Chapter 9: Truth

Pirate AA Cannon: Top Floor

Samus Aran marched into the tower's nerve center, the walls of which Bjorn had knocked open in her absence. The giant of a man was staring out one of those holes, hands raised and cupped around his eyes in a parody of binoculars, Dark Samus standing only a short ways away. Any other time she would have questioned the sanity, and effectiveness, of using hands for ocular-enhancement, but this was Bjorn. Almost nothing he did made sense to a rational mind. Her clone wasn't doing anything overtly malicious that she could tell, apart from glancing back at Bjorn every few seconds which she could only discern by a slight pivot of Dark Samus's helmet. She would assume there was something nefarious going on, but she couldn't know what.

Bjorn partly turned to look at her, and waved momentarily. "Dere you iz!" The big man pointed out into the great expanse of the Pirate's homeworld. "Iz been lookin, an dat boy waz right! Dere's loadz ov dem gitz on da way!"

She found herself smiling, as eager for the impending violence as Bjorn was despite the imminent attempted betrayal of Dark Samus. It was going to fail. She was quite certain of that. The only thing she wasn't sure about was how badly the attempt was going to fail.

Bjorn started speaking again. "Ey, dere'z a bridge out dere." The Warboss immediately started roaring, presumably at the orks. "EY, ALL OV YOU BOYZ! LEG IT OUT TO DAT BRIDGE! MAKE DEM GITZ WALK INTO OUR DAKKA!"

After her ears stopped ringing the translation made its way to her brain, and it impressed. Basic though it was, it was a sound strategy. Depending on what Bjorn had seen it could have been nearly genius. Although pirate aero-troopers could complicate things. Not to mention if Ridly showed up.

That name sparked her mouth. "Bjorn, you don't happen to see, say, anything that looks like a dragon do you?"

Bjorn looked at her for a second before turning back to the vista and "looking" through his hands. "Eh, nuffin out dere lookz like a dragon, no. Dere's loadz uv dem gitz dat waz ere wen we crashed on in. Dere's sum gitz floating around dem. And dere's dese really big gitz smack in da middle ov the ole fing. Like dem puny ones, just biggah."

She again ran the translation. So, more or less he was saying that there were lots of troopers, aero-troopers, and elite pirates or berserker lords. Either of the last two could be problematic, but the sheer amount of rounds the ork could put downrange would likely make the rest of the approaching army nil. Then again, how would the elite pirate's shield generator handle bullets? She couldn't recall it handling straight missiles before…

She looked down out onto the plains, just in time to see the orks tear out across the barren rock on their motorcycles. She was once again struck by the sheer obnoxious volume of the both the engines and tires. It then tangentially occurred to her what in hell they were using for fuel, but she dismissed that thought almost immediately under the assumption that thinking about it would only make her head hurt at an inopportune time.

Dark Samus however, was new to this whole thing and reacted appropriately, covering her "ears" and letting off an automatic comment/question. "How can they hear anything sitting right next to that?"

She started smirking. "If that confuses you, think about this. Bjorn and the orks snuck up to this place wearing purple paint."

Bjorn stopped staring out towards to the incoming army to speak. "Itz true it iz. Purple iz da sneakiest colah!"

Barely suppressing a snicker she spoke again. "Go ahead, ask why."

Dark Samus, understandably, hesitantly acquiesced. "Uh, why is purple the sneakiest?"

In unison, both she and Bjorn answered, with varying degrees of clarity. "Because, have you ever seen a purple army?"

The clone started to say something, but trailed off into confused stammering. Confused stammering that she found utterly glorious. Projecting her prior befuddlement onto her clone was deliciously cathartic. And her irate feeling towards Bjorn for letting Dark Samus live were fading by the second.

Bjorn spoke, mind clearly prioritizing. "I hope da boyz leave sum gitz fer me ta shoot."

She obligingly went with the change of topic. "You do plan on running to get there, right? Because if you are you're going to have to carry me. My suit can't run."

She didn't care that that tidbit of information might give Dark Samus a small edge should they come to blows. She wanted to get into battle, get "stuck in" as the Warboss would say. If Bjorn and the orks were born for battle, she was satisfied with a label of being born to destroy Space Pirates, part and parcel of the same purview. War was something she had lived for since her Zero Mission. She'd just been waging her war solo. But now…

Bjorn started to reach out, but hesitated momentarily with his big mitts in the air. "Eh, how'z youz want me ta carry ya? Iz can hold da suit an you separate. Eh, Iz can carry da suit wiff youz in it…"

Realizing that the big man was leaving the choice up to her, a welcome change, she looked up. "I could ride on your shoulder, if that works."

