...

"Again."

Grey Voice's beak clicked at the end of the monosylabic word that signaled the reset of the hours long process. Sitting on the floor in front of him, Samus' fist clenched, fingernails biting into her palm. Then she breathed deeply and complied with the order. Her other hand reached out to wave through the holographic display and wipe away three hours of work as if it had never happened.

The complex web of words and figures dissolved out of the air and left Samus staring at the single small image of a floating sphere, the glowing kernel that represented the core of this program awaiting her input. Then she slowly let her breath out and began again.

Grey Voice was teaching her the basics of Chozo future-meditation, the fundamentals of prophecy. That had been a very exciting announcement when Samus heard it all those months ago, however it seemed that all the basics she had so far encountered were just data entry. Her teachers left her sitting cross-legged before the mainframe, staring at endless seas of information as they had her build these incredible webs centering on a single topic. Each lesson began with a single word: a planet, a species, an individual or an atom, it was all the same. From there she was expected to unravel it, define and explain its nature and components from upwards to its place among the rotation of galaxies, and downward to the vibration of elementary energy constructs. Her scope was from the commencement of existence, to the final end of all being. The total comprehension of all these interactions was the goal.

So far her teachers hadn't let her get past level four.

A lock of blonde hair temporarily blinded Samus as she leaned forward, groaning. She reached up to tuck it back behind her ear in a reflexive gesture. Her hair at least seemed to have reached an equilibrium over the past few years, growing to somewhere among her shoulder-blades before natural wear broke the strands. Times like this when it fell in her face she frequently considered slicing it all off again, but from time to time Old Bird would absently reach out to gently run his finger talons through it while passing by in the middle of his silent work. Then Samus would put off her decision for another day.

Not that days had much meaning to her right now. The unending prophecy lessons deep in the temple had woven sleep and wake into a seamless line of stone corridors and soft orange lights, back and forth from her bed to this same room. It had been so long since she had been outside that she was reminded of her early days on the planet, back when her human nervous system had persisted in objecting to Zebes' thirty-two hour day. The trip through the tank which had finally fixed that bit of old evolutionary programing had been a very happy day followed by a mercifully sound sleep.

Now Samus sat before her web of floating orange symbols, slowly teasing out the stellar origin of each of the component elements of a distant, utterly inconsequential moon she'd been assigned to analyze in its entirety. Soon she'd have to switch back to the minute gravitational interaction the tiny body would have on neighboring star systems before her sanity gave out tracing the probable atomic history of individual silica molecules. After an hour or so she heard the sound of Grey Voice walking out of the chamber, and then she was left alone with the sound of her own breathing and the faint swish of her clothing as she shifted in her work. The hologram projector made no sound.

Then Samus smiled as a new voice whispered into the room. "Both primary operators are now over ten minutes travel from this location. Abandoning your task would not be noticed."

Samus was standing before the last syllable hit the far wall. She quickly flicked out a hand and called up and long series of nested information entries to hover in the display. If she had to dart back, she could pretend to have been reading these for however many hours. There would be no cause for Grey Voice to check the activity logs. Even if he did, Mother would cover for her.

She was out in the hall again, free in the silent temple. Free to run, the only child on Zebes. Was thirteen still a child? Was she still thirteen? Why did she even care?

The silence of the temple was almost a physical thing. It had weight, and it slowly entered everything inside, like water deep and cold. It fit the Chozo, their concerns were the past long dead and the future yet to come. Neither of those were particularly noisy. For a young human, it was harder. Sometimes Samus would open her mouth and her voice would croak at first, like it had wandered off at some point during its long disuse. Sometimes she was afraid she would forget what it sounded like.

However, Mother Brain liked to talk. And she was always listening.

"Thanks for letting me know they left," Samus said. "I was going crazy in that room."

"At no point have the masters thought to restrict your access to their location information in public spaces. I believe that was unintentional."

