(hehehe!! I Just LOVE Cliffhangers Don't You Agree?
bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla...
allright, I'll stop now. I expect some nice big reviews for this one; btw, and thanks Desert Lynx for being the only one to answer my question. Hopefully you all will get a better understanding of what's been going on from this one...--looks at chapter-- Okay, maybe that'll be chapter thirteen...
Just because, if you really wanna know (I didn't think so, but I'll tell you anyway) I got stuck on the third sentence of the fourth paragraph in this chapter, and didn't write any more for a few months. That's why I didn't update for so long...no, I don't expect you to care. Well, on with the story!
...finally...)
XII: To the Death
The iris hatch slid shut, leaving the tall figure silhouetted against an eerie blue glow. Samus had the fleeting impression that this was how she had appeared to thousands of space pirates throughout her career, but it was lost in the jumble of thoughts that flooded her brain. His footsteps were measured and precise, echoing slightly in the room, which suddenly seemed so large and empty; once he'd stepped from the light, Samus could see his face.
It was the same Adam she remembered so often, whether she tried to or not—but different. She squinted for a moment, her guard down just a fraction, trying to figure out... Same short greyish-brown hair, hard-set mouth, sharp and rather prominent nose. Same grey eyes...no. The eyes were Adam's eyes, but Adam wasn't in them. They were blank. Dull. Robotic.
And that's when Samus began to run.
She darted toward the door, but Adam was too quick. He stepped in her path, leaving the bounty hunter skidding to avoid hitting him. A laser shot rang through the air—he was carrying a sleek cannon with one arm, a fact Samus had barely noticed in her scrutiny of his face. She whirled around, searching for an enemy she knew didn't exist, and was rewarded for her doubt by narrowly avoiding another blast, so close it sent energy waves crawling up her skin.
He was going to kill her.
Whoever or whatever this was had been sent by Ridley to kill her. It couldn't be Adam. It couldn't. The thoughts churned through her head as Samus dodged another succession of rapid shots. The world was moving in fast-forward—or was it that her mind was thinking in slow motion?
Samus ducked and whirled, evasive, darting about the room in frantic motion, knowing all the while, in the back of her mind, that she couldn't go on like this forever. She had to do something. The time she'd set for her escape was trickling away with every shot he made, every time she barely escaped. But she could do nothing.
That's not true. A cold whisper in the very depth of her being, a realization like icy water trickling down the back of her neck. Like the blade of a knife, placed against her throat.
You can kill him first.
No, Samus said. No. I can't.
It would be simple. He's unguarded, untrained. Easy prey.
I CAN'T!
Her brain snapped back to reality a second too late. The beam hit her in the shoulder, with a blast of energy that made her reel to the side, the skin under her armor searing as she was jerked backwards, trying to regain control as a shriek threatened to tear from her throat. And it didn't stop.
The next shot DID knock her down, and before she could roll away another hit her chest. Pain was rolling across her body, tearing at the fibers of her consciousness with each measured, systematic blast—her body had lost control, convulsing as it sought blindly to curl into a fetal position, its last, pre-natal defense. And she was screaming, her helmet echoing as the tortured voice module gave up and her instinctive cry reverberated through the room, "Adam! Adam, STOP!"
He did.
A strained look came over his face, and he made a slight flick of his arm, as if to throw the gun away, that stopped before it could be called a motion. It was only for a second, but it was enough. In that time Samus's mind registered the break in the sequence, and, before she could stop to think, she wrenched her burning arm up and fired a single shot, straight at Adam's unprotected chest.
He staggered backwards, the impact lifting him off his feet momentarily and then dropping him down to crumple onto the floor. For a moment, Samus just lay where she was, numbness creeping up her limbs, breath sucking in and out of her chest—then the enormity of what she'd just done struck her, and she ripped her ravaged body up off the floor, savagely propelling her muscles to lift each leg in turn and stumble over towards the place Adam lay.
He wasn't dead. The coat and shirt he was wearing were scorched where her beam had hit him, but his chest was rising steadily if slightly, the muscles in his neck and arms working to push himself up and twitch toward the gun he'd dropped. Nothing had changed.
Samus dropped to her knees, the will drained from her body as suddenly and completely as if a metroid had just sucked her dry. Adam's eyes stared fixedly as he levered himself up on shaking arms, slowly, mechanically, inching toward his weapon. Samus knew she couldn't muster another shot. The voice of reason was silent. There was nothing left to do...
But then, as he turned his back to his quarry, propped up on his right elbow with the left groping for the cannon, his charred coat slid down off his shoulder, exposing the back of his neck to Samus's despairing gaze. Something snapped into place in the huntress's mind.
Facts and events all the way from that eternity ago, the news broadcast, to now. Incidences. Pictures she'd ignored as unimportant in the computer database. Glimpses of plans. It was all falling into place like puzzle pieces... There, mounted like a white-metal collar around the back of his neck, leaking battery fluid from a crack in the casing, was a small white rectangle with a panel of steady, glittering lights running around the top rim.
There was one last hope. Samus grabbed Adam's shoulder and pulled his back toward her, her cannon-arm hanging useless at her side, placed a knee on his chest as he tried to escape, transferred her left hand to the metal box and pulled it off.
There was a flash of electricity, one that traveled up her arm and knee to her spine, reawakening the tearing, seething pain of the beam cannon's shots. She could feel his body go rigid, and his eyes flew wide open, lips parted in a silent, ragged cry of pain. In the one part of her consciousness not being battered by crackling, electric energy, she knew it was the same force that consumed them both, trying to keep its hold as the machinery that contained it was torn from its place of power.
It stopped suddenly. Samus's head was bowed, ears ringing, as blotches of darkness chased one another across her vision. Her body was in shock, numb and listless, and as her eyes cleared she realized that Adam, still pinned to the ground by her knee, lay limp and deathly white on the floor, unmoving.
A cold rush similar to that in her body stole over her mind. Samus's fingers unfastened her helmet and dropped it to the ground, her cannon coming to join it a moment later, and then the glovelike hand extensions of her power suit. It was bare fingers that she ran desperately up his neck, searching, searching for any sign of life...
A faint movement of his lips. Samus bent her head down to the level of his face, turning her ear to catch what seemed, almost, just a tiny exhalation. "Samus," it whispered, "Samus Aran..."
And that was all. Samus stared down at the face of her friend and superior, no longer blank. She was beyond thought. Beyond movement.
Beyond tears.
(Nobody kill me! It's not over yet!)
