(OMG…this is taking a long time. Once again, I'm sorry about the wait, but I happen to be a very lazy, unmotivated author glares at self …who happens to write pointless a/n's that detract terribly from the reader's attention span...so saying…on with the fic!)
XIV: Not a Good Day to Die
Blobs of darkness swam drearily back and forth in a sea of undefined shapes and perspectives, their sole purpose seeming to be to drive a certain bounty hunter insane. Samus blinked, bringing the world into slightly better focus; several more times, and she was presented with a view that, if hazy, was bereft of the occupants of her previous conception. The ceiling sloped away from her left to her right, up to a height that seemed dizzying from this angle—what angle was it, anyway?—and there was an open hatchway in the wall furthest from whatever she seemed to be lying on.
She tried to move, but as soon as her muscles responded to her mind's summons, deep-set aches rippled up the bounty hunter's legs, back, shoulders, neck. Grimacing, Samus let herself flop back down again, trying to remember…
There had been a dream. Watching feet that stepped mechanically, dry earth and fires around them. A hand, gripping a ledge. An open hatch on the top of a smooth silver surface. Pieces of metal peeling off a pair of arms…and a man's haggard face…
Her eyes informed her that something in the room was moving, although a single image from the dream had detached itself from her thoughts to drift over, superimposed at the top of the strange apparition, and hover concernedly over her, brow furrowed over intelligent grey eyes.
"Lady? Are you awake?"
She didn't seem to be able to respond. Unsatisfied, the dream-face pulled back and began to walk away…
Wait a minute, Samus thought. Wait a minute…
Then she remembered—remembered in vivid, excruciating detail. Willing her voice to work, she croaked after the retreating figure, "…Adam?"
"Lady?"
"…You're not dead?"
"No more than you." Steps came tapping over, and in a slightly softer tone, "Probably less, actually. You should be resting, Lady, after…everything…why don't you just go back to sleep? Everything's under control—"
Ignoring the dry throbbing of her muscles, Samus levered herself upright, blinking out the fog that was creeping up her vision. She swallowed for a moment, then choked out, "I'm fine. Where are we?"
Someone was sitting on the foot of Samus's bunk, watching, as she looked around with an effort. "In your ship," he said. Brown-grey hair; back not quite so rigid as she remembered. Grey eyes.
"You don't say?"
He elaborated. "Orbiting somewhere in the area of the recently damaged planetoid… Kelta-Z." A frown crossed his features, and Samus's former CO looked at his hands. Those particular objects were reddened slightly, almost as if sunburned… The explosion. The heat wave. It gave her a mild shock to realize that her own skin had the same tinge—it wasn't just her muscles that had suffered.
Fragments of scenes flashed sharply in her mind's eye. Somehow, she'd made it to her ship, carrying Adam. Somehow. It was all like the bad dream that she had mistaken it for at first; hazy, as if her mind had somehow shut down while her body continued functioning. But there was something—something important. Something she couldn't remember…
"Lady…lady?" The voice interrupted her recollections, and Samus looked up, then jumped. Adam was standing in the doorway, grey eyes staring back at her; they slid away as she met his gaze, to land on the blank floor in front of him.
"What?"
"I thought you'd like to see where the ship's at from the computer. Coming?"
Nodding, Samus got up and walked after him, muscles protesting. The Chozo DNA infused into her as a child had given her the human equivalent of Chozo muscle and bone structure: the strongest muscle possible along with the least mass for their birdlike agility. Samus was neither as agile nor as strong as her mentors had been, but she was barely seventy pounds at almost six feet tall and could hold up her body's weight with one hand. On Kelta-Z, she had been, physically at the very least, taxed to the utmost—there was no other explanation for the muscle pain she felt at the moment.
She'd been a hair's breadth from dying.
Samus glanced at the back of the tall man who stepped briskly in front of her toward the control room. He must've regained consciousness before she did; what did he remember? Anything?
Four years is a long time to be gone, Samus…
Adam stopped in front of the computer terminal and gestured her over, face turned to the view screen. The bounty hunter stepped up by his side. It was almost like before, standing reviewing another mission to be completed…almost.
"Lady?"
"What?"
"I see you've gotten back safely—although your condition seems rather abnormal. Could this entity possibly be the friend of yours you've mentioned on previous occasions? Logical deductions lead me to the conclusion—" A few wild thoughts raced through her head in an instant—what was he talking about?—before she remembered the computer.
"Well…" Samus's throat momentarily stopped up as her mind searched for the right words. "Yes. ADAM…this is Adam."
Her former CO looked interested, a muddled expression between concern, sadness, and humility crossing his face. "They made a module of…me? I had no idea…how strange…"
Samus's mouth let loose the words before she thought about them. "Well, everybody thought you were dead. And after all…they do put the best…" The silence consumed her words as she realized, belatedly, the absurdity. Babbling.
The man's face, carefully guarded, changed. The quiet was uneasy, seeming to resonate with unspoken vibes of emotion. On both sides. Something Samus had never been exposed to before. He'd always known what to say—whether she was ranting about HQ, or space pirates, or just wanted to know