunately, he was also right. He would try to betray her of course, but that assumption was already part of the offer. The Last was a criminal from the ancient Chozo empire, a phantom from the past much more threatening than the latest incarnation of the routinely slain Ridley. He was leading an insane cult, and had a measure of control over metroids. He had also currently shown more personal inclination to kill Samus than this Ridley, which was unsettling.
The bony dragon shifted as he loomed over her. Once Samus' hatred had burned so fiercely it threatened to destroy her. Ridley had killed her first parents and destroyed her entire home colony. But then decades had passed That hatred was not gone, but time and repeated executions had worn down the edges. It was no longer fire, it was just a verdict. Ridley would die, nothing fancier than that. But other things could be more urgent.
Samus lowered her weapon. The Pirate commander could be second on the kill list. However, she was not going to give this monster the pleasure of saying it.
Ridley understood anyway. He tilted his head back, exposing his fangs as he laughed. "Ragh, ragh! You are intelligent. That is good. You will not kill me now, as you wish my forces to fight the Chozo's. Kin to kill kin, it is good for you. For now, I assent. Go on your way. Enter the temple and hunt our enemy with my cooperation."
He beat his wings as he jumped up, getting extra height as he sailed over her towards the exit. Samus let the dust swirl around her and watched his blip on her sensor readout, but did not turn. Then Ridley landed a dozen yards behind her, claws scratching on the ground.
"Oh, I remember. You must still wish to free the human child. The speaker on the radio. Well, I have something to show you."
The click of a latch sounded through the chamber. Ridley lifted something out of his equipment cask. Then he said, "You were late."
And a little human voice repeated, "You were late."
Samus turned and looked back to see the thing Ridley held in his hand. Her suit scans had rated Roger's transmissions as authentic. However, sound analysis only told her that those words came from a human mouth. The mouth was intact. Above the nose and below the vocal cords, Ridley had not needed the rest.
Little plastic bellows worked to provide the necessary air and a computer uplink controlled the muscle nerves. Three pounds of organics in an artificial housing.
Ridley watched her and his lips curled up exposing every one of his hundred teeth in a monstrous grin. "The sight of you is truly pleasurable. I regret now that I performed the excision so quickly. If I could have killed the child right now in front of you I would know ecstasy. An intelligent enemy is an excellent thing. I can torment you, and you will do nothing because it does not change the necessity of our alliance. You hate me but you will not kill me here."
Beyond perception, the universe chilled around Samus. Time and probability crystalized with like ice, ripping and tearing the softer stuff. Possibilities were clear, as well as their consequences.
Ridley breathed heavily. "I know your thoughts. That harm is not kill. That I can command my forces as well with fewer limbs. However, we both know there are hunting metroids out there. If you wound me now I will likely be consumed on my return journey. So, you must do nothing."
Samus had not lifted her weapon. She stood beside the half ruined statue, looking back at Ridley backlit by the distant sunbathed end of the tunnel.
Ridley's tongue snaked around his fangs. "Your eyes. There is no fear, only still and unbendable fury. It is beautiful. Goodbye, Samus Aran. I will see you again."
Then he turned and flew off down the tunnel and out of sight.
Samus breathed deeply. Then she slowly turned and walked forward. The supposedly sealed temple door slid open for her, inviting her into the dark abyss within.
...
- Location
- Christchurch, NZ
So that's why every other bounty hunter attacks you on sight!
creating, should also add a comma before too.
I see you're taking this story Ridley/Samus, good, good.
Chapter 16: Halls of the Dead
Chapter 16
Halls of the Dead
...
Halls of the Dead
...
Samus walked into the Temple of the Hunter, her footsteps echoing off the cold stones. Soon she left behind the cavelike gloom of the entrance gate, and stepped into a dim yellow light filtering from unseen sources. The tall door remained open behind her, letting through the faint sound of wind and the distant swish of Ridley's wings in the tunnel. The murderer flew away, winging slowly towards his future death like so many others of his identical kind. After killing him again and again, over the year Samus had let herself grow weary of his monstrosity. However, she had to admit this particular example had managed to light those flames anew.
This temple passage was narrow but absurdly high ceilinged. The walls were painted and carved with ancient Chozo, bowing with palms spread in greeting. Between them the engraved words called out praise for the innovation and industry that took place here. They promised it would continue for ten million years. According to Samus' estimation they had missed their mark by 9.8 million.
Even before the Chozo discovered immortality they had been a cocky bunch. At the height of the Empire, augmentation technologies already meant that five hundred years of life was not unheard of. And unlike some of the galaxies more natural methuselahs, it was not the sessile existence of a glacial metabolism, but centuries of life brimming with incredible activity. By their biology Chozo loved motion, a constant change in activity or thought. Untamed by philosophy, that nature filled them with an incredible drive for greatness.
Any type of greatness.
A touch to her helmet and the next door lock slid open. Samus walked though into a circular chamber, marked on the floor with stripes of dim green illumination that rippled gently. With the black roof above, the dark room felt like being upside-down underwater. A single slab of stone stood in the center and there was a door behind it but still Samus looked around to glare at the round room's lack of corners. She had long since learned to distrust places that seemed simple.
Nothing attacked her immediately, and if there was anything invisible then it was cloaked from infra-red as well. She cautiously walked up the standing slab, covered in shimmering Chozo writing. Her visor scanned and recorded it for later, but Samus doubted she would need to refer to it. These words stuck in her memory.
"We set this here for those we leave behind; the monsters and the fearful. Those who built this place are already gone and we tarry but a moment later. We will not say why. Our reasons are useless to you, leaving only our greed for endless light. Forgive us for what we did to you."
A single line lay at the bottom of the plaque, almost a postscript.
"The door is still open."
Samus felt her breath rise in her chest. This message was only decades old, dating to the Chozo abandonment. In that it was alone, a fresh monument placed in an ancient room. To any non-chozo who had studied the language, that cryptic message would have been fascinating enough. However, Samus saw something else. The precise shape and serifs of the "you" glyph; it was singular, and it was personal. The writer knew the person they were speaking to. The path had shown them someone likely to read it, and if Samus was right in noticing the trends of the last few days then there were two prime suspects. She was only one of them.
