o
The pressure wave from the impact had left Samus dizzy and disoriented, the stars and planet and ships spinning around her as she wondered if she'd actually ejected too late, drifting around in the tiny life pod from the dark gray gunship that had mere cycles ago belonged to Geras.
It had been hulled by the large pirate cruiser's batteries, resulting in his death, but this time- in no small part thanks to the extensive repairs that she herself had overseen- the frame had held long enough to impact the pirate vessel's forward viewport, effectively avenging its former master. She preferred to imagine that the elderly hunter would have approved of the act. At the very least, his two apprentices had, even if Rygda had taken some convincing to let her fly the ship at all.
The enormous purple cruiser that went by the ID Slayer had lost its forward viewport entirely, the reinforced panels cracking, then fragmenting entirely. It was the ultimate nightmare of any spacefarer, watching helplessly as the transparency that kept the vacuum of space from snatching your life away began to forcefully break apart, only averted by the internal emergency bulkheads slamming themselves shut as they had on the BHG to prevent further loss of oxygen... But given that this was a nightmare which the space pirates had brought on hundreds, thousands of other ships, defenseless or not, Samus didn't feel one iota of guilt. Not even when the wildly thrashing bodies of several space pirates flew out of the shattered port, quickly drifting past her before quieting and growing still.
Her own life pod was claustrophobic and vulnerable enough to raise old instinctive fears, even if her power suit was vac-proof. If any of the surviving pirate gunners spotted her, they could have easily fired and vaporized her. Fortunately, they seemed occupied dealing with everything else going on- the ship's heavy weapons had gone silent.
The other hunters hadn't let up after the crash, she saw. They were unleashing a virtual kaleidoscope of beam weaponry, occasionally punctuated by missiles, into the Slayer until its engines were reduced to drifting debris as well. As expected this close to such a large planetary mass, it almost immediately become trapped by GY4192's impressive gravitational field, pulled into an orbit just like her pod had been. Helpless, for the moment.
It worked. The surge of elation felt like it belonged to someone else than her, it had been so long since it had felt okay to celebrate something. Her commanders in the marines had considered it unprofessional, but she wasn't in the marines any more. As she had so recently discovered, the hunter's guild operated very differently, and she opened her suit's comm channel.
"Well done. Well done, everyone. They're trapped now. I see no energy coming from their warp engines."
Most of the replies sounded scrambled and fuzzy, likely due to her suit having a much shorter range than Geras' freezing gunship had, yet the voices were unmistakable, Gandrayda's most of all: "Ha! Take that, dragon-boy! Anyone see him?"
"No signs of escape pod launch", Locus observed more quietly. "Stars. Do they really think they can save it?"
"Remember that the space pirate chain of command is entirely unidirectional", Ghor reminded him. "Great effort is taken to discourage individual thought. If their commander has been incapacitated by the attack, or otherwise left unable to give them orders, they are unlikely to take action until that changes."
"How pitiful", Xan-Fei's honeyed voice agreed. "Even the least of my servants are capable of acting without me when needed."
Samus shifted her view to spot the niritanian's bulbous black assault runner, which had been disabled and left adrift by an earlier attack but had already called for a support ship to warp in and begin repairs to its engines. Those blocky vessels, bright yellow and large yet unarmed, had been ordered to wait back in reserve until the fighting stopped. Likewise, another pair of them had been sent to help the Federation freighters get back on their proverbial feet so that they could limp to their original destination safely.
Looking even father back, she could see just how badly the Slayer had savaged the supply convoy. There was no doubt that if the hunters hadn't arrived when they had, Ridley's crew would have stripped the vessels of all valuables aboard, and then destroyed them. That was the standard space pirate MO, only occasionally amended by a directive to spare one ship and let them tell their superiors what had happened, generating the desired level of fear in them.
"Samus", a white claw-shaped hunter gunship, one of the ones that hadn't been necessary for the main plan, flew in close enough to reach her. "I've made contact with the captain of the convoy. He wanted to express his thanks for saving their lives."
"Did he say anything about a payment?", Gandrayda asked dryly. "People whose lives you just saved are pretty generous with their pocketbooks, right?"
"That was not the reason for this mission", another new arrival reprimanded her in low, cold voice. Samus saw the distinctive ice slide of a phrygisian hunter drawing closer, outside a gunship but protected by his heavy suit, just as she was. Naturally, this meant he had to draw close to her pod before she could hear him. "Our mission was to take revenge on the pirates that destroyed our home."
"This is so", Xan-Fei agreed. "Depriving them of their greatest warrior, their secret weapon, just as they sought to do to us."
"Samus", Ghor noted more urgently. "According to my calculations, the Slayer's orbit will begin to decay within the hour. It will likely be destroyed in reentry shortly after that.
"Got it", she replied, making sure to speak a little more loudly and clearly than normal to make sure everyone could make out what she was saying despite her weaker comm unit. "Start boarding operations immediately."
Not everyone was thrilled by that idea. It would have been much safer to bring a repair ship in tow the pirate cruiser to safety, but it was simply too big a mass for that. Further, if anyone was going to risk their lives trying to steal back pirate resources and research, it should be them.
"We should just let them burn", Locus said angrily. "You know they're just going to attack us as soon as we board them. Even if it guarantees they die."
"We have to try", Samus reminded him. "If there's any prisoners on that ship, we have to at least make an attempt to save them. Besides, if Ridley orders them to surrender, then they'll surrender. Then we'll have our own prisoners for the Federation to interrogate."
