Chapter 11: Get Burned
Pirate AA Tower:
Samus Aran felt horrible. Not at all surprising when she recalled that she had just had her ass handed to her on a plate by a Pirate commando before the alien made a poor tactical choice. Still, that could empirically be forgiven considering that no Pirate had ever had the opportunity to strangle her before. And if she weren't slightly more durable than the average human she would be dead. As it was, she was barely conscious and fuzzily hearing some rather familiar voices bickering.
An ork was speaking. "…An Iz tell ya, da boss'z, eh, wat e call it, da boss'z lady ain't ded." There were some clunky boot steps. "Juz watch, Iz poke da squishy humie where da boss does an…"
She shot up and just about dove out of the chair she had been slumped in. "Ok ok, I'm up, alive. You don't have to touch me anywhere!"
The ork who had been about to "wake her up" just stood there with a dumb look on its face. But, that was par for the course really. The other orks were just staring on, a few slightly chuckling about something incomprehensible. She didn't know, she didn't care. As oddly endearing as the orks were at times, now was not one of them. Which brought her to think of one odd little detail… Why was her butt such a finger magnet? First Bjorn, then him again, and now the damn ork. Neither likely knew the definition of personal boundaries.
She shook her head and sighed loudly. "Where's Bjorn?"
As per usual, there was a short moment of silence while the orks in the room processed her question. "Eh, da boss iz out lookin at all da nice shiny bitz dem crunchy gitz left wen dey run off."
She nodded curtly. "Good."
She made to move off just as abruptly, but a stroke of vertigo threw her balance at the worst possible moment and she once again found herself sprawled face-first on the floor.
She got back up, shakily, and sent a glare towards the cluster of orks. "None of you saw anything."
The ork in front immediately responded. "Saw wut?"
Unusually satisfied about the response for some reason she moved off, making sure to keep close to the wall.
Pirate Homeworld:
Samus Aran slowly trudged out into the dimming light of evening, nursing her head with one hand while scanning about for Bjorn's hulking physique. Obviously, given the height difference, the big man wasn't that hard to locate. The Warboss was standing out in the open amidst the wreckage of one of the downed frigates shouting orders and occasionally stomping on the bodies of random Space Pirates still clinging to life. She might have been moved to sympathy, but, obviously, Space Pirate.
Slowly picking her way around the debris, highly conscious of jagged edges for modesty's sake, she approached Bjorn despite the exasperating effect his bellowing was having on her head. She couldn't think of a definitive reason why. She just, wanted to be near him right now. Logically she should have just found a moderately soft surface and taken a well-deserved nap, gotten something to eat, anything to recuperate. But no, Bjorn's simple proximity felt more important. Hopefully he wouldn't wheel about and accidentally pulp her bruised body when she made herself known.
She stopped just outside of Bjorn's long wingspan and tried to shout over the Warboss's roaring. "BJORN!"
Predictably, she went completely unheard. She couldn't even hear for certain what Bjorn was yelling to the orks and, what were they, gretchin scuttling about over and around the wreckage. But that really didn't matter to her right now. She looked down and noticed a roughly fist sized chunk of metal, which sparked a fairly juvenile, if practical idea. She knelt and picked up the scrap in both hands, tested the heft for a few seconds, and then heaved the metal with all she could muster. Her target, Bjorn's big helmeted head. Naturally, she missed completely.
Bjorn might not have been struck, but the giant did stop yelling to notice the thrown bit of metal. After about three seconds of apparent contemplation the big man turned around to look at her. "Dere you iz!"
The giant of a man started trundling towards her, arms stretched out wide, and she immediately felt all the blood drain from her face. "Oh god…"
She was swept up into a hug that felt more akin to being caught inside a vice-grip. Her spine popped more times than she could count. She could not breathe, at all. In fact black spots started clouding her vision, the second time in less than a day, as the "embrace" continued. But, just as quickly as she felt the life being squeezed out of her, Bjorn put her back down. Also, the big man graciously set her on her feet and held on, preventing her from falling to the ground in weary relief.
