Chapter 22

Flower in Bloom

...

Samus Aran stepped out of the temple doorway, golden armored boots clicking across the fallen door into a slanting slice of sunlight. The sun glinted off her ruby helmet, its metallic surface sweeping back into slight points like it had blurred under great speed. Every surface of this armored skin was engraved with infinitely intricate patterns, scattering the light until the glow seemed to curl around her.

Before her, a squadron of panicked pirate troopers began to charge up the narrow slot canyon with an unsteady roar, firing wildly as their fear of Samus just barely lost to the fear of disobeying their superiors. Samus stood in place and breathed in slowly, relishing the soft impacts as uncoordinated blaster fire splashed against her shields; a gentle rain falling on dry ground.

Her golden fingers flexed at her side and they truly felt like her fingers. The engraved golden gauntlet she wore, clawed design somewhere between musculature and baroque architecture, bore no hint the flesh inside was missing. All that pain was gone, not just there but from her other wounds as well. There was no barrier between woman and weapon. She tasted the air through sensor scan, and felt the warm sunlight against her metal skin. She could smell the charging pirates and hear the panic in their heartbeats. She could feel the energy of their life.

Her chozo parents had led her to this moment. The Path had led her here and she trusted it, though what came next was still shrouded in probabilistic fog. She also had one trick planned with that cable she had just threaded through half the temple, but right now she simply exulted in the new strength of her body. And there were other things to occupy her attention. The Space Pirate squadron below had finally formed up for a real attack, and after that first scattered barrage the suit was hungry.

Samus raised the weapon which engulfed her right arm like twined spears of melted silver and a white beam burst out. Bright beyond color, it expanded to a blinding flash and before leaving behind a shrinking core of light. It also left behind a smoking gap through the ranks of Pirate troopers, a neatly drawn line of death. That squadron staggered back as the calculation of fear changed, but then it was too late.

The impact of thrusters ignited across Samus' armored back and calves as she erupted forward. A thunderclap of destruction rocked the narrow canyon as she crashed into their front ranks. Battle lines collapsed into a brilliant scrum of blaster fire, explosions, and viscera but that clean white light burst out again, searing away more troopers in another thin arc. Then another flash came, and another, and soon glowing orange globs rained down from above, molten rock from where that beam terminated against the high canyon walls.

The last Pirate soldier of that squadron fell to the ground smoking and twitching, and Samus slowly turned her head to watch the lone Pirate Elite bolt away from his fallen troops. He raced to scramble and climb up to the massive metal device that filled the end of the canyon, evidently hoping for some salvation on its peak. Then Samus' scans took in the structure he was climbing. It was an entire intact battleship-grade rotary gun battery, and seeing it mounted here on the ground was like finding a fission bomb in a broom closet. Well, that certainly explained what that noise from the other side of the temple door had been. She should not let him climb that.

Samus raised her arm and shining missiles streamed out of her gun barrel like a waterfall of sparks. In the air they spread and arced before falling against the gun battery's side with a wave of rolling thunder, shaking loose the Elite with their impacts. It was the age-old solution to any evasive enemy: saturation bombing across the geography. Then his grip slipped and, once falling, his trajectory was strictly ballistic. Samus' primary beam flashed again and the body landed on the ground with a loud thump and without a head.

Samus began to walk down the canyon, her heartbeat slowly rising to the rhythm of battle as she glimpsed the wider valley beyond the unmanned gun emplacement. Then massive barrel slowly swung down to track her.

Samus instantly burst back up to full speed, suit jets ricocheting her between canyon walls faster than the oversized cannon could track. Oversized for the purpose it might be, if that behemoth of a cannon caught her with a direct hit no amount of suit shields would matter. But in this new suit, she ran as easily as falling. Up and down were matters of personal opinion, and she moved far quicker than the cannon could track.

Then the battleship-gun began to sway and rise as the huge mounting platform suddenly shifted and split. Three gargantuan mechanical legs unfolded beneath it spider-like as they lifted the cannon up and helped speed its tracking, a mammoth tripod holding a weapon the size of a gunship.