"In exchange for 50,000 credits per prisoner, right?", Gandrayda suggested eagerly.
"Maybe", she allowed, cutting her line for a brief moment so no one heard her groan. Even here, at the cusp of victory, some of them couldn't help but want to place a price on every bit of good they did.
This was why hunters usually opted to work alone, she knew. Their motivations- and their levels of desire for profit- were just as varied and diverse as their species. Some hunters like herself and Rundas, would be happy to take a job 'pro bono' if it meant saving lives and stopping pirates, only accepting the pay afterwards due to their contract.
But those types were rare as garulian gemstones, and she could understand if not everyone felt the same way they did. One still had to eat, after all. The maintenance and construction of equipment like gunships and power suits didn't pay for itself. Splitting the pay multiple ways wasn't desirable.
Even deeper than that though, she could understand the common instinct in most hunters that caused them push others away when it came to dangerous missions. The fewer distractions, the more likely you were to survive and complete your mission. The larger the team, the more time spent coordinating instead of taking action.
Still, she considered, it was shame that such a partnership was so rare considering what this one had accomplished in just one hour.
"I shall go first", Ghor offered humbly. "My power suit can withstand a great amount of enemy fire if they choose to resist us."
"If Ridley chooses to resist you", Samus reminded him, "don't try to engage. Just fall back." If he survived, no way we'd be able to take the ship without destroying it. While she had only met the drakkari commander once, she had seen enough of him to identify a few traits that made his surrender unlikely. Surrender means imprisonment for his crimes. It means he can't fight any more. For him, there's no worse punishment than that.
Though, if he was alive, she would have expected some kind of move by now. Before the impact, the cruiser had clearly been under the direction of a skilled operator, instantly recognizing their trap and doing all he could to break out of it, changing vectors so rapidly it had been a task for them to keep up the interception pattern while also dodging enemy fire. If the other hunter hadn't occupied the minnows, it would have been impossible even for her.
And yet now, the pirate cruiser had all but fallen silent, refusing to answer Ghor's hails, his offers that they surrender peacefully. Was this really how it was going to end? Had the pirate who had destroyed her life and set her on the course that would dominate her life really been killed by a lucky shot?
No, she realized with growing certainty, greater than anything she had ever experienced before. Somehow, she knew it couldn't be true. Not that one. If any pirate was going to survive, it would be him.
Rundas had pulled up alongside her pod, presumably for the sake of having a friendly 'face' to look at while she drifted in the void, unlike last time. His ice slider streaked out behind them as Samus reactivated her suit comm. "Wait. Wait. Everyone keep your distance. Don't try to board just yet. Something's... Not right."
"You think they're gonna overload their core?", Locus yelped in alarm. Immediately, she saw his ship change course to get farther away from the Slayer. The other hunter ships followed suit more slowly.
She had no such option of course, being stuck in the tightness of the escape pod, in a situation not unlike when she'd been vented out into the vacuum around the BHG earlier, Rundas trailing alongside her as she studied the drifting cruiser closely. And still no attack. No radiation signature indicating a power overload. Why?
"Samus, according to my calculations we have less than an hour before the Slayer reaches a degree of reentry that will prevent boarding procedures or departure. Furthermore, your pod will reach that state even more quickly if we do not retrieve you."
Ignoring the cyborg hunter's warning, she tightened her gaze. Could I have read this one wrong? Maybe all that stuff before was just bravado. People say they'd rather die than surrender all the time, but... how many actually mean it?
For the third time, the hulk began an involuntary rotation towards its port side, the signs of damage obvious from her position but not yet severe enough to believe them completely helpless just yet. No sign of activity within, though certainly the others had managed to detect lifeforms on board.
Samus' musings were interrupted when her pod's own carefree course jolted to a halt like some amusement park ride, the sudden shift causing her to hit her helmeted head on the pod's front chassis. Looking around for the source of the sudden loss of momentum, she saw Locus' ship projecting a tractor beam, an eye-straining green mini-constellation of energy slowly drawing her in, and out of GY4192's orbit.
"Don't", she rasped, comprehending the instant she felt the weight of the beam, recognized the gunship as belonging to Locus. "-Cease that beam!"
The young hunter sounded as passive-aggressively offended as only one his age was capable of, never mind that he was technically ten solar cycles her senior. "Oh, sorry, I didn't realize you wanted to get burned on reentry-"
"No!", Rundas called to him, the panic he'd caught from Samus managing to show even through his low basso voice. "Stop the beam and get your shields back u-"
Too late, Samus saw. The Slayer's large port hatch suddenly blasted apart as though a gunship had unloaded missiles into it directly. Before that could register, a large shape tore its way free of the wreckage, leaving the remaining crew to suck vacuum as it darted out to strike the vulnerable blue gunship.
It was a shape that Samus had become expertly familiar with in the last few cycles. A dragon's folded leather wings, stretched out behind an elongated purple head of nightmare jaws and glowing eyes. The only new addition was the tiny red and gray dome-shaped device attached by mechanical welds to the left-center of his chest, a 'vac pump' unit that could allow certain particularly large and hardy species- of which a drakkari certainly qualified- to survive in vacuum without a power suit for as long as thirty minutes by creating an artificial seal around their bodies. Most ships carried several in case of emergencies, but Samus saw no one else emerge from the wreck of the Slayer.
Locus must have seen it too, and moved to stop the tractor and reactivate his shields, but Ridley was just a hair faster, his claws and wicked tail ripping into the ship's hull like a starving beast. Shocked exclamations flooded the comm channels but did nothing to stop the plating from being torn free, or the pirate commander from bringing his other claw down hard on the viewport, threatening to shatter it but not quite succeeding. Yet.
