...
Samus stood at the edge of a parking lot carved into the side of the canyon wall, looking down at the silent colony city that spread out in the wide valley before her. The valley was a nexus below where three particularly large canyons met, all leading down from the general northern direction of the preposterously tall mountain that loomed in the distance. Through the thin, clear air Samus could clearly see the massive statue of the Chozo carved into that rocky cliffside staring down at her and the entire human city below her. On three sides of the city the valley's steep natural walls shot up to the high altitude volcanic tablelands above, while to the south the depression spread and widened out into the hazy distance of the lower and warmer south. Well, warmer in a relative sense for the standards of this planet.
The glass-studded buildings that characterized human habitation filled this end of the valley. For such a new colony it was an impressively large city. Samus just wished she could see a single sign of life moving down in the streets below.
The radio transmission crackled and Nakamura's voice continued to broadcast down from orbit. "Aurora, report."
Samus steeled her sinking stomach with practiced tensing as she readied for the continued silence. Then a jolt of surprise raced through her core as another transmission clicked onto the spectrum. "Aurora-926 reporting."
A breath of wind pushed past Samus as her head snapped around look up the valley. The signal was tight banded, aimed for space, and encrypted but the suit narrowed in on its origin in under a second. Far across the city at the mouth of one of the three large branching canyons there was a hulking white building, massive by the standards of this colony. It was part of a larger sprawling complex of linked multistory buildings and now as Samus focused the suit's resources she could detect a faint radiation signature of an active shield around some of it. The fight wasn't over. There were still forces resisting the Pirates' advance.
The colony's supervising computer mind continued its transmission, layering vocals over continuous data transmissions. With a faintly feminine voice it said, "Understood, Diomedes. The facility is secure. The land-bound hostiles made another attempted assault but continue to be stymied by the deployment of my emergency countermeasures. Five thousand of my charges remain secure within the facility."
Samus' left hand clenched at her side. Five thousand survivors accounted for. This colony's registry entry listed eleven thousand. Those were horrific casualties but exactly how bad the situation truly was she couldn't know. The Aurora unit and Nakamura both knew that if there were Pirates on the planet they could possibly be listening on this call just like Samus was. Then she felt the smallest trill of hope. Some of this could be false intelligence. There could be more survivors holed up somewhere less protected but more hidden. Aurora could be concealing their location. Samis had to hope that was so.
"Understood, Aurora." Nakamura sounded tired. "Hold position and protect those that remain with you. Our counterassault is delayed by repairs but the enemy has the same concerns. Orbital standoff persist. Next contact at code alpha four two nine. Diomedes out."
Samus tilted her head up as she looked through her visor past the thin wisps of clouds towards the unseen black of space. Directly above her, the optical effect of the sky faded from blue into a circle of deep purple. The atmosphere was thin. On an Earth-standard planet this air pressure would be found at approximately twelve thousand feet. Outside her suit the wind was cold.
All the Federation forces had to assume that she was dead or captured onboard the Pirate Command ship since that was her last known location. Even if her suit had been able to punch a signal up to Diomedes in its current state she would not. There was no reason to give up the possibility of a surprise attack agains the land-bound Pirate forces. The corner of her lips twitched up. In fact, she did the strike right then she could get several surprise attacks. The dead rarely reported back on who killed them.
The Aurora Unit's facility was the first place to search. The biocomputer had mentioned recently repelling an attack so there were likely to be Pirate forces still in the area. Even if there weren't she needed to make contact with the Federation and let them know she was still alive. They could fill her in on what happened during those eleven hours she had been unconscious.
Samus took off down the road from the Park trailhead's perch on the cliff side as it cut through the red and black volcanic stone of the valley wall. She made time at as fast of a jog as she could manage without impeding her body's continued healing. It only took her two minutes to make it down the canyon wall to the highest edge of the valley floor where the city began. Still there was no sign of life in between the habitation buildings and work facilities, just scraps of litter and fine grey dust blowing in the breeze. She continued down the streets, passing shop windows and delivery vehicles parked here and there. The wind moaned faintly as it caught against the corner of a multistory apartment complex.
