(Yay! Thanks for all the good results, people. If I'm encouraged, I might
get on updating...nah, just kidding. I do this as much for myself as for my
reviewers—the games do Samus no justice.
There might have been some confusion in my last chapter, as the computer took all my nice little symbols—the ones that divided up the sections—completely out of the text. I will try to fix that.
Once again, thanks. Now I'd better start the fic and stop blabbing.)
V: Arrival
Samus peered at the cratered landscape of Kelta-Z. There appeared to be no life, but she of all people knew that looks could be deceiving.
She charged up a beam on her cannon, ready for danger, and propelled herself into the air, spin-jumping from the ledge she was standing on to the dusty ground below. Her screw attack protected her in the air, but who knew what was lurking just behind that rock formation...
As it turned out, nothing. With the craggy red rock at her back, Samus turned back toward the high outcropping upon which she had hidden her ship. Good. Nothing could be seen of the shining silver craft. It would be difficult for any enemies to find what could possibly be her only way off the desolate surface of the moon.
Her steps crunched dryly on the pebbly red earth as Samus set out away from the ship, marking it carefully on her helmet's mapping system before beginning to move. The combat visor was calculating her surroundings, searching for both potential ways into the space pirate base and harmful native organisms.
A warning signal flashed across her eyes, and the earth in front of her suddenly crumbled in with a soft sucking noise. Samus jumped back, narrowly avoiding a huge reptilian head that shot out of the surface, fanged jaws snapping at the place she had been just a moment before. When they closed on empty air, the creature withdrew halfway and flopped around on the earth, dragging its huge jaws across the red pebbles around the hole.
It didn't seem to have a body; any limbs were down lower in the hole. Where its eyes should have been, there were only shallow shaded pits. But the lack was more than made up for by the size of the jaw, which was heavily snakelike and surrounded by large, spade-shaped scaly projections.
Samus aimed her cannon and fired, but the shots only bounced off the creature's earth-caked, slightly oozing hide. Alerted to the whereabouts of its prey, the head swung around and lunged at Samus, gaping mouth showing rows of misshapen teeth. Without thinking, Samus flicked the controls and fired three missles into its open jaws.
The creature let out a half-gurgle, half-scream and flailed around madly, pulling its head back under the surface with a rumble. The next moment, the earth underneath Samus shook with a muted roar, as something huge went churning off straight beneath her feet. After only a few seconds it faded away again, leaving a shaken bounty hunter staring at the now-empty hole.
Her scan visor finished calculating and the in-helmet computer spoke up. 'Tunneling snakeworm. Snakeworms dig tunnels beneath the earth while searching for prey, which they detect using extremely sensitive, vibration- sensing fibers on their bodies. After a large meal, a snakeworm may hibernate for up to six years. Their jaws and rotating-plate scales, which they use to propel themselves through the earth, can crush almost anything. The body of a snakeworm is extremely well protected, but its mouth is susceptible to most attacks.'
"Now you tell me," Samus muttered.
She continued past the hole, her visor adding the spot to her small but growing map of Kelta-Z. Nothing else seemed to be moving in the landscape, but Samus kept her eyes peeled for any hint of another living thing. She knew she had limited time to search; from what ADAM had told her, the moon was only about two-thirds the size of earth, with an average daylight span of only nine galactic standard hours.
Three hours later, she trudged back toward the high place her ship was on, not physically tired but mentally at a loss. The sun had already disappeared behind the bulk of Sephaniza Matrim, and the only thing Samus had found was an abundance of small, scaly black batlike creatures. They seemed to center on her as a potential food source, and though their pitiful dives at her weren't enough to take any energy from her tanks, it was beginning to get annoying.
With a new sense of purpose, however temporary, Samus headed to where the bats were coming from, trying to figure out where their lowly hovels were so she could at least vent a little frustration. In a few minutes, she had been led to a place where a large plateau was cut off into a twenty-foot high, slightly sloped cliff.
The rock face was scarred with hundreds of crags and pockmarks, from each of which bats issued in fluttering flurries. Samus scowled. There was no way she was going to exterminate this infestation. Well, she thought, brightening, she could at least end the misery of a few of the beasts...not as if it would hurt a population this size...
Stepping closer to the cliff, Samus was assailed by even more bats than ever. One flapped up to her visor and hovered there, little shiny bulging eyes seeming to bore into her own. A number of tiny shapes zipped around it; for a moment, she thought they were an insect of some kind, then realized they were miniature versions of the already small bat.