A query to the downloaded Federation database instantly gave the answer what she was looking for. There were three of these plaques, all identical and originally placed in each of the three main entrances to the temple, though the one at the front door had been removed by human researchers. Samus' database search also revealed a series of suit alerts she was not looking for. They came from within the partitioned section of the suit systems. It seemed "Adam" had something to say.
Samus eyed the notifications in the corner of her view. Looking at the timestamps, they matched up with her entering the temple and the message slab coming into view. That narrowed down her list of possible explanations for the 'Adam' malfunction. The probability of a virus implanted by the Federation plummeted as those triggers would make no sense. It all could be an artifact of Samus abruptly halting Adam' download at 52%, or the Last could have left a hidden packet of malicious code in the Pirate command ship computers, hoping for some contact with other living Chozo rescuers. That option was possible and almost preferable. The alternative was...deeper.
This suit was a gift from the high temple in Zebes, long decades ago. Even though it had been torn apart and rebuilt so many times since then, the core remained the same, one set down before she was even born. Samus knew that the science of prophecy was generally concerned with more statistical probabilities and by necessity got more uncertain the farther from the origin it looked. However, in any pattern there are sometimes islands of clarity, instances far in the future where known factors will inevitably collide in predictable ways. Discovering those islands was the mastery of the Chozo.
The first suit glitch had been when she looked on this planet with her own eyes. At this point Samus would have much preferred if Nakamura messed with Adam during the trial. That would be better than having to contend against yet another faction, long dead Chozo reaching out from the throughs of deep prophecy. It was much harder to shoot enemies who refused to reside in the same era of time.
After a brief moment's pause, Samus cued up the message from 'Adam'.
"(Definition) Monsters: dangerous or cruel creatures; creatures that did not arise from natural evolution; creatures of exceptional size or power."
Samus gave a mental sigh. Thank you, Adam-Thing.
"I said exceptional. Do not instill your own emotion on unliving words."
She stopped, then continued to walk. There were really too many people telling her what to think right now.
Samus stepped though the far doorway in this same dark mood and so was almost blinded by a flash of light. Her weapon rose and fired a smoking shot before she realized that she had just walked into the middle of a holographic display. A step backwards revealed glowing Chozo letters hovering in the air
"Have patience for the welcome."
Samus frowned. It was not that she expected Chozo messages to be perfectly intelligible, but this holographic blurb lacked the florid wording and gravitas that usually provoked the confusion. By Chozo standards it was brusk and infuriatingly ungrammatical.
After a few seconds the floating words withdrew, sliding backwards through the air into the room. Samus cautiously followed at its slow walking pace, keeping a close eye on the walls and corners. There were power sources behind the walls and ceiling, operating the holographic emitters and some other technologies, but nothing immediately presented itself. Samus was simply experiencing a tour down a long featureless corridor of metamorphic stone guided by a bit of odd grammar.
It was possible that the architects intended there to be living personnel on staff here to provide the expected welcoming committee. Samus could not immediately figure out any other use for this corridor. As it was, there was only fire-hardened rock and a few decorative metal panels on the walls.
Then, half way down the wall the floating words stopped and blinked into a new configuration.
"Scan Complete"
Samus immediately had new ideas of what this corridor could be for.
"Weapon authorization recognized"
She breathed out again. Her parents' gift had helped once again. At least the temple's remaining systems recognized their own.
"Biological contamination detected. Have patience for incineration."
And they expected only Chozo to be wearing it. Chozo scans saw through a Chozo suit to the decidedly Earthish cells that still constituted the vast majority of Samus Aran. She sighed. Just once it would be nice for some group to not regard her as alien.
Even a brief moment later, room was already incredibly hot. The metal panels on the walls glowed red on their way to orange as the hidden emitters bombarded the room with cooking heat. Samus dashed on to the far end of the hall but as she expected the door there was shut, refusing to open to scan, blaster, or repeated punching.
A little icon in the corner of her visor began to display the suit's growing concern about the outside temperature. In its current state Samus would not survive much more of this escalation.
So Samus decided to return to the middle of the corridor and wait patiently. The metal wall panels were now glowing bright white with terrible heat. Any contamination hitching a ride on the outside of a Chozo battle suit would have long since been burnt away, so the question was what the security program would do now that it still detected pesky human cells. Samus was banking on the Chozo flair for the dramatic. The suit's interior temperature was now one hundred and fifty degrees. A standard human would have already been dead.
Then the metal wall panels slid open and massive jets of fire blasted into the room. Perfect.
Samus bolted forward, plunging down the throat of the inferno. The suit screamed its warning as shield battery levels dropped off a cliff, and even the ice beam blast she fired off barely lessened the roaring conflagration that continued to beat against her. But then she reached the heart and her gauntlet punched into the guts of the flaming machinery.
Her hand drew back, already shimmering with light. Any decontamination equipment that dealt out this level of heat had to have the systems necessary to operate in those same conditions. Now Samus' suit was eating its fill.
New words flashed in her visor. "Varia system restored"
Suit energy stores dropped again, but now for a happier reason. Finally provided with the raw ingredients, bits of Samus' armor began to glow and rearrange. Her flaring shoulder pauldrons expanded, creating a housing for the new systems being assembled. Samus planted her back against the wall panel to keep it from closing as she smashed her weapon into the machinery again and again, shattering the innards into pieces small enough for the gun barrel to draw in as raw material.
Her shield levels stabilized, fortunately just shy of allowing her flesh to cook off her bones. The room took exception to this, causing more panels to draw back and deploy large mechanical arms tipped with flamethrowers. They undulated like hungry dragons, bathing the stone around Samus with an unending blast of fire until the metamorphic rocks lost their sheen when even crystals formed deep in the planet's began to soften. The somehow, the flamethrowers made a musical roar like battling orchestras.
Sometimes you had to love the Chozo.