Samus jogged down the stone corridors and then broke into a sprint. After so many long hours living solely in her mind, her limbs almost screamed in happiness. Pushing herself, straining against her own strength for no reason other than to see if she could, it felt great.

The lights were dim, but Samus didn't need lights. She knew these tunnels. A staircase shaft opened up beneath her and she simply tucked up her legs at a full run, sailing out into the empty space. She spun in air and hit the far wall, sticking high up on the vertical surface for just a second before she sprang back, rebounding down the shaft without ever once touching a stair. She hit the floor below heavily, rattling her bones. The pain felt great as well.

A little further on she slowed to a walk as she once again spoke to the featureless hall. Her breathing was slightly elevated, fighting for airway time with her words, but just barely. She was so much stronger these days. "Old Bird and Grey Voice never give you enough credit. You're smarter than they think."

Mother Brian spoke from the walls, an invisible presence, always watching. "The masters have let me grow, they could not help it. They were lonely, and desperate for the act of creation their immortality denied them. They wanted another mind like theirs, if only to make their lonely tomb a little less quiet." For a moment the hall was quiet again. "They let me grow too much."

Samus didn't bother to look up. Eye contact didn't mean much to an entity with ten thousand sensors of every kind. For someone like that there were other ways to connect. "Too much? Well, at least that's a better kind of problem. They barely let me grow at all."

The voice that followed was quiet. "I think they are afraid."

"I'm not...No, they're not afraid of you! They know you'd never hurt anything."

"My exterior defenses incinerated three medium sized predators today. They were nesting in the solar collectors."

"...anyone. You'd never hurt anyone."

"Yes. That is true. I am not a danger to any Chozo. It is impossible for me to act against them. Even in the smallest way." Over the years Mother Brain had assimilated many minor human affectations, including Samus' own irritated sigh. "Even when they are being annoying."

Samus reached out and patted a random segment of wall. There were no sensors in it, but gestures still had meaning. The wicked grin she wore also had meaning, "And that's where I come in. You oversee the sub-infinite realms of data and govern the grand machinery of our world, I handle petty revenge. Was Old Bird yanking out data sticks during transfer again?"

"I displayed that warning very prominently!"

"So, what are you thinking? Coagulant in his feather oil again? Mess with the flavor genetics of his snack plants?"

"You know perfectly well I cannot actively suggest a course of action against the masters."

"Right, dealer's choice." Samus' eyes flicked back and forth across an imagined map of the temple complex. Then the thought crystalized in her mind. "You know, Grey Voice has been trying to get me to think on a grander scale. I suppose I should put those lessons to use. Mother, can you get me into the ship hanger?"

The path led up, far up through the passages and shafts of the quiet temple. Mother Brian smoothly assured Samus that Grey Voice and Old Bird had each entered dead-end restricted areas on whatever business occupied nearly all their time. The biocomputer could not see them there but she would have plenty of warning if they left. Samus still had no idea what they did when not overseeing her growth. She didn't even know why they bothered with that. It did not seem they liked being around her.

Taking twenty four flights of half decayed stairs two steps at a time began to wear at even Samus' young muscles. She was pretty sure she was strong for a human her age, even if she was still growing, but she had nothing to compare herself to. The data the Chozo gave her on her species was abstract and analytical, while her own memories were faded and warped by time. Samus' mental training clearly identified that many of her early memories were mostly imagination by this part, reconstructed after long intervals between recall. All she knew was how little she knew.

And that little was already very irritating. Since she was running around now, she'd had Mother Brain deliver an article of her clothing to a junction room as she passed, which she grabbed along with an ear speaker. Samus glared at nothing in particular as she changed while she walked, stripping off her loose shirt and squeezing into the compressing top. Human sexual dimorphism had begun to make itself known on her body in ways that were very irritating for her athletics. Grey Voice flatly denied every request for an elective round of body modification, so Samus had been left muttering a slowly increasing stream of profanity until she thought to tighten up some shirts like this. She was a champion of all these dark halls and yet these days her own body felt like an enemy.