Bjorn put his hand down low enough for her to easily step up, and she did so. After a short moment of deliberation she parked her rear end just behind on of the spikes on the wide metal plate. Quite the stable position actually, at the moment anyway. Just how that would change when the Warboss started running remained to be seen. On a completely unrelated note, she felt quite delighted that Bjorn wasn't just sweeping her up and hauling her off now. His asking left a nice, warm feeling in her chest.

The moment was immediately ruined when Bjorn turned to Dark Samus and offered the same thing. "Youz want a ride too?"

After a moment, likely one born of confusion, her clone nodded smugly. "Of course, I'd be delighted."

Probably just to add salt to the wound, Dark Samus ascended to Bjorn's opposite shoulder and perched there like some kind of diva. And as Bjorn started walking Dark Samus just looked over at her, helmet melting away just long enough to reveal a condescending smirk. Thankfully, Bjorn took off sprinting promptly, forcing the both of them to cling to his armor for dear life, both letting out rather undignified shrieks at the same time. The Warboss apparently found that funny, but what didn't he find funny?

As the big man ran, he roared aloud. "Dere'd betteh be sum gitz left for me ta shoot wen wez get dere!"

In addition to the thundering of Bjorn's footsteps, gunfire started filtering into the ambient noise. Roaring, orks cursing, explosions; ergo sounds that set her blood pumping. A flood of thoughts entered her mind; the impending firefight and her imminent genuine test of her suit's capabilities. The equally imminent point in which Dark Samus attempted to stab her and Bjorn in the back. The question of when Ridly would inevitably show up, like the fact that there would be skree in a cave. And a gleeful thought of how quickly the thrice damned dragon would fall apart under a barrage of ork bullets.

Her thoughts were abruptly interrupted with a cartoonish skidding noise and the accompanied preservation of momentum flinging her forward. There was a metallic crash and one of Bjorn's big mitts closed around her ankle, wrenching it uncomfortably, but dashing her head against the rocks was by far the more unpleasant option. At least the sound of gunfire was far closer. Just over the next ridge if she had to guess.

The Warboss lifted, keeping her head from cracking against the ground as she swung back. "Sorry, Iz waz finkin dat youz waz oldin on tightah."

Looking down, relative to her, she threw on a smile. "It's fine. We're just about there, that's what counts right?"

Bjorn returned the smile. "Dat'z right it iz." The big man set her down gently, and then not so gently set her suit on its feet, cockpit facing her. "Youz ready ta shoot sum Spacy gitz?"

Without a moment of hesitation she leapt into her suit, closing the canopy and powering it up. "I thought you'd never ask."

Only peripherally aware that Dark Samus had dropped from Bjorn's shoulder, she squared up with the ridge separating the three of them from the raging battle and took a deep breath. At most she had only ever faced small squads of Pirates at a time, not an army. As much as she was looking forward to it, this was a new and daunting experience. But at least the Pirates would have a lot of other targets to aim for, and they'd probably prioritize the roaring green monsters trying to chop them in half. She would; basic survival instinct right there. Another survival instinct that she was learning, let Bjorn go in first. So she waited for the Warboss to bellow "WAAAGH!" and charge ahead before she moved over the ridge.

Chaos was the word. Pirate and ork violently crashing into each other on the rather narrow steel bridge. Orks with crude blades traded vicious melee blows with Pirate troopers and commandoes; the smaller Pirates ganging up two or three per ork to essentially nibble the green goliaths to death. Of course, that strategy sounded good in theory. In practice it was more hit or miss. One misstep and the Pirate troopers would, and frequently were, swatted clear off the bridge and into the chasm below. Those not armed with melee weapons traded shots from the rocks on either side of the bridge, with varying degrees of success. The Pirates were far more accurate, but the orks didn't seem to care when they got hit. The orks were hitting the rocks far, far more often than they were hitting targets, but when they did connect the Pirate in question lost a limb at least. Both sides were also lobbing explosives; crude grenades and rockets from the orks. And from the Pirates, grenadiers and, more worrisome, several Elite Pirates. The living tanks were standing behind almost total cover and were lobbing plasma shots from their artillery cannons into the ork lines with impunity. Another one was wading into the melee on the bridge, all but ignoring the storm of bullets.

