Chapter Two

Habeas Corpus

...

Samus stepped down onto the Diomedes hanger deck and very quickly reassessed some assumptions about her "capture". This place was huge. Racks of fighter craft waited along the walls and other armed transports were parked across the floor within the absolute minimum tolerances. At least twenty flight crew were moving around within sight and a full squad of armored marines stood at attention. Samus thought to herself that she might have slightly overestimated the GF's commitment to politeness. Two hulking point-defense bots shifted their metal limbs near the main exit, gun barrels the size of her chest aimed down at each step she took. Yes, they were not happy with her.

Her previous two armored escorts disappeared with obvious relief, passing off their charge to a group with stronger armaments. Yin and Perez might have wished they could do the same, but as the arresting officers they were tied to Samus side for the foreseeable future. Samus watched them shrink back a bit as their path took them between the huge robots, atlas-class anti-aircraft guns tracking the base of their spines. Samus shook her head as inside her helmet her lips curled up at the corner. The show was actually amusing. Apparently she was a prime bounty now. Then to the side she could now just glimpse her yellow gunship in the process of being rather well restrained into a secure docking location. She gave a familiar two fingered wave in the ship's direction as they left the hanger.

The escort stomped down long corridors. Off down a corner Samus saw another hanger in the distance. Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. This ship was too big. There was no reason for something this size to be out here at the very fringes of the Federation space. Nothing in this system could justify even powering up the jump drive on this monster. But they had come only for her, and probably not just to seek justice against her. She was missing something from this cost calculation.

"Right in here," Officer Yin said, gesturing to an open door leading to a clean white room. "You'll be processed inside. Officer Perez and I will be waiting at the exit when you're done."

Samus stepped inside, armored shoulders just barely coming fitting through the width of the doorway. These bulkheads were extraordinarily thick, composed of sturdy, energy absorbing alloys. Sensible precautions, really, if woefully insufficient in this particular case.

The door closed behind her and Samus stood in the middle of the room, an orange and red metal goliath surrounded on every side by seamless white.

"Disable all armaments and exit from your armor." A voice came out of a few artfully concealed speakers. The voice was calm yet firm, any menace dulled by long repetition. Yet underneath it all was a trill of fear. Their sensors would be throwing up only pure confusion as they attempted to scan the Chozo technology.

"Your equipment will be released to you upon your acquittal or completion of your sentence. If you require assistance to remove the armor, automated systems will be made available." Translation: Get out or we'll cut you out.

She had no reason to keep them waiting. Samus reached up with her left hand and grabbed her helmet. It slipped off without resistance, instantly releasing at her will. She tapped it against her thigh and it hung there easily with an invisible bond. Then Samus closed her eyes and breathed in, preparing to step out of her skin.

The entire front of the suit began to unfold and part like a biomechanical chrysalis. Alloyed armor plates, contractile cables, crystalline nerves, energy systems, and shield emitters all slid apart in a chaotic ballet. Samus moved one leg forward and now her armor remained behind. She walked forward into the room while in the corner of her eye the shit resealed itself. Tiny shimmers danced over the sliding metal and organic systems as small bits of matter dematerialized and reformed to permit this geometrically impossible process. She felt light; light and weak.

"Step forward into the next room."

Samus glanced up at the speaker as a portion of the white wall slid open to real a small corridor lined with sensors. It seems the people running this inspection were fine with her not striping off her blue interface-bodysuit. It was just as well, the linkages with her biology took almost twenty minutes to deintegrate especially after such a lengthy fusion. The spinal connections always tingled a bit. Samus stepped forward through the door.

This new little corridor was less well lit than the previous room. In fact it was positively dark compared to the blinding white which sealed off behind her. The one of the hallway's walls was mostly taken up by a long window looking into an adjacent, slightly elevated room that housed the specialists examining her. There, a number of human technicians and officers were glancing at the invisible readouts of sensors which were already having a field day after finally being able to peer into her unshielded body. Yin and Perez were missing, presumably being quickly debriefed. This inspection was a little like being on display but still Samus felt a small warmth of comfort. There was something primally reassuring about standing unguarded among people who looked like her. However, another part of her was growing tenser by the moment.