It's a mother, Samus thought, a kind of ache deadening her urge to kill the annoying creatures. The bat stared at her for a while longer, then flew off into the dark, closely followed by the babies. Not disappointed, but feeling more confused than ever, she turned to leave, taking one last look at the thousands of bats streaming out of every available crack...
Wait a minute. That wasn't quite true. There was one crevice, about halfway up, which seemed to be empty. Looking up and focusing her scan visor on the place, Samus peered more closely at it.
A picture appeared to one corner of her visor. 'Titanium tubing,' the voice from her computer said. 'Airflow detected. Probably a ventilation shaft.'
"Bingo," Samus said.
She spin-jumped from ledge to ledge, careful not to activate her screw attack so the bats would remain unharmed, until she found a ledge close enough to the vent to stand on.
At the place, she examined the small hole, loath to bomb the area. It was far too small to fit into, even with morph ball, and the scan visor would have told her if the ground were weak...
The little voice in the bottom of her mind stirred. Excuses, excuses. If you really wanted to, you would bomb the place anyway. The scan visor doesn't know everything, Samus. Are the bats' lives worth your goal?
Samus shook her head fiercely, as if to clear the thought from her head. Sour disappointment coursed through her stomach as she turned herself, with an effort of will, away from the lead and trudged back towards her ship.
She kept an eye out for danger, even though she had so far encountered nothing threatening but the snakeworm. It was something she could concentrate on, other than her strange unwillingness to sacrifice a few bats. Were they any different than the other creatures she had mercilessly killed in her zeal to exterminate the metroids and destroy the space pirates? Many of them had probably had their own young, just the same...
Samus bit back a startled cry as her foot slipped and slid downwards with a clatter of moving pebbles. Grateful for the distraction from her own troubled thoughts, she switched her visor to night-vision and surveyed what she had stepped in.
The hole was about three feet in diameter, although slightly caved in...a moment later, she leapt back with a mild explanation. The snakeworm hole! What if the worm was still there, lurking just under her feet? Samus tensed her muscles, ready to jump, then froze, forcing herself to think about the situation.
Of course it wouldn't be. She was being paranoid. It was probably long gone in search of larger prey...although, with this ecosystem, there probably was nothing large enough to make more vibrations than she did. What could there be...? Her train of thought progressed rapidly.
It made sense, Samus thought with growing dread. After all, if one very- light-footed woman could activate its sensors, how much more...it had probably been asleep for years, so they wouldn't have known...its jaws would've been powerful enough...
A fresh wave of resolve swept through Samus's body. No fear. If there was any way into the space pirate base, she would find it. Whatever the cost.
This is suicide, said that one tiny voice.
"For Adam," Samus told it fiercely. Then she rolled into morph ball and went down into the hole.
Years' worth of federation scientists had still not figured out how exactly the Chozo had built the power suit. Samus suspected they had used something akin to a periscope to allow her to see in morph ball form; but as of now, if it worked, she didn't care how.
It was dark in the tunnel, although the lights radiating from her energy tanks—another useful Chozo ingeniousness—lessened the gloom somewhat. Samus could feel vaguely the dirt being flung up behind her as she rolled along. The ground beneath the surface of Kelta-Z was no more soft of wet than at the top.
She kept going, seeing nothing other than grim crumbling earth. It was deathly quiet. Then she turned a sharp angle and came upon a place where two wormholes crossed.
She hadn't expected this. She always tried not to imagine what might happen in places like this—it only induced fear. But that meant she was more easily surprised.
Samus now had three paths to choose from—one going to the left and down, one to the right and slightly up, and the one she was on, which slanted slightly down in front of her. She checked her map. If the ventilation shaft was one way, she had probably take the path leading nearest to it... A quick look, and the morph ball jumped up slightly and followed the right- hand tunnel.
She didn't know how long she had been going before disaster struck. It started with a tiny vibration—just an earth tremor, she thought at first. But it didn't stop. A warning flashed across her vision.
"Oh, crap," Samus said.
'Vibrations from behind,' her helmet computer told her blandly.
Without a second thought, Samus began rolling as fast as she could down the tunnel. She only hoped it was the right one...
The earth was shaking. Showers of pebbles and dust pelted the morph ball's sides as Samus fled, acutely aware of how defenseless she was. Bombs could only do so much...
Every thought fled her mind as the side of the tunnel burst out behind her, exploding with a hail of dirt. A huge head plowed across the passage, rotating-plate scales driving earth before it with a roar, like a gigantic drill. A moment later, the head disappeared in the earth on the other side, drawing its long segmented body in after it. Samus stayed still, and it to was obscured by the dirt...