Samus just had time to pull her limbs in close and concentrate her shields as the cannon blast hit the stone wall right behind her. The shock wave threw her across the narrow canyon but she was ready for this impact. One quick spring off the shattering rock shot her down under the tripod's nearest giant mechanical leg, and a crackling blue grapple swung her out to the other side of the behemoth's shadow, out of the narrow canyon.

At the apex of this swing, Samus momentarily hung in the air and took in the view of the wide valley that opened before her. A scree slope of tumbled boulders fanned beneath her, leading to a flatter floor that was filled with parked Pirate fleet vessels all the way to the cliff-like valley walls. In between those two locations were thousands of heavily armored Pirate Troopers, hovering fighter craft, mobile artillery pieces, and even a second Behemoth cannon also rising onto its own thundering tripod legs. Every single gun barrel was aimed her way.

Samus had time for a brief flicker of regret. She really shouldn't have left her cable in the temple, that trick of would be very useful right now. Oh well, she would have to do this the slow way.

Floating for that moment high above the shadow that swathed the valley floor, Samus' suit caught the sun and shone like a golden treasure. Then the air exploded into a rain of light that made the burning sun look dim.

...

The Space Pirate pilot tugged at the controls of his fighter craft as he fought to spin it around and bring the main lasers to track the tiny target which raced across the battlefield two hundred feet below him. This ship was very maneuverable and unlike many species' combat fighters was at least half-designed to operate in atmosphere, but this kind of combat was still stretching the edges of its usefulness. Not that he had any objections to his inclusion in this battle. They needed every weapon they had. After all, they were up against the Hunter.

Across the sloping boulder field of the upper valley floor, entire ranks of infantry vanished in flashes of light. That terrible white beam sliced out, lasting just long enough to be swung through squadrons like a blinding sword. No, not a sword. It was a scythe and harvest had come.

Missiles rained down and bathed the ground in explosions, but to little effect. Devastation traced the collapsing battle line, bracketing it in fire but hardly slowing its advance.

There! A glimmer of metallic gold and red through the dust and a flash of telemetry from the targeting computer. The pilot pulled the trigger and twin streaks of laser fire lanced down, strong enough to explode rock from the temperature change alone. Ship computer confirmed a glancing hit and the signature of enemy shield energy expended. Then the fighter craft rocked in the air as a massive beam from one of the Behemoth cannons followed his targeting with its own shot. The pilot raised his claw in triumph as the entire battle site transformed into a bulging mushroom of flame.

But then a streak of shimmering colors flashed across the ground and terminated a hundred yards away where five more soldiers flew back, smashed by an impact cloaked in light. That blinding white beam weapon sliced out yet again and proved its wielder had escaped. People were dying by the clawfulls and those shields of hers were already recharging.

She was called the Hunter, but this battle was not hunting. Herbivores did not hunt the grass. The god painters were right. Death was here, and she had come for them.

The pilot gripped his flight controls. Maybe he could flee. He quickly eyed the rain of twinkling missiles that arced across the valley through the air around him. If he positioned his craft to be "accidentally" hit by one of those in a noncritical area, he could fake losing navigational control. Spin off into the distance over the horizon and return in a few minutes once he "regained control". He might need to crash the fighter on landing to disguise the trick but the wicked penalties for incompetence were still less than the penalty for desertion.

Yes, he could just...

The shimmering streak of colors blinked across the battlefield again. Then it suddenly became a twinkling star beneath him, rapidly growing in brightness. The computer screamed its proximity alarm in the same instant the impact landed on the hull. The pilot looked down in his cockpit and saw boot prints punched into body plates. She was on the hull.

He really should have fled faster.

...

Samus dropped down through streaming trails of black smoke. A Space Pirate fighter craft made an adequately steerable missile once suit scan brushed control away from the owner, but its terminal explosion against the side of the Behemoth cannon still lacked the focus of a proper munition. Yet as Samus landed amid the smoke she felt its newly damaged armor plating crunch satisfyingly under her feet. That was a start.