Bjorn saw that one Elite on the bridge and made straight for it, roaring his battle cry and charging through the ranks of the orks while curiously not barging any of them off of the bridge. For his enthusiasm, Bjorn was rewarded with a big fist to the face from the charging Elite. As per usual, the Warboss completely ignored the blow and responded with one of his own. Whereas the Elite Pirate's blow was ignored, Bjorn's was incapable of the same. The Warboss punched the Elite so hard the phazon-enhanced monstrosity was impaled on Bjorn's arm, drenching the big man with a spray of phazon-blue blood. Without any apparent effort Bjorn then hurled the Elite off into the chasm.

A familiar sound filtered to her over the carnage, Dark Samus's arm cannon. She looked over to her evil clone just in time to see the first lump of phazon energy sail right past the ork Dark Samus had undoubtedly been aiming at to crash into the commando just about to execute a separate fallen ork. Her clone visibly hesitated, confusion hilariously obvious.

She shouted at Dark Samus, voice slightly augmented by her suit. "Having problems? Your aim seems to be a bit off."

The only answer she got was a glare, one venomous enough to poison a planet. The subsequent attempt to spite her comment all but nullified whatever justifiable caution she would have felt. Dark Samus fired another shot, one that missed, again, by an equally narrow margin. She felt like doubling over with laughter. Funny in and of itself because these last few days included more laughing than the rest of her life combined, excluding perhaps her childhood which she couldn't remember clearly. But she did not, not yet anyway. Now was the time for action, shooting specifically. She had all the time in the world to drown in mirth later.

She turned her gaze, and subsequently her suit's primary armaments, towards one of the partially hidden elite pirates. "Time to see what this hunk of metal can really do…" After a long moment, before she pulled every trigger she could locate, her mouth spontaneously uttered one more word at low volume. "Waaagh."

First off, the plasma artillery cannon she had aimed the beamy death gun at vanished in a fiery explosion. The beast bellowed in pain, not just from the explosion, but also from the withering barrage of bullets she was pouring in its general direction. To be sure the majority missed, but the technically small percentage that hit still amounted to a gleefully high number. Spurts of phazon-colored blood leapt from the body, and like a great tree the elite pirate toppled backward, hopefully crushing one or two of the troopers in the process. She was immediately reprimanded of course, in the form of a laser barrage that she could not have avoided even if she weren't in a barely mobile gun platform. Seeing how she was, the vast majority struck the front of her suit. Now she realized she had a problem; she had no idea if the hits were actually damaging the suit. Her vision was restricted enough that she couldn't see anything to the left or right. But, this was a great heap of metal. Lasers could only do so much to nearly solid metal, right?

She scowled sourly. "Sure, tell that to the robots in Sanctuary Fortress on Aether. All of their smoking, mangled bodies."

Best as she could, she ignored the torrent of laser-fire and just kept shooting, trusting in the ork design to weather the storm. Still, she couldn't figure out how to use the rockets. At the moment she couldn't remember if she'd just never been told where the trigger was or if she had been told and just forgot about it what with all of the mind-numbingly insane things going on. Or it could have been the crash. People getting hit on the head and forgetting things was pretty cliché, but those things existed for a reason, right?

That was when she heard something, something over the furious cacophony of the battle, a screech familiar enough to her by now that she could almost mimic it herself; Ridly. She looked up, further ignoring the lasers hitting her suit, to try and spot the dragon. After a few pulse-pounding moments of searching the skies the beast appeared from the toxic clouds, looking almost exactly like the meta-Ridly she had killed, or at least assisted in killing, on Tallon IV. When would this thing take the hint and just stay dead?

