(A/N: Big SORRY to all my reviewers for not updating in so long. Research paper now successfully written, although the whole project is not yet complete, which gives me some free time. Once again, thanks!
The next few chapters are going to be mostly classic Metroid adventure with a little mystery/suspense type stuff, not a lot of emotion. (I may be awful at making action sound good, but...) For romance lovers, don't worry, I haven't forgotten it! it will just be a long way off, as the story is mostly about...well, let the story tell you that.
Quick note: when the regular sign is after a section in the body of the story, it usually means a perspective change. When is used it means flashback. I think its annoying to write out flashback for some reason.)
IV : Hunter, Hunted
Matthew Arastrough had a problem. A very large problem. It was in the form of a sleek silver ship hurtling through space a couple thousand miles from planet Aressus, where it should've been.
A frown plastered on his face, Arastrough found the link and opened a com to the silver craft's computer. He waited for a minute, then the face of the ship's pilot appeared on the screen—or rather, the helmet and armored torso. Arastrough was vaguely alarmed to see that the woman he was supposed to be controlling had already changed into her power suit.
"Ms. Aran," he began, "You were ordered—"
"I was requested," Samus said, in a voice that sounded as though there were a very evil grin underneath that visor. "And requests can be denied." Arastrough opened his mouth to protest, but the screen went black. "Link terminated," his computer said blandly. Arastrough frowned. He was almost sure he had seen the bounty hunter make a very rude gesture at the screen a moment before it flicked off.
Shaking his head, he opened another link, this time to a branch of the high security quarters at the docking bays across from the government buildings.
The other end was opened immediately.
"What now, Arastrough?" The voice was a sharp, slightly hissing tone, extremely unlike the dully profession voices of the officials; a voice alive with undertones and half-hidden expressions. Arastrough shivered in spite of himself. His new ally could be a bit...creepy.
"This may be inconvenient timing. However—"
"No, it's just fine with me. It gets boring in here with nothing to do."
"However," Arastrough, not used to being interrupted, continued slightly annoyed. "I need you to leave for Kelta-Z now. On the way, should you encounter the bounty hunter, you must see to it that she does not reach the moon."
A smile cracked the reptilian mouth of the face on the screen, revealing pointed teeth. "My pleasure," yeldiR said dryly.
The slight hum of the instruments filled the silence in the control room of the silver ship, giving it a feeling of life and breath. Samus stared up at the stars dotting the infinite void of space. She spent much of her time of solid ground; but the cockpit of a spacecraft, with the controls in her hands and the open darkness all around, still seemed like home.
ADAM, which had been conducting a search of all possible destinations and space pirate ships by elimination, had been silent. Now it whirred into life. "Lady, the scanners have found no less than fifteen space pirate ships in the area of HQ's data reception satellites. I can tune into the satellites' data and search for key messages."
Samus nodded, then rolled her eyes and said, "Sure. Thanks." She had to get a modification that allowed the computer to recognize motion cues. This was getting annoying.
A moment later, ADAM said, "Messages containing the key words and pictures were picked up by one satellite two days ago. Should I trace them to origin/destination?"
Samus shrugged. "Fine. And you can stop asking me. Just do what it takes to find Adam and sort out this whole mess."
A few more minutes. "Lady—we've got trouble," the computer said. "Routine scanning of the ship revealed a federation tracer frequency focused on us. Disabling this may prove extremely difficult. We would have to shut down the search system—"
Its words were interrupted by a bleep from one of the instruments. Samus looked down and frowned beneath her visor. "Don't bother. Keep searching—we're going to need a place to land. They're already following us."
The ship was federation-issue grey, small and unadorned. Neither its advanced weaponry nor its quickness and modern design made it dangerous. What supplied that factor was the pilot.
YeldiR grinned to himself at the prospect of what lay ahead. He had a plan. This was perfect.
Samus stared at the readout on the control panel. "Crap," she said. "Our friend 'yeldiR' seems to be on his way."
ADAM didn't reply to the comment; it was too busy calculating. "Lady, the sending ship seems to have been headed for one of the larger moons of Sephaniza Matrim. Apparently they have set up a base on a widely orbiting planetoid called Kelta-Z."