Samus breathed heavily as she looked out at the battle sideways, standing easily on a nearly vertical slope of the cannon's exterior housing. She had been going all out since the instant the battle was joined. Gradual escalation of force only worked if you could accept losses, and she was currently an army of one. However, giving everything you had meant the enemy could grow accustomed; there were no surprises when you held nothing back.

From this perch, on each side of her the walking cannon's massive legs slowly pumped and shifted, rotating the structure as step by thunderous step though it was still looking for her. The other Behemoth labored under no such confusion and from across the valley it presented its long barrel straight towards Samus as a black dot. It held off firing for now as Ridley would be angry if anyone broke his toys, but relying on Space Pirates to not shoot each other never worked for long.

Suit systems worked in concert as Samus darted along the underside exterior of the Behemoth Cannon like a gecko, booster jets aiding in brief flares of light. It was an odd type of locomotion by necessity, as she tried to keep as much contact as possible with the walker's surface to both keep from falling and avoid some of the incoming blaster fire from ground level. The other Behemoth might be avoiding firing, but those Pirates wielding lower caliber weapons had no reason to hold back. Multicolored blaster bolts splashed against massive cannon's hull, scattering into cloudy bursts like fireworks.

Pretty, but worrying. Samus' shields wearing down; she had only killed one enemy soldier in the past two minutes. And plan A of allowing suit scan to hack control of this weapon platform fell flat in the face of the Last's legacy in upgrading the Pirate computer systems. Samus made a rapid dodge and felt the twinge of half-healed wounds. She had to work fast.

The savage silver weapon around her right arm flexed slightly as it shifted firing configurations. She closed her eyelids and when they opened her vision shifted, the outer expanses of the valley faded into grey mist of background X-rays. The slab-like Behemoth beneath her was suddenly an intricate web of interlocking mechanical parts traced by glowing lines of energy.

There, three feet under the armor plate, her first target.

Seen from afar, a dim spiraling line of energy shot out from the other side of the Behemoth, leaving a wake of crackling sparks as it vanished. But the Behemoth showed no sign of injury, not even a blackened scorch on the hull where the beam entered or exited. Twice more Samus' same wave beam seemed to effortlessly pierce it but still the great machine showed no hint of damage, only a trail of sparks. The Pirates who watched this display knew a trill of hope. Maybe the Hunter was weakening. Compared to that burning white beam slicing through their ranks before, this new attempt was pathetic. The circling fighter craft all maneuvered into position in the air above, presumably holding fire until their enemy shifted into open ground.

Then Samus danced to a final firing position and shot her beam through the machinery. The entire Behemoth suddenly swayed as its leg servos spasmed. This colossus might have been guarded against the more subtle assaults of Samus' suit computer, but there were ways around any defense. The principles of acupuncture worked just as well on robotics, you just needed a fancier type of needle. These piercing beams left electricity in their wake, overloading capacitors, tripping breakers, and flipping magnetic charges until the final shot landed like a gentle hammer on a human knee, creating involuntary reflex.

Samus shot and the Behemoth turned. It took a moment before the Pirate army realized what was happening. Then that realization was reinforced as the Behemoth suddenly fired, a raking blast that tore a trench across the valley floor and terminated in an explosion where the beam met one of the parked fleet ships.

Samus' weapon jabbed the Behemoth again, sending the structure stumbling forward. It fired again, another raking explosion, but that was all she was going to get. This hijack process was exactly like trying to steer a moving vehicle by shooting holes into it, so Samus crouched to spring away and make her escape. This huge target was about to become the focus of every single Pirate munition in the valley.

Her foot actually left the metal before it occurred to her that those munitions were not actually incoming. It also occurred to her that her jump here was an easily predictable moment.

Ridley announced his arrival with a tsunami of flame. Galactic chemistry had improved greatly on nature's fire and this violent maelstrom showcased every bit as Samus was caught mid jump. The roiling explosions buffeted her and set her tumbling, direction vanishing in the confusion of fire. Then she burst out the burning cloud, trailing smoke as she fell from the sky. She flipped around and flared her suit jets just before impact, landing with deceptive softness on the valley floor but with depleted shields. Amid the dust, ephemeral white feathers across her pauldrons flared and quieted.

