Update: This story is being abandoned on this site and continued on Archive of Our Own. Please see last chapter if you are interested in the reasoning.
Author's Note: Hello, everyone. I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with it, but this story is a part of my "Human Series." More specifically, it takes place in the same AU, 5 years prior to the events of "Human."
I realized that in about a week, it will be one full year since the last installment of that series, "Zero Host," was completed. So now I've decided to come back to this AU that I've enjoyed playing in since 2015, and I'm starting a new full-length story. And since it takes place well before any of the other installments in that series, they are not required reading to understand what is happening in this one.
Essentially, this story is what happens when I get bored of waiting for details about Metroid Prime 4 to be released and decide to make up my own story instead. I sincerely hope you enjoy it, although readers who have found it because they were following "Seven Wonders" should be advised that this series contains more mature content and has a very different tone than my fluffy romances.
Anyway, without further ado, I give you the first chapter of "Ghosts," my Metroid Prime 4 fan fic. Thank you for reading, and as always, comments are sincerely appreciated.
Chapter 1: The Weapon
"Chairman Keaton?" A humanoid woman stepped through the doorway of the Galactic Federation Chairman's Chambers. She was a short, almost pinkish being who looked and dressed like a human woman from the waste up, but her lower body appeared equine in nature much like the centaurs of mythology. Thick-rimmed plastic fuchsia glasses took up much of her face and brought out the bright magenta of her hair. "I have a Mr. Samus Aran here to see you now."
Chairman Keaton regarded her from his regal desk, which blended perfectly into the rest of the dome-shaped office. One-way windows spanned the expanse of the circular walls, framed by golden arches that reached up to the dome ceiling and punctuated in between by lavish oil paintings of past Chairmen. Above their heads was a massive mural of the constellations and stars that made up the territory of the Galactic Federation itself.
The only things that seemed out of place were Chairman Keaton himself and the tall blonde human woman standing behind him. Standing about four feet tall with wrinkly green skin, the perpetually annoyed looking little alien did not seem to fit his role as Federation Chairman, but he had held down the position for the past five standard years.
Keaton nodded dismissively to his equine secretary, paying no mind to the unremarkable human woman behind him. "Mr. Samus Aran?" he asked with the slightest hint of amusement in his voice. "Of course. Send him in."
"Yes, Sir." The secretary nodded and stepped back out of the gilded double doors only to be replaced a moment later by a very tall human man.
At least six and a half feet tall, the man had a massive build that looked as though he had been chiseled by master sculptors into the perfect model of a human male. His skin was tan, and he had large, strikingly blue eyes with thick black hair that fell down to his shoulders. He wore a standard black fight suit that was just tight enough to outline his muscular expanse while still leaving some things to the imagination. Around his waist her wore a utility belt, but security must have taken his weaponry because the gun holsters at his hips were empty.
Keaton did the wrinkly, hairless alien equivalent of raising an eyebrow at the young man who couldn't have been aged more than twenty-five standard years.
"Samus Aran, I presume?" the alien asked, giving the man another long look up and down and thinking that he looked like something off the cover of a sleazy human romance novel.
"Yes, Sir," the tall man replied, his deep voice smooth and lush. "I am galactic bounty hunter Samus Aran."
The man then noticed the woman standing behind the Chairman and found her silent presence odd. Unlike the rest of the people in the Capitol building, she was not dressed for business or formality. She had her long hair in a high ponytail and wore a black hooded sweatshirt and a pair of faded jeans. Her face was completely unreadable are she just watched him.
"That must have been a difficult battle, Aran," the Chairman continued as though he and the man called Samus were completely alone. "The Marine doctors had some doubts that you would ever awaken from that coma or survive the Phazon infection, but here you are, standing before me. Clear as day." He frowned.
"It was a difficult battle, Sir." The man stepped forward and took hold of one of the chairs across from Keaton's desk. "May I?" he asked as he went to take a seat.