The next moment pain seared her body as the head erupted from the tunnel next to her, snapping at the air where she had been. A rotating scale had clipped the side of the morph ball, sending her tumbling down the tunnel.
The snakeworm shrieked and pulled its whole body back into the tunnel, thundering down after its escaping prey. Samus hardly knew she was rolling. Pain was flowing across her curled-up body in waves, traveling like liquid fire through every muscle and bone. She held on to one thought to keep from passing out. Keep going. If you stop, it will be a thousand times worse. Keep going. Keep going.
Adam...
Samus pushed the morph ball faster, racing down the tunnel at top speed. The snakeworm threw itself out through the wall and came back in from the side, snapping and roaring. She kept rolling, leaving a string of bombs behind her, passing numerous tunnel-openings to the left and right. Nothing mattered now but flight.
The ground was beginning to hum and vibrate. What now? Samus thought. It could be nothing good. But—
Light. Light was streaming down into the tunnel. Not the red sunlight of Kelta-Z, but a harsh, white, hospital-room light. Samus heard the crackle of electricity, felt it pulsing through her suit. There was a wall ahead, strange and sudden in the earthy darkness—a wall with a hole in it.
Collapsed rubble lay all around. The snakeworm had tried to invade here. But why hadn't it succeeded? Samus didn't care. Somewhere...anywhere she could get away... A moment after she raced through the opening, she knew why. The worm following her screamed, and so did Samus. Electricity crackled around her, searing through the power suit savagely, and pain lanced through her body, coursing across, around, and inside...
With a desperate burst of speed, she flung herself out of it, rolling to the ground a few feet away. It was a room, not a tunnel. Samus's tortured muscles couldn't hold her in morph ball form any longer; she uncurled and flopped dizzily on the mercifully cool, smooth floor. After the darkness, the sudden brilliance hurt her eyes... or was that the electricity? She couldn't tell.
Laying there on the ground, the feeling slowly returning to her limbs, it finally dawned on Samus. She was in the space pirate base. She had made it.
(Review response—
Axa: thanks. You can probably find information about Metroid on the internet. How did you find out about my love of Warriors, though?
To all my faithful reviewers (no, I haven't forgotten you.): I can't thank you enough for your response to my fic. The criticism really helps. On summer break now, which means I can hopefully update more frequently. See you next chapter!)
There might have been some confusion in my last chapter, as the computer took all my nice little symbols—the ones that divided up the sections—completely out of the text. I will try to fix that.
Once again, thanks. Now I'd better start the fic and stop blabbing.)
V: Arrival
Samus peered at the cratered landscape of Kelta-Z. There appeared to be no life, but she of all people knew that looks could be deceiving.
She charged up a beam on her cannon, ready for danger, and propelled herself into the air, spin-jumping from the ledge she was standing on to the dusty ground below. Her screw attack protected her in the air, but who knew what was lurking just behind that rock formation...
As it turned out, nothing. With the craggy red rock at her back, Samus turned back toward the high outcropping upon which she had hidden her ship. Good. Nothing could be seen of the shining silver craft. It would be difficult for any enemies to find what could possibly be her only way off the desolate surface of the moon.
Her steps crunched dryly on the pebbly red earth as Samus set out away from the ship, marking it carefully on her helmet's mapping system before beginning to move. The combat visor was calculating her surroundings, searching for both potential ways into the space pirate base and harmful native organisms.
A warning signal flashed across her eyes, and the earth in front of her suddenly crumbled in with a soft sucking noise. Samus jumped back, narrowly avoiding a huge reptilian head that shot out of the surface, fanged jaws snapping at the place she had been just a moment before. When they closed on empty air, the creature withdrew halfway and flopped around on the earth, dragging its huge jaws across the red pebbles around the hole.
It didn't seem to have a body; any limbs were down lower in the hole. Where its eyes should have been, there were only shallow shaded pits. But the lack was more than made up for by the size of the jaw, which was heavily snakelike and surrounded by large, spade-shaped scaly projections.
Samus aimed her cannon and fired, but the shots only bounced off the creature's earth-caked, slightly oozing hide. Alerted to the whereabouts of its prey, the head swung around and lunged at Samus, gaping mouth showing rows of misshapen teeth. Without thinking, Samus flicked the controls and fired three missles into its open jaws.
The creature let out a half-gurgle, half-scream and flailed around madly, pulling its head back under the surface with a rumble. The next moment, the earth underneath Samus shook with a muted roar, as something huge went churning off straight beneath her feet. After only a few seconds it faded away again, leaving a shaken bounty hunter staring at the now-empty hole.