Finally the gunship's engines flared up, desperate to shake their passenger, yet the pirate held fast by digging his claws and tail in, refusing to be torn loose. Ice shards from Rundas pelted him, but failed to do more than distract. Craning his long neck back around with a cruel expression, Ridley lunged out-
Lunged at her. The life pod was slow, tiny, vulnerable... but she knew full well that he hadn't targeted it until he'd seen exactly who was inside of its globed transparency. Though it was impossible to hear the creature without his own comm unit, the look on his long sloped face said that was needed:
I have you now.
More shots lanced towards them from a gunship, but then they were both spinning out of control and it was impossible to tell who'd had the guts to risk firing. Pushed back hard into the harness of the pod's transparency, Samus could only make out the slate gray of the planet below, followed by the infinite starfield. Faster and faster the two alternated until it hurt to look.
"Ijsh'nahk! Launch! Begin retrieval-"
That was all she made out before she'd gone far enough that short-range suit comms could no longer reach, and everything was just a buzz of incomprehensible static to be shut off after several seconds, leaving no input except for the sensation of the pod tumbling end over end, out of control...
Gray. Stars. Gray. Stars. Gray. Stars. Gray. Stars. Lightning-
"Sensor lock lost." Even Ghor sounded despondent now. "The escape pod has entered a major thunderstorm on the planet. Due to the extreme atmospheric disruption, we can no longer track its course."
If nothing else had surprised them today, it was how long it took before someone broke the ice and spoke up. "Samus did say lives would be lost in this battle. I'm certain she knew that could include her own."
"Perhaps", the voice of Xan-Fei intruded after another moment's pause. "But we have no proof that our matriarch is dead. Until that time, we must do all we can to locate her."
That brought a few optics back up to the present. While the niritanian hunter's ship remained immobilized for now, a large shade had exited the ship's hatch, propelling itself under its own power until they could make out the details. The one who had come within inches of disbanding the bounty hunter's guild was now wearing a large shell of dire red power armor, equipped with a set of microjets on the belly for self-propulsion, though at a rate slower than Rundas' ice slide or any gunship.
"Don't be stupid", Locus called worriedly, still trying to fix the damage Ridley's done had done to his ship. "You can't survive a planetary reentry, even with that suit of yours. Even the escape pod would have it rough."
"You may board my ship", Ghor offered. "I estimate a tight fit, but I have the room necessary. We can commence a search for Samus together."
"No."
Another silence. It felt like few recognized the voice speaking with such conviction... or perhaps they just hadn't heard her at all. "I said no", Gandrayda repeated firmly. "In case you guys all forgot, we're still got a job to do here. That pirate ship's going down in what, thirty minutes? Less?"
"Let them burn", Xan-Fei scoffed. "They deserve it."
"Maybe. But their prisoners don't. And like Sammy said, there could be more valuables on that ship." Her snarl of exasperation registered only as a blast of static. "Do I really need to remind you that she ordered us to board and loot that ship? Here, let's play it back-"
A second later, they all heard a passable imitation of Samus' lower, breathier voice speaking on the channel. "-'If there's any prisoners on that ship, we have to at least make an attempt to save them'-"
"We know", Locus argued back. "We all heard her. But she's not here right now."
"So you just ditch and do your own thing as soon as she's gone? I mean, there's ungrateful, and then-"
"Gandrayda", Ghor emphasized to catch her attention. "You... Are correct. We must try to complete both missions here. If there is any chance left of us capturing the pirate commander, then we must take it. However, I calculate that Xan-Fei and I are the ones best suited to a boarding action against that ship. Our power suits insulate us well against the vacuum, and I calculate that we will both able to function in combat capacity even in the event that the ship's artificial gravity has been knocked offline."
"That leaves us to go find Samus", Rundas spoke up for the first time, even more taciturn than usual now that his brother and father were dead. "But I can't make a reentry on my own without a ship. Kid, how's yours?"
"No good", the young slicer admitted, his ship maneuvering but barely. "I'll need a few hours for a patch job before I can land on a planetary mass."
"Take my ship", Gandrayda piped up, and once again everyone seemed stunned by such an offer. "Yeah, yeah, I know", she admitted after several seconds. "This is weird for me too, y'know. We all know the Hunter's Laws, right? And the unwritten one. The one that says you should keep to yourself whenever possible. That any real friendship could be a trap. Stars know we just saw how that can turn out with Otka."
"This... Is so", Ghor slowly agreed, for once genuinely curious about the changeling hunter's words. "I must admit, I am intrigued by this sudden... shift in your usual behavior, Gandrayda."
As if to help make her point, her pink stingray-shaped ship angled back towards GY4192's dusky gray sphere, the pirate cruiser already becoming a mere purple speck along its breadth.
"This isn't like our normal jobs", she continued. "Normally, yeah, it sucks having to split the pay and avoid getting in each other's way. Most of the time, it's simpler and more fun to just hunt alone... but this one's different. This one's special. These bastards burned us all. Burned our home. So we take 'em down together. Stars know I want a chance to stick a blade or six in that Ridley freak if I can."
"And there it is", Locus' mockery came back. "The real motive. Sorry I can't be more help. I'll transmit the access codes for the Slayer to Ghor's ship."
"That is much appreciated", the cyborg hunter acknowledged. "Well. It seems we all have our tasks. Let us begin."
Thunder.