"No," said Keaton, and the man stopped mid-motion, caught completely off guard by the Chairman's refusal to a question he had only considered a polite formality.
"I apologize then," the man said, pushing the chair back to its original position and taking a step back. His eyes flicked back over to the blonde woman, but she may as well have been a ghost that only he could see. She remained unreadable and silent.
"You see, Mr. Aran," Keaton continued taking on a vaguely mocking tone, "I don't want to keep you here long, not what with the galaxy seeming to be in perpetual danger and whatnot… especially not after the deaths of your three closest competitors. It seems you've got us a bit backed into a corner here in regard to needing your services."
"Once again, Chairman Keaton, I am very sorry to hear of the deaths of the other hunters." The man's tone was appropriately somber as he regarded the little green alien. "I wish I had been able to save them all."
Keaton nodded. "I'm sure you are. At any rate, the military thanks you for your service, and I wanted to extend that thanks to you myself. Now, if you'll head back outside and speak with my secretary, she'll see you to your next appointment. It seems there are several journalistic publications all dying to get their hands on the real Samus Aran. Everyone's just been dying to learn your identity since your famed mission to Zebes."
"Of course, Sir." The man nodded and extended his hand for Keaton to shake, but the alien just looked at it. Confused, the man then extended his hand to the blond woman, but she remained silent and stoic as ever. After a while of feeling awkward, the man called Samus withdrew his hand and just nodded again. "Right then. Thank you, Sir. I'll be on my way then. Shouldn't keep the galaxy waiting."
He turned to leave, only glancing back once more as he approached the gilded doors and began to open them. He gave the woman one last curious glance before disappearing through the doors and presumably going to Keaton's secretary.
Once he was gone, Chairman Keaton turned to the tall blonde woman behind him and gave her a skeptical look. "That's the one you're passing off as Samus Aran?"
The woman just nodded, looking over to the large doors. "He'll do quite nicely for my purposes," she said in a deep voice. "Doesn't ask too many questions. Never asked to see me without my armor. Doesn't try to add any of his own style to the character. Very attractive by human standards. They'll slap his face across a few holo-tabloids and they'll sell like hot cakes."
Keaton nodded, noting the differences between the woman and the human man who had just left. While they were both tall and very muscular, that was where the similarities ended. The woman before him was much harder looking, less like a fitness model and more like a battle-hardened soldier. She had some scarring visible on her face and neck, but the alien knew the rest of her body showed much clearer signs of the abuse it had endured over the years. There was a sharp edge to her, a constant sense of uneasiness, and the Chairman knew from experience that she was always ready to act at a split second's notice. Everywhere she went, she always seemed to be anticipating a fight.
"Well," the Chairman scoffed, turning back to look at the holoscreens on his desk. "Let's hope he's more believable than that green haired woman a few years ago who claimed to be Samus Aran."
The woman frowned. "People are much more willing to believe I'm a man than to believe any woman claiming my name. So let's play into that instead. Besides, female humans and male-attracted-male humans will be all over this guy. They'll like his butt and fancy hair. Your average human family will be much more likely to believe him if he comes across their holoscreens after dinner than they would believe someone who looked like me. And then the media will finally have a face for Samus Aran and I won't have to deal with people trying to catch me without my armor."
Keaton silently regarded the real Samus for a moment as he parsed out what to say. "You've hired actors to play you before to throw the media off your trail. This is the first time you've actually arranged for one of them to walk through my chambers to keep up your charade."
Samus walked over to one of the long windows that lined the walls and gazed out of it. "I've never blown up an entire planet before."
The Chairman nodded as he continued to watch Samus. Normally it would be unheard of for anyone to come into the Chairman's Chambers in such informal attire and possessing the types of weaponry he knew she was concealing, but as ended up being the case more often than he cared for, he had made an exception for Samus Aran.
"Yes, well," he said, "I don't think that blowing up Phaaze could be avoided, although I know plenty of high-ranking officials who would have loved to have gotten their hands on more Phazon to continue the military's work."