Her scan visor finished calculating and the in-helmet computer spoke up. 'Tunneling snakeworm. Snakeworms dig tunnels beneath the earth while searching for prey, which they detect using extremely sensitive, vibration- sensing fibers on their bodies. After a large meal, a snakeworm may hibernate for up to six years. Their jaws and rotating-plate scales, which they use to propel themselves through the earth, can crush almost anything. The body of a snakeworm is extremely well protected, but its mouth is susceptible to most attacks.'
"Now you tell me," Samus muttered.
She continued past the hole, her visor adding the spot to her small but growing map of Kelta-Z. Nothing else seemed to be moving in the landscape, but Samus kept her eyes peeled for any hint of another living thing. She knew she had limited time to search; from what ADAM had told her, the moon was only about two-thirds the size of earth, with an average daylight span of only nine galactic standard hours.
Three hours later, she trudged back toward the high place her ship was on, not physically tired but mentally at a loss. The sun had already disappeared behind the bulk of Sephaniza Matrim, and the only thing Samus had found was an abundance of small, scaly black batlike creatures. They seemed to center on her as a potential food source, and though their pitiful dives at her weren't enough to take any energy from her tanks, it was beginning to get annoying.
With a new sense of purpose, however temporary, Samus headed to where the bats were coming from, trying to figure out where their lowly hovels were so she could at least vent a little frustration. In a few minutes, she had been led to a place where a large plateau was cut off into a twenty-foot high, slightly sloped cliff.
The rock face was scarred with hundreds of crags and pockmarks, from each of which bats issued in fluttering flurries. Samus scowled. There was no way she was going to exterminate this infestation. Well, she thought, brightening, she could at least end the misery of a few of the beasts...not as if it would hurt a population this size...
Stepping closer to the cliff, Samus was assailed by even more bats than ever. One flapped up to her visor and hovered there, little shiny bulging eyes seeming to bore into her own. A number of tiny shapes zipped around it; for a moment, she thought they were an insect of some kind, then realized they were miniature versions of the already small bat.
It's a mother, Samus thought, a kind of ache deadening her urge to kill the annoying creatures. The bat stared at her for a while longer, then flew off into the dark, closely followed by the babies. Not disappointed, but feeling more confused than ever, she turned to leave, taking one last look at the thousands of bats streaming out of every available crack...
Wait a minute. That wasn't quite true. There was one crevice, about halfway up, which seemed to be empty. Looking up and focusing her scan visor on the place, Samus peered more closely at it.
A picture appeared to one corner of her visor. 'Titanium tubing,' the voice from her computer said. 'Airflow detected. Probably a ventilation shaft.'
"Bingo," Samus said.
She spin-jumped from ledge to ledge, careful not to activate her screw attack so the bats would remain unharmed, until she found a ledge close enough to the vent to stand on.
At the place, she examined the small hole, loath to bomb the area. It was far too small to fit into, even with morph ball, and the scan visor would have told her if the ground were weak...
The little voice in the bottom of her mind stirred. Excuses, excuses. If you really wanted to, you would bomb the place anyway. The scan visor doesn't know everything, Samus. Are the bats' lives worth your goal?
Samus shook her head fiercely, as if to clear the thought from her head. Sour disappointment coursed through her stomach as she turned herself, with an effort of will, away from the lead and trudged back towards her ship.
She kept an eye out for danger, even though she had so far encountered nothing threatening but the snakeworm. It was something she could concentrate on, other than her strange unwillingness to sacrifice a few bats. Were they any different than the other creatures she had mercilessly killed in her zeal to exterminate the metroids and destroy the space pirates? Many of them had probably had their own young, just the same...
Samus bit back a startled cry as her foot slipped and slid downwards with a clatter of moving pebbles. Grateful for the distraction from her own troubled thoughts, she switched her visor to night-vision and surveyed what she had stepped in.
The hole was about three feet in diameter, although slightly caved in...a moment later, she leapt back with a mild explanation. The snakeworm hole! What if the worm was still there, lurking just under her feet? Samus tensed her muscles, ready to jump, then froze, forcing herself to think about the situation.
Of course it wouldn't be. She was being paranoid. It was probably long gone in search of larger prey...although, with this ecosystem, there probably was nothing large enough to make more vibrations than she did. What could there be...? Her train of thought progressed rapidly.
It made sense, Samus thought with growing dread. After all, if one very- light-footed woman could activate its sensors, how much more...it had probably been asleep for years, so they wouldn't have known...its jaws would've been powerful enough...