"Then that's where we need to go," Samus said. "Set the ship to revert to the quickest route there as soon as I stop manual control."
"Going the quickest way would entail flying straight through an asteroid belt, Lady."
"Like I said, whatever we need to do...right now I need to try and get away from that other ship before it's—"
A sudden shock rocked the craft's balance, sending a jolt up through Samus's legs. Alarm signals went off and a warning readout flashed across the computer screen.
"—too late." Samus tightened her grip on the controls and turned around in her seat, the protective barriers on the back half of the cockpit sliding back to give her 360 degrees of clear vision. "All right, you lizard-faced little bastard," she growled, "if it's a fight you want then that's what you're going to get. Nobody's shot me out of the sky yet, and I mean to keep it that way."
The silver ship's engines roared into life, preparing to propel the craft toward the nearest asteroid belt. One held; the other, however, made an alarming clanking noise and sputtered out. Samus swore as she took the time to look at the readout on the screen: RIGHT PRIMARY ENGINE DAMAGED. AUXILIARY POWER INITIATED.
A quick look out the back of the cockpit told her all she needed to know. Samus jammed the controls to the side, the silver craft tilting and sliding under the pursuing grey ship. ADAM seemed concerned. "Lady," it admonished, "This is no time for fancy tricks. What you need to focus on is staying alive."
Samus stared at the computer in the navigation room. "Move quickly, and stay alive...That's an order. Any objections, Lady?"
She nodded blankly, everything blown away. The computer...it sounded just like Adam. Not the same computer that had withheld information that was vital to survival. On that would go directly against orders, and face the consequences, for the sake of the universe. For her.
"None, sir," Samus replied.
Move quickly, and stay alive... Samus remembered the words only too well. Her mind twinged in warning. She might be treating this like a game; but just below the surface, everything in her knew that it was dead serious.
As her ship swerved to the side, Samus swiveled the cannons and pushed the button into taking mode. She looked up just quick enough to avoid an asteroid hurtling toward the cockpit, slamming the controls hard to the left. Samus winced as it wobbled a little on the backup engine, but the cutting-edge technology kept the ship on course relatively well.
YeldiR smiled and gave his ship the command to fire as necessary. The ion cannons opened up and began to charge, and his smile turned into a wide- mouthed grin as an asteroid directly in his path exploded with one blast, sending pieces showering over the cockpit. The silver ship was straight ahead, weaving a tantalizing path through the asteroids. The cannons opened fire.
Samus saw it coming and streaked behind an asteroid, feeling the shock as it was pulverized behind her, the leftover radiation making all her instruments go momentarily haywire. The second they returned to normal she shot a volley of concentrated energy blasts in the general direction of the grey ship behind her, keeping an erratic pattern through the asteroids now flying all around.
YeldiR dodged and dipped down lower with a twisting dive, using his radar steering to keep from colliding with the asteroids in his path. He cleared the distance between his ship and his opponent's and kept ahead as Samus copied the manuever, the silver craft lilting slightly to the right. YeldiR switched his weapons and fired backwards.
Samus dodged the missle easily, but it swerved around in a tight arc and headed back towards her. A homing missle, almost certainly packed with enough power to vaporize her entire spacecraft.
The engines roared into speed as Samus slammed on the thrust, sending her ship streaking through the air straight beneath yeldiR's. With the view obscured in a blur of motion, she navigated blindly, jerking the controls back savagely and feeling the response as the false gravity in her ship suddenly changed planes.
The silver ship tilted sharply up in a breakneck curve, desribing a complete loop around the grey craft. The missle, with its inexorable logic that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, chose the shortest path to its target.
Unfortuntely for yeldiR, something was in the way.
Samus saw the explosion dizzily from upside-down, completing the loop a moment later and sliding back into the normal gravity status. The smoke cleared, but there was no sign of the federation ship.
She sat back, breathing heavily, not from exertion but exhileration. Once, Samus might've taken time to calm her heartbeat; but after being a bounty hunter for so long—hunter and hunted—she had learned to control every slight reaction. On planetside she could afford fits of emotion; here, no one cared if you were so angry that you accidentally crashed into an asteroid and killed yourself.