Bjorn's beaming face remained mostly fixed on her as he gestured about with one hand. "Juzt luk at all dis scrap! Wez gonna ave us a workin space ulk in no time!"
Her reply was barely louder than a whisper due to Bjorn's crushing hug. "Wonderful. What about the 'blow up the planet' part?"
Bjorn paused for a very long moment. "Eh, right, I fogot bout dat part."
She couldn't help but blurt out. "How do you 'forget' about that? Blowing up a planet is a huge deal."
Bjorn shrugged. "Well, Iz was real excited about all dis scrap. An I iz lookin real ard ta find da blu lady. She don't seem ta be anywhere in all da wrecks, an I knowd she sposed ta be ere cuz dis is where Iz thrown er."
Bjorn's mentioning of Dark Samus jogged her memory, and at the same time caused her to smirk internally. One ship had fled during the battle, before she'd gotten the gun back online. She'd bet her entire, frozen bank account that Dark Samus had finally seized the opportunity to run away. The clone was probably laughing her maniacal ass off while detailing everything memorable about the orks and Bjorn.
She smirked and blithely spoke. "One of the frigates did manage to get away. You know that, right?"
The big man gave her a long, seemingly ambivalent look. But he reacted quickly enough. "Da crunchy gitz ave nabbed da blu lady!"
Whatever she thought the Warboss was going to say, that was definitely not it.
Bjorn tore off through the ruined ships, again roaring at the top of his lungs. "Any boyz dat ain't workin directly wif da mek boss get ya stuff togetha! We'z goin ta stomp dem Spacy gitz where deyz gone! An wez gonna get da blu lady back!"
She just stood there for a long moment. And then her mouth dropped open in raw astonishment. Granted she hadn't suggested that Dark Samus had gone willingly, but, what were the odds that the events weren't exactly as she was imagining them. Her clone was evil! The possibility that Dark Samus was currently some kind of damsel-in-distress in a Space Pirate base? She would laugh if it weren't so absurd; if it hadn't prompted Bjorn to dash of on an insane, if not rather heroic in a somewhat misguided way, quest to "save" Dark Samus. She imagined that she should have been concerned, and she was, but only for Bjorn. She had seen firsthand that the big man was not, in fact, invincible despite his incredible feats of hardiness. Charging headlong into a Space Pirate base was begging for something bad to happen. With a long sigh she started jogging after Bjorn; intent on getting him to reconsider this "rescue" idea.
She emerged from the debris field, after a fair bit longer than she would have liked, and leaned forward with her hands on her knees momentarily. "Ugh, how much more of this can I take?"
A loud crashing noise caught her attention. When she looked up, in the direction of the noise, she was shocked to see Bjorn lifting canisters of phazon over his head and smashing them open on the ground. She was further shocked to see orks cavorting in that toxic sludge, turning blue and multiplying in musculature just like that one ork from the tower basement. She considered this an even worse idea, but Bjorn was already doing it. Roughly a hundred or so orks were already infected. A nightmare situation flashed through her head. These phazon enhanced orks turning on Bjorn at the worst possible moment. Dark Samus laughing hysterically as the blue beasts tore Bjorn, and eventually her, apart.
She stood and hurried over to the demented display as fast as her aching body allowed. "What are you doing?!"
Bjorn stopped, a full and un-ruptured canister of phazon lifted over his head, and looked at her with not a trace of guilt or hesitation on his face. "I'z makin lucky boyz." The giant smashed the canister and 'explained' more. "Blu is a lucky colah. An now dese boyz is blu. So dat means dey iz gonna be really lucky wen wez go aftah da blu lady. An wez doin dat real quik like."
Humoring the Warboss, not just because she could not possibly get him to undo what he had just did, she asked another question. "And, just how are we going to do that?"