There was clear evidence of a hurried evacuation. Broken doors, shattered windows, dropped valuables on the sidewalk, all pointed to some time in the past when a placid civilian populace was suddenly faced with pure terror for the first time in their lives. Aurora's report had suggested massive casualties but at least in this area of the city Samus could see no evidence of that. That is not to say that she saw nothing. She passed the corpse of a woman lying crumpled at the bottom of a stairwell. Scan said she had fractured her scull. Deeper in the city a man's body lay in the street, chest blackened and burt along with the few scattered blaster scars on the building behind him. But these were the exception more than the rule and that gave her hope. She had seen no sign of the colony's emergency shelters but that meant the Pirates might not have found them either.
The greater mystery was what the Pirates down here on the surface were actually doing. They were presumably trapped on the planet until Diomedes and the splinter fleet worked out who held orbital dominance. Any Pirate lander craft would be defenseless to Diomedes if the the larger ship came around for another orbit while they were still rising up out of the atmosphere. But by the same token, if the Federation had not already landed ground forces then they were not likely able to now, not after the Pirates had been given all these hours to build up anti-air defenses. The enemy certainly had the numbers to do so. Now in the depths of the colony Samus glimpsed far off shadows moving in the distance across the length of the city when once she passed a particularly long and straight boulevard. An armed lander craft had floated across that road, just barely a few yards above the pavement and well below the skyline. Then in a second the ship was hidden again, vanished into the buildings of the colony. They hadn't seen her. Those Pirates didn't act like they had military superiority here on the planet. They were being very cautious. Samus didn't know why and that made her very uneasy.
A computer device lay where it had fallen out of someone's fleeing hand onto the sidewalk. Samus bent down to pick it up and read the message that still glowed across the partially broken screen. "Evacuation Alert: Proceed to your districts designated shelter. Reminder: Your shelter is located where the sacred Chozo ignores."
Samus frowned at the little rectangle before raising one eyebrow in mild respect. That last message was clearly leveraging local shared experience as an encryption code. Clever, easy for the residents to understand and nearly uncrackable for a foreign force. One point to Aurora-926. It also meant that Samus was right. There were multiple shelters and some might still be safe. The corner of Samus's visor blinked that all the devices relevant data had been downloaded so she let it fall from her hand as she moved on. It shattered on the cement at her feet.
A few blocks away she passed a minor governmental office and on an instinct lightly punched through the reinforced glass. She walk in through the easily expanded hole and set her suit scan to rip into the main public information database. That at least gave her a map of the city. A rectangular outline of a building suddenly glowed as a virtual projection behind the blank interior wall; a local police command center about a block away from her current location. It was a good place to investigate.
A minute later she rounded the end of the block and was once again faced with the reminder of why this colony existed at all. A Chozo statue sat in the middle of an open city square; its dark metal and stone standing out starkly against the glass and concrete of the human colony. Two designs, mutually alien to each other.
Samus' eyes narrowed as she began to feel a building anger at these humans daring to move a statue, for desecrating it and its creators to use as mere ornamentation. Then she got a closer look at its plinth. The way the statue jutted up from a circle punched in the center of the square clearly showed that it had been left in place and the colonists had built around it, honoring the previous residents of this world in their own ignorant way. Samus breathed out and forgot her anger, focusing in her mission once more. Being on this planet was bringing back old habits from her youth.
As she crossed the concrete expanse towards the police headquarters she passed near the statue. A crouched figure of an unarmored Chozo sat in the middle, even larger than life, with its hands held out before it as if cradling a precious burden. Those huge hands were empty though the statue's eyes still glowed with a faint orange light. On each side of the statue stood vertical stone slabs, carved with flowing Chozo script and then a network of circular symbols that even Samus didn't recognize.
She casually tapped the temple of her helmet to have the suit scan and retain the text for her to read later but a second later an odd visual glitch jumped across her visor. Samus froze in the middle of her step, however after that one strange instant nothing similar recurred. Everything looked normal, though the suit displays were still complaining about her current dreadfully weakened state. She turned back towards the statue, narrowing her eyes at its unmoving metal form. The eyes still glowed blankly in the face of a being long dead. Samus knew that her suit had suffered incredible damage in the planetfall. Frankly, it was astonishing that the thing still worked at all and all things considered, a software glitch was perfectly forgivable. However, she knew better. Despite her recent trauma she had not forgotten the strange welcome message that had popped up when her suit scanned this planet for the first time. Her Chozo built technology was reacting to this place, to this secret domain of its makers; this last fortress. This wasn't anything she'd experienced before, even on other Chozo planets. She didn't like it.