Samus frowned as she turned back to the Chairman, the light illuminating a series of dark blue vein-like markings around her right eye. "I can't say I'm too torn up over that. They nearly killed me with that fucking PED suit. Besides, last I heard, the Federation had a ban on building bioweapons."
"They're not bioweapons if the substance is only being used to power their suits, Aran."
"That's the thing," she replied with a sour look on her face. "That's impossible. I saw it with the Pirates. With the Hunters. Even with Ridley to an extent. There is no way to just do a few mechanical enhancements. The Phazon takes over every time. It poisons the mind."
"Hmph," Keaton scoffed again, looking her up and down. "Says the woman who used Phazon enhancements on two separate missions and lived to tell about it. And I don't recall it ever poisoning your mind."
Samus didn't say anything as she turned to look back out of the window, concealing a slight tremor in her right hand as she did so. "No, I suppose it didn't."
"Of course, you've never been quite right in the head as long as I've known you," the alien said dismissively. His tone gave no indication that he considered the remark an insult, only a statement of fact, and Samus didn't bother to argue with him.
"I suppose I'm just so used to being out of my mind it wasn't much different than a typical Tuesday."
Keaton made a chuffing sound. He knew from prior experiences that Samus rarely had any idea which day of the week it was and seemed to operate on some kind of internal calendar only she understood.
Samus inhaled deeply as she felt the tremor in her right hand growing more pronounced. She put it inside the pocket of her jeans as she turned back to the Chairman. "I really should be going anyway."
Keaton nodded. "Frankly I'm not sure why you've been around this long to begin with. Getting too lonely out in space?"
Samus snorted. "Hardly. Just dreading leaving this office and stepping out into the damn crowds of Daiban. You know I've never been particularly fond of people."
"If you're not too fond of people, then why are you still talking to me?" The perpetually annoyed-looking alien looked at Samus with his usual bored indifference.
Samus just shrugged as she turned and walked toward the big double doors. "I guess you know how to contact me next time you've got a contract you need carried out."
"Yes…" Keaton replied, his reluctance evident in his voice. "Unfortunately with the other three top bounty hunters dead, I have a feeling we're going to be seeing a lot more of each other before the war is over."
It was Samus's turn to scoff as she looked back at the Chairman. "Don't be ridiculous, Keaton. You know I won't live to see the end of this war."
Then the mercenary just turned and left, letting herself through the heavy double doors and breezing straight past the equine secretary as she made her way out to the corridors of the Capitol Building of Daiban. She walked quickly, keeping her head down as she made her way through the busy government building. It was crowded with every species of sentient beings from planets all across Federation territory, and fortunately they were too distracted with their own work to pay Samus any mind.
If there was one thing Samus Aran truly despised aside from her enemies, it was crowds. Already hyper vigilant and with senses more acute than those of any standard human, she found the extreme level of stimulation overwhelming and always got nervous that if there were to be any kind of attack, she wouldn't see it coming and be able to respond in time. Not to mention the fact that large crowds of people in crowded Federation buildings were prime targets for any Space Pirates who might try to launch a strike.
Going outside wasn't much better. The thoroughfares were just as crowded with pedestrians, and ground vehicles made traversing them all the more treacherous. Samus just hurried through as fast as she could, ignoring anyone trying to stop her to ask for donations or the occasional male human who felt the need to comment on the appearance of anyone of her sex.
She didn't slow her nearly inhuman walking speed until she got to the commercial hangar where she had docked her ship. Not bothering to look the front desk attendant in the eyes, she swiped her access card and bolted through the heavy steel doors that opened to reveal the long steal corridor that led to the docking bays. It didn't take her long to find the number of the door her own ship was behind, and as she swiped the card once more, the hexagonal door opened from the center outward, and she stepped through it to find her ship right where she had docked it.