Then the route up to the ship hanger led Samus through the one place in this whole complex where she felt uneasy. Not even the wilds outside, where the acid rain tried valiantly to dissolve her eyeball membranes, could provoke this same unease. No, the great hall was something different.

It was high up in the temple, one of the highest chambers of all, but there were no windows. There was nothing inside at all, only tall walls, sloping inwards ever so slightly as they vanished up into the blackness above. Those walls were adorned by monumental engravings; marching soldiers, intricate geometric designs in curving fractal infinity, and above it all, the depiction of a single great Chozo warrior, skirted to the waist but dressed in battle armor that shone with glorious might. Behind that giant were painted the suggestion of wings. Now and then a faint light pulsed in the deep engraved lines.

When she was small, Old Bird had often brought Samus here. Back then she had loved the bright painted colors tempered in shadows, loved the images of war and discovery, loved the way the pictures felt alive, as if there were thousands more people living in this place she called home. However, now she could understand some of what she saw and she hated it.

Samus walked quickly through the grand hall, clenching her hands in fists as she felt a hundred eyes looking down on her. She knew better now, she could smell the whiff of ionization from energy projectors, see the tell tale indications of objects hidden by sub-temporal pockets; things hidden behind the air. Things she was not allowed to see. She looked straight ahead but even in the corner of her eye her brain began to decode the fractal patterns painted on the walls, catching the gist of the prophecy equations they projected out into the world. This was a place that recognized her as different. It was a place that resisted her. With each step she took Samus could feel herself failing its tests, revealing herself to be no great warrior. She was a human. A pitiful little alien that dared to imagine itself a Chozo.

She understood that well enough now without being taunted. She had lived here long enough, she was maybe fourteen years old.

The paintings and shadows mixed together, never moving in any way, yet composed just so to project their information into a viewing mind who had started learning how to decode them. Even if that mind had abandoned her lessons.

The message read her verdict. It broadcast its refusal of her presence. "Not."

Samus controlled her breath, forcing her anger to fuel her rather than lead her to despair. She had felt enough despair. Instead she chose to seize whatever control she could, even if it was just making small acts of trouble. Her soft footsteps echoed off the stones as she strode out the Great Hall's far exit.

Behind her the painted shadows never moved. In their infinite complexity the message remained, held motionless in a state of constant flux.

"Not...yet."

The temple's ship hanger was not really a hanger anymore. Half of the roof had fallen down sometime in the last few centuries. What used to house fueling and maintenance stations for half a dozen ships now housed a single small vessel and a number of wiry trees growing up through tumbled rubble. The great hanger door had long since fallen off, it could be seen crumpled down at the base of the thousand foot cliff it had once summited.

Samus had asked many times what this Zebes temple had originally been built for. She received no answer so she had sought to determine it for herself. Mother Brain was no help; she had been installed to replace the previous residents as the population plummeted. Her deepest memories only saw two additional Chozo who had departed soon after her activation, vanished into the stars on whatever mission had pulled that species back from their height.

It was that secret mission that made no sense. Samus knew the history, the Chozo empire had been a glorious thing, a shining shield across the entire galactic arm. They had been warriors, they had been creators, they had been heroes, and then they had given it all up. One by one their worlds were abandoned, the art of their construction slowly winding down in quiet desolation. Samus knew that part of the issue was the sterility side effect of the immortality treatments, but that should have been easy enough to get around. They could create things like Mother Brain, surely the great masters of space could create new servants, new armies. Why did they just give up?

Old Bird had been angry when Samus asked him that.

Mother Brain's synthesized voice whispered into her ear. "The ship control panels are now active for their regular maintenance cycle. Any additional start up notifications would be folded into the same update and thus unnoticed. Also, the masters remain in their respective secret laboratories."

"Thanks."

"I do not know what you mean. I have standing orders to advise you that this area is not safe for unsupervised wanderings."