Sensors spun, flashed, and pinged her with invisible radiation while behind the glass the science team conversed in the illusion of privacy. It was trivially easy to read lips of you were fluent in the language. Well, fluency and the subject deciding to remain facing you.

One of the technicians turned around from inspecting a readout on the far wall, already in the middle of talking. "...programs not even recognizing her as human?"

The warm feeling began to drift away again.

Another technician glanced over. "...that far outside even any ... divergent population DNA lines? The... of… those space colonists from the pre-FTL days with ... skulls slip through this lady doesn't? I know her file lists her as augmented but the system should have been taken that into account."

"Just look at this. It's not just some suite of soldier boosts, even the most extreme. Her bones are laced with carbon fiber and an alloy matrix. There's vibratic tensile fibers in her muscles, tendon reinforcement, and at least three stable nanobot colonies I've found so far. Half her nerve ganglia are crystalline fiberoptic and I'm not even sure what some of these other implants are doing."

A third man was now just staring at Samus through the window with disbelief and something between pity and fear. She stared right back at him from inside the silent scan room.

He said, "Even with all these documents I can't imagine her medical history. Everything on the surface looks perfectly healthy, but ... of the modifications were all post-utero but started long before puberty. Fifteen percent of her DNA shows splicing and her cells have three organelles not native to any human population. There's what I assume is Chozo modification, semi-random damage from long term radiation exposure and acute phazon poisoning, metroid based DNA therapy, and what's documented in the file as some sort of classified parasite infection." He sighed. "At this point she's basically scar tissue in the shape of a woman. It's-"

Then he suddenly noticed Samus' focus on his lips and turned away as he continued talking. She breathed out. Yes, she was certainly back among her species.

Evidently this inspection was taking longer than it should be because a tall man with bars on his shoulder stepped inside the other room and started saying something that, when he was periodically angled Samus' direction, looked rather loud.

"What's taking...damned scan?!"

"..."

"If...you override it! Just get... before... out here!" With that he turned and strode out of the room again.

Very quickly a voice came over the speakers in the narrow scanner hallway. "You may step forward into the next room."

Outside, Yin and Perez were waiting once more, now with a new complement of armored marines. From there the newly assembled convoy made its way down the ship corridors. Once or twice Yin and Perez tried to make light conversation but with all these gun barrels on hair triggers around her Samus didn't feel particularly chatty.

Then they crossed a security airlock and saw up ahead a large dark room room covered with glowing analyst workstations. This was an absurdly well-outfitted ship. In fact down at the end of that room filled with advanced machinery and trained personnel was an armored door Samus recognized as the gateway to an Aurora unit housing. Indicators on the doorframe said it was empty. The mystery was growing by the minute.

There was a small group of people waiting at the edge of the roomwhere the white hallway intersecting that dark and blinking information cathedral. A black haired man in an unmarked dark jacket stood with his back to them, looking out at the banks of specialists and glowing computer displays. Whoever he was, he was flanked on each side by a taller man and woman in uniforms that bristled with obvious marks of rank. As Samus drew near the decorated man turned back and saw her. His expression was dour and unreadable as he leaned down slightly to whisper to the man in the blank coat. There was no visible reaction.

Officer Perez almost jumped as he snapped to attention when he recognized the people at the end of this hall. "Commander!"

The man in the dark jacket slowly turned as Samus got within a few paces of him. With casual interest she looked down and was met with piercing eyes staring up to meet hers. Her eyebrow ticked up slightly in provisional respect. So this was the man who controlled the interstellar fortress around them. There was a measure of power he exerted, which clashed invisibly against Samus' own presence in a way that unnerved the bystanders. His second in command edged forward, now trying to match stares on an even eye line with Samus but though he might meet her in height she had him beat by thirty pounds even before her special gifts were accounted for. Whatever sense of threat he was trying to project did not materialize.