But that mystery was forced to take a lower priority to the remaining human lives currently at risk here. Samus turned back around, but not before gesturing two fingers at her eyes and then at the silent statue's, and strode across the concrete expanse towards the tall armored colony building striped in blue paint.
The righthand outbuilding of the police station was in ruins. Samus guessed that it had been the vehicle bay and so had received a quick heavy weapons barrage from the initial Pirate decent. The attackers must have wanted to stop any defense ships from being launched. However, the rest of the station seemed intact enough, including the communications array on the very top. Right now, to Samus' eyes, that was more valuable than any amount of armaments a tiny local defense force might have had. The front gate was open and a few dropped weapons showed more evidence of a disordered retreat. Grey dust collected in the corners of the enclosed compound yard.
She stepped through the unlocked front doors and an alert flashed in Samus' visor. Her gun twitched up before her mind could read it. But she calmed herself and processed the message. The weird glitches were getting to her; she was becoming afraid of her suit, her own self. Her brow furrowed as she frowned, the painkillers still in her system were dulling her thoughts. That kind of doubt was a quick way to get killed on the battlefield, even quicker if there was actually a reason for that doubt.
"ALERT: upgrade materials detected"
An orange icon blinked through the far wall, indicating something hiding in the near distance behind it, somewhere in the station. Samus walked through the deserted police office, ignoring a lone security scan system beeping futile as it noticed her armaments. She pushed past desks and waiting areas, walking down an undamaged grey hallway as she searched for the door to the material alert location. The locals had completely abandoned this location without a ground fight. Samus didn't have a full picture yet of what had happened while she was unconscious, but there would have had to have been a damn good reason to desert this building, even with the light damage it had sustained. This should have been a prime Pirate looting target, she thought as she passed a half stocked armory. Or the disordered retreat could have been simple panic and incompetence, but all the same Samus' eyes were thin and suspicious as she swept her head from left to right, taking in the signs of hurried evacuation.
Then she casually thew a door open and heard it clunk firmly against metal. Samus blinked as she looked through the doorway and found herself staring slightly up at a large security robot with a large police shield symbol printed across its armored torso.
It was as loud as it was large. "This area is restricted! Vacate immediately or you will be forcibly restrained!" Then in a split second it alternated to a tone of geniality as its programing switched tracks. "No registration detected. Please, citizen, display your hardcopy registration or accompany me to the nearest station to speak with a human representative."
Samus kept an eye on the security bot's menacing arms and heavy tank treads as she leaned to the side to confirm what she already regretted. The rest of the empty hallway proved it, the detected upgrade materials were inside the robot. Samus sighed. Right now it looked to be in much better repair than she was. Luckily, the robot was confused enough by her suit's scan resistance to not notice the obviously visible weapon enveloping her right arm.
"This area is restricted! Vacate at once! If you require assistance with a faulty registration transmitter I can contact a technical aid representative. It is my pleasure to serve."
Samus slowly backed up as the heavy robot rolled after her, both aiming a stun gun with one limb and in the other cheerfully holding out a blinking communication line. Whoever did budgeting for the local police had certainly cheaped out on the AI model here. In fact, now that she focused on the some of those large parts, the whole thing looked like a repurposed construction robot. It was just an upright cylinder in treads outfitted with four heavy duty multipurpose arms and not much else. But apparently it's power core contained the transuranic alloys that Samus needed right now.
"Comply immediately, or face the consequences! Have a nice day."
Samus' weapon rose in a slow smooth motion at the same time as a security bot arm unfolded to reveal a powerful organic destabilizer. Samus sighed; why could nothing she needed ever just be laying on a table?
A few minutes later, the smoking and sparking security bot bore enough hammer-like powerbeam impact marks to resemble an abstract art product. The entire first floor of the police station was strewn with debris, pieces of broken cubical walls and shattered plastic-wood desks. Black scorch marks covered the sturdier walls. Samus stood over the fallen robot with one foot planted on it's ripped metal torso, panting as her weapon remained trained on its now exposed core.