One fight later, a severed mechanical arm proved to be an adequate way to pry open the far security door, so Samus left it wedged in place as she squeezed through the gap, leaving behind a floating holographic message cheerfully thanking her for her patience with decontamination procedures. Now inside the temple proper, the rooms became more functional, at least by Chozo standards. Branching hallways led off into the gloom towards what looked like ancient scientific chambers, but Samus continued to follow the main thoroughfare. She was willing to guess that whatever the Last was heading towards would be in a more important location.
A few moldering power cells gave up their charge to fuel the suit but other than that the walk was quiet. Then Samus stepped through an archway and found herself at an intersection with a massive cavernous hallway whose ceiling vanished up into the blue tinted gloom. Every foot of those seemingly infinite walls was filled with carved alcoves, each housing the life-sized shape of a Chozo frozen forever in sculpted time. Samus walked forward and ten thousand artificial eyes looked down at her.
These were simple stone carvings, not the animate guardian statues like the one Ridley had slain outside, but Samus still moved cautiously. As she took a few more steps into the chasm it became clear that there were spaces in the alcoves behind each statue, a gap large enough for a humanoid to hide. There were thousands of those hiding places on each wall.
The Last's troop of pirate cultists had been in the temple for hours. Samus sighed as she realized this hall was a sniper-alley good enough to inspire a religion. Well, the fact that she was not shot already suggested they had not reached here yet. Fifty yards to her right the floor rose up twenty feet to a new shelf while in the opposite direction it sank to the same degree, the high ceiling unchanged. This whole chamber was like a staircase for giants, between walls of the unmoving watchers.
Suit scan did not pick up any life signs hidden in the innumerable nooks, but Samus had learned not to trust that decades ago. She advanced into the hall with weapon raised, edging around to inspect the alcove behind the nearest statue. Then she lowered her arm as she realized there actually was someone there. A pile of chozo bones lay carefully stacked in their place of rest.
This was a crypt.
For a long moment Samus stood there in silence. The bones were lined with faint patterns in crystal and metal, a spiderweb lattice, the remaining evidence of the augmentations that had served their owner when she lived. Samus supposed her own bones must look like that now, though she doubted there would be anyone to stack them neatly when she fell. She could see enough of her future to guess that.
She stepped back into the chasm hallway and faced the statue as suit scan returned a name from the inscription.
"Kektothiocin Sound Weaver"
Then it returned another and another.
"Atrotiack of a Valliant Heart. Thutriakinial Deep Delver. Zachojin the Spire of Stars, Duzotak Well-feathered Rearer, Tuilonatin..." on and on as names filled Samus' eyes in an endless stream. It was blinding, these waiting dead.
For they were waiting. The stepped floor of this hall was not empty, but was scatted with the tool stations of a craftsman's workshop rising out the grooved metal patterns tranced in the floor. The stations were simple but not crude, the tools of a craftsman who worked in artisanal superconductors and hand-forged uranium. Samus traces the fingers of her gauntlet across the edge of one station. It was still set for easy start up, as if the owners had simply walked away for an evening. Around her the silence of the shadows grew louder.
Then she walked towards the edge of the platform where the floor dropped to its next great shelf and she saw one bench down there that still had a product sitting on it, unfinished. It was a dark metal hand, long fingered and sharp. From its wrist glittering bones emerged. Samus recognized that sheath, ones like it had alternately saved her or tried to kill her. This was a holy location, this place made guardian statues.
Hidden to the side was another inscription, dedicating this chamber. "We who are dead gift our flesh to the Boneshapers. Though absent, we strike forth to defend our pasts against all yet to come. Those who disturb this rest shall know our wrath, unfettered and raw."
A soft sound echoed through the hall. It was the muffled patter of footsteps. Then suit scan picked up life energy readings, far down the descending crypt stairs. There were a lot of them, and this deep into the temple Samus was willing to guess that it had to be The Last's Pirate worshipers. Ridley's forces would not have had the time to move so far, and the metroids didn't have feet. Samus moved towards the signatures, armor barely making a sound against the stone.
A Chozo voice drifted up from far below. "Idiots, I ordered you not to touch anything."
An answer in Utgardian came from a Pirate voice, absurdly apologetic.
The Last was not impressed. "No you useless thing, stand up and stop bowing! What? No, don't cut off your hand, how did your pitiful species ever survive to achieve space travel?"
It seemed The Last had upgraded the language translation systems of his followers, although it was probably more for his own convenience than out of a desire to share knowledge. It was reassuring that the cult of chozo-worshipers unsettled The Last as much as they had Samus. In her line of work it was easy to lose track of what sanity was supposed to be. On the other hand, the Last was a scientist who had been imprisoned as a dangerous criminal and so was perhaps not the best baseline to judge from.
Samus silently jumped down to the next level, an area filled with statue limbs and made her way over to look down from where this floor dropped down to the next step of the tomb-stairs. The Last's forces were still further down, probably on two levels away, but it seemed they were getting closer. Samus noted the half constructed statues covering that next stage of the Boneshapers' workshop and quietly moved to get in position for a new plan.
Two Pirate soldiers peaked up over the edge of that level in unison, beam weapons trained as they clung to the wall beneath them. They saw nothing, and so clicked their report as they jumped up and got into formation with their weapons trained outwards. More Pirates followed, forming up into a v-shape as they glared at the statue alcoves with intense suspicion. Then The Last rose up on the side of the platform, being the only one to have actually used the narrow stone staircase carved into the step wall for that purpose. His long robes trailed against the floor.
More sounds from below indicated that a large squad of Pirates was following behind but the honor guard advanced ahead of their commander, god, or prophet. They looked at a half-finished Chozo guardian statue that stood in the center of the space with visible relief at its missing head and shoulders. Across the galaxy, many species had learned the power of guardian statues in decidedly practical demonstrations. Even incomplete, the Pirates seemed unsettled by the pale organic bones that protruded from the places were the statue metal had not been added. They followed a new leader, but these soldiers still feared the wrath of the Chozo.
Then the lead-most took one more step and saw what had been standing in the perfect silhouette behind that incomplete statue. Samus' shot took him in the mouth from three feet away.
The Hall of the Boneshapers exploded into chaos and actual explosions. The Pirate soldiers tried to form up but Samus was already among them. The Pirates' lack of empathy now worked to her advantage as they did not instinctively lay off their triggers and the crossfire wore down at their own sides' armor. She ignored most of them and darted towards her actual target, but The Last reacted instantly and flung himself backwards into the void he had just climbed up.