Above her, broad dark wings snapped out from the underside of the damaged Behemoth. Ridley had used Samus' own trick, crawling along the surface of the weapons platform to escape notice. Which, on further reflection, explained the restraint of the Pirate close air support. Suit scan showed com transmissions radiating off Ridley, but for once he was not using his breath to monologue at her. All across the valley floor, ripples of motion passed through the disorganized Pirate forces as they formed back into squadrons and ranks. When he focused, Ridley was a dangerous general.

Samus narrowed her eyes and raised her weapon his way. Below the rhythm of battle beating in her veins she could feel a cold mass of fury rising up behind her brow. She owed this particular Ridley quite a lot. Justice for blood and death and for a young boy named Roger.

Then suit sensors screamed a warning. "Incoming"

Samus leapt with enough speed to shatter the stone beneath her. It was still only just enough to dodge the attack from a gleaming blade set on the tip of a long silver tail that cracked through the air. Samus spun to look back and see glowing green eyes set in a long narrow skull of shining metal, and behind it shimmering orange wings. The robotic dragon looked up at her, opened its mouth and unleashed its own bombardment of burning plasma. Another Ridley.

"Really?" Samus said to the Pirate commander as she danced among the broken boulders and scattered wreckage of the Pirate war camp while two flying monsters hunted her. "You activated your own backup? You know he will try to kill you as soon as he physically can. How did you even decide to do this? You're psychologically incapable of acknowledging any equal or superior."

The answer came rolling back over the coms, a paradoxical mix of rage, joy, and calming Ridley's slavering voice. "Killing will come. But before that, the rapture of battle."

Then came a separate transmission from robotic version, text scrolling across Samus' visor. "Genius is to be surrounded by idiots. No challenge. Human psudo-intellects play strategy games against themselves. I kill you against myself."

Samus grimaced. All right. Whatever twisted logic they had reasoned themselves into, the mind behind each was still the same template. Treachery was their very foundation. She could easily trick them into turning on the other if...

The text reappeared in her visor, a highly encrypted message even as Mecha-Ridley landed in front of her and lashed out in a storm of blades and blaster fire. "You will do no tempting. I have already arranged for my victory. While the defective organic fool thought he was still activating me I slipped a film of micro-explosives around his neck. The instant you are dead I will activate them and be alone in my triumph."

Samus could see over Mecha-Ridley's thrashing shoulder to where the organic version circled in the air on broad wings, looking for his own chance to lay devastation down on Samus. With a reptilian grin that Ridley waved a hand her way while his double was occupied, momentarily brandishing a small device that looked like the detonator for a type of undetectable bomb Samus had to assume was now installed in the robot. No, inciting treachery would not work as a strategy, but only because they were both already filled to capacity. Samus felt like sighing.

Still the two of them working together at least for the moment. A tough riddle, but Samus could still...

Impacts of blaster fire slammed against her back. Pirate troopers were moving back on the attack, their twin commanders having bought them a moment to recover from Samus' first assault. Ok, that was tougher but she could use a chance to let the suit's reaper system get a little extra energy to this might...

Against a backdrop of the high canyon wall, the remaining Behemoth cannon swiveled and by simple perspective transformed its long vicious barrel into a simple black dot looking Samus' way. She had almost forgotten that one. It was not a good idea to forget four story tall walking battleship cannons.

But she had been trained for this. Samus abandoned attempting to plan and seized hold of the music of battle. She refused to acknowledge uncertainty. Her intention was victory, and the world around her would bend to allow that path. It would bend if she had to burn it all to ash in the process.

...

Shakshi-22b was not having a good time. This valley that had been slowly growing into a respectable forward raiding base over the past few days was now a dust-clouded storm of missiles, beam weapons, and fire. The ground rang from the constant thumps of high powered explosions; a mixture of artillery, walking-cannon shots, and those devastating power-bombs the Hunter seemed to be dropping in her wake like eggs.

Currently 22b was hiding behind a large rock and happy to be doing so. A rock could only hide him from one direction but it was something at least and from the sound of things the Hunter was still consistently rockward. At least it was was a substantial rock, a thick irregular slab long enough to shelter four other soldiers bunkered down beside 22b.

