Woman of Three Legacies
By Mr Khan
1: The Incident
So the Hatchling passed from our care, returning to her own kind; standard-bearer of an empty nest twice over, as her guardians turned to face the Worm that inevitably consumed us all.
Hypersleep was supposed to be deep and dreamless; a still, placid existence as devoid of all purpose as anything this side of Death. It was meant to fill the time spent in deep space travel by pilots of one-man spacecraft, who would otherwise have nothing to do as they watched the swirl of Subspace fleet by. Thus hypersleep was not meant for Her, for although Her ship was small and economical, it was also fairly well-equipped, and could take on passengers perfectly well and provide her with entertainments or exercises to pass the time. She opted for hypersleep as her drug of choice, the only way to live a properly efficient existence and not waste the requisite hours and days of space travel just thinking. The kind of thoughts she had were nonproductive, and could only serve to dull her edge or distract her from her work.
But even hypersleep seemed to fail her.
~0~
Suddenly her vision is filled by one vicious, monstrous mandible, fastening to her and beginning to feed. Nothing came out, nothing she could perceive, but the parasite drew her inexorably to her death. She was dying, or was she growing stronger? Was she the one feeding on the victim, drawing life-force into herself? The woman collapsed, dead, the parasite detached, and began to scream.
~0~
The screaming didn't stop. The hypersleep system had kicked off, and she awoke to the all-too-familiar sound of the Baby's Cry distress beacon. High priority; immediate assistance, she knew what that beacon meant, but she needed context. She sighed and stirred, motor functions restored as she awoke.
"Where's the distress beacon coming from?"
"Local coordinates, about 3/4ths of a light year from here, Samus." The reply came from her new, disembodied companion; the preserved intelligence of Adam Malkovich.
Adam had taken refuge aboard her ship since he had defied military orders back at the BSL station and ultimately aided her in its destruction. It was surprisingly less awkward than she had initially assumed, having Adam be omnipresent aboard her ship, since he was no longer human. For all intents and purposes, he was just another shipboard AI, albeit one with most of Adam's memories and all of his personality quirks. He didn't speak until spoken to, and though he, as part of her computer, could see her at all times, it bothered her no more than if it were merely a computer watching her. Mostly things remained unchanged, except that she now had a highly decorated military veteran living with her, a second opinion that could provide analyses that few other AI's could hope to achieve, and someone whom she could trust to give the best answer in almost any situation.
"3/4ths of a light year…" she mused, fully sitting up in her hypersleep chair, which snapped into place behind her. It took her a moment or two to remember which sector she had drifted into lately, to what might even be in this vicinity. She swiped her hand in front of a display, prompting a holographic starmap to appear before her vision. There wasn't much out here at all, and the distress beacon was coming from a small nebula that was too dense for usual subspace travel.
The random distress beacon meant many things to Samus; a mystery, an adventure, a harrowing brush with death, a chance to discover more about herself. It was something that could likely be a dangerous trap, a meal ticket, or might end up being both. She adjusted course, heading away from the doldrums and towards a new adventure.
Life as a bounty hunter had always been irregular for Samus, compared to her time in the military, but the months since the incident at the BSL Station had been especially slow-paced. She had gotten paid for that, even though it had not been an assigned mission. She had been paid quite discretely, in a manner which she had inferred and which Adam had positively identified as "hush money," a lump of cash from the Galactic Federation to make sure that she did not breathe a word of the fact that they had once again been illegally cloning Metroids, and had almost unleashed a plague of X Parasites upon the galaxy. That one payment, however, had been the last instance of contact she had had with the military higher-ups. She had not been declared an outlaw, but clearly the military had had it with her free-spiritedness.
She had known this was a possibility ever since she had decided to become a bounty hunter, but it was still deathly boring when the military finally decided that she was more of a liability than her services were worth; they had always given her the life-altering assignments: the two to Zebes, the rescue mission to Aether, the mission to the Alimbic Cluster. In the early years, while the Space Pirates were still active, they always had a constant stream of sabotage missions up for Bounty. Now, however, that well had run dry, and even basic odd jobs were few and far between. Fighting against galactic evil was all she had ever known, and her enduring boredom sometimes led her to ask certain existential questions, more of those resolve-weakening questions she hated so, and the reason she now turned more insistently to hypersleep for solace.
Thus, in her own way, she was grateful for the fact that someone was in distress. She was inclined to feel guilty about that fact, but that was another feeling that would not help her, and she refocused her efforts on the task at hand. Her ship decelerated to normal space as she reached the bounds of the nebula. "Switch to beta-ray scanner," she said. Adam or her ship (it was hard to designate one compared to the other at this point) complied, and the persistent teal mist of the nebula disappeared in favor of a black void with a few solid objects outlined in a green wire-frame.
One object in particular dominated the view. It was large and awkwardly shaped, smooth and rounded on the bottom, but the top was highly irregular, dominated by many different structures as though the whole thing were a huge, spacefaring city. As her ship cruised closer, Samus studied it carefully. She was just about to give voice to the obvious question when it was answered for her. "This vessel matches no registered design in current use by any entity known to the Galactic Federation," Adam said. She had assumed that was the case. If this was an actual spacecraft, it was horrendously designed for actual space travel, and even space stations were generally more symmetrical.
She hit another key, and the ship ran a search for suitable landing sites, then she stood and activated her Varia Suit. A beep indicated that a site had been located, and her gunship moved in to land on a landing platform that jutted out of the side of one of the many towers that protruded from the "city's" surface.