The synthesized voice continued, "Lethal force autho-autho-authorized! Would you like to rate your experience today?"
Samus grunted as she leaned down to grab and rip the necessary component from the chattering wreckage. Her weakened shields and armaments meant she had needed to be a lot more acrobatic in that fight than she might have preferred as the owner of a set of still healing organs. Light glowed around her hand as the Chozo suit began absorb the materials it needed. Then a new alert flashed in her visor; this time mercifully green.
"Charge beam functionality restored"
Well, that was one down.
Following one of the sturdier looking undamaged walls, Samus located a stairwell up to the building's less public offices. Soon she found a secure terminal on the second floor and jabbed her arm at it to gain physical access. Then it was just a matter of waiting a few moments for the Diomedes' orbit to come around again.
Time elapsed and the signal lanced up, wrapped up in Federation code and Chozo system sorcery that disguised it as the same format as Aurora's last message. It would look like a duplicate message unless the recipient possessed the handshake program Samus had made the suit leave in Diomedes' computers. No one but that particular ship would know that this was Samus and not another bio-computer message, particularly the Pirate ground forces. In fact, Samus had actually left that ship with a few other instructions in addition to the handshake program.
Contact was established and Diomedes replied with an automatic hail as it rerouted her call. Then a hesitant and confused female voice spoke from the other end.
"Er, this is Officer Yin? Who...how am I even getting an outside call?"
Samus smiled. She'd almost forgotten she'd set this up. The Federation had the nerve to arrest her for saving them from the X-parasite so she was going to be very nice and compliant with the law. And that meant all calls went through her parol officer, even if the Federation in no way wanted them to.
"This is Samus Aran reporting in on my commuted service sentence. Status: damaged but operational after eleven hours unconscious. Hi, Yin."
"Ms Aran?!" Yin's voice came back, astonished. "How...Um, hi to you too?"
The communication line suddenly clicked as Samus' reroute protocol was forcibly overridden. A rather angry voice replaced Yin's disoriented one. Apparently, Commander Nakamura did not appreciate Samus' interpretation of the terms of her sentencing.
"Aran! You're alive?! Why are you talking to some...?!" However, he quickly gained control of himself and became serious again. "You know what, never mind. There's not much time on this orbit. Damnit, you're down in the colony city? Ok, we can use that." He breathed in and out. "Eleven hours, and you've seen nothing. Well, let's catch you up. Aurora-926 is in the central Federation Research Facility and is under intermittent attack from Pirate ground forces. While you're down there, coordinate an offense with 926. Transmitting a hard-wire communication point and a path for you to get there. Acknowledge orders."
Samus snorted slightly at the formality as she leaned back, standing in front of the computer terminal as she looked at the blank wall behind the inactive holo display. Once words like that had been hammered through even her stubborn reflexes, but she hadn't been in the military for decades. Still, Nakamura was a sensible man. And she had a colony to save. She flicked her thumb and the suit transmitted a confirmation signal.
"Acknowledged"
While the audio signal still lasted Samus could hear Nakamura breathing. There was a strain under his attempt at projecting forceful command. Then he sighed. "Repairs to Diomedes are underway. Do what you can on the surface to push back the Pirate forces. Listen to Aurora and we can keep any more valuable technology out of their hands. We'll be back in the fight soon. Until then, happy hunting." The last word vanished into static. The transmission terminated as the ship once more fell beneath the horizon.
True to his word, a new destination marker offered itself in Samus' visor, off in the distance at the head of the valley where the space split into three narrower canyons. The access point was at the edge of that large Research Station complex Samus had seen as soon as she got her first view of the colony. She glanced at the map overlay the suit displayed as she trotted back down the stairs, It would take her about twenty minutes to get there on foot if she didn't run into any hostile patrols on the way. She stepped out through the front doors into the courtyard that was still littered with scattered weapons, armor plates and the fine grey dust that covered everything in this city.