He'd heard it on countless worlds, and easily come to understand why so many different species- humans included of course- had come to regard this kind of powerful atmospheric disruption as a grim omen, a superstition that stayed with them even as they set their sights to space.
The Drakkari homeworld's searing atmosphere was capable of blazing heat storms and solar prominence not far removed from those of a dwarf star... yet without sufficient moisture it was incapable of generating such wild thunderstorms as this one, more was the pity.
GY4192 was surely a perfection of that art, a natural marvel. Its above average gravitational binding kept its atmosphere dense and muggy, ensuring that roughly half of the planet would be covered in powerful electrical storms at any given time. The resulting noise and flashes across the boiling gray sky were incredible to behold, forks of lightning that spread into more forks that spread into more forks until a dozen bolts could be seen lancing into the ground, leaving behind tiny craters or simply blasting apart some of the spiky rock formations, leaving them even more jagged than before.
Of course, while beautiful even to Ridley's trained warrior eyes, such a world was less than ideal for a number of reasons. The storms caused severe interference, and threatened to make any ship that dared visit a permanent guest. Only by transmitting from the Slayer moments before it was destroyed had he been able to guarantee his distress call would be heard by other pirate forces. For one without wings, navigating the mountains and rocky fields would be a long, arduous trial, and even he had to try harder than normal to maintain flight. He didn't even dare to fly too high, or risk having the obvious happen.
Still, he didn't need his instincts to know it was important to keep moving until his backup got here. The hunters would be coming for him. Storms wouldn't stop them. Nothing would stop them. Nothing, he knew now, but death.
He had to hand it to them. The Mother Brain had calculated the value of the operation thoroughly, arranging for the careful, subtle capture of the family of the veteran bounty hunter named Otka, contacting him in a way that could not possibly be traced. The sabotage of the station designed to take place during a time when the majority of the hunters would be there. Everything had been perfectly arranged by the living supercomputer to terrify the guild's skilled warriors, and leave them broken and unable to fight on.
And yet... they hadn't broken. Just the opposite. They'd rallied, set up an ambush that had crippled his fleet and driven him into retreat. His first ever retreat. If the proper retribution for that humiliation was anything less than death, he would have applauded their willpower and ferocity. They'd turned out to be true warriors... or at least some of them had.
Flapping up over the next spined ridge, he saw the one he had a strong hunch was responsible for it all. The colors of Samus Aran's unique Chozo power suit were unmistakable, and he could see the shattered wreckage of her escape pod not far off. It seemed the hunter had not endured reentry well at all, showing no signs of life as he surveyed the bitter gray plain and the sharp rock pillars perforating it like blades. No surprise with how flimsy that life pod looked. A shame. We barely got to know each other.
Of course, there was the chance that she was simply playing dead, lying there in the field waiting for him to get close for a sneak attack. While a part of him ached to glide in and finish things up close and personal, he hadn't forgotten how he'd gotten into this predicament to begin with. No more traps. No more ambushes.
Instead, he kept a long distance away, slowly gathering the mighty fire in his throat before unleashing it in a stream that blasted through rock and into the motionless hunter's fallen body, immolating it. The fire tapered quickly with this kind of atmospheric pressure, and he watched the amusing young human who had sworn to kill him go up in-
Smoke?
The suit was gone. Not just destroyed, gone. Not even a star marine's power suit would be so thoroughly erased by just one blast of his breath.
That was as far as he was able to think before something that felt like a thousand swarming war wasps crashed into his ear and something else kicked him in the gut like a super missile. Without waiting to see the lasting effects of her overloaded disruptor pistol, Samus descended, waiting only until her summoned suit was finished forming over her body to begin gathering herself into a spin jump towards her target.
Initially dazed, the pirate commander recovered astonishingly fast, gliding back and his tail lancing out... directly into the bright blue energy whip of the grapple beam. While it was unable to get a solid lock, the energy conducted enough to shock him further, opening him up to another volley of shots aimed high, so that any effort to fly above her line of fire would merely worsen the damage.
Snarling, he transitioned into a power dive behind a large rock tower, one strike of his barbed tail destroying the formations and kicking up a dust cloud across the entire area as the booming thunder above seemed to intensify further.
"Destiny was kind to you once, hunter", he remarked through the grit, shrieking to be heard over the thunder. "But don't expect me to be. Not this time."
The docking hatch accepted the prongs of Ghor's ship willingly now, forming a tight seal before he and Xan-Fei stepped out into the airlock. The two of them were large enough that a regular lock would not have been enough, but this one had been designed to permit a row of attackers to rush out and perform a boarding action.
"Weapons fully charged", the niritanian reminded him, unsure of how to treat the cyborg hunter due to a lack of experience together. While she had spent the majority of her time on missions away from the BHG, Ghor had only just recently graduated. "Shields to full."
"I calculate that requirement to be unlikely, lady Xan-Fei", Ghor pointed out politely, his power suit distorting his voice to sound more savage as an intimidation tactic but failing to remove his kind nature. "If they still live, these pirates have been abandoned by their leader. Logically, there is no purpose in them resisting us any further."
"They have a purpose", she shook her head, eyes limned in violet. "Their purpose is to serve their masters. Nothing else."
"My weapons are ready", he assured her. "Open the hatch."
The wide lens slid open to reveal a nearly lightless warren of corridors, not helped by the shroud of thick smoke. Several sections of wall had been caved in by the fighting, while others had been replaced by thicker bulkhead doors to block vac breaches. There looked to be a hatch leading up to the bridge level, but little else of detail.