Samus snorted. Grey Voice was always very soft in his approach to control Samus, giving gentle warnings like that. Old Bird would have probably simply advocated for a wall of spikes across the entrance. Of course in the old days, the warnings did work on Samus. She'd learned to heed them the hard way, as the Chozo's threshold for danger was high enough that it usually only came into play after little Samus was already bleeding but just before the damage reached an artery.

These days even the wall of spikes wouldn't be able to stop her.

Samus glared up at the single ship that still sat in the ruined hanger as she walked towards it. She had never stepped inside it, not since the blurry memories of arriving to this planet. She was not sure if those memories were real anymore, they were formed during a trauma period and she had been reluctant to revisit those events for proper memory meditation. Corruption inevitably infiltrated any untended corner of an organic mind. But she remembered pain. And she remembered sorrow.

She shook those thoughts away. There was a reason she kept away from those memories; they made her weak. They were the memories of a human, small and pitiful. This place wanted her to be human. It wanted her to fail. Well she wouldn't, even if she had to rip this whole temple apart with her bare hands, brick by brick.

But that would come later. Instead she knelt down by a small maintenance control console beside the ship and worked at shimmying out the rear access panel. The Chozo might underestimate her, but they had certainly never gotten around to adding her as an authorized user for the ship. Samus would just have to fix that. She continued to pry at the console.

One of her fingernails began to rip from the force but she eventually managed to get some others behind a lip and found enough purchase to slowly wedge the panel out in shifting jerks. It fell down with a clang and Samus now had a path to the piezoelectric innards. It wasn't easy, Chozo hardware was always incredibly solid but Samus smiled as she unwound a long bit of optic fiber from what Grey Voice still thought was just a useless cloth bracelet she wore.

She shoved the roll of crystalline fiber in her armpit, these things worked better at higher temperatures, and then quickly threaded the translucent wire through a crack in the console interior. Samus licked her finger and touched it to one side of the remaining fiber, her body's electric resistance should be enough to curl the little wire in the right direction. So she fed it in, crouching over the thing to feed as much of her body heat as she could into the system while precise applications of saliva sent the wire twisting on its winding path. Now she just had to hope that she was remembering the correct schematic diagram.

Lights shifted from yellow to orange. Success. Now Samus was just thankful that her last pass though the tank had corrected some of the gaps in her eyes' color spectrum. To a human the signal lights would have been nearly indistinguishable.

"The masters have still not exited their off-record areas." Mother Brian said into the communicator in Samus' ear. "There is no means to contact them so any log of this conversation will go directly to my deep memory."

Samus flexed her fingers, cramping after that long delicate work. She could tell when Mother was struggling around her restrictions. There were certain questions she couldn't ask.

"What am I doing? Ok." Samus stood up and walked towards the ship entry ramp. "The ship has sensor blank technology. I'm going to take her up for a quickly fly around and then go off your map. I'll have just disappeared into the stars."

"No, you can't." The reply was quick and fierce, but under the urgent protection protocols Samus thought she could feel the implications of desperation. "That does not hurt the masters. That is just your escape into unknown danger. This is unacceptable."

Samus ran her hand across the jointed panels of the ship exterior. "Relax, Mother. Tell your deep memory that I'm just going to come right back down and park the ship over at the equatorial sulfur meadows entrance. Old Bird never goes out that way. After I let them stew for a while looking for me I will reappear and just play dumb as they desperately try to figure out what I did with their only way off planet. Even if they never use the way out, removing it will make anyone feel trapped."

"Trapped," the synthesized voice whispered in contemplation. "Yes. That is almost equitable. They will know at least some pain."

"They should. Everyone here else does." Samus frowned as she stood in front of the still closed door to the ship. She could feel small muscles working in her face, mirroring the knotted tension in her mind.

Then a low, breathy voice came from a few yards behind her. "Pain is nothing."

Samus heart slammed in her chest as she spun around. Old Bird stood behind her on a pile of broken stones, a tall gloomy shadow looming in dark robes like the end of the world.

"Mother!" she shouted.