A sound whistled across the sky and Samus jerked into motion in the exact same second that her suit flashed a warning in her eyes. She'd heard enough missiles launching in atmosphere to have burned the reflex down into her bones. But as she spun behind cover, raising her gun to find an incoming target, she got a view and relaxed as quickly as she had tensed. Three large-bodied rockets had been gently lobbed up from the far outer edge of the city where the pirate landing party seemed to be concentrating but Samus didn't need the suit's dotted trajectory lines to know that they were going to miss her current position by quite a lot. What she was interested to learn was that the suit was sensing life signs within each of the ballistic canisters.
The Pirates were firing live payloads? Why?
The three crude missiles arced overhead and then fell down to vanish behind the city's skyline. Samus frowned. Those things each landed a bit apart, two in the canyon behind the Research Center complex and one a little deeper in the city on that same side of the colony. There was no sound of any distant detonation, only a return to the unnatural silence. The only sound was the same low tones that the wind played through the canyon mouths. Some sort of commando troop insertion? Maybe, but Pirates favored squad tactics and they should have clustered that kind of landing. And who did they need to move around that they couldn't use their ships for? Samus remembered that Pirate patrol she'd glimpsed in the distance, a lander craft traveling just barely above the street pavement. Somehow the local defense force had made the invaders afraid of the skies. Some sort of powerful anti-air? Was that the "emergency countermeasures" Aurora had mentioned?
She glanced up at the dark blue sky with unease. Samus needed to get in contact with the Aurora unit. It would have the answers she needed because right now all she had were suspicions and a leaden feeling in her gut. A quick motion of her hand and she called up a view of the city map. A crooked orange line marked out the path Nakamura had given her to the hardwired Aurora access node. It ran in a direct line through the city streets before curling around the outside of the vast Research Center campus.
However, there was a shorter path. Nakamura's computer had plotted a route that avoided things like secure research areas Samus had nothing resembling clearance for. She looked up the gently sloping street where the valley narrowed around her. The Research Center was a massive sprawling complex of hulking buildings that stretched across two of the three canyon mouths that formed the end of this valley. The web of connected facilities had campus protrusions jutting out into the city in may places, showing both the continuous construction and the fact that this Center clearly had more power than the city. The city map confirmed that there should actually be a path to her marked destination that stayed inside that web of connected facilities. That would allow her to stay out of sight of the Pirates until she managed to repair her suit more and gain some intelligence on what was actually happening on this planet.
Her journey through the city was suspiciously easy. Nakamura had made it sound like there was an active ground war going on down here, but Samus did not even see a single Pirate patrol. Only, silence, broken glass, and dust. Up ahead the tall sturdy wall of the Research Center campus rose to mark the terminus of the road.
One of those Pirate missiles had landed somewhere nearby on the far side of this bit of the facility grounds. Samus' gun began to angle itself towards every doorway and shadow that she passed, waiting for some unknown attack. But instead, as if cued by her thoughts, the suit began to pick up a renewed round of transmissions from the orbiting Pirate forces. There was not much information Samus could glean from them through this fleet's still curiously advanced encryption, but she did noticed the prolific abasements in the message headings. Her brow lowered as her watchful stare became a glare. She recognized when Pirates talked like that. That kind of language meant Ridley was down here on the planet, receiving those transmissions from his terrified orbit crew. It was all the more reason to make contact with the Auroroa unit and complete the repairs to her suit.
Samus turned her attention away from the sky and resumed concentrating on making her way stealthily down these deserted streets when the suit's transmission monitoring suddenly beeped an alert of total defeat in the encryption war. A new dense burst of data was streaming down from the orbiting Pirate forces above, but that was not what made Samus freeze and look up wide eyed into the violet tinged path to space. Her suit couldn't crack the meaning of this transmission, but it recognized the format far too easily. Its signature was that of pure Chozo technology. And it was talking to something down here on the planet. Samus had destroyed the cube, but she had missed something. What had they found deep out in space. And what did it have to do with here?
This gate into the Research campus was an easy fifteen foot vertical jump, clearly designed more to dissuade than to bar. Inside, huge sturdy buildings stood amid carefully arranged planters of local flora. Off in the distance, still a ways off, Samus could see the largest building that had to be the main control center. The subtle shield signature her suit picked up spelled out that it was where Aurora was huddled with her 5,000 remaining charges. That was where Samus was heading. Then a sound rang in the air. Samus snapped her head back to see the dots of more rocket burners rising into the air. The Pirates were at it again, whatever they were doing. Samus decided to get inside.