"You are defenseless", Ghor broadcast into the darkness. "Surrender and you will not be harmed."
Silence beyond. The occasional sparking panel lit, but there were no signs of reaction.
"Perhaps they fled to another deck?"
"Unlikely", Ghor replied. "Their sensors on this deck are still functional, ergo, they would know we were coming and docking with their ship."
"Then they seek to draw us into an ambush."
"Unlikely. This would be the optimal location to resist a boarding-"
The earsplitting noise of plasma bolts cut him off, shots lancing out from several concealed places to strike him... and be negated by his suit's orange energy shields. More fire poured in, and he clomped back with her to the shelter of the hatch until it quieted.
"Pirates!", he called back. "Your ship will reach terminal reentry in less than ten minutes! We are your only hope of survival now!"
No response. Ghor looked back to Xan-Fei to see if she had been hit, only to find that she had vanished.
"I will not shoot you unless you fire upon me", he tried again, louder. "Drop your weapons and surrender. You will be taken into custody. But you will live."
He'd barely covered half the original distance before more shots came in, and he recognized that even that much was just bait to let him reveal himself further. Firing back with the heavy maser cannons in his suit's exoframe, he couldn't tell if the explosions they caused had actually hit any pirates or not, but focusing in on the source of the shots guaranteed it.
"Surrender or you will die!", he cried out desperately.
"They know", Xan-Fei's domineering voice came to his audio sensors. "They have chosen death."
When he looked next, his partner had managed to phase through the hull behind their attackers, and shoot down all the remaining pirates. The last one was now wedged in the plating of her tail, choking as she tightened its grip.
Privately, Ghor noted to install some kind of illumination device or thermal visor in his suit for next time. Publicly, he clomped forward furiously, his augmented voice no longer mere theatre. "They are living, sentient beings!"
"Living sentient beings who chose this", she countered, each word vising her captive's neck tighter. "Or perhaps they did not. Either way, they cannot break from what they were programmed to be. It is too late for that, dear."
The soft, sad tone to her voice and the choice of word 'programmed' made Ghor feel like he was being lectured. A younger hunter would have been offended. Instead, he merely scanned the ruined ship for any remaining life signs. "I am not naive, lady Xan-Fei."
"In some areas", she allowed. Tightening for the final time, her tail severed the pirate's head. "Yet less than ten cycles ago, you were a cadet. How many pirates have you terminated? How many had surrendered?"
Determining that he had the processing power to do that while searching the rest of the ship, he ran the calculations. "Approximately... seventeen. None surrendered."
"Precisely. Because they do not surrender. Their masters never order such a thing."
"I am detecting more life signs", Ghor cut in, continuing his scans. "One on the detention level... three on the bridge. Five... Wait...!"
The alarms kicked in, buffeting them with a sound that seemed incredible considering that over half the relays must have been shorted out by now. Instead, it lent the noise a strange staccato 'wave' effect, something that a normal being might have found disturbing.
What disturbed Ghor was the sudden spike in radiation in the deck he'd been scanning, a pale red blot on his suit's scanners and radar that quickly built into the more dangerous scarlet red indicating severe contamination growing at a dangerous rate.
"Reactor core has been set to overload", he announced flatly. "We must retreat, now."
No other pirates tried to stop them from heading out, and no laser batteries interfered with the detachment of their airlock from the ship or flying free of the increasingly decrepit hulk.
Only a few minutes later, he sensed the flash of detonation behind them.
For a long time, he said nothing. His red optics flickered in the light of the explosion. Xan-Fei studied the mighty colossus of metal and circuitry and weaponry he knew himself to be, trying to read his emotions. "We did all that we were capable."
Sentient, living beings. They denied their own lives, even when it accomplished nothing. Nothing but to deny us the life of a single prisoner. Assuming that life sign was even a prisoner. Programmed. Programmed to obey their commanders. Programmed more thoroughly than any machine.
"It", Ghor whispered brokenly, so quietly that his power suit's systems did not pick it up. Only his true voice emerged, though still as mechanical as the rest of his body. "It is not... logical."
Okay, Samus considered in-between curtains of fire, I think I know where I went wrong the first time.
Her mistake, beyond the obvious one of charging in blindly out of hate, was trying to fight this pirate commander like he was a target. Like he was another wanted fugitive to be brought in for credits, who would drop his weapons and surrender as soon as she gained an advantage over him.
But no. This one wasn't that kind of target. This was more like the mission Yivayo had spoken of to her once, where he'd been asked to travel to Narvaho III and put down a local beast which had been driven mad by a chemical leak. A beast that was in such agonizing pain already that it no longer cared about being hit by beam weapons, swarm bombs or even missiles, only stopping when there was hardly any flesh and bone left to support its frame, and the thing had simply collapsed into a lifeless heap of bone and blood.
There was no possible way of taking Ridley in alive. His earlier sneak attack had proven that much. If anything, she would consider it a success to survive long enough for the others to arrive and help subdue him.
Not that she wouldn't try to kill this evil genocidal freak. She had to try, with all her might. If she didn't, he would probably figure out that this was a delaying tactic and leave.
More challenging than that was to hold onto her hate. It was still there, flickering at the edges of her perception, always threatening to spill over and turn the entire world blood red like it had before. Worse, the drakkari seemed to know that. He knew now, that she had devoted a great deal of her life to this very moment... and defeating her here, humiliating her, would do more damage than any tail or breath weapon.