The Commander continued inspect Samus. His eyes roved fearlessly over her body but there was no lust or anxiety, only a frustrated searching. She represented something to him, some resource he needed. The only question was what.

Then Samus heard Yin's voice behind her. "Um, sir? The tribunal is scheduled to start."

Well, they certainly weren't wasting any time. Which only made things more suspicious. Samus never trusted it when justice was swift.

...

Samus slouched back in her chair behind a little desk facing a semicircle of elevated people in various highly decorated uniforms. Above, this chamber had an actual vaulted ceiling, almost preposterous on a military ship. The whole tribunal was a joke. Worse than that, it was boring.

She'd barely been escorted into the room when an officer with grey at her temples slid into the seat beside Samus and quickly started typing on the interface which flicked to life on the desk. From the way the woman did not seem at all concerned with Samus' existence she had to assume that this was her lawyer.

After a few moments typing the woman finally looked up and inspected Samus' face, eyes quickly dancing over the faint phazon corruption scars across her cheek. The lawyer's voice was brusk and businesslike.

"Aran, I'm Michelle Ortega and I'll be acting as your counsel today. I'm familiar with your case. Rather familiar in fact, since I've had sixteen months to prepare." There was a note of frustration there. "Just don't address the bench without speaking to me first. Nothing hurts a defendant more than talking too much. Got that?"

Samus continued looking at Ortega and leaned slightly further back in her chair. The chair creaked faintly.

"Perfect. Just like that." Ortega seemed as pleased as she was likely to get.

Then a general warning sounded out that the ship was warming up its jump drives to transfer systems in fifteen minutes. That actually did surprise Samus. It hadn't even been an hour since her apprehension, three hours since the ship dropped into this system, and this massive vessel was already basting off with all haste. That was a quick turnaround.

So this hadn't been a case of the Federation dispatching nearby teams to wherever they caught a whiff of Samus showing her head. Ortega had known she would have this assignment. This ship in particular had been hunting her for all this time. Or at least it had been consistently in the area, out here in the frayed edges of "civilized" space. What were they doing here? What could possibly be worth all the resources it took to operate this massive thing?

But once they dropped in and out of jump, hours passed while the other crew recovered from the physical and mental disorientation of warp jump. Samus sat in bored silence. Then the tribunal was talking again.

"...born to Virginia Aran and Rodney Aran on Colony K-2L. Most records were lost during the attack on..."

It still wasn't interesting. There was no need to listen to other people talk about her life. What was more important is what they weren't mentioning in all these procedures. Back in the examination chamber this crew hadn't received clearance to know the details of the X-parasite, and yet the metriod gene therapy directly resulting from her infection was easily displayed to them. Here the tribunal seemed to be operating on the same level of information. Why was the metroid procedure declassified and not the details most relevant to the destruction of the SR388 Research Station?

Samus wished she could run these thoughts by Adam back on her ship, but the computerized mind was currently otherwise occupied. In fact she could currently hear his voice here in the tribunal room, listing off the many crimes against the Federation she had committed in the last two years. The Diomedes had of course copied Adam off the heavily modified but commercial grade memory banks of her gunship and the tribunal was currently interrogating selected snippets of his personality. He'd still be fine on the ship when Samus got back, but as she heard his voice reciting answers to all their questions and accusations it felt uncomfortably like she was being mocked by someone close to her.

However, if someone was trying to railroad her towards conviction, they were doing a very poor job of it. The list of charges they had levied against her were lengthy but utterly preposterous. Treason? Dereliction of duty? They had her dead to rights on a massive count of destruction of government property and grand theft, but here those points were muddled under a rambling thesis of conspiracy across decades. In fact the narrative seemed designed to bring up her best and most public actions; Zebes, the opening of Aether, the defense of Norion, and her assault on the Pirate home-world among others.