She took aim, the sheer range of the shot she would have to make daunting enough that she harbored doubts about her ability to shoot true. But shoot she did, and miss she did as well. Her shot sailed wide to the front of the beast, missing its snout by a wide enough margin that Dark Samus would have been perfectly justified in making a retaliatory snappy comment. But mercifully there was none forthcoming. Ridly's only reaction was to roar, she couldn't tell if it was a mocking one or not, and fly closer. She would have taken another shot, but something more powerful than the standard laser shot hit her suit and staggered the contraption. She struggled to right her suit, and as she did she became quickly aware of what had hit her. An elite pirate had her zeroed with its artillery cannon, and she'd just taken a direct hit. She managed to return fire and destroy the cannon, but another roar stole her attention. A sort of calm fell as Ridly dove in for a strafing run. The dragon's flame breath lanced out straight towards the expanse of the bridge, engulfing several of the Pirates, but primarily igniting every ork on the bridge. Panicked screams of orks aflame filled the air as the poor souls flailed about, many of which tumbled off into the abyss in their delirium.

Bjorn, as usual, unfazed by the fire turned to follow Ridly's flight and bellowed at the dragon. "Ey! Nobody zogz mah boyz an getz away wif it! Get bak ere soz Iz ken give ya a propah smack!"

The Warboss began firing at the retreating, aerial dragon, leaving his back completely exposed to the Pirate hoard. She would have opened fire, but another of the elite's pegged her with an artillery round, a direct enough hit that her suit toppled over onto its side. The side that happened to be the one with the beamy death gun on it. While she was stuck one of the commandoes jumped up onto Bjorn's back, and though the giant violently thrashed about the commando ignited its energy blade and buried the orange construct in the gap of Bjorn's armor just above his waist. Bjorn roared in pain, the first time she could ever recall him making that noise, and reached around to grab at the Pirate clinging to him, but the far more nimble commando evaded the seeking mitt and climbed higher, leaving a jet of black blood behind as the commando ascended, clearly intending to aim for the neck. Other Pirates, commandoes and otherwise, jumped on, adding to the chaos that she couldn't do a damn thing about. That fact prompted an unfamiliar feeling to bubble up, one she didn't immediately have the words to describe. It felt, hollow, like the inside of her chest had been scraped out by a particularly clumsy ork. And something wet was running down her face…

Without warning a bolt of blue energy crashed out of nowhere and nearly vaporized the commando nearing Bjorn's neck. A collective moment of confusion fell, and that moment was long enough for more shots to appear and pick off every other Pirate clinging to Bjorn's body. Though it was a struggle, and her suit audibly protested the movement, she twisted her off-kilter vision towards the shot's origin point. Even though the simple color was a major clue, she still could barely believe it. But it was true, Dark Samus was standing right out in the open, arm cannon obviously pointing straight at Bjorn. The confusing point was that the kind of precision her clone had just demonstrated could not have been an accident. Dark Samus must have deliberately aimed at every one of those Pirates. And, why in hell would her clone do that? The sentiment seemed mutual; for the distant Dark Samus looked down at her arm cannon, back up at Bjorn, who was now fully engaged in mowing down as many Pirates as he could with his gun, before clutching at her head in apparent pain.

The remaining Pirates seemed to make a tactical choice to withdraw, if "tactical" could be used to describe a hysterical sprint away from the bellowing Bjorn and the surviving orks. She understood; to them it must have seemed that their "commander" had betrayed them. And Ridly seemed content to just fly off, so, that left the command structure for the attacking force all but evaporated. As much as it tickled her to watch the Pirates run like rats in the light; she was far more irritated that she couldn't stand up in her suit. That, and the canopy was wedged into the dirt, trapping her inside. On the bright side, she wasn't going to suffocate because the fan was still working. But that was only a mild salve on her pride. Considering that she was going to likely going to have to holler for Bjorn, or even one of the orks, to right her suit so she could get out.

She let out a long sigh. "Ok…" She took a deep breath. "Hello? Someone help me?"

It took a few minutes, but the heavy *thump* sound of boots drew close. "Ey now, watz dis?" Whichever ork it was must have thought her situation incredibly funny. "Boyz! Dat squishy humie'z stuk in er kan!"

Orks started laughing; and the steadily increasing volume told her that more were stomping up just to see what was so funny. She would have felt embarrassed, if these were people. As the orks were little more than overgrown, extremely violent, toddlers she just set her face in a deadpan glare and sullenly stared out of her suit's eye slit.

Eventually, the laughing started to die down. And she took the opportunity to speak. "Would you mind setting my, er, kan, upright?"

A moment of dumb silence passed, and then one of the orks outside spoke. "Oh, so datz wat youz wanted."