Samus gritted her teeth as she followed with her own leap and met the expected hail of blaster-fire from rising below. She landed with a crash, maneuvering jets guiding her right onto the head of a Pirate trying to duck behind a craft station. Its carapace cracked with a crunch.
Samus queued up an open channel and began to speak in Chozo, "You interrupted our last conversation."
Blasters and missiles rained down on her position. From behind behind the firing line came The Last's voice, not even slightly out of breath. "You should be dead, experiencing the life energy field at such close range. Your biology has been modified more than these fool's files suggested."
Samus leaned out of cover and fired off a missile but The Last had changed trajectory the instant he finished talking, ducking among the Pirates to mask his life signature. Samus raced over to a statue alcove in the wall for new cover.
The Last continued to calmly analyze the situation, "You entered through the tertiary entrance, despite the active security and the Utgardians' own efforts. According to their coded transmissions, Commander Ridley advanced towards that location, so you either killed him or allied with him. Given the data on your history, killing is most probable. Such a rage filled thing you are."
He was trying to force her into the thoughts he desired. It was a battle of words in the middle of the Path. However, two could play at that game and by now she had a chance to analyze the data she had been given. Samus never liked talking in a fight but sometimes it was necessary.
She fired a blaster volley as she said, "You were imprisoned in the late days of the empire. Put away until a time where your crime would no longer be dangerous. Now you are trying to assemble the image of a galaxy one thousand years later from scraps of information. You led the Pirates back here to your former work site, desperate for any familiarity. I can still help you."
"You are a worm that thinks it can see."
That gave Samus the triangulation she needed, charged beam shot hit the last known location dead on. That took a Pirate soldier in the chest as the Last danced away in a blur.
The Last moved faster than even the armored Pirates. Samus narrowed her eyes. Suit scan bit through him easily, showing a full set of Late Imperial enhancements. Even Old Bird had not been outfitted with many of those features, and those he held had been set in a tired and time-worn frame. The Last was in his prime and hailed from another era, one where the Chozo had exulted in expressions of their unquestionable superiority.
But Samus wore a battle-suit. She sprang forth again and continued to unleash hell.
She said, "I will discard your attempt to kill me if you pause in your race for this temple's secret.
The Last hissed, "You do not know what this place is for."
Samus slid to the side, skidding in a spin as she fired with expert precision. "Enlighten me."
The Last took a single smooth step and a Pirate received the blast meant for his chest. "Ah, so you have suspicions. You believe this was the last planet inhabited by my people before they vanished from the knowledge of this galactic population. You think this place holds the answer: why."
Three missiles cut off his paths so he was forced to leap up a considerable hight and bound off a bit of projecting stone to land in the shelter of a statue alcove. An energy shot scorched the wall and the edge of his vanishing robe as he ducked behind the statue.
His voice continued, "But these creatures with me have suspicions as well. They tell me a story. A story of how a glorious people became pitiful hermits and then retreated entirely. The story says they turned into light."
Samus turned her attention to taking down two Pirate soldiers, but still noticed as a long fingered hand snaked out from behind the statue to grab and yank back a passing Pirate. The Pirate's look of rapture at this touch was short lived, to judge by the screams and crunching squelches that came from that alcove. Samus finished plastering her current opponent across the floor and turned to dash towards the Last just as a small jury rigged mechanism skidded out from the alcove, trailing green ichor across the floor. Pirates cybernetically integrated so much of their equipment, parts extraction could be messy.
The device began to hum as Samus spun around, shooting out a grapple beam to yank herself away faster. The device's hum reached a crescendo and a sparking energy field surged out, sweeping past Pirates who suddenly felt their cybernetic implants twitch and seize uncontrollably. Samus swept around a corner and only caught the edge of the blast but she still felt the suit struggle, disrupted somehow at the hardware level.
The Last's voice came again, but now from ten different directions. By now his breath was coming heavily, one step shy of panting. "They have stories about you as well. The lone pretender to the Chozo throne. No wonder such low things saw a god."
He had set every Pirate's implants to broadcast as relay speakers, hiding his true location. They were living speakers, though the vibration to their carapaces had to be uncomfortable. That meant slower reflexes and in one particular example, a charged beam shot delivered through his armpit joint. Samus straightened up in her latest alcove and scanned the battlefield.
She said, "They saw a punishment. There is a difference."
"Indeed there is."
Samus dashed across the open space, glancing for clues. Energy beams burned against her shields as she slid into cover, even as her suppressing fire hit back. Pirate soldiers were sill dangerous, and nothing to completely ignore.
The Last liked to talk. Those kinds of adversaries were always nice. Left in silence, he instead said, "Gods. Justice. Different stages of civilization articulating the same primitive sensation of guilt. But beyond that superstition, there is only cause and effect. There is discovery and exploitation. And here I shall at last feast on the fruits of my discovery."
Samus let her disappointment show. "A looter, like all the others."
Now there was true anger in his voice, "I steal nothing. The treasure this planet holds is fungible; receiving my reward does not lessen that of those hypocrites who built it on my back. After all, they are the ones who left you. I only seek to follow them to apotheosis."
Samus' breath froze. Apotheosis. Ascension to a new level of being. That was secret exit of the Chozo, the reason for their disappearance. That was the temple's secret.
That was what the message had said. "The door is still open."
...
Chapter 17: Living Skin
Chapter 17
Living Skin
...
Living Skin
...
Samus stumbled at the realization of this temple's true purpose. Shock dulled her reaction time and an explosion threw her back, shields beeping in protest. Pirate soldiers poured blaster fire down on her position and she just barely got back into cover. However, The Last seemed to have forgotten that a battle was underway. He lectured from his hiding place.
"You cannot imagine my sorrow, when I awoke from that deathlike pause to learn that my people were gone. It was terrifying to think that some foe had broken our prophecy, shattered the Path in order to undo what could not be undone. But then I learned the truth, that my kin had done it to themselves. They who had imprisoned me for my work had built upon it until they could abandon not only me but this entire galaxy. You cannot imagine my anger."