It wasn't her usual ship, the round golden starship that had become associated with her on the news or in other media. This was her second ship, her war ship. It was the one she had used in her most recent battles, flying between Bryyo, Norion, Elysia, Phaaze, and even the Space Pirate Homeworld itself. Like her regular ship, its coloring matched that of her Varia Suit, a bright golden orange with a green forward window, but unlike the other ship it had two massive thrusters on either side with mounted canons. In fact, this ship had several upgrades her regular ship lacked, including some that were slightly less than completely legal.
The only upgrade that she was concerned with today, however, was its cloaking device. Made of Chozo technology, the cloaking feature was beyond what any currently living being had ever created. It was nearly perfect, capable of rendering the entire ship basically invisible and completely undetectable on modern surveillance systems. And it was how she had managed to get her allegedly destroyed ship onto a planet like Daiban in the first place.
As she approached the ship, a platform lowered, and she stepped onto it as it rose up, bringing her into her ship's medical bay. Unlike her regular ship, there were no living quarters on board the war ship. It only had the hyper-advanced medical bay, a small bathroom, and the cockpit. Most nights, she only ever slept in her pilot's chair, regardless of which ship she was on. On her other ship, the room that was supposed to serve as her bedroom was little more than an armory, whereas on this ship, she didn't bother keeping her rifles and other weaponry out of sight. The walls of both the medical bay and cockpit were lined with guns.
Normally, she would have activated her armor as soon as she got out of view of the people on Daiban, but she didn't this time. Instead, she opted to walk straight into the cockpit and sit down in her chair. She scanned her palm on one of the panels and a glowing white half orb appeared on her left side. As she placed her hand upon it, she was just glad it wasn't the right side as now the tremor in her right hand was growing significantly worse and starting to move up her arm. She took it as a sign she needed to hurry up and get into space, and she impatiently waited as the doors of her docking bay opened and her ship's cloaking device booted up to full power.
Technically, she had listed this ship as destroyed in her report after the destruction of Phaaze. It wasn't that she intended to commit insurance fraud, although that had been the sort of by-product of her actions, but her intent had simply been to make sure no one knew she still possessed it. After all, it did contain several illegal upgrades as well as a vast amount of Chozo technology she didn't want to fall into the wrong hands. Though these days, she found herself wondering if her hands weren't the wrong ones.
The ship took off and flew straight into the sky as soon as the doors finished opening. Since no one could see her, she had to be careful to avoid all of the sky traffic as she blasted out of Daiban's atmosphere. And as soon as she was just far enough away, she made the jump into hyperdrive, holding her course until she was several light-years away from the Capitol Planet of Daiban. Only then, on the outskirts of Deep Space, did she put the ship into a sort of slow cruise as she got up from her pilot's seat and made her way back into the medical bay.
But Samus didn't go for anything in the high tech medical bay. Instead, she turned and walked into her bathroom. The tremor in her right arm was very uncomfortable at this point and severe enough that she knew the arm was effectively useless. Pulling her ponytail away from her face, she knelt over the toilet and heaved heavily before vomiting up the contents of her stomach. Trying to catch her breath, she failed as another wave of sickness overtook her and she threw up again. The process continued until she found herself violently dry heaving, nothing left inside of her to come up. And only then did she let herself sink to the bathroom floor, holding her throbbing head as she waited for the room to stop spinning.
The only silver lining was that the tremor in her arm had calmed down considerably while she was being sick to her stomach, and now it was only a small tremor in her hand once again. She closed her eyes as images of her recent mission flashed across her vision, images of the other hunters she had been forced to kill, but more importantly, she saw images of the bright blue phazon.
She envisioned the phazon stores she had seen on every planet, even the living world of Phaaze itself, and she found herself craving it. Ravenously. She couldn't get the image of the radioactive blue substance out of her head, wishing she could have just one more injection of it, one more trip into hypermode, where everything in the world would fall away except for what was immediately in front of her and the massive amount of power she had been able to unleash from her arm cannon.