Samus narrowed her eyes. This narrative also mentioned the Chozo: mentioned them a lot, almost as much as her conflicts with the Space Pirates. Her childhood with them was frequently brought up, as were the technology of her suit and her enhancements. Even Tallon IV and Elesia were brought up in a rather forced way. Again, referencing the legacy of the Chozo. Most of those particular reports were signed "-N."

There was a hand behind all this. But in order to find out more Samus first had to sit through this interminable show. Old lessons of meditation came to her mind and as her stare locked on the head of the tribunal up on his bench. While he droned on about boring matters like treason and a threatened death penalty, her mind was cast out to the infinite web of existence that surrounded them all to the edge of the universe. So preoccupied, she didn't notice how profoundly uncomfortable that stare was leaving the man.

Then a change in his tone of voice snapped Samus back to attention.

"This tribunal finds Samus Aran guilty of the following charges: two grand counts of destruction of Federation property, one count of unauthorized access of classified data, and one count of reckless contamination of a planetary orbit."

Samus arched her eyebrow. Really, they didn't even find her guilty of stealing Adam? That charge at least was a slam dunk. They had the stolen property testifying in the tribunal room! Instead they transformed blowing up a multi-trillion credit Research Station into an orbital littering ticket.

The tribunal bench continued, "The recommended sentence is fifteen years imprisonment, commuted through government service and subject to parole. Commander Nakamura is hereby appointed as your overseer. You are to report to him to receive your assignment. You are now..."

Here there was a bit of confusion as Samus had already gotten up from her seat and pushed past the surprised marines on her way to the door. She stopped when she realized that the Chair had not actually signaled the end of the tribunal. Samus was now politely waiting by the door with two pulse rifles pointed at her head. She gave the Chair a vaguely apologetic nod.

"...Er, you are now free to go."

Samus gave a two finger wave and strode off to push open the chamber door with a bang. Commander Nakamura: there was not really enough to go on but Samus' trained intuition told her there were good odds she now knew who "-N." was. She remembered the short black-haired man from the hallway. She remembered his stare. The master of this ship had written half the background documents for her trial. This was quite a lot of trouble to go through to arrange a meeting.

Out in the halls Samus took advantage of the confusion from her shifting legal status to blaze her own path through the ship, choosing directions based on wherever looked like the places that someone like her should least be allowed to go. The sound of rushing footsteps behind her showed that Officer Yin had managed to extract herself from the tribunal room and was still in some nominal sense Samus' guardian. Once Samus got in the lift she decided to let a now breathless Yin push the correct button after she just slid in through the closing doors.

Nakamura, Samus visualized his face, those dark and searching eyes. Let's see what you want.

...

"Commander Nakamura will meet with you in his quarters."

Samus nodded to Officer Yin as the door to the commander's room opened in front of her. Instantly, a lot of things became rather more clear. There was a consistent decoration theme in here and that theme was Chozo artifacts.

Miniature reproductions of statues lined a shelf and one wall was covered with a large and heavily engraved sheet of metal filled with the slashes and cuts of ornate Chozo script. Samus moved into the room, glancing at a framed slice of an ancient fresco mounted across from a piece of technology that even she didn't recognize off the top of her head. So, the commander was a fan of her second family.

Then she saw the man himself at the far end of the room, once again standing with his back to her, now silhouetted against a full wall holo display. The commander who wore no decoration on his jacket. Behind her, the security door closed.

"Samus, it's good to meet you." Nakamura started talking without turning around. Glowing information continued to flow through the air in front of him. "I would have said more prior to the tribunal but given the uncertain nature of such proceedings I didn't want to unfairly get your hopes up. The sentencing was not my jurisdiction, though I had my hopes."

