As soon as the corroded iris ground closed behind her, Samus realized that she was not alone in the small chamber. The pile of debris in back unfolded into a mechanoid with two long and multiply-jointed arms, each one terminating in a toothed excavating wheel. It began a slow circuit of the walls in a hand-over-fist fashion, using its own body as a pivot. She carefully stepped out of its path, still training her gun on it in case it became actively hostile.
Her suit's computer did not recognize the design. That, combined with the mechanoid's heavily encrusted body and excavating teeth worn down to nubs, suggested that it could be very ancient. It certainly looked older than the chamber. Zebes Colony had been built and rebuilt in successive settlements over its long history, with many things buried and forgotten. She wondered whether this mechanoid could be of Chozo origin.
"Zoes chora," she said, experimentally. Any Chozo mechanoid should react to the standard phrase of command.
Nothing. It continued its blind search of the walls.
She tried the classical dialect. "Zo eth chorete, shektulu," she said, feeling at first awkwardly formal and then suddenly embarrassed. The modern word "shaktool" properly meant "digging mechanoid", but she remembered too late that the older form meant "digging laborer" only by way of a fairly crude physical analogy. She reminded herself that any fear of her hard-beaked classics tutor manifesting to berate her was entirely irrational. For its part, the mechanoid continued to ignore her. Perhaps it was damaged, or perhaps her human approximation of the reconstructed classical dialect was unintelligible, or perhaps it was from the wrong period or not Chozo-made at all.
After a little while, she noticed that it kept pausing at the rear of the chamber. A quick scan hinted at a silted-in tunnel behind the denzium-alloy wall. The mechanoid might have entered the abandoned storage chamber through one of the openings above, only to find itself trapped by unfamiliar walls.
Whatever its origin, she decided to help the poor shaktool.