The worst part of it, however, was knowing that even though it had been killing her from within, the lack of phazon in her system was what was making her sick right now. She had functionally become an addict over the month that her body had been corrupted by the substance, and when it was suddenly ripped from her during following the destruction of Phaaze, it had led to her being sicker than she had ever been in her life.
Standing up, she flushed the toilet and then bent over the sink and brushed her teeth. She hated the sour metallic taste it left in her mouth. While this wasn't the first time she had been on her ship in these few weeks following the destruction of Phaaze, it was the first time she had actually been cleared to leave Daiban.
For the first two weeks following her mission, she had been under strict quarantine in one of the high security medical facilities on the Capitol Planet. There she had gone through the worst of the Phazon withdrawal, not that she remembered most of it. Once they thought she was stable, they had kept her in quarantine for another week as she went over an intensive psychological evaluation, which she had of course faked her way through with a level of skill that surprised even her. Over the years, she must have gotten better at lying to doctors than she thought she had because in their final report to the Chairman, they said they found no evidence that the phazon exposure had altered her mental state in any way and stated that she should be free to go. Their only findings were the same as always, that she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and a pathologically antisocial disposition, and they had prescribed her medication accordingly with the recommendation of long-term therapy.
Not that Samus ever took the psychiatric drugs people prescribed to her. She just didn't like the way they made her feel, dulling her edge slightly and making her less on her guard. Samus liked those aspects of herself. They were what made her such an excellent weapon. And while she didn't argue about the existence of her very obvious post-traumatic stress issues, she didn't think she was nearly as much of a sociopath as people seemed to think she was. It wasn't that she actually hated people or lacked empathy. It was simply that being around other people made her uncomfortable. Being around other people had never ended well for her or anyone around her.
As she sat back down in her pilot's chair, she found herself thinking back to the other three hunters, the ones who had died on her last mission. Once again, she found herself the only survivor of a catastrophe, with all the guilt that generally entailed. She truly had no idea why she always ended up surviving while those around her perished, and she rejected the idea that she was simply the strongest out of them. After all, no one else had ended up in a coma for a month following the initial corruption. While she had slept in the hospital facility, they were out doing their assigned missions. And she doubted it was because she was somehow the strongest willed out of the lot, though she did possess a horrible stubbornness and a refusal to yield to the wills of other.
She thought perhaps there was some truth in what Keaton had said and that perhaps it was the fact that she felt like she was always teetering on the edge of losing her mind that had spared her from surrendering to the phazon the way every other hunter eventually had. After all, she had years of experience with resisting the less wholesome impulses her mind seemed obsessed with forcing upon her.
She just sighed as she turned her ship's motors off and reached into a compartment on the ship's console and pulled out a full bottle of whiskey, her usual poison of choice before all of the phazon stuff had gone down. She opened it and took a long swig, draining about a third of the bottle in one gulp. Her genetic enhancements had left her with an unfortunate tolerance for most intoxicants, and the frequency with which she imbibed didn't help matters much either.
Leaning back in her chair, she was ready for a night of getting drunk and trying to purge all of the memories from the last two months out of her head, but even as she relaxed, she felt her mind going back to that last mission. More specifically, she pictured their deaths again, the same ones she had pictured every night that she had been in the Galactic Federation's hospital and living facilities. Rundas rescuing her from falling to her death, only to be impaled on his own ice shard. Ghor and his demeanor before the corruption, and then what he had become after. Her desperate attempts to save both of them.
And then there was Gandrayda. Her mind lingered longest on Gandrayda. But then it had been lingering for years on Gandrayda, her former lover and hated rival. There was a lot to unpack when it came to thinking about Gandrayda. But while the Jovian had always had a wicked streak in her, the Phazon corruption had made her downright sadistic. Even to the point of torturing Samus in her final moments, shifting into the shape of each hunter Samus had failed to save and finally into Samus herself as she lay dying. At the time, Samus had thought it was a cruel look into her inevitable future, her own death from corruption.