Samus quietly snorted. As commander of a newly constructed Aurora-class warship out here at the bleeding edge of Federation space the things that were not effectively under his jurisdiction were limited to certain laws of physics. The computer behind him displayed something about the movements of ships in this sector.

She was now just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Then Nakamura turned around and to her surprise his face was lined with worry. Something had him scared.

"Please, I need your help."

And there it was.

Nakamura continued to lay out his case. "I don't know what you've heard while hiding out here but things have been lively back in the core worlds. The Federation has been rolling back the Space Pirates since the end of the phazon crisis. Fantastic work there, of course."

Samus didn't say anything. She was naturally suspicious of praise from any source and right before someone asked her to do something was even more spine tingling. In her experience, pleasantries were rarely so.

Nakamura seemed to notice her reluctance. Perhaps in an attempt to set her at ease he moved over and sat down in a comfortable looking chair, but since Samus declined to notice his waved proffering of the other seat this maneuver just left her towering over him by still more.

"Right. Our business." He gathered his thoughts again. At least he didn't seem physically intimidated by her like many human men. "There's still an observation fleet enforcing a partial blockade on the Pirate home-world but most of the fleets had already fled out in every direction to the black beyond our reach. As a culture the Pirates put too many eggs in the phazon basket and without it they're still in full recovery mode. An entire society in corruption withdrawals. There hasn't been much threat from them as a result." Here he paused. "At least no direct threat."

He waved his hand and glowing information popped into existence in the air beside his chair. Samus glanced over and saw holographic images of different breeds of Space pirates and technical specifications on a wide range of different ships. Then she looked closer. Some of those ship specifications looked off.

Nakamura was talking again. "For the last twenty-three months Intelligence has been following traces of a certain Pirate splinter fleet. Not the biggest by any measure but it attracted attention by being distinctly...heterogeneous. Heterogeneous and rather well behaved. When they fled the home system they just seemed to follow their own strange path out through space with not a single notable raid to their credit. Of course that made us think something had to be wrong."

Samus had walked over and was now stood very directly in front of Nakamura's seat, obliviously infringing on his personal space as she carefully studied the display beside him. After an uncomfortable moment Nakamura flicked the information over onto another projector and Samus was led away but she was too far into her thoughts to notice the reason for this migration. They were showing at least five Pirate ethnicities operating as a single fleet operation. That was something Samus had never seen before.

The pirates were a morphologically diverse species, made more so by their total lack of augmentation taboos, but their old world-bound cultures still shone through in their strong tendency to only operate in related clans. It as a much stronger instinct than even Humans suffered under, though tempered by the Pirate's willingness to reassign ethnic lines under the surgeon's knife or gene-molder's tank. However, this fleet was acting differently and strange behavior from your enemy was always worrying.

Nakamura continued, "While the main Pirate fleets have been skipping around with small raids in their respective territories of unclaimed space, this band of misfits seems to have called dibs on the most hard to reach sectors and then burned hard out beyond our furthest listening posts." The shadows played over his face as the projector flickered to display new information. "When they came back into our range they were changed. Their behavior was oddly restrained. One report even has them paying for goods they needed on an inhabited world, not stealing and salvaging every bit of technology they found. Because they already found something. Something lost out in the dark beyond Federation space. Something powerful and old. Archeotech, we think. But now their violence is increasing again and the fleet is getting closer to inhabited Federation worlds, searching for something else."

Now it came together. But Samus was very used to military officers talking around what needed to be said. Given the chance they'd leave out information the size of a mountain and expect a soldier to "adapt" before plowing into its side. This pirate fleet had found something powerful out in the depths of space and was now turned on to other similar payloads. They had tasted a new treat and they were hungry for more. And there was a reason Nakamura was out here at the fringes. A ship like the Diomedes was not built to chase, but to protect.

She decided to speed this up. "You've already found it."