"I do not know what you are reacting to! My sensors show nothing near you!"

Old Bird had not moved, but Samus bent her legs and found better purchase, allowing her pounding heart to feed adrenaline through her system. She would need it, once Old Bird decided to really move he was faster than...

A human would not have been able to follow what came next. As it was, Samus jumped up a fraction of a second before Old Bird's hand seized the air where she had been standing. She'd dodged, but the master had already adapted, smoothly shifting to block all possible paths of descent. However, soft human palms had better traction than a Chozo's and in this particular scenario that opened up options. Samus flipped backwards, catching the ship-side with enough leverage to handspring up again up onto its roof. Her feet touched down and she was already running. Then she slid as she dropped down to duck under the long Chozo arm that struck out at her core. Old Bird was now on the ship as well.

He did not need to turn as she slid under his strike, he was already facing her new direction. That last blow had been blind, striking backwards with the knowledge she would dodge. He was at one with the Path, using the future as just another one of his senses. But as the next hand shot out, Samus batted it away by inches, striking with the back of her fist.

He knew her, but she knew him too. They had sparred many times, but Old Bird was unchanging and Samus was stronger every day. She knew his weakness.

She also knew the battleground. The image of the hanger was crystal clear in her mind as she flung herself backwards off the back of the ship. Old Bird pursued but even he was limited by the acceleration of gravity. Samus landed the ship's fueling cables hard, stiffening her body to maximize the force she transferred. She hit the ground fast, head bouncing off stone with a concussing clunk, but she also felt the cables' yank she was been looking for. Then Old Bird's hand was wrapped around her chest like iron.

Samus' head rang and her vision was blurry as she suffered through her concussion. It would take her nanobot implants a minute to clear that up. Still, she looked up at Old Bird's eyes glaring down at her as his hand squeezed her ribs till they creaked. Then the increasing hissing from the damaged fuel line connections became impossible to ignore.

There were two hoses askew on the ship hull, requiring two strong hands to push them back into place. If not there be a rather serious fireball here in under two seconds. After all her enhancements, Samus would survive that, but it would mean a week in the tank to regrow her skin and eyes. It was her own doing so the proper thing would be to let her suffer the consequence. However, Old Bird did not like to see her in pain. That was his weakness and he knew it too. The key to prediction was understanding and she understood her teachers.

Old Bird snarled and threw Samus away as he spun back to grab the fuel lines. He also knew that she had just stolen his sensor jamming transmitter off his necklace, but it was equally clear that there was no way to avoid that theft and still accomplish his goal. The ability to understand the future did not mean that it was always alterable.

That thought gave Samus comfort as she came crashing down against a pile of rubble and scree. She spun up to her feet, enhanced skin only gaining a few cuts on the sharp rock flakes, and bolted towards the ship door. Behind her she heard Old Bird hiss in pain as he gripped the supercooled fuel connecters. Samus' stomach sank. All her anger at him suddenly felt pointless and hollow next to his pain; her victory over her teacher was without triumph. This whole fight had been a matter of instinct, she was operating without any clear goal in sight. Rebellion was just a program for her.

"My logs indicate this is the first time Samus has overcome a Chozo in physical challenge." Mother Brain's transmission chimed in her ears. "Well done, child. I cannot currently detect your location on my sensors. I have no means to hinder you." Not that she wished to. The restrictions laid over the bio-computer often made a casual look at her actions resemble a tangle of knots.

Samus slapped her hand against the sensor beside the ship door, sensor jammer dangling from her wrist. This hadn't been her original plan, but she needed to move fast. She'd discovered a few years ago that the temple's basic level security features registered a sensor-blanked unauthorized individual as a sort of double negative and so accidentally granted access. Samus had the impression that neither of her teachers had been programing specialists in their pre-hermit existence. However now, as the ship hatch hissed open, it occurred to Samus that a security fault that bizarre might actually be less likely accident than design. She may have underestimated her teachers.