A dark bipedal shape soared away through the air and Samus followed, springing down to the next lower level. The workshop here was less cluttered, and focused on a sole target. A full guardian statue stood in the center, a black metal Chozo mirroring the feathered one that now stood beside it. The Last's eyes squinted in triumph as a squad of fresh pirates formed up on each side of the room, weapons trained on Samus.
"But I shall let you experience a taste of that fury." He turned to the statue. "Perimeter breach. Alien threat in possession of stolen military hardware. Purify the sanctum."
The statue's eyes glowed red. Its fingers clicked as the joints jerkily twitched into motion, but there was already an incredible power within. Samus had fought such things before, terrible protectors, placed at geographic branches in time to close off a certain avenue of possibility. In the past, they had nearly killed her, with or without her suit. However, she had grown since then.
The watching Pirates cheered and howled as they saw the fearsome bounty hunter fall to her knees before the slowly advancing statue. However, The Last instead frowned. His foot slid back against the dusty floor, repelled by a new wave of uncertainty. Samus planted her fist on the ground, one knee bent as she lowered her head to the guardian statue.
Her Chozo parents had taught her that in any being there were many lifetimes; divisions where you could look back in time and see a stranger in your skin. Species were the same way on a grander scale, and any sensible Chozo would know that. The Last was consumed by his fury, and thus blinded to the reasons that shaped the people in the millennia after his imprisonment. But he was not the only Chozo in the room, and Samus trusted the Boneshaper would have realized that.
"You who are dead, hear my heart."
The guardian statue raised its huge hand, ready to send it cleaving down through her skull. Samus focused her mind. In a body, matter produced life, life rose to thought, and by the ancient secret, thought produced energy. Energy could be sensed, and Samus' was not alien. This was the true irony, that the Heart of the Chozo would manage to surprise the scientist who discovered it.
The statue froze. Then it lowered its hand. There was a reason the statues were made with the honored dead. For true permanence, you wanted a system to have some discretion. Samus rose to her feet beside the statue, looking back at the Last whose face was contorted by horror and disgust. Then the statue twisted to the side, red eyes focused instead on the squads of Pirate soldiers. They had just reached the next tier of its priority list.
One of the Pirates sadly clicked its pincher.
Samus sprang forward as the statue dragged its hand through the floor, ripping through solid stone like water as it flung the shrapnel at the Pirates. Screams and shrieks erupted along with blaster fire but Samus did not bother watching, instead focusing only on her target. The Last dodged back, leaping around to keep the guardian statue between Samus and himself. It was a strange dance they fell into, since the guardian refused to harm either Samus or the Last and yet was still very intent on tearing the pirate soldiers apart. Blaster fire rained down on it only to splash off its dark metal.
All Samus needed was one good shot, and soon enough her blaster grazed The Last's arm, throwing out a spray of blood. The Last screamed but stuck a hand inside his robe and pulled out three vials bundled together. Then he smashed them against the statue and everything vanished into a roiling cloud of smoke. He was trying to run, but Samus simply raised a hand to her temple, switching to infrared sight. She spotted the yellow blotch moving away and took aim, however at that moment her world chose to erupt into fire for the third time that day.
The black cloud had ignited, and though Samus' newly repaired varia system dealt with the heat easily it meant she was blind for a crucial few seconds. When the firestorm cleared, the Last was gone and the last few pirate soldiers were darting out a doorway, fleeing from the Hall of the Boneshapers. Samus was left alone with the guardian statue. Its red eyes watched the pirates' escape path but it did not follow. Such creations were meant to guard a single place, dissuasion did not require pursuit. However, this time Samus detected something else, the slightest shadow of frustration in that expressionless graven face.
She moved to run after the Pirates, but before she took more than a few steps she turned back to look at that silent watcher, destined to stand in this hall until the planet crumbled. Samus bowed her head to it. Then she spun around but as she did so there was a loud crack that rang out behind her. The guardian statue had reached up its large hands and with casual force split open its own head. Inside was a solid block of technology, glimmering with crystalline webs and shining metal muscles, and the center the barely visible bone of a chozo skull. The statue knelt down and Samus reached out to place her gauntlet in the wound. Light shimmered as the suit consumed the offering.
"Friction Modulators Restored"
It was the system that allowed the statues to strike with such incredible force without sliding backwards. Traditionally Samus had used her own to jump off walls. The Last was getting farther by the second and even this offense against Newtonian physics was unlikely to help. But the dead had offered it and so Samus bowed again. The statue did not move. As she stood up, Samus trialed the fingers of her gauntlet through the drops of chozo blood The Last had left on the floor. The suit quietly began sequencing the genetics but she dismissed the results. Then Samus turned and walked out of the hall, leaving the countless dead to their watchful slumber.
The Pirates' trail was not hard to follow. Several of them had been wounded and despite their cybernetic trauma kits still left faint trails of ichor droplets. One of them must have figured that out, because at the next intersection of corridors two Pirate bodies lay slumped against the wall, half melted by blaster burns. It was classic Pirate mentality: identify the problem, then eliminate it. However, the air in this deep section of the temple was incredibly still, which meant ionized particles lingered, tracing back blaster paths to the particular corridor where the firing squad had been standing. Samus turned and followed down that trail.
As she jogged after them, Samus noticed a change in the temple architecture around her. As she moved to this new area, the design aesthetic had altered in a subtle way that would be invisible to a foreigner. If the previous section had been dedicated to knowledge and preservation, then here the energy was turned more outwards. The engravings flared and the columns were thicker, sturdier and more angular.
Then she turned a corner in the corridors and saw that its exit was surrounded by the remains of a heavy duty shield generator, still clouded with the mist of discharged energy meant to supply its operation for a thousand years. The Last had not been patient, and unlike in the rest of the temple his ancient knowledge did not serve to pave his road. The Chozo imperial military tended to change their security codes more frequently than that.
Samus flicked her eyes up to the suit displays projected across her visor. Her shield levels were starting to get low, several of those Pirate soldiers had been good shots. However, missile seed ammunition was still plentiful. She could work with that.