ADAM spoke up for the first time since yeldiR had fired at them. "Lady, course set for Kelta-Z. Estimated arrival time 10 minutes."
"Good," Samus said, her face grim as she glanced at the readout screen once more. "The engine looks pretty bad. Auxiliary power isn't designed to hold out very long." And knowing yeldiR, he had some trick up his filthy sleeve.
The next ten minutes were nerve-wracking. Samus concentrated on the instruments, searching for signs of further damage. She knew that if she hadn't, she would've been looking back every moment, trying to find yelidiR's ship. Samus might've been happier if he had showed up and tried to bombard her with lazer fire; as it was, the stillness translated itself into an uneasy, watchful calm. All of her senses were telling her that something was waiting to happen.
ADAM finally broke the silence once more as the huge red planet Sephaniza Matrim began to grow in the corner of the view portal. "The moon Kelta-Z is straight ahead," it told her.
Samus squinted at cockpit window, and finally made out an indistinct spherical shape, of the same material as the planet. She could immediately see why it was a potential space pirate base: it was situated by a hostile, barren desert planet next to which it was both easily camoflagued and insignificant in size.
As she got nearer, the surface of the moon filled the view portal—unremarkable, craggy and pockmarked, probably just a huge chunk of Sephaniza Matrim carved out of the planet eons ago.
The silver ship fired its engines,a little unstable on backup, and dove into the gaseous atmosphere of Kelta-Z.
YeldiR, in the badly damaged federation ship, turned off his state-of-the- art cloaking device and followed her. He wasn't laughing any more. Let the Hunter think she'd won. His plan...
Aran crashed on Kelta-Z, he typed into his message unit. I'm going in there. If I find her alive, I'm sure your government can deal with her—I'm guessing treason doesn't go over well in such a well-developed socitey. There's no better chance to start my work, so I'll simply continue and be on the lookout for our rebel. –Yeldir
(by the way, sorry about the short chapter last time. I had always intended to make chapter three a short one; but I was just reading it one time and realized it really was too short. Maybe I'll change that sometime...but in the meantime, I'd better get on with all my cliffie chapters. See you next mission!)
The next few chapters are going to be mostly classic Metroid adventure with a little mystery/suspense type stuff, not a lot of emotion. (I may be awful at making action sound good, but...) For romance lovers, don't worry, I haven't forgotten it! it will just be a long way off, as the story is mostly about...well, let the story tell you that.
Quick note: when the regular sign is after a section in the body of the story, it usually means a perspective change. When is used it means flashback. I think its annoying to write out flashback for some reason.)
IV : Hunter, Hunted
Matthew Arastrough had a problem. A very large problem. It was in the form of a sleek silver ship hurtling through space a couple thousand miles from planet Aressus, where it should've been.
A frown plastered on his face, Arastrough found the link and opened a com to the silver craft's computer. He waited for a minute, then the face of the ship's pilot appeared on the screen—or rather, the helmet and armored torso. Arastrough was vaguely alarmed to see that the woman he was supposed to be controlling had already changed into her power suit.
"Ms. Aran," he began, "You were ordered—"
"I was requested," Samus said, in a voice that sounded as though there were a very evil grin underneath that visor. "And requests can be denied." Arastrough opened his mouth to protest, but the screen went black. "Link terminated," his computer said blandly. Arastrough frowned. He was almost sure he had seen the bounty hunter make a very rude gesture at the screen a moment before it flicked off.
Shaking his head, he opened another link, this time to a branch of the high security quarters at the docking bays across from the government buildings.
The other end was opened immediately.
"What now, Arastrough?" The voice was a sharp, slightly hissing tone, extremely unlike the dully profession voices of the officials; a voice alive with undertones and half-hidden expressions. Arastrough shivered in spite of himself. His new ally could be a bit...creepy.
"This may be inconvenient timing. However—"
"No, it's just fine with me. It gets boring in here with nothing to do."
"However," Arastrough, not used to being interrupted, continued slightly annoyed. "I need you to leave for Kelta-Z now. On the way, should you encounter the bounty hunter, you must see to it that she does not reach the moon."