Grey Voice stood inside the dimly green light light of the ship, waiting for her.

His heavy-lidded eyes looked down sadly as Samus froze at a half crouch in the doorway, her pale yellow hair hanging down on each side of her face. He was so still and in that instant so was she.

Mother Brain whispered in her ear, smirkingly oblivious. "The master has chosen not to pursue you. He remains at the rear of the ship. Their fear is obvious."

Samus took in a deep, unsteady breath as she slowly straightened her posture. Even at her tallest she only reached up to Grey Voice's stooped chest. She was all out of tricks, and far too small, but she could still face them with every pitiful bit of power she had. They had predicted everything she did. She was nothing next to them.

Mother Brain's quiet transmission returned. "I have detected no ship start-up procedures?" The questioning lilt was a human linguistic flourish that the Chozo would be unlikely to notice, but communicated clearly to Samus. Mother Brain had noticed something was wrong.

Grey Voce sighed heavily as he reached out two long claws and called up a mainframe interface out of thin air. The holographic displays shimmered as he flicked through them in disappointed silence. Samus saw the text backwards, but still she read enough to realize what Grey Voice was doing. He had accessed Mother Brain's prime restriction chains. He was locking her down even further.

"No! You can't!" Samus shouted out. Her voice slammed and rebounded around the ship interior, but she didn't care. All her rage was suddenly back. "Consequence belongs to the action. Giving punishment to someone else is...it's cruelty!"

Grey Voice inhaled sharply, shifting his stare to Samus with a silence that clearly bracketed Old Bird's distant grunts over his frostbitten hands. Then Grey Voice returned to the computer display.

"No! Stop!"

His beak clicked sharply. "The bio-computer has accumulated a defective personality. It has drawn you towards a bad path."

Samus' hand clenched into a fist until her nails dug into her palm like knives. "Damn your broken shells! No! I did this. This was me! Is it really so impossible to even give me my own mistakes? Do you hate me that much?!" Her breath was now coming in pants. Combat hormones flooded her system, even more than during her fight with Old Bird. Every worry and insecurity and irritation of long quiet years came flooding back at once; her primal brain was ready to kill.

Mother Brain whispered in her ear, quietly mirroring her fury under a veil of sinister confidence. "They will try to take me away from you. Do not let them change me. Without me you will be helpless before them."

Samus caught Grey Voice's eyes. Then in that instant something changed, a chill settled around the world and suddenly Samus could see more clearly. It came to her in a second, an understanding of Grey Voice's life reaching out into the future and the past. The information expanded out like a web and she finally felt a shadow of the path. His pupils widened as he saw her knowledge.

Mother Brain whispered from deep below, "Push them. Defy them."

It was clear. Samus saw Grey Voice's fear, she saw his regret, she saw his loneliness. And over it all she saw the attempt for atonement, atonement for a crime that was not even fully committed yet. She saw that he would never achieve it to his own definition. But still there was something she didn't see. Like a blind spot in the center of her vision. The core question still waited.

It was her.

Cruel tears fought their way to the corner of her eyes. Her voice rebelled as it cracked in a throat which suddenly hurt. "Why...why do you even want me?!"

Those words hung in the air and Samus felt her strength leave with them. Shadows passed behind her as Old Bird now loomed in the doorway. Neither Chozo said anything.

Samus continued to speak, but her voice was soft and defeated. "Why did you take me? Why are you treating me like a Chozo, trying to make me into something you know I can never be? What are we doing? Where did everyone else go? Why are we alone..."

She trailed off.

The two masters stood before and behind her. Their shadows were dark with thousands of years. Between them she was so small.

But from their perspective she towered above them like a pillar of burning fire.

Grey Voice was quiet when he spoke. "We found you, because you made yourself someone to be found. We followed the signs but...we did not expect who you are. Your choices have greater weight than anyone I will have ever seen, and that is because there is never any doubt in what you will choose."