The horrendous thunder of revving orkish engines seemed to answer her, as did the big grin on Bjorn's face when he immediately spoke to say, "Datz how!"
In spite of herself, she felt just a little bit terrified by this plan. If "plan" she could really call it.
Twenty Minutes Later:
Samus Aran swallowed hard, and loudly. Mercifully this sound was completely muffled by her suit and her fear was not going to be widely known. Yes, the contraption she was sitting on had been successfully used by multiple orks, and she had seen this personally. That was little comfort, because seating her suit on this "bike" had caused the machine to groan horrifically. And this one had been specifically modified on Bjorn's orders to accommodate her suit, ergo the fact that she only had one hand available on her suit to operate the bike. She was not looking forward to what might happen if she misjudged the terrain, if she tipped the bike and got sent tumbling across the planet's surface like a tortured armadillo. Worse, if she did wreck, the orks weren't going to stop. She assumed that quite strongly. And what's more, something she had tried to impress upon Bjorn multiple times, she had never manually driven a ground vehicle before. Never driven a car, never driven a bike, never driven a truck… And she explicitly meant well-made vehicles with safety features. This ork bike was a death trap, in every sense of the phrase.
As she sweated herself through millions of disaster scenarios, quite literally despite the fan, a thunderous stomping rocked the ground and stopped next to "her" bike. "Youz ready ta do diz?"
She would have looked up at Bjorn for a sliver of encouragement, but her suit didn't turn far enough for her to look at the giant seated atop the even more gigantic squiggoth. "No, not one bit. Not in a hundred years."
Though she couldn't see it, she felt that Bjorn was giving her another thumbs up. "Remembah, Iz believe in ya! Everyting iz gonna be fine."
That reminder was very welcome, but as the other ork vehicles in the formation revved their engines she was once again gripped by punishing anxiety. She was in the front. Not only did this present the problem of getting run over, multiple times, if she crashed, but she was also going to be the first to get shot at by whatever the Pirates rolled out to counter this very obvious attack. Ironically, this was what she had been expecting when this whole war started. And now she was dreading it utterly because she was actually thinking about everything involved. Back on Petrarch she'd been standing in the back, left more or less to her own devices and allowed to act with impunity. Now, oh god…
She heard Bjorn start to draw in breath to bellow the charge, and she muttered to herself. "Just don't stop. Do not stop…"
The Warboss roared, simultaneously urging the squiggoth, Lumpy, forward. "WAAAAAAAAAAAGGHHHH!"
The cry was echoed by the other orks, and her hand almost automatically punched the go button. The jolt from still to moving was so violent that her head smacked against the front of her suit. But adhering to her own dogma she kept her hand clutched around the throttle as tight as it would go. Even then she was losing ground to Bjorn and his giant pet. But, this was the easy part.
The landscape, if she decided to dignify a barren wasteland with such a word, buzzed past her in a blur as she struggled to keep her bike going as straight as possible. The only things that would divert her were rock outcroppings that would obviously tip her like a cow. Otherwise, she plowed straight ahead. This bullish attitude led directly to no less than three blood-curdling jumps that sent her suffering heart into her throat for minutes at a time. And that was all before the first artillery shell smashed into the rocky surface mere meters from her. Ork suit or not, she doubted that she could survive a hit like that.
Her allies, the ever dauntless orks, only seemed emboldened by this; and somehow her machine seemed to catch the frenzy by going even faster. The twinge of a migraine prevented her from thinking too much about the phenomena. Even lacking that though, she doubted that she would care enough to shake her attention from the gauntlet of death bearing down on Bjorn's breakneck charge.