A fresh wave of resolve swept through Samus's body. No fear. If there was any way into the space pirate base, she would find it. Whatever the cost.
This is suicide, said that one tiny voice.
"For Adam," Samus told it fiercely. Then she rolled into morph ball and went down into the hole.
Years' worth of federation scientists had still not figured out how exactly the Chozo had built the power suit. Samus suspected they had used something akin to a periscope to allow her to see in morph ball form; but as of now, if it worked, she didn't care how.
It was dark in the tunnel, although the lights radiating from her energy tanks—another useful Chozo ingeniousness—lessened the gloom somewhat. Samus could feel vaguely the dirt being flung up behind her as she rolled along. The ground beneath the surface of Kelta-Z was no more soft of wet than at the top.
She kept going, seeing nothing other than grim crumbling earth. It was deathly quiet. Then she turned a sharp angle and came upon a place where two wormholes crossed.
She hadn't expected this. She always tried not to imagine what might happen in places like this—it only induced fear. But that meant she was more easily surprised.
Samus now had three paths to choose from—one going to the left and down, one to the right and slightly up, and the one she was on, which slanted slightly down in front of her. She checked her map. If the ventilation shaft was one way, she had probably take the path leading nearest to it... A quick look, and the morph ball jumped up slightly and followed the right- hand tunnel.
She didn't know how long she had been going before disaster struck. It started with a tiny vibration—just an earth tremor, she thought at first. But it didn't stop. A warning flashed across her vision.
"Oh, crap," Samus said.
'Vibrations from behind,' her helmet computer told her blandly.
Without a second thought, Samus began rolling as fast as she could down the tunnel. She only hoped it was the right one...
The earth was shaking. Showers of pebbles and dust pelted the morph ball's sides as Samus fled, acutely aware of how defenseless she was. Bombs could only do so much...
Every thought fled her mind as the side of the tunnel burst out behind her, exploding with a hail of dirt. A huge head plowed across the passage, rotating-plate scales driving earth before it with a roar, like a gigantic drill. A moment later, the head disappeared in the earth on the other side, drawing its long segmented body in after it. Samus stayed still, and it to was obscured by the dirt...
The next moment pain seared her body as the head erupted from the tunnel next to her, snapping at the air where she had been. A rotating scale had clipped the side of the morph ball, sending her tumbling down the tunnel.
The snakeworm shrieked and pulled its whole body back into the tunnel, thundering down after its escaping prey. Samus hardly knew she was rolling. Pain was flowing across her curled-up body in waves, traveling like liquid fire through every muscle and bone. She held on to one thought to keep from passing out. Keep going. If you stop, it will be a thousand times worse. Keep going. Keep going.
Adam...
Samus pushed the morph ball faster, racing down the tunnel at top speed. The snakeworm threw itself out through the wall and came back in from the side, snapping and roaring. She kept rolling, leaving a string of bombs behind her, passing numerous tunnel-openings to the left and right. Nothing mattered now but flight.
The ground was beginning to hum and vibrate. What now? Samus thought. It could be nothing good. But—
Light. Light was streaming down into the tunnel. Not the red sunlight of Kelta-Z, but a harsh, white, hospital-room light. Samus heard the crackle of electricity, felt it pulsing through her suit. There was a wall ahead, strange and sudden in the earthy darkness—a wall with a hole in it.
Collapsed rubble lay all around. The snakeworm had tried to invade here. But why hadn't it succeeded? Samus didn't care. Somewhere...anywhere she could get away... A moment after she raced through the opening, she knew why. The worm following her screamed, and so did Samus. Electricity crackled around her, searing through the power suit savagely, and pain lanced through her body, coursing across, around, and inside...
With a desperate burst of speed, she flung herself out of it, rolling to the ground a few feet away. It was a room, not a tunnel. Samus's tortured muscles couldn't hold her in morph ball form any longer; she uncurled and flopped dizzily on the mercifully cool, smooth floor. After the darkness, the sudden brilliance hurt her eyes... or was that the electricity? She couldn't tell.
Laying there on the ground, the feeling slowly returning to her limbs, it finally dawned on Samus. She was in the space pirate base. She had made it.
(Review response—
Axa: thanks. You can probably find information about Metroid on the internet. How did you find out about my love of Warriors, though?
To all my faithful reviewers (no, I haven't forgotten you.): I can't thank you enough for your response to my fic. The criticism really helps. On summer break now, which means I can hopefully update more frequently. See you next chapter!)