But then she had lived. Somehow. Like she always did.
She took another long drink from her whiskey bottle, leaning back in her chair and just staring at the ceiling of the cockpit. She had held no love for the three hunters while they were alive, and she had killed them all when it came down to it. Killed them with perfect efficiency like the weapon she was. But it had affected her, affected her to the point where she had needed a moment to grieve alone on Elysia before returning with Admiral Dane's fleet.
She was about to finish off her first bottle of the night when a message appeared suddenly on the main holoscreen in front of her forward window. Hoping it wasn't an emergency of some kind, she stashed the liquor bottle as fast as she could and wiped her mouth as she sat up, hoping to make herself at least reasonably presentable for the Chairman if he were the one calling.
But even as she accepted the transmission, no one's face came up on the screen. It was completely dark, though she knew it had made connection.
"Samus Aran," a synthesized disembodied voice called out to her from the dark screen, "I see you've finally made it off Daiban and off of the Chairman's lap for the time being."
Samus frowned. This wasn't the first time she had received a call like this, though she hadn't gotten one since before this most recent mission.
"You're very observant," she replied, hitting a few buttons on the side of her dash in an attempt to trace the origin of the transmission. "You've been quiet for a while. I was starting to think you'd forgotten about me."
"I hope you didn't think that pretty boy you hired to play you was going to throw me off of your trail. I doubt you're that foolish."
"'That pretty boy,' as you refer to him, was never intended to throw any serious combatants off of my trail, just to give the media a poster boy so they'll stop hounding me in my free time. I would never assume that you would mistake an underwear model from Melpomene for the real thing. If you're a skilled enough stalker to call my ship directly and to know which planets I've been to, then you're at least a skilled enough stalker to know I'm not a human male."
"Do you really think you should have flown so far into the recesses of space? Just to poison yourself and brood over your most recent kills?"
Samus frowned and crossed her arms. "And what makes you think I'm doing that?"
"Because I know how bioweapons and the self-righteous scum of the Federation act. You enjoyed killing those other bounty hunters, even if you won't admit to that to anyone. You enjoy the kill in general, whether it's Space Pirates or your competition. And the phazon only amplified your bloodlust. But you can't let yourself acknowledge that. So you make a show of mourning even if it's only to yourself. Because that still gives you plausible deniability that you're the soulless killer you know yourself to be."
"I've never made a show of mourning." Samus glanced over to the other computers that were trying to trace the source of the transmission but they didn't seem able to follow the signal. "I know exactly who and what I am."
"And what is that?"
"A weapon." It wasn't a lie. That was precisely what she had been made into and precisely what she acted as. From the time she had been a toddler and the Chozo scientists had opened her skull and installed the powersuit interfacing hardware into her brain, that was all she was ever destined to become.
"A living weapon is an abomination, and dependence upon it is a testament to the Federation's failings. And even you must see that."
Samus shrugged even though she knew the owner of the voice couldn't see her. She was running out of patience but she needed to keep the speaker talking if she had any hope left of tracing the signal. "I'm willing and they pay well. Not to mention the fact that we have common enemies. If the price of galactic peace and the deaths of every last Space Pirate means aligning myself with the Federation, I see no disgrace in that."
"Perhaps they would have done better with a different ally, but you personally saw to the deaths of the three who could rival you. And now you've flown so far from Daiban, leaving the galaxy without its self-proclaimed protector."
Samus's eyes widened at the same moment that the transmission trackers began to beep. As she looked over to her holoscreens, she heard the voice laugh as she saw its location. Only one solar system over from Daiban and getting closer by the second.
"What the hell are you planning to do to Daiban?" she demanded, fury in her voice as she shouted at the unknown entity.
But the transmission cut out there, leaving her alone in her ship once more, deep in the abyss of space and light-years away from where she needed to be.