22b flinched as the sounds of fighting abruptly drew closer. Fortunately, his immediate superior had been killed so there was no one to give him a direct order to go join that mess. Then a fellow soldier fell from the sky. He bounced and scraped to a halt in the dust beside 22b, then shakily leveraged himself up, leaking some type of fluid from his armor or his body, only to freeze as he saw five weapon barrels aimed at him on hair triggers.

"Co..." The soldier then coughed and almost got shot into pulp but managed to get his words out. "...mander Ridley orders you to execute ambush plan seventy-three."

22b groaned. With the Hunter hacking their com channels it seemed the Commander had taken to just throwing soldiers. Ten yards away another flailing soldier dropped from the dust filled air and bounced off a boulder. More reinforcements for their position, it seemed.

Explosions and roars rang out from the other side of that sheltering rock slab. 22b just pressed his back against the stone, clutched his weapon desperately, and silently cursed his Shakshi gene-tyrants who had decided that lower food costs were worth their soldiers being thinner and weaker than those of other clans. 22b really did not want to be weak right now.

A few yards away, pressed against the shelter of the same slab wall, one of the fellow soldiers stamped his feet, puffed his abdomen, and rallied himself for the coming fight. And then fell over as a flash of light incinerated his head. An instant later, a second beam punched straight through the rock barrier, crumpling the soldier beside him as a helmet and what it held were both suddenly missing, and in the blink of an eye a third fell too. The next soldier managed to see what was happening and so ducked to avoid the next beam.

Ducking was smart. It just didn't help. The burning light flashed slightly lower this time and the soldier's truncated neck sizzled as his body slumped forward.

22b ran as fast as he could, without the slightest concern for cover or conventional retreat tactics. The hunter could see him through five feet of rock and shoot with pinpoint accuracy. There was no strategy against that, at least not that 22b could see. Let Commander Ridley think of something, as long as 22b was not nearby to be thrown off on the new strategy.

...

Samus felt every blow.

It was all an illusion, her invincibility. The Chozo's last suit covered her, it bled into her, it channeled its fire around her and burned the world at the flick of her wrist. But she was tired. Every muscle thrummed with energy, each single flash of the battle lay out clearly in her mind like a diagram, and the moments of the future sang in her ear, a drumbeat she saw before it landed. But she was tired.

Half a second into the future, this patch of rock would explode. Samus was already gone when it did from a massive energy beam striking like yellow lightning. Now she ran as only the chozo warriors could, light shimmering around her in a kaleidoscope of colors, an aurora on her metal skin. The flash of the explosion still hung in the air as she held out her hand. Orange fire rippled on one side of the gauntlet, crystals of ice on growing on the back, just from the speed of her passing. She was tired, but it was so beautiful.

Then time caught her and beauty exploded once more into the screaming war of combat. Smoke and fire and blood and metal, it never ended. A pirate blaster shot caught her shoulder and spun her. She used that motion to flip, dodge the next, and return her shot, producing a spray of shrapnel and pirate blood. Then another hit smashed against her leg. She clenched against it and barely slid, but for a moment her knee wobbled.

Chozo war-tech could stand against an army and watch it splash against her like waves on a stone. But eventually even stone crumbled. She could take a hit. She could take a hundred. She could kill a hundred pirates. She could kill five hundred. But a thousand? Two thousand? How many hits could she take?

How many until she could not bare to let herself take another?

Sparks and drops of molten metal fell from the broken Pirate frigate ship around her, newly snapped in half against uneven ground. Across the valley, a half dozen other ships lay in similar injured splendor, Samus' targets one by one. Space Pirates were not like humans, they fought the hardest when they thought they still had a hope of getting away. Cut off their escape routes and the fight often went out of them. So Samus was breaking their ships and neither Ridley was very happy about that.

The jagged roar shook the air and clawed its way at Samus's spine. Ridley's voice was designed to do that, the sound carefully modified after a study of human evolutionary genetics to create the frozen terror of some platonic Terran predator. It was the shadow from the sky, the teeth behind your neck, the frenzied rush from the murky depths. And it worked, but Samus did not allow herself to feel it. The meat of her body was not her master.