Despite having chosen her for precisely this task, Nakamura was still impressed. "Yes, we did. Admittedly, we already had it long before we knew they were looking. Once we guessed the Pirates had found something Chozo it wasn't hard to guess what was at the center of their narrowing search pattern out in this sector. Whatever was in their cache must have only described the general location of this other base." He nodded at the computer and once again the entire far wall lit up into a window-like display of a planetary landscape. A dry rocky landscape reaching up to a mountain of almost preposterous scale. "Admittedly we could still be wrong about their target but if they're collecting Chozo stuff out here then I'm feeling pretty safe about my bet."

In the light of the projected screen, Samus looked out at a mountain as thin wisps of clouds slowly splashed against its flanks. She had to agree with Nakamura; The carved image on the mountainside of a seated Chozo pointing forward was a pretty good sign. Since it was over half a mile tall and apparently wrought from more living stone than a whole city, one might even call it a great sign. The statue was larger than this entire ship. She smiled to herself. No one had ever called the Chozo self-effacing.

Nakamura saw that smile, but his face was still grave. "Now the crux. The Pirate fleet is coming, and there are five thousand human colonists living at the base of that statue. We only have a week to prepare and defend them."

That certainly changed the tone.

The commander was pacing in his cabin as the ship intercom announced preparations for yet another warp jump. Samus let him do so as she continued to cycle her finger in the air, scrolling through the information the ship's computer was projecting in front of her. He continued his lecture.

"This isn't the first time the Pirates have salvaged and adapted foreign technology. In fact, that's nearly all they do. I mean, you know that." Deliberate informality injected into his speech to build rapport. He was a good speaker. Possibly gained his advancement through politics instead of military success. That wasn't a mark against him, just a different skill set.

He was chatty though. "Not that we humans can be to superior on the issue of technologic scavenging. I doubt there's a multi-system species in this galactic arm that hasn't been combing through the Chozo's ashes. They were invincible, rulers of space for five thousand years. Then they just...collapsed. In the span of a few centuries their dominion splintered, fleeing to hermitages and before disappearing completely leaving only...Well, that's not important right now."

Nakamura shook his head. "We've, I mean the Federation, have been learning what we can. Trying to rebuild something like the Pax Chozo in this region of space. The Elesia research base eventually gave us the clues to planet J-4M here, though not without resisting. This planet wasn't on the standard lists of Chozo contacted systems. We only inferred its existence from forensic data, and extrapolated its location from a curious absence of recorded ship routes. But this little world may be the real treasure we were waiting for."

He gestured to the image of the planet, mostly brown with wide ice caps at both poles. "The Chozo love of secrecy hid it well. But unfortunately our current intelligence on these Pirates isn't much better. At first Sig Int were very confident since this splinter fleet of ours seemed much more talkative than normal, positively oozing communication traces as they left home-world and headed out to the black. But it's mostly unintelligible chatter to our code-breakers if its code at all. The best interpretation leaves the bulk of it as devotional wailings. These Pirates sound like a cult."

Samus frowned. Cult-like behavior? That didn't make sense. The Space Pirates were notoriously indisposed to religion. They took an almost pathological pride in their materialism, consigning the fields of philosophy and morality to the babbling of children. This was all very strange. Well, she could understand why Nakamura wanted an expert on Pirates, in addition to his Chozo fascination.

At that point he turned dramatically, arm held out to sweep her into his next topic. "The thing you must..."

He wobbled a bit off his step when he saw Samus wasn't there anymore and was instead now across the room. She glanced up from where she casually leaned against the wall and gave him a finger twirling "go on" signal. He did, but Samus thought that he was faintly offended she was not fully buying into his theatrical presentation.

"Yes. Well, for how openhanded the Chozo were at their height they took the balance of their most valuable secrets to the grave or wherever they went. Frankly, I'm a bit jealous if the Pirates found something this useful out there. We humans missed the largés of the late Chozo empire by just a few centuries at most and even down on J-4M we're mostly left with poetic prophecy and black boxes. And even with putting our Aurora unit down on the planet surface to help decipher, none of the relics have proved useful yet. They are pretty though."