It took her a few more minutes to realize that the reverse was true as well. It was the reason why he hadn't flown off yet. Warrior's pride had drawn him to her, and even though he knew that, he still would not drop it and flee. Drakkari warriors, she knew, tended to develop that kind of stubborn pride with consecutive victories over their brethren back on their home planet... and Ridley seemed like the type who had won a lot of victories, both over others of his kind and his victims.
So the fight became a careful, deadly balancing act for her. She had to fight mainly defensively due to her target's incredible strength and speed even with his flight capabilities reduced, and yet she couldn't be too defensive, or he would lose interest.
To keep that interest focused squarely on her, Samus switched into the morph ball to escape the latest salvo of flame from the pirate. A stealth attack had worked at the start but now the drakkari was even more cautious, casually lancing his tail out to destroy the rock pillar nearest to her.
"I thought you were a hunter!", he cried out into the wild thunderstorm, his shrieking voice even louder to compensate. "Yet you're hiding! Do they pay you for hiding?! What am I saying, of course they do, you're a HUMAN! That's what they do best!"
Get him riled up, she told herself. Keep him mad, so that he stays here.
Insults were not her forte. Nor was cruelty, or even ruthlessness. Despite over a month of living among some of the foulest-mouthed beings out there, the hidebound discipline of the star marines clung to her, always making her think twice about her words before speaking. The only exception to this had been Gandrayda, whose childish insolence had pushed her beyond anything that the strict military regimen that Adam had taught her could handle.
And, as she quickly discovered, the changeling was not the only one who had pushed her buttons to overload.
"Don't be so modest. You did a really good job hiding on your ship, after all."
Drawn by the sound of her helmet's vocoder, he unleashed the fire, scorching the pile of rocks but not damaging her. A pair of bombs blew apart the left side of the pile, prompting more fire in reply, a distraction to let her safely roll out of the right side and into a firing stance. Missiles flew out, designed more to keep him focused on evasion than any hope that they would actually strike home at this distance, then she was up onto another pillar, using it as a springboard to gain air, lancing his wings with the faster beam shots.
Spinning, the mad drakkari transitioned into a power dive towards her, changing course when he saw it would take him right into another missile, only for it to detonate on a pillar and drop it on him, followed right after by more beams. Powering through the damage, he flew back up to perch on another pillar.
"You should thank me. How many humans got to have your destiny?"
"Just one", she snarled back, firing. Insulting the memory of the Chozo had always been one of her few triggers. "One is more than enough."
Ridley sprang. He'd embedded his tail spike in the ground, using it to slingshot himself directly at her at a speed she hadn't anticipated, grabbing her tight in his foreclaws.. "Still you deny it! You still think you'd be happier as an ordinary human? The domesticated bovines you fight to protect?! We could destroy them! Burn them all to ash, and they know it!"
Taking her in one claw, he slammed her into the rocks, only letting go when the bomb dislodged her, letting her free to unmorph and fire back as he charged.
"They're terrified of you, hunter! That's why they pay you so well! That's why they're burning through trillions of credits trying to make you all obsolete!"
Samus grimaced inside her helmet. The Otka speech again, or something like it. There had certainly been a number of persistent rumors going around that the Federation had been pursuing various science projects designed to give them fighters more powerful than their star marines. Projects that took place in secret, carefully-concealed facilities far out in deep space, where the morals embedded in the galactic constitution were null and void.
But they were only that. Rumors. Conspiracy theories. Such things had been around since before the institution of the pax galactica, before humans had ventured out into space at all.
"They have no respect for true warriors! No respect for anyone who they can't control, anyone who isn't a human like them!"
Her response was a missile blast to the tip of his wing. That knocked him off balance enough for her to slide in and burn his exposed belly with beam shots. His claws came down quickly only for her to dodge to the side, leaving him only with a cluster of bombs detonating in his face.
Screeching like the crazed animal he was, he repeated the slingshot move, but this time she was prepared, predicting his path and unleashing more missiles into it before morphing to escape the follow-up. Coming back out into a somersault, she found herself above the pirate lord for the first time, descending into the blistering inferno of his breath.
Shifting her weapon slightly, she fired nonstop, the chill of the ice beam dissipating the heat into a boiling steam cloud that her suit easily handled, coming down to bury the other arm in the drakkari's slender neck, forcefully arcing it back as though she intended to break it.
His wings closed, vising themselves to crush her, but she avoided them by merely leaning back- just like with Xan-Fei, he was unwilling to use his deadliest weapon- his tail- this close up, for fear that he might miss and mutilate himself. Instead his razor claws reached up, tearing at her armor as he opened his maw to unleash more fire.
One missile unloaded directly into that gaping mouth made it snap shut again. And before the claws could finish, before they could dig in and tear her loose, Samus jammed her other arm in further, feeling a leathery lid and pushing past it into something rounder, softer.
Ignoring it, she pressed down hard with her thumb. The orange metal thumb of the Chozo battle suit designed specifically for her, to enhance her already formidable physical strength to levels previously unseen by any other human in galactic history.
Even in something as simple as this.
And Ridley's mad screeches momentarily blocked out even the peals of the thunder. A mighty gust from his wings finally separated them again, allowing her to behold her handiwork in grisly detail.
The pirate lord's yellow right eye was no longer glowing. No longer moving. It was a crushed black socket now, slowly leaking out some kind of brackish black fluid as he tried to cover it up with one claw. They were large, vulnerable targets- the only soft parts on his entire body, really. And knowing that, Ridley had learned to protect them very well.
Until now.