Her ship landed, and she moved over to the lift. "I'll relay some pictures and scans of what I can find inside," she said to Adam. She said no more because she did not need to, and her computer did not reply for similar reasons; both knew that their first goal here was to try to determine this mysterious craft's origin. The vexing matter was the fact that this ship of completely unknown design was using a galactic standard distress signal. The obvious solution was that someone else had happened upon this ship and had run into something dangerous. The more sinister possibility was that this was all a trap, but Samus was not the feared and respected heroine of the galaxy for nothing, and this was exactly the sort of thing she was good for. Perhaps the only thing she was good for, but again she shunted that thought out of her head as she descended to the landing platform below.
She stepped across the landing platform, safely protected from the vacuum of space by her familiar red-and-yellow Varia Suit, something she had retrieved from an old Chozo outpost after her old suit had been damaged in the incident on the BSL Station. With a bit of effort she had also found a few basic suit upgrades in the vicinity of the Chozo outpost; Screw Attack, Plasma Beam, Ice Beam, Super Missile, and Power Bomb, guaranteeing that she would be prepared for most possible scenarios, barring another major mission.
A quick glance at the door leading into the tower verified that it too operated according to the galactic standard for militarized zones; a basic shield on the door that reacted to ray stimulation. A quick shot from her arm cannon and she gained access to a small room that she quickly identified as a pressurizing chamber. As she heard the familiar hissing sound of artificial atmospheric gases filling the room, Samus keyed her scanner to assess the atmosphere's breathability. It came back negative, but in an odd way. It definitely wasn't breathable, but the suit's systems could not determine what side-effects this mixture would have if she breathed it in. Not that it really mattered, as she wasn't planning on taking her helmet off.
Once the pressurization finished, she proceeded into the next room, making her way into a straight hallway. It was made of metal and what she guessed was some sort of composite plastic, and Samus cast her gaze over every inch she could see, both to satisfy her curiosity to explore and to send bits and parts of the elaborate etchings in the metal mould around the ceiling back to Adam to identify. The artistry of it was subtle, but touching in its own way, though it did not appear to depict anything coherent, it signified a species less utilitarian than most, though again that should have been apparent from the egregiously impractical design of the entire vessel.
After negotiating her way through a few of these well-adorned but otherwise nondescript hallways, she found herself facing a deep shaft. Samus surmised it was an elevator, but it was down below, and she could derive no controls for it. More intriguing was the view on the far side of the shaft, which was some sort of clear plastic, through which she could see a large dome-like structure; the point from which her suit told her the distress signal was emanating. Encouraged by the sight of her apparent goal, she Screw-jumped down the shaft, some 40 meters deep.
Down at the bottom she stepped through another door, into another nondescript room, a small waypoint room with four doors leading in four directions. She moved slowly through the room, fairly certain she wanted to go straight ahead, but…
Samus stopped suddenly as the HUD in her visor flickered, then dissolved into static. Her alarm increased when she found she was also paralyzed, the joints of her suit refusing to function.
A suit failure. But I'm not under emotional duress, she thought, recalling her near-disastrous encounter with the Ridley clone on the Bottle Ship. She thought frantically, now certain that she had indeed been drawn into a trap, when she gathered a new memory; a small spherical robot she had encountered on Aether. That enemy had been able to force a soft reset of her suit's software, but this seemed more pervasive. If she wanted to move, she would have to deactivate her suit, exposing herself to the unknown quantity of the atmosphere here.
She deliberated about that decision, but soon whatever was affecting her made it for her. Her suit began to dematerialize from the arms outward, and she hastily took one last breath of oxygen, for whatever it would be worth. Her suit finished fading away and Samus stood, exposed and vulnerable to the elements in her skin-fitting blue biosuit. She glanced around frantically, knowing she had minutes at most to reclaim control of her suit before death claimed her.
Again, whatever sinister force was at work here resolved her dilemma by emitting a small electric shock through the atmosphere, just enough to force her stubborn lung muscles to work, sucking in the non-viable air. Samus learned the effects of the gas mixture very quickly, or would have, had she been able to retain her consciousness. She collapsed to the cold metal floor, her limbs and blonde ponytail splayed in a prone position.
~0~
"Samus, Samus?" She awoke slowly to Adam's voice, her slowly-awakening mind expecting to see him leaning over her, before she remembered that he was now merely her computer. Once that fact clicked back into place, awareness of many things rushed back simultaneously; she was alive, she was back in her Varia Suit, Adam was present, which meant she was on her ship, and this led her to a whole host of questions.
"How did I get back here?" she asked.
"You were suddenly teleported just outside of the ship in your suit," Adam replied. "I repositioned so that the ship's lift was able to retrieve you."
"What happened to me?"
"The ship's medical scanners showed no detriments to your health, except…"
The "except" showed that it was indeed a human intelligence powering her shipboard computer. No normal AI would show that degree of concern for its patient's sensitivities, but Samus had never been one to enjoy having information withheld from her.
"Except…?"
"Two of your eggs were taken."
Author's Note: "Random bad incident," is the standard plot for so many Metroid games and fics, I know, though obviously it's necessary exposition. The reason this contains only that much exposition is that I'm too ADD-rattled to do more than one chapter consecutively. I am going in what I hope is an interesting direction with this, so bear with me. It's also my first Metroid fic ever (previous efforts being in One Piece and SWAT Kats, with one-shots scattered elsewhere), so reviews will be appreciated on my general approach.