Ridley's swooping impact crashed against her and she met his blow, her gauntlet arm darting up to catch his striking claws. The Pirate commander's dark purple scales were burnt and ripped in a dozen places but he kept fighting, never slowing for a second, even missing an eye and half the fingers on one hand. Samus pushed off against him, borrowing momentum from the attack and flipped back through the air. Then she instantly darted to the side as a streaking red laser beam swiped across her landing site, leaving a glowing melted trail in its wake.

Mecha-Ridley had lost a wing, but the silver construct still hovered in the air, held up by burning thrusters along its back. Damaged and wounded, both Ridleys still attacked like striking lightning; whips and blades and teeth and fire darting out at Samus in a constant flurry. They knew better than to let Samus get away from them. At a distance she had the advantage; close, even with all the technology wielded by each side, their size still mattered.

She could make a break for it. Choose the right moment and neither dragon would be able to stop her from escaping their reach, and once free she could shoot them down like the mad beasts they were. Unfortunately this was not just a two on one fight, most of an army still occupied the rest of this valley, and proximity to either Ridley was the only thing preventing a barrage pounding Samus' current position into fine sand. Those were her choices. Move through cover, fight the dragons. Race to a high ground position, face a firing squad.

She needed something else. Any distraction to shift the balance. Most battle tactics assumed you were not confronting an entire army alone. They assumed you had any allies.

She sensed something change about the wide battlefield before she saw it, before even the suit scan managed to return any new readings. But then there they were in the distance, blinking in the top of her eye. A large number of motion signatures approaching from the far end of the valley, from the mouth of the Colony city, too low energy to be munitions but no life signs registering..

Samus was in the process of fighting up the slopes of Ridley's parked capital ship when she first got a line of sight to this new development. Her helmet gained an angle over a hull metal ridge just in time to see into the distant valley mouth where a pirate rearguard soldier got run over by a speeding civilian car. That cheap-looking vehicle was barely defined by more than six walls and four wheels, but it still managed to reach seventy miles per hour and that was enough to carry it through two pirates. As it spun in the dirt one of the doors ripped off and exposed an empty cabin from which loud music suddenly leapt into the distant air, quickly drowned by the noise of thirty more similar vehicles barreling headlong out of the colony city through the understaffed lines. For guards expecting to defend against metroids and a bounty hunter, an inexplicable automotive stampede produced decided confusion. The colony had joined the fight.

Then a rising whine joined the rumbling thunder as a swarm of tiny flying delivery robots swooped out from behind a building side in the same direction. Pirate blaster fire raced up among them, but the tiny things moved erratically and if one fell down in smoke and sparks there were ten swirling behind it. They buzzed over the panicked Pirates, spreading confusion as half a dozen new defense plans fought across the Pirate com systems. Only a few of them noticed that none of these new actors possessed even the most rudimentary weapon systems, and compared to a real military force were about as dangerous as confetti. If the Pirate forces had been thinking clearly, the whole display would barely have been a distraction.

But it was a distraction.

Samus felt the music of the battle shift and now instead of forcing it to follow her she let herself be swept along. Her burning white beam flashed out and missiles rained down on the pirate army, There was no need to trust her tired will. There was no need to fight the future. The last combatant had made themselves known, and so now all the interlocking gears were so brilliantly clear to her. Humanity, Pirates, Chozo, metroids, and in the middle of it all Samus herself. With a grateful breath she subsumed herself. The Path guided her and she followed in its wake in a graceful dance. And at its guidance she let loose the blinding fire that sliced through metal and flesh.

The Pirate army screamed as it burned. Then, in the midst of the storm of light and explosions, some of them looked up to see a new star appear in the daylight sky. It grew swiftly, becoming red, an ill omened comet shining down on them all. Then the pirate forces received a new update from their coms, a single unanimous conclusion that broke through all the battlefield confusion and panicked disorder. This alarm was very clear.

The battleship Diomedes was dropping through the atmosphere at full engine burn. The Galactic Federation had finally decided to join the war as on the ground the dragons roared.

…