There was the brief temptation to crack a joke about the human stereotype of pirates with eye patches, but she passed on it. There were more important things to focus on.
Such as not dying.
The pirate lord's fury was something to behold. It felt like a natural disaster, coming on implacably, filling her world with flame and claws and screeches and and rapid tail strikes. She had hoped that by staying on his right side would make dodging easier, but clearly his adrenaline rush and anger made any loss of vision irrelevant.
She fled, vaulting over the edge of the plateau now that she knew he would chase instead of retreating. Got him nice and angry now. Now he's too focused on killing me to remember that he's supposed to be waiting for his backup.
Yay me.
Without waiting to see if he was doing as expected, she was sprinting, vaulting over fresh rock pillars into another stretch of densely-packed dust, rock and thunder.
And Hell followed after, blazing streams coming from behind, the heat and her own instincts only allowing a second's worth of warning before it became necessary to dodge or fry. A few times she miscalculated and took a graze, crisping her suit and slowing her down, letting the crazed pirate get closer.
Finally, she lost pace with him. She felt it. Each strike and blast got closer and faster until she knew the next would inevitably hit. Another grab, this one while she was unmorphed, too tight to escape the grip.
Instead of spraying yet more fire directly into her face, the pirate lord brutally slammed Samus into anything and everything within reach. Rocks cracked and broke from the force of it. Eventually he ran out of rocks, so he began smashing her down into the gray dirt itself, hammering her over and over again until the emergency alarms of her suit were blaring in her skull.
"This is what happens", he growled, speaking coherently for the first time in many minutes, all his earlier savage cheer gone, punctuating each sentence with another floor slam, maw practically closing on her helmet so that she could see every detail of his nightmare teeth. "This is what happens, hunter!" Slam. "THIS is what happens when you mess with the Cunning God of Death!"
Gritting her teeth, realizing there was no other way out of it, Samus twisted her arm cannon ever so slightly before launching a missile point-blank. The resulting explosion compounded her suit's damage, but it allowed her to twist free of the pirate's iron grip at last.
Not looking good, she admitted privately, surveying her suit's energy levels. While she'd certainly fought much more skillfully than their first encounter, Ridley still held too many advantages. He was a drakkari, a species of a fantastically strong constitution thanks to the blazing fires and molten heat of their home world, born and bred for fighting without the need for a power suit. His training and lust for battles had allowed his speed and strength to exceed any other among his people, so that even a team of expert-level bounty hunters would struggle to bring him down, or indeed even find the courage to fight him at all.
But she had. And she knew she wasn't alone in that.
Samus took a deep, measured breath.
This is your destiny, child. We have foreseen it. Your sole survival of all the colonists was no coincidence. It may have been the very will of the galaxy itself.
Always remember. All life exists for a purpose. Even should it choose another, its nature cannot be denied. No matter what challenges face you, always remember.
Remember.
Almost as an afterthought, she fired off a charged ice beam shot, freezing the pirate's left wing- the one she'd singed earlier- forcing him to break out of it while she fled. Vaulting off the rock pillars granted her more and more height against the heavy gravity, seeking to rise above her pursuer, forcing him to fly higher on numbed wings. The fire blasts came on just as they had before, seeking her destruction, but this time...
This time was different.
She already knew that it would be impossible to explain to a group as skeptical and hardened as the hunters. It would be impossible to explain properly to anyone.
Somehow, she could feel it. It didn't even register as heat, merely a murky sense of looming pain and damage approaching from behind. A possible future while she lay broken and bleeding on the ground. A future that she killed by acting, by shifting her course just enough to get out of the way.
Whatever it was, she didn't question it. She could feel it was right. This was the right future, the one she desired.
Not one fire blast hit her. Every tail strike met only air. Confident now, she turned, unleashing missiles and beams alike, always aimed low. Just low enough that the pirate would flap his wings and rise up to avoid it without losing momentum and falling behind his prey in the stern chase their battle had become.
Finally, she realized that she'd reached an empty space without any more pillars, a dusty crater where the rocks were small and scattered, strangely ebon-shaded and reflective, perhaps transmuted over the millenia. Instead of continuing to try and stay up, her spinning jump with gravity's will now, using the spin to fire off one final missile.
Cackling at the predictability of the move by now, the pirate lord swooped upwards, past it. Now his prey was trapped between the cliff face of the mountain and the crater, and he'd now gained enough height to target her from anywhere. The booming sound of the missile detonating near him only deepened his contempt. Proximity detonation. Please. Does she think me fool enough to fall for that old-
The next boom was not a warning.
It was a lament. Far louder than any noise a missile could create, it came several microseconds too late to warn him of a forgotten danger coming. The obvious.
And by the time it came, Ridley's senses were too overloaded to hear much of anything at all. The single lightning bolt had forked right before it struck him directly in the center of his exposed spine, channeling through one of the upraised spikes flowing through his skeleton, briefly illuminating it in the tortured gray sky, his shape a silhouette against dazzling light like none Samus could recall seeing in a lifetime spent traveling the stars and bearing witness to all the beautiful wonders this galaxy held.
The weltery screech and the hard, dismal thump into the dirt that followed after sounded inconsequential by comparison. A weak, trifling epilogue to the grand fanfare of the cosmos. To the storm that would eternally rage on this planet regardless of whether the rest of the galaxy came to be dominated by the Federation or space pirates.
'Warning', the suit's alarms interrupted her musings, speaking to her in the swishy, mystic-sounding language of her adopted people. 'Energy levels are critical, disengaging suit to replenish power reserves.'