He was gesturing to the inscribed slab on his wall with something approaching reverence in his eyes. Samus looked over too, casually peering a little closer to read the elaborate script out of curiosity for whatever the commander had scrounged up. Then she half choked in surprise as she blinked rapidly to clear whatever emotion he might see on her face.

It was a poem, and the poem was filthy. Flowery and poetic, rife with metaphor, but absolutely obscene to its core. Samus was left struggling between bursting out laughing and burning with mortification. The bit about beaks and mountains alone was almost too much.

Nakamura continued, oblivious. "So much wisdom held inside. Now they're gone and we're just left with frustration. If only we could strip away the ornamentation and get a firm hand on what they were really saying."

It took Samus a considerable amount of mental energy to remain expressionless. Apparently Nakamura's translator was serviceable but not culturally fluent. Mercifully he got back to the matter of the Pirates.

"But however they managed it, this Pirate fleet has shown signs of a technologic jump and a singleminded pursuit of more Chozo relics. Their first find has improved their ships considerably. J-4M must be defended, not just for the lives of the colonists and scientists down on the surface but because we can not allow this Pirate fleet to rejoin contact with the rest of their population. This fleet is behaving odd and we like the enemy we know."

Samus could agree to that. Truthfully, that expression might also describe why she had worked with the Federation so often.

Nakamura looked back at her, tilting his head down slightly even though she was much taller than him. "Well, there you go. All my cards on the table. You've got decades more experience and wisdom with this type of thing than any of my people. Out here at the Edge, we humans are on a bit of tightrope but we're in it together. I'd ask you to help though you've already got a tribunal sentencing ordering you to do so." He met her eyes, dark brown locking on blue. "But I'll ask you anyway. Will you help us?"

Wisdom, he said. Samus breathed heavily. Her oldest enemies were arming themselves with her own strength and she had to figure out a way to take it back. With all this talk of the Chozo around her, Samus did not feel wise. Despite being around enough other humans to remind her that even if she didn't look it she was now over fifty years old, the carvings and the statues still made her feel so very young. Young and lost.

Her lips parted without conscious thought, catching her off guard with a whisper; a bit of wisdom long ago drilled into not just her head but her muscle. "Energy is matter."

"What?" Nakamura was startled by this seeming nonsequitor. Then Samus realized that she had spoken in Chozo. But why had she spoken at all? It had risen unbidden from the unconscious depths of her mind. She hadn't spoken that language in decades.

Still, Samus felt no need to repeat herself. She barely knew why she said it herself. Somehow it felt like meditation, the techniques of generating new discovery from deep within the mind, like prophecy. So she continued to recite the rest of that old lesson, though switching languages to the commander's own. The translation didn't hold up, but she doubted Nakamura was conversational in the Chozo. "Matter is life, life is thought, and thought is energy. Past and future are the same present. All divisions are an illusion."

It was the first lesson and the last; the one her second family had tried to drill into her again and again. They called it the Heart of the Chozo. They said it was the sum total of all wisdom. Their eyes had smiled in a familiar sad way when she said that she understood. They had said it was ok that she didn't. Not yet. What did it mean that this had come back to her now?

Nakamura was over his startlement and gave a faint and weary smile of his own. "Why Aran, that was almost at speech. Not really relevant, but I'll take what I can get."

Then the final jump warning alarm went off. Samus and Nakamura sat down and strapped themselves in as outside the cabin porthole Officer Yin did the same. The Diomedes' metal ribs hummed as it prepared to head to J-4M, to protect another set of humans hunched at the feet of the Chozo from the specter of the Space Pirates. Samus supposed that for her it was a bit like going home. She breathed deeply and found peace within herself. With great and terrible power, the ship lurched beyond the speed of light.

When they fell out of jump they met the communications of a colony that was already screaming.

...