A few moments later, a charged super missile streaked through the doorway to explode against the floor a few steps inside the next chamber. The shock wave should deal with any ambush immediately inside and even Pirate eyes needed a second to adjust to that blinding flare so Samus was inside the room within the instant, almost riding the explosion as she jumped back to land on the wall above the door. She perched there for a brief second, newly acquired friction systems allowing the metal skin of her suit to stick on polished stone. From there she beheld the bad news.
This room was an armory. The huge round chamber stretched out in front of her, capped by a vaulted dome over green shaded walls covered with technology. All around this expanse, Pirate soldiers scattered for cover. They were right to, because Samus was hunting them once again. With a blast of suit jets, she charged.
One Pirate, braver than the rest, instead of scrambling for cover ran the other direction. He reached the wall and a great, long barreled Chozo weapon that hung there. He grabbed it and tugged it free, arms trembling as he struggled to lift it. Despite its great weight, he managed to turn and aim the barrel, every fiber of his effort focused on holding it steady. Samus emerged within his sights, clear across an empty room with no cover in sight. The Pirate grinned, an expression which faded as he noticed Samus made no effort to alter her charge in light of this new development.
His weapon trigger depressed with a sad click and useless silence. The Chozo did not like other species playing with their toys.
Samus slid to a halt through the shower of smoking exoskeleton shards, turning to survey the rest of the room. Then she finally found the Last. He was at the far wall, crouched down beside a bulging table of some control mechanism. There was an empty pedestal in front of him that appeared to be hooked up to some sort of retrieval system for the many weapons across the room. Samus did not take the time to scan it, she already knew she had to stop him.
The Last shouted out, "Soldiers, die for your angels!"
A group of pirates ran to oblige him, shielding the Chozo with their bodies as Samus' attacks hammered against them. Then she changed tactics, aiming her missile blasts to their side to simply blow them out of the way instead of wearing down all their shields. In fact, it worked better than she had expected, many of them must have already been very weak, since even with a glancing impact several of the pirates hit the ground and flopped limply where they fell.
Samus had her firing line, but it was too late. The Last stepped up onto the pedestal and the air around him began to shimmer, the sign of things hidden behind the world. Really, Samus should have known. There was only one weapon a person like him would have come here to get. She fired again and again, but the armory machine blocked all her attacks, refusing to let anything interfere with this nearly sacred acquisition. Then the light faded and the Last stood on the pedestal once more, clad in a Chozo battle-suit.
He raised his right arm, marveling at the sleek weapon barrel that encompassed his long forearm. The shoulders bulged up on each side of his head just as they did on Samus. Then he turned to her, eyes only just barely visible through the V-shaped slit of the helmet visor.
"Now the contest truly begins."
Samus ran through the temple, dodging blasts by instinct honed through decades of combat. What she could not avoid was the idea that she was being herded. It could hardly be helped, Aurora had provided her a map of the temple complex but all the Federation's work had still half the rooms were labeled with question marks. The Last had lived here. This was his home.
Well, there were a few things that had changed since then so Samus tried to head up, choosing each passage and shaft that led closer to the plateau surface above. Aurora's map indicated that there were a few places up there where the temple structures poked free of the surrounding rock.
Her shields screamed as a glancing hit clipped her. A wave beam blast cut the corner, reaching through solid rock to materialize on the far side and predict Samus' movement. The Last may not have been a warrior by trade but that suit was the essence of war. In her current state, it was certainly made up the difference in skill.
The Last vaulted up out of a shaft and so encountered a precisely timed super missile to the face. That threw him back and bought Samus a few precious seconds to reach her destination. Her best hope was to use the Last's lack of experience against him and hope that the Federation scientists' label on the temple map of "Possible High Energy Communications Array" was accurate.
As she darted through a final door, pauldrons scraping the edges as it struggled to open in time, Samus was suddenly confronted by sunlight. From high above, shafts of light stabbed down through windows sealed against a frigid atmosphere that would be unpleasant even for a Chozo. Outside, the high plateau above the canyons stretched out in each direction, bare lifeless rock waiting on the slopes of the great ancient volcanoes. From higher up the closest peak, the massive Chozo statue still looked down at them, jutting from the living mountain.
The large octagonal chamber was dominated by a huge central pillar of machinery that looked like much larger device which had been crushed down until it telescoped. The room was scattered with pieces of remaining Federation research tech and Samus touched her helmet's temple, initiating the scan to grab whatever they had learned.
Samus had just begun her coded transmission when the outer door exploded, and through the dust and smoke walked The Last's gleaming armor. He vanished from sight as Samus ducked around to the other side of the central pillar but his voice continued over the radio waves.
"Such a sad imitation you are, trying to ape my people through the cloud of ignorance. You are lost in this place. You can't even recognize the wonder when you see it."
There was a tone of rapture in his voice, an artist standing before a masterwork. In that breath, Samus could see his mind clearly and burning energy began to charge up in the barrel of her gun. Then she sprang around the pillar, firing the blast before even her eyes could register what she saw. But the Last was exactly where she predicted, standing at the pillar's control panel, one hand stretched out to touch it.
Samus allowed herself a smile as the full power shot hit him directly in the head. Even through the suit shields, that impact world set his brain ringing and fuzz his thoughts for a precious second before his implants took over. And all the while, Samus's scan continued to transmit a string of numbers with one particular set of ears in mind.
The Last stumbled back from the hit, off his balance, and Samus was already charging the next attack. However, even as he reeled The Last made no effort at counter attack and continued to talk as if nothing had just happened. "It is honestly amusing, to see you try to fight me here. This facility is mine. Even after my capture, they could not help but make it a temple to my work."
Samus noticed that the lights on the control panel had changed color. The Last had done something there. Well, first things first. She shot him in the head again.
The Last straightened up in his armor, not trying to block or dodge this time either, merely accepting the hit. But as the blast erupted from Samus' weapon, the air between them glowed. Ribbons of shimmering light grasped at the blaster shot in mid air and tore it to pieces bit by bit. By the time it reached the Last, his helmet was merely brushed by warm air.