Ahead, a mountain, a true mountain, rose above the wasteland as the horizon rolled closer. Bristling gun batteries lobbed heavy round after heavy round, most of them seeming to coincidentally land directly in her vicinity. Scorpion-shaped vehicles she could only assume to be Pirate tanks floated towards them to directly oppose the charge, spewing green laser blasts from their tail "stingers." Shrike gunboats flew past, troopers upon them firing strafing runs at the orks in pass after pass. And still the orks pressed on. Were she watching from the sidelines she would probably be moved to call the scene utterly heroic. But as it was she was far too busy screeching as artillery and laser blasts threatened to end her existence.
She screamed aloud, to no one in particular. "I'm going along with this insane plan, to rescue my evil clone? WHY?"
She looked up, and all the blood drained out of her face. Seemingly in slow motion she watched the shot fall, painfully slowly, and thread the gap between the stumpy legs of her suit. The resultant detonation obviously obliterated her bike. The not so obvious part was that she was catapulted straight up. She screamed, loudly, and felt not an ounce of shame over it. She felt herself falling, but her bulky suit didn't cooperate when she tried to turn over in mid-air. Why she would was a question in and of itself; after all, why would she want to see her death approaching? But miraculously she didn't die. Instead, there was a very loud clank, followed by an infinitesimal return skyward, before she came to a stop. But the sky above was still flowing past.
Her mind ignored practicality for a moment while she processed the one simple fact. "I'm still alive? Heh, I'm still alive!"
An ork's voice shook her thoughts back to reality. "Ov course youz iz."
The voice gave her brain just enough information to figure out what had happened. Somehow she had been lucky enough to get thrown from one vehicle right into another one; one with enough space in it to accommodate her suit sprawled out on its back. What was it, a "truck?" No, wait, "truk?" Oh god, now she was thinking in ork words.
Something exploded, and the shockwave plus the bucking of the vehicle beneath her was enough to pop her suit up onto its feet. She quickly realized that she was in something much bigger than a truck, er, truk, whichever. She was surrounded by four orks, the regular variety, that were all kind of staring at her with slack jawed gazes.
Another ork spoke, one very clearly not impressed. "Oy, ooz dat stupid git dat fell out ov da sky inta mah battlewagon? Nevah mind, Iz don care. Stik em on da big shootah up top!"
The orks around her were now looking at her expectantly. And just because of that she looked up towards where the supposed big shootah was. It was a gun nest, with the splattered corpse of one of the gretchin smeared over the back. She felt a chill. She couldn't fit her suit up there. It'd just be her zero suit between her and anti-armor rounds. One lucky shot, just one, would smear her across the metal just like that poor gretchin. But, what else could she do? The orks obviously couldn't fit up there. And the longer the gun was silent the longer the Pirates were free to attack the battlewagon with impunity.
The same ork objected to her hesitation. "Wat iz youz waitin fo ya daft git! Don make me cum bak dere an knock sum sense in ta ya!"
She let out a long groan and popped the seal on her suit; hopping down to the metal floor of the battlewagon before getting a boost up to the gunner's roost, which was every bit as revolting as it had looked from below. The squeamishness about the gretchin guts only lasted for a moment, as long as it took for a shot to ricochet off of the metal only a foot away from her head. She did her best to stop thinking at that point, instead focusing on prioritizing every Pirate vehicle that even thought to look her way. Fortunately, the gun she was using was a twin-linked variant of the big shootahs that the orks on foot used, with an attatched beamy death gun. And the latter proved extremely effective, especially against the swarm of Shrikes flitting about and raining laser-fire.
One of the Pirate tanks ahead turned, and instead of shooting it accelerated straight for the battlewagon. As she turned the gun to deal with it however a Shrike started approaching from a perfect ninety degree angle. On a split-second decision she fired at the tank, lancing it through what she guessed to be a viewport. But, this left her wide open for the tri of Pirate troopers on the Shrike. Just as the lead one brought its gun up though something amazing happened. An ork on a bike somehow had attained air, and the cackling, goggles-wearing, blue-skinned driver crashed square into the entire Pirate crew, clearing the Shrike of gunners and saving her life at the same time.