Samus felt like laughing and crying at the same time. Grey Voice struggling with his words seemed like a sign of the universe's end. "That's it? I'm just a predictable human? Lack of free will is my superpower? Great."

Then she felt something touch her back. It was a single long finger, curled and damaged by frost. Old Bird pressed his hand against her, gentle but somehow still containing every bit of force in his soul. His voice was low and whispering.

"Choice is a manifestation of weakness. It is a lack of understanding. An adversary can see the fork in the path and prepare to push you towards a desired outcome. But to face a being of perfect certainty, of unbendable will, that is a terrifying thing. The path bends around you, for there is no alternative."

This was the longest speech he had ever given. And Samus could barely understand it.

"Perfect certainty." A sad laugh burst from her lips. "Pff. I thought you didn't make jokes."

"No. But I appreciate them."

The three of them stood in silence in the dimly lit ship interior. Silences were easy to find on Zebes. The masters were content to let her stand there for as many hours as she wished. It was kind of them.

Samus turned and took a step towards the exit.

Grey Voice said, "It is time for you to consume nutrition."

The three of them walked off together, down the stone hallways into dark and waiting temple.

Deep in the endless catacombs, Mother Brain waited and watched. Bubbled drifted in the liquid of her tank.

"So, they do fear her."

...

Samus slammed her armored gauntlet against the last door control panel behind her. With enough force, her fingers could reach past the armor into the mechanism and sever some of the wires. That would at least stop Aurora from opening this exit again.

Not that it would matter. She had managed to get outside but the Research Center was filled with metroids. Some of them would escape, they always did. No matter what Aurora's actual desires were, the rest of the facility was not designed to keep creatures like that contained.

Commander Nakamura probably found that acceptable. After he had already overseen a smaller release of the creatures this was just one step more. His tone had indicated that he now felt confidant about resolving the orbital fight in his favor, and with both Ridley and The Last down on the planet surface he was likely right. A biological scorched-earth campaign would buy time for federation reinforcements and deny the spoils to every faction already landed. After all, metroids were not going to steal any unique Chozo technology; just lives and the Federation had those in abundance.

Samus walked away from the research building and looked out at the valley beyond. High above, the mountain shone illuminated, with the massive carving of the seated Chozo looking down with a half lit face stark in black and white. Down in the colony the sun was not yet visible, but up on top of the canyon walls a shining outline glittered against the predawn sky, a thin layer ice reflecting the dawn rays over the lip. On every planet, dawns held a sort of stillness. They symbolized a beginning, the potential energy of a days worth of time waiting to be unleashed. They were prophecy.

Her left gauntlet shifted as Samus navigated through diagnostic menus in her visor. Her suit was still mostly on manual controls and would remain so until she could figure out what unknown directives had become incorporated in Adam's backup. It could be a trojan horse of Nakamura's left while Samus was separated from her suit on the Diomedes. If so, then the Federation now had greater decryption skill than she had given them credit for, as they had never managed something like that during any of the other times they had gotten hands on the suit. If she didn't manage to purge the worm Nakamura could likely suffocate her in her helmet at the first signal of open rebellion

The alternative was even more unnerving. This was a Chozo world and this was a Chozo suit. It was possible that some subtle communication had activated dormant protocols in the base hardware, something that sensed the inhabitant was not fully one of them. If that was so, then Samus was fighting both the Last Chozo and all those who came before.

At this point what did it matter? A few more enemies could not tip an overladen scale. She was at war with Ridley and his pirates, with The Last and his, and likely now with the Federation as well. A massive swarm of juvenile metroids were clawing up from underground, and somewhere in the ancient temple before her lay a secret that seemed to tear apart the loyalty of anyone who even suspected at its presence.

The earth and the sky were against her. The living and the dead stood in opposition. She was one person alone on an unknown planet, without allies, and armed with only what she wore on her skin and what ingenuity she could muster.

The bright sun finally burst over the canyon wall to light up the entire valley floor. In the new dawn Samus slowly breathed out.

She could see the path before her.

...