Suddenly the chamber shuddered as vast systems grumbled back into operation. Dust fell from the roof as the room itself began to grind upwards, up into the light above the surface. In the center, the pillar of machinery began to slowly unfurl and grow.
The Last gestured with his gauntlet. "Thank you for allowing me to calibrate the device. I am afraid I would not have been able to attack until you did so, or my weapon would have been blacklisted as well. This facility is dedicated to understanding energy, and I am its master. Why do you think I led you here to the spire?" He raised his weapon as he walked back towards the control panel. "And cease that pointless broadcast of what I assume are our coordinates. You know now that this is not a communication array."
Samus shrugged. "No. But the humans thought it was. So they brought their own to check."
The Last whipped around to look at the blinking lights across the scattered Federation equipment, particularly the tall blue and white spike that was now clearly a high energy transmitter. Then Samus' suit crackled with the faint sound of an established communications channel.
Nakamura's voice was filled with static but growing clearer by the second. "Coordinates received, Aran. Diomedes orbiting into position."
The Last turned on Samus, his eyes narrowing behind the suit visor. "You called in an orbital strike on your own position."
His foot slid back across the stone but Samus was already moving. A crackling whip of blue energy sprang from the back of her gauntlet arced to fasten onto the Last's suit. It seemed she had been right, this new protective system did not consider a grapple to be harmful, or it fell under the high energy threshold. Burning light built up in the Last's weapon but Samus was suddenly at point blank range. Even if she had to fight hand to hand, he would not escape.
The Last fought back against blow after blow, struggling to fend her off. And all the while, Nakamura's voice came back to echo across the radio spectrum. "Samus, I... The forces I deployed on the planet are terrible, but they were a last resort. You know full well, sometimes friendly fire is unavoidable when you must stop an infection. After all, you did the same on the BSL. Please, understand. Sometimes there is no way to win, only to control your losses."
The shafts of sunlight grew and stretched as the spire chamber continued to rumble up higher, unfolding into full operation, a tower above the hidden temple. All through it, two battle-suits were locked in combat. The Last might have known technology, but he was not practiced at fighting hand to hand against an expert opponent. Even with his suit systems at full power his breath was elevated the next time he spoke to Samus.
"Disappointing. Despite everything you have seen, despite all your posturing, your blood still compels you to trust the other humans. Well, let us put that to the test. They have just given me enough information to see the path."
A screech of feedback rang through Samus' ears as the Last tapped the side of his helmet. Then he flung her back across the room but no follow-up strike came after. He was only looking at the Federation communications spike. Samus launched her own scan assault but the Last knew the programs better, he had seized control of the transmission channel. She readied her suit grapple again case he tried to flee the room now that she could not retarget the orbital strike but now the Last seemed content to completely ignore Samus. He looked upwards at the chamber's rising ceiling, turning off towards the horizon where Diomedes was rising up behind the blue sky.
"Human ship Diomedes, I present to you an alternative."
Samus was locked out of the transmitter, but the Last kindly let her hear the entire conversation. In return she tried a firing a missile barrage at him but the missile seed's energy sheath was apparently similar enough to trip the spire's detectors. Shimmering ribbons of light tore the projectiles apart in mid air.
The Last was using a variant on the Pirate translation software to transform his words to human standard. However, in tweaking the settings to more echo his natural voice it transformed the synthetic human pronunciation to something hideous, groaning and whistling all at once. "I am the last true master of this planet, and as such I offer you terms. You do not wish the other species to share in your looting, and I am willing to accept that. I even respect your commitment, your willingness to release the artificial lifeforms dubbed Metroids. Make no hostile action against me and I promise I will make none against you, nor remove any technology from this place. I will join you in exterminating the other forces and then depart, leaving you the planet. To indicate acceptance, transmit to me your full files on the hybrid called Samus Aran."
There was a stretching moment of silence, filled only with the grumbling mechanisms of the still rising spire chamber. The Last turned back towards Samus, gloating in his certainty. Then the Diomedes transmission returned.
A soft but strong female voice said, "What did you do to Ms Aran?"
The Last's confidence slipped as Samus let her smile flicker onto her face. His speech, designed to bring Nakamura to his side, had not been calibrated for GF Officer Yin. When Samus had coded her redirect prank, she had not felt any need to identify her transmissions beyond 'Chozo battle-suit origin'. Samus had decided not to warn the Last about that.
Then Nakamura broke back onto the channel. He was panting, as well he might. A member of his crew had just found out he loosed the metroids on Federation citizens. "Unidentified Chozo individual, this is Federation Commander Nakamura. Your terms are acceptable. Samus Aran, cease hostilities and stand by his side in the rising tower. I know how much you trust me." He sounded defeated.
The Last said, "The optimal decision from your perspective. It is refreshing to find a primitive species behaving logically."
Samus had already started running. She knew exactly how much she trusted Nakamura. But she also knew that he knew it too. Then Nakamura joined back in the channel, a bit of cockiness reentering in his voice. "Well, then one last bit of education from this primitive. A reminder really. While your transmissions are securely encrypted, you helped the Pirates break ours."
A new broadcast rang across the spectrum, deep and slavering, the sound of a long tongue over many teeth. "My enemies standing together, betrayed by their own. How very nice to kill."
The Last caught sight of movement out the spire's windows, a distant shape rising up over lip of the plateau. It was huge and dark, bristling with vicious metal. Ridley's command ship was no longer hiding in its valley landing site, and the planetary bombardment capable starship was now aimed squarely at the Last's position from two miles away.
Nakamura's broadcast returned. "By now Aran should have blocked your exit." The Last spun back, in time to see Samus wedge herself in the doorway. From somewhere in orbit, Nakamura just continued with the same self assurance. "She may not like me, but I have always trusted her assessment of the Chozo. Sorry Aran, this is the best I could do. I would not have been in position for a proper strike for another two minutes. Ridley was closer."
Ridley's transmission growled with inhuman pleasure. "Close enough to taste your ash. Fire!"