A smile cracked the reptilian mouth of the face on the screen, revealing pointed teeth. "My pleasure," yeldiR said dryly.
The slight hum of the instruments filled the silence in the control room of the silver ship, giving it a feeling of life and breath. Samus stared up at the stars dotting the infinite void of space. She spent much of her time of solid ground; but the cockpit of a spacecraft, with the controls in her hands and the open darkness all around, still seemed like home.
ADAM, which had been conducting a search of all possible destinations and space pirate ships by elimination, had been silent. Now it whirred into life. "Lady, the scanners have found no less than fifteen space pirate ships in the area of HQ's data reception satellites. I can tune into the satellites' data and search for key messages."
Samus nodded, then rolled her eyes and said, "Sure. Thanks." She had to get a modification that allowed the computer to recognize motion cues. This was getting annoying.
A moment later, ADAM said, "Messages containing the key words and pictures were picked up by one satellite two days ago. Should I trace them to origin/destination?"
Samus shrugged. "Fine. And you can stop asking me. Just do what it takes to find Adam and sort out this whole mess."
A few more minutes. "Lady—we've got trouble," the computer said. "Routine scanning of the ship revealed a federation tracer frequency focused on us. Disabling this may prove extremely difficult. We would have to shut down the search system—"
Its words were interrupted by a bleep from one of the instruments. Samus looked down and frowned beneath her visor. "Don't bother. Keep searching—we're going to need a place to land. They're already following us."
The ship was federation-issue grey, small and unadorned. Neither its advanced weaponry nor its quickness and modern design made it dangerous. What supplied that factor was the pilot.
YeldiR grinned to himself at the prospect of what lay ahead. He had a plan. This was perfect.
Samus stared at the readout on the control panel. "Crap," she said. "Our friend 'yeldiR' seems to be on his way."
ADAM didn't reply to the comment; it was too busy calculating. "Lady, the sending ship seems to have been headed for one of the larger moons of Sephaniza Matrim. Apparently they have set up a base on a widely orbiting planetoid called Kelta-Z."
"Then that's where we need to go," Samus said. "Set the ship to revert to the quickest route there as soon as I stop manual control."
"Going the quickest way would entail flying straight through an asteroid belt, Lady."
"Like I said, whatever we need to do...right now I need to try and get away from that other ship before it's—"
A sudden shock rocked the craft's balance, sending a jolt up through Samus's legs. Alarm signals went off and a warning readout flashed across the computer screen.
"—too late." Samus tightened her grip on the controls and turned around in her seat, the protective barriers on the back half of the cockpit sliding back to give her 360 degrees of clear vision. "All right, you lizard-faced little bastard," she growled, "if it's a fight you want then that's what you're going to get. Nobody's shot me out of the sky yet, and I mean to keep it that way."
The silver ship's engines roared into life, preparing to propel the craft toward the nearest asteroid belt. One held; the other, however, made an alarming clanking noise and sputtered out. Samus swore as she took the time to look at the readout on the screen: RIGHT PRIMARY ENGINE DAMAGED. AUXILIARY POWER INITIATED.
A quick look out the back of the cockpit told her all she needed to know. Samus jammed the controls to the side, the silver craft tilting and sliding under the pursuing grey ship. ADAM seemed concerned. "Lady," it admonished, "This is no time for fancy tricks. What you need to focus on is staying alive."
Samus stared at the computer in the navigation room. "Move quickly, and stay alive...That's an order. Any objections, Lady?"
She nodded blankly, everything blown away. The computer...it sounded just like Adam. Not the same computer that had withheld information that was vital to survival. On that would go directly against orders, and face the consequences, for the sake of the universe. For her.
"None, sir," Samus replied.
Move quickly, and stay alive... Samus remembered the words only too well. Her mind twinged in warning. She might be treating this like a game; but just below the surface, everything in her knew that it was dead serious.
As her ship swerved to the side, Samus swiveled the cannons and pushed the button into taking mode. She looked up just quick enough to avoid an asteroid hurtling toward the cockpit, slamming the controls hard to the left. Samus winced as it wobbled a little on the backup engine, but the cutting-edge technology kept the ship on course relatively well.