The atmosphere of the planet held the acrid reek of burned oxygen without her suit to protect her nostrils, just as it had when she had left it out as bait for her trap earlier. But it was tolerable. She'd already tolerated far worse- the frigid interior of Geras' gunship came to mind, even more so when she had been its only pilot.
Incredibly, the fallen pirate lord began to shift at her approach. His low screech was one of unbearable agony. His previous rapid movements were disorganized, crazed, the mad thrashings of an animal reaching last inch of its life and very much aware of that fact... but he was alive.
For a moment, Samus was actually too stunned to move or speak, staring in silence. Regaining her discipline quickly, she drew her backup disruptor pistol and hiked down the slope towards the crawling freak.
It was only when she was right up next to him that Samus realized that he was actually speaking, though his words were just as damaged and broken and pitiful as the rest of him- a prideful ferocity now reduced to a meandering wreck of a being.
His single remaining eye stared up into the cloudy sky, seeking the stars above for an answer. "...est... estin...", he crooned desperately. "Destiny... My... Destiny... This... This isn't how it's supposed to end..."
Then, distantly, he felt the pressure of a booted foot on one still-smouldering wing that focused his ebbing mind again, back on the figure directly in front of him.
A skintight ocean-blue suit, the under-layer of the previous one. Long blond hair, tied back into a tail. A figure that, as far he understood such concepts, was considered attractive by human standards.
The snub-nosed barrel of an emergency disruptor pistol pointing directly at his remaining eye. Normally something he could shrug off with ease even at full charge, but not now. Not like this.
But what kept his attention trapped there was the worst of them all. It was her eyes. Those eyes... No...!
Samus Aran was no longer afraid of him. Wary, exhausted, determined... but no longer afraid.
"No", he breathed, his voice cracking into a whisper. "This can't... No... Not a human...!"
"Yes", Samus confirmed, packing as sarcasms as possible into each syllable, keeping her full attention ready for any last-ditch lunges. "A human. A puny, weak, pathetic human hunter, who beat you. Hail to the Cunning God of Death, right?"
"NO!", his screech strained the limits of coherence, tapering off as he struggled to stand and failed, collapsing back down, trapped in curtains of thunder. "This... This is not... My Destiny...!"
"Our destiny", Samus replied acidly, "is what we decide it to be. The Chozo didn't make me your destroyer. I did that. Me."
It was a strange thing to behold. Whatever else one could say about the pirates' greatest warrior- and she could certainly say a lot- his body combined with his natural grace and wingspan also made him a creature of strange, primordial beauty. Magnificent, even. Now, whatever energy he had left froze up just for a moment, as the deepest of shame flooded that body for the first time in history, leaving him paralyzed.
Only for a moment, though. When she looked next, that single yellow eye was glowing brighter than ever, the raw screaming fury of the being before her washing over her as it had before, setting off her instincts and making her back up several paces no matter how helpless he seemed to be.
"Human", he rasped, trembling not from pain but from anger. "Human. Hunter. Samus Aran... I... I swear... I will kill you. If it takes a hundred solar cycles, a thousand battles... I will make you suffer beyond all others for this humiliation. I will bring you to my new home, on Zebes. I will tear away your precious power suit, and I will watch the oxygen in your lungs ignite and burn your young flesh to a pile of ashes. Or... perhaps I won't." His razor fangs slid out, forming into his trademark cruel grin "Maybe I'll have come up with something even better by then, something even more painful for you."
Thinking for a moment, she yielded to her deepest revulsion and spat on him, an accidental mixture of her saliva and her blood splattering the freak's snout and making him shudder in disgust at her. "Tough words, for someone who I'm about to execute."
"Execute?" While unable to move much, he managed a mad cackle and tilted his long head, letting the blood run down it to drip free. "You can't kill me with that weak thing. And if you could still use your suit's weapons, you would have by now. You're depleted. Empty. You won't be able to finish me. Not here."
Punctuating his words, a new peal of thunder echoed across the rocky valley. Unnatural thunder, and Samus recognized it instantly. It was the noise of a massive amount of displaced air that resulted whenever a large ship made reentry. Sure enough, searching the skies she was able to make out a rounded green shape, close and drawing closer.
Concentrating, she re-engaged her power suit. The weapons might not have enough energy left to fire, but it could still protect her. Now she stared through her green visor at her prey.
"Damn. Pirate cruiser. You did send a distress call!"
"Hardly my nature!", Ridley agreed with a weak cackle. "But I'm no fool, hunter."
"Maybe not", Samus allowed, studying the sky and calculating how long she had before the ship was within firing range. "But after this, will anyone still call you 'Cunning'? Or' God'? I suppose you'll have to settle for 'The Death'."
"Amusing", the drakkari nestled down, wedging his head into the sand to hide the feverish hatred in his eye. A useless effort.
"I beat you", she turned, staring back until it felt like his eye had swallowed her... or perhaps the other way around. "Always remember that. A puny human beat you."
"You... did", the freak admitted, sounding even weaker for a moment before regaining some of his former vigor. "You are correct. We decide our destinies... and I have decided mine. I will destroy you, hunter. I will see you beg for death's mercy. No matter how long it takes. Carry that with you, wherever you flee to."
She moved fast, eager to avoid being picked up by the cruiser's sensors before her own backup could arrive. As she'd feared, it was too late to stop the large-hulled ship from setting down near where she'd left Ridley.
And though it remained faint, by some trick of the planet's acoustics, the drakkari's mad laughter continued to follow her for a long time after.
o