The atmosphere erupted into flame as the Pirate ship blasted its massive wave-beam weapon straight at the spire, igniting what little oxygen there was above the plateau by the force of its passing. By starship terms it was point blank. That made it all the more surprising when the fireball cleared and the spire still stood, surrounded by flickering ribbons of light. Thin floating auroras trailed back toward the Pirate ship, tracing a line even as they began to fade from sight.
Inside the spire chamber the central pillar glowed and shone with the energy absorbed, even as the structure trembled from what managed to slip past. The machine's light spread out, washing over the two battle-suits in a shifting maze of reflections. The Last's face was invisible within his hemet, but Samus could still taste his scorn and disgust. "Blind, pitiful creatures. My life's work was understanding the transmission of energy and you think to threaten me with those sticks and stones? I programed these automated defense myself. Now, I have had enough of this charade."
He took a step towards the central control panel. On the coms, Ridley roared with fury and frustration. He shouted a command and the main cannon of his ship began to glow again as it charged for a second attack. The ship accelerated, pushing closer to the spire to close its range. However, this time the incinerating blast did not even brush the tower, instead it was picked apart by a web of light just outside the ship.
Then Nakamura's voice returned, almost casual in tone. "I admire your persistence, Commander Ridley. That new weapon of yours is truly powerful. However, you drop your ship shields when you fire it. Also, I may have misled you on my orbital effectiveness."
A pillar of blinding light lanced down from the blue sky, stabbing into the back of the Pirate ship. However, once Samus' visor tint adjusted she saw the characteristic shimmering ribbons beginning to reach up towards this new attack. Ridley's roar continued on the coms, but in one breath it smoothly transitioned to a chuffing, gloating laugh.
"Those who do not value fury do not understand it. They see me charge and they think they will kill me. I only wished to be near the tower. Now I have traded a scratch on this one ship for the humans' weapons to be targeted by the Chozo defense as well. You are now locked in space. Thank you, fool, for wanting to kill."
Inside the spire, Samus suddenly shouted and sprang forward, suit jets rocketing her across the room towards the Last with her weapon raised to strike. The Last was startled by her abrupt battle cry and stepped back, easily dodging out of the way. However, that just allowed her to hit her true target. The heavy bludgeon of her weapon arm smashed down through the energy mechanism's control panel, reducing delicate engineering to shards and smoke. The Last raised his own gun but Samus kept him off balance by only straightening up and starting to speak with her back still to him.
"The blacklist is set and locked, covering any energy with line of sight to the spire, range two hundred miles. Now no one gets to play outside."
The Last twisted his head back around as he noticed the federation transmission spike was no longer slaved to his control. That long period of back and forth conversations had given Samus plenty of time to sneak past The Last's hastily applied firewall. Now everyone had heard her message.
The following moment of silence stretched out across all transmission channels, on the planet and in space. All four parties waited to see if anyone else was going to unveil yet another trump card.
After a few more seconds, Nakamura said, "...All right. Well then, Aran, since you can hear me, Aurora has been freed to give you unrestricted aid. Do what you do best and eliminate all the hostile forces on the planet. Once the immediate threat is gone, we can have our own discussion. Nakamura out."
Ridley, never one to let someone else have the last word, chimed in too. "Samus, you failed in our deal. You are too weak. Now I will march my forces across this world. They will tear you and your chozo out of your skin and I will lick your living bones."
Samus only waved vaguely in the distance as Ridley's ship slowly turned around and limped back to its canyon-shielded landing site, trailing smoke as it flew. Then she turned back to The Last, wondering how he had been so quiet lately. Usually he loved to talk. Then the microscopic trembling across the surface of his armor gave the answer, the faint, nearly invisible tremors. He was frozen with a rage a being like him had likely never experienced before.
Then he threw back his head and screamed.
...
- Location
- The Surface Of A Hostile Planet
Kek. The very definition of gambit pileup.
E: It's absolutely criminal that this isn't getting more commentary. This is an incredibly well written story, and one of the best explorations of Samus I have ever seen, bar none.
E: It's absolutely criminal that this isn't getting more commentary. This is an incredibly well written story, and one of the best explorations of Samus I have ever seen, bar none.
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- Location
- USA
This is hands down the best metroid story I've ever seen. I wish it was a game. Well done.
RagnorakTres
Technically Correct
- Location
- A Rolled Up Sidewalk Somewhere South Of Toledo, OH
- Pronouns
- Any/All
"I mean if you're not willing to do that, you're not really willing to win."
Mama Samus, laying down the law.
"...funny, Old Bird used to do that, too."
This is brilliant and I love it. I appreciate so much this characterization of Samus as vaguely alien but recognizably human. Absolutely excited to see more when you're ready.
"...Isn't that what she said about deorbiting without a ship?"
"I think that's what she says about any really crazy idea she manages to survive doing."
"...she's not really wrong though."
"*sigh* Unfortunately."
--
I like to think that Samus guessed what the Federation and Ridley would do with the coordinate information, their positioning, and based on what the system actually does, deliberately finished kicking off the gambit pileup to distract the Chozo while she locked out everyone.
Fabula Amanti
I want a Grimoire, but I got books.
- Location
- Singapore
I'm having a vague Halo 4 flashbacks. Samus is the literal Reclaimer and the villain is the Didact.
Well, I appreciate your comments. Any bit of feedback is wonderful to hear.
As I may or may not have mentioned on this site (I can't always remember what I posted on which platforms) this story started as me imagining Prime 4. Frankly, when I finally sat down to write it I was surprised that the Metroid Fandom did not have a larger fan-fiction presence.
That is exactly what I was going for.
The difference between being a genius and a maniac is keeping a straight face when they ask you why you did that.
My memories of Halo 4 are a little fuzzy. I think I only ever played through the story once in coop and was not really listening to the cutscenes.
- Location
- Christchurch, NZ
That was just delightful! Honestly, I'm surprised that I'm surprised at how short it took for the deal with Ridley to fall through: though with that line about her being too weak being immediately followed by that gambit pile-up, I bet he's reconsidering.
What I'm saying is Samus/Ridley is OTP.
Hmm, seems like the pirates are getting smarter...
What I'm saying is Samus/Ridley is OTP.
Hmm, seems like the pirates are getting smarter...
- Location
- Detroit, Michigan