YeldiR smiled and gave his ship the command to fire as necessary. The ion cannons opened up and began to charge, and his smile turned into a wide- mouthed grin as an asteroid directly in his path exploded with one blast, sending pieces showering over the cockpit. The silver ship was straight ahead, weaving a tantalizing path through the asteroids. The cannons opened fire.
Samus saw it coming and streaked behind an asteroid, feeling the shock as it was pulverized behind her, the leftover radiation making all her instruments go momentarily haywire. The second they returned to normal she shot a volley of concentrated energy blasts in the general direction of the grey ship behind her, keeping an erratic pattern through the asteroids now flying all around.
YeldiR dodged and dipped down lower with a twisting dive, using his radar steering to keep from colliding with the asteroids in his path. He cleared the distance between his ship and his opponent's and kept ahead as Samus copied the manuever, the silver craft lilting slightly to the right. YeldiR switched his weapons and fired backwards.
Samus dodged the missle easily, but it swerved around in a tight arc and headed back towards her. A homing missle, almost certainly packed with enough power to vaporize her entire spacecraft.
The engines roared into speed as Samus slammed on the thrust, sending her ship streaking through the air straight beneath yeldiR's. With the view obscured in a blur of motion, she navigated blindly, jerking the controls back savagely and feeling the response as the false gravity in her ship suddenly changed planes.
The silver ship tilted sharply up in a breakneck curve, desribing a complete loop around the grey craft. The missle, with its inexorable logic that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, chose the shortest path to its target.
Unfortuntely for yeldiR, something was in the way.
Samus saw the explosion dizzily from upside-down, completing the loop a moment later and sliding back into the normal gravity status. The smoke cleared, but there was no sign of the federation ship.
She sat back, breathing heavily, not from exertion but exhileration. Once, Samus might've taken time to calm her heartbeat; but after being a bounty hunter for so long—hunter and hunted—she had learned to control every slight reaction. On planetside she could afford fits of emotion; here, no one cared if you were so angry that you accidentally crashed into an asteroid and killed yourself.
ADAM spoke up for the first time since yeldiR had fired at them. "Lady, course set for Kelta-Z. Estimated arrival time 10 minutes."
"Good," Samus said, her face grim as she glanced at the readout screen once more. "The engine looks pretty bad. Auxiliary power isn't designed to hold out very long." And knowing yeldiR, he had some trick up his filthy sleeve.
The next ten minutes were nerve-wracking. Samus concentrated on the instruments, searching for signs of further damage. She knew that if she hadn't, she would've been looking back every moment, trying to find yelidiR's ship. Samus might've been happier if he had showed up and tried to bombard her with lazer fire; as it was, the stillness translated itself into an uneasy, watchful calm. All of her senses were telling her that something was waiting to happen.
ADAM finally broke the silence once more as the huge red planet Sephaniza Matrim began to grow in the corner of the view portal. "The moon Kelta-Z is straight ahead," it told her.
Samus squinted at cockpit window, and finally made out an indistinct spherical shape, of the same material as the planet. She could immediately see why it was a potential space pirate base: it was situated by a hostile, barren desert planet next to which it was both easily camoflagued and insignificant in size.
As she got nearer, the surface of the moon filled the view portal—unremarkable, craggy and pockmarked, probably just a huge chunk of Sephaniza Matrim carved out of the planet eons ago.
The silver ship fired its engines,a little unstable on backup, and dove into the gaseous atmosphere of Kelta-Z.
YeldiR, in the badly damaged federation ship, turned off his state-of-the- art cloaking device and followed her. He wasn't laughing any more. Let the Hunter think she'd won. His plan...
Aran crashed on Kelta-Z, he typed into his message unit. I'm going in there. If I find her alive, I'm sure your government can deal with her—I'm guessing treason doesn't go over well in such a well-developed socitey. There's no better chance to start my work, so I'll simply continue and be on the lookout for our rebel. –Yeldir
(by the way, sorry about the short chapter last time. I had always intended to make chapter three a short one; but I was just reading it one time and realized it really was too short. Maybe I'll change that sometime...but in the meantime, I'd better get on with all my cliffie chapters. See you next mission!)