The front entrance to this nearest building was locked but the armored glass on each side of the door gave way soon enough. Inside, Samus grabbed the nearest important looking computer and let her suit's hacking rip out a floor plan for this place, plotting a path to Aurora that didn't expose her to Pirates launching unknown payloads down on her head. Then she turned and walked in the direction the building's designers least wanted an intruder to go.
The armored security door blinked out angry red messages, bright in the dim interior light. Then Samus' suit scan brushed against the classified systems and those firewalls crumpled too. The door slid open with a soft hiss. Samus noted the flow of air; a slight negative pressure inside, sucking atmosphere deeper into the building. So, fear of something escaping rather than fear of contamination. That indicated that the scientists weren't worrying about something delicate but rather they studying something they didn't understand or that they didn't control. Weren't they always.
Samus walked through the dimly lit white walled corridor. Under the emergency power protocols, the only light came from the widely spaced emergency labels for doors and exits. Heavy doors to experimental lab rooms slid open as she passed them, all yielding clearance to the suit scan. Each new room revealed more Chozo artifacts, sometimes accompanied by the knocked over chairs and dropped tools of the panicked evacuation. Samus wasn't surprised by the artifacts, after all that was why the colony had been established in the first place. It was also no longer surprising that the scientists had been so cautious about what was inside this place. Until the Pirates arrived, attempting to operate Chozo machinery without a manual would likely have been the most dangerous activity on this planet.
Deeper inside the facility Samus passed larger lab strewn with disassembled Chozo technology surrounded by the lab's own devices. Thick power conduits snaked off to vanish into the walls while above color coded pipes carried unknown fluids. One of them shimmered with a faint coat of frozen condensation and slowly falling fog. Suit scan ripped free encoded research documents but Samus didn't have time to red them all. The few snippets that flashed in front of her eyes referenced the scientists trying to uncover the origins of an ancient weapon project. Of course they were. However, a glance at the materials and degrees of corrosion also revealed that these Chozo devices hailed from what had to be a thousand year plus spread of history. The previous owners had been on this planet for a long time. But then they left, like they left everywhere else.
The silence was beginning to bother Samus. She was getting close to the rendezvous point with Aurora but she still had yet to see a single sign of life in this vast Research Center. The next abandoned lab chamber held a row of large metallic canisters of obvious Chozo design. They were all open and empty. One of the researcher's computer displays was still active, projecting a magnified view of a slab of Chozo engravings up onto a blank white wall. Samus didn't need the annotated translation to read what it said.
"Behold and stand amazed, our most terrible instrument strikes forth, though not loosed by our hand. Hear its approach, travelers who tread on our bones. Fear its hunger, for within it are multitudes and evolution is its constant. Marvel at its creation, on a far distant planet for far stranger prey. And weep for those who unleash it here, for this tomb shall be the cradle of its apotheosis."
Samus felt a faint shiver wash down her back as she walked back out into the long main hallway. The Chozo were her people as much as humanity was, but she had no illusions about either's ability to make mistakes. Both races had a history soaked in blood and monstrous invention. And the Chozo had the greater guilt by being able to dimly forsee what would become of their actions and yet still proceeding. Her eyes narrowed as she continued her path through the tangled passages of the Research Station. She wondered what those long departed Chozo had seen here when they peered into the future. What new monster nurtured their guilt? Was it another damaged creation like Mother Brain, or corrupted machines like Elisia, or a shortsighted sin of unimaginable proportions like their single greatest failure, the-
A harsh distant sound ripped through the still, breathless air. The terrible screech crashed off the walls, thrashed through echoing corridors, and ripped through trembling ventilation ducts. Samus was already running, legs pumping in her frantic face down the hallways as her heart pounded violently in her ears like not even Ridley had managed to inspire. That sound was like crackling electricity, and shearing metal, and burning atmosphere. It was the sound of a voracious hunger without a mouth. Samus knew that sound. She knew the fear it inspired. It was the call of a metroid.
...