Astonished, she started looking around the battlefield; and the more she looked the more amazed she became. This wasn't so much a battle as it was a single-sided slaughter, of the Pirates. It wasn't like back on Petrarch, where the orks were getting shot and simply not caring. This was trained Pirate marksmen being somehow incapable of hitting anything. Artillery rounds blew up right in the orks faces; and they rode through the fireball, ramped off of a crag and shot down a skiff. A tank tries to run over one of Bjorn's blue orks, it jumps off the bike and crashes through the viewport, turning the tank on the other Pirates. Bjorn and his pet alone were barging about and crushing just about everything with one stomp from the seemingly damage-proof squiggoth.
A tiny smirk tugged at the corner of her mouth. "Heh, I guess 'lucky boys' actually took." And then she actually smiled. "Hey, I'm wearing blue. Why am I never that-"
A flash of agony blitzed through her skull, forcing her to release the gun in front of her to grab for her head. It wasn't quite intense enough to make her black out, but it was damn close. Was this going to be a thing now? Was sudden, unexplainable head pain going to be a hobbling thing she was just going to have to deal with from now on? If so, damn that was going to be inconvenient.
A sardonic grin crossed her face. "Inconvenient? That's what I'm thinking when my head feels like its getting sawed in half with a dull chainsaw?" A short laugh escaped her despite the laser blasts pinging off of the gun nest around her. "I must be learning to be numb like the orks."
To put that statement to immediate test, the wagon bucked over some bump that she couldn't see. That "bump" sent her head into the top of the gun nest, the impact of which set off an explosion inside her head which was followed by immediate blackness.
Pirate Homeworld:
Samus Aran let out a long groan and felt for the top of her head. With both hands she tried to massage the throbbing away, but found little success. The pain however, faded from her immediate attention when the thought of "what happened with the battle" crossed her mind. She opened her eyes, found herself staring up at the putrid sky, and sat up.
She was greeted with a panoramic picture of mass carnage. Twisted metal carcasses of ork and Pirate make alike littered the field as if thrown about by a child having a tantrum. Some of the husks, mostly the Pirate versions of tanks, were still burning, filling the air with a horrendous stench that nauseated her. There were conspicuously few visible bodies though. Which begged the question, 'how long had she been out?' Also, 'if we won, why isn't the invasion of the base already going?' She assumed that Bjorn and the orks had won, just out of habit. After a moment of visual searching, she indeed noticed Bjorn. The big man was sitting not five paces away, idly scratching at the dirt and rock while humming some tune she didn't, nor likely would have, recognized. Her suit was also there, just to Bjorn's rear, open and waiting for her. Otherwise, the field was entirely bereft of life. She started to open her mouth, but winced and instead made a small noise of pain.
Bjorn's head shot up and his big green eyes focused instantly on her. "Ey, youz iz up! Feelin bettah?"
She considered a blunt 'no,' but neglected to. "Than this morning, I suppose so." It was a blatant lie, but Bjorn was being so damn cheerful she would have felt horrible for killing his mood, if that were even possible. "Where is everyone, ah, I mean the rest of the boys?"
Bjorn got up, a huge grin on his face. "I'z sent da rest ov da boyz bak to get da space ulk ready by da time we'z done ere." The Warboss jabbed a thumb towards the Pirate base behind him. "I'z waz finking dat wez could do dis wun juz you an me. It'll be fun ya?"
She just stared in silence for a long while before sighing deeply. "Yeah, sure, it'll be a blast." She muttered to herself. "Risking my neck personally to save my evil clone, perfect." She stood, wobbled for about two seconds, and staggered over to climb into her suit, thinking aloud to herself the moment the canopy was closed. "Alright, get this over with before I physically fall apart."
Wearily, she started plodding along behind Bjorn, eternally grateful already just for the fact that she now had several inches of armor plating between her battered body and whatever the Pirates had waiting inside. Probably Ridly, and who knew what else. Hopefully this time she could put that dragon down for good.