Just like that she was roughly thrown to the left as her suit was jerked up out of the soft dirt onto its feet. The sudden shift was so sudden she almost overbalanced and toppled over onto the other side; but a surge of quick reflexes born of her extreme desire to not further make a mockery of herself kept her suit upright. She did however, crack her head against the interior of the canopy. The whole debacle actually was something she was going to have to remember though, because her suit couldn't stand up on its own. An effective translation into tactical advice; don't fall over ever again. If only for the sake of her pride.

Immediately, she popped the hatch on her suit and hopped out to both get a breath of fresh air and stand on her own two feet for a moment. "Ugh…" She rubbed at the spot on her head where she'd hit her head. "The things I put up with."

With a glance she looked over towards Bjorn, just to make sure that he was okay. What she saw both amused and disturbed her. Bjorn, for once, was conversing at a volume that she could not hear, granted the Warboss was quite a long way off. And after a few seconds the big man scooped Dark Samus up and gave the phazon-born clone a hug. While normally such a gesture would be construed as cute, this one was not so much. Dark Samus, to the best of her knowledge, did not have a defined skeletal structure. This did not change the fact that the clone looked human, and that when Bjorn hugged Dark Samus the clone's torso compacted inside the Warboss's grasp to a sickening degree. The fact that her clone didn't even make a sound she could hear, a sound of pain, pushed up the degree of disturbing.

She looked over her shoulder at the orks still just standing there; and decided to try something. "Get my suit back to the, eh, base."

After a few seconds, and some eyes squinted in what she assumed to be the orkish equivalent of heavy thought, a pair of the barbarians hefted the giant hunk of metal and guns before just sort of trudging off without much of a care. That issue handled; she started picking her way across the rocks towards Bjorn, thanking her lucky stars that it wasn't raining right now. Once or twice she almost lost her footing, but for the most part it was a steady descent. Around seventy-five percent of the way down she considered calling out, getting Bjorn's attention. But she didn't, curiosity driving her to remain quiet to hear what the big lug was saying to Dark Samus that she couldn't hear. Yes, there was an element of suspicious jealousy to her silence, even though she doubted Bjorn had the capacity to be deceitful, but damn it she didn't trust her clone.

Just on the edge of earshot, when she could only hear trace snippets of Bjorn's bombastic voice, she mounted a small rise after a ditch that put the Warboss and Dark Samus back in plain view. What immediately struck her was how Dark Samus had "removed" her helmet. Or more specifically, the expression on the revealed "face." Her clone was smiling. Smiling and looking up at Bjorn with a doe-eyed gaze that would cloud over every few seconds with a sort of abjured rage, and then fade back to the former, softer expression. It was odd enough that she momentarily forgot about her jealousy to think, 'what in hell is going on here?'

Then a thought occurred to her, a lightbulb lit up, a bolt of inspiration. A revelation if she were so bold to think. One that re-wrote her entire impression of Bjorn and the orks. Maybe this was all happening because. Just because the orks believed that it was supposed to happen. Back in Bjorn's home, Erasmus had said explicitly that her suit should not have worked at all. No connected power supply, ammo belts, or even a supply of oxygen for the occupant. By that observation she should have suffocated within a few minutes, and certainly not last the several hours she had been trapped inside after it shut down back on Petrarch Prime. Purple paint should not have possibly made someone harder to see, and yet the orks believed it did, hence it worked that way for them. All of those cobbled-together vehicles, she was willing to bet something was off with the design that should have meant they didn't work, but they did. Somehow without adequate fuel as well. And Dark Samus, Dark Samus had made a big show out of professing how much of a fan she was of Bjorn, outright bragging about so easily convincing Bjorn and the orks. If so, then the orks believed Dark Samus liked Bjorn. So, that meant that because the orks believed the clone liked Bjorn, that Dark Samus actually did like him now? Hence why the phazon-born doppelganger had instinctively leapt to Bjorn's defense?

She grabbed at her temples. "Oh god my head. Someone make it stop."

And then another thought occurred to her. Where did she fit into this nonsensical equation? If the orks believing something made it so, then what were they thinking about her? Did their thinking that she was on their side actually warp her perceptions and actions until she actually was on their side? She was thinking in circles, and suffering physical pain from it. She felt like something inside her skull was snapping, and the sensation forced her to let out a piercing scream before dropping to the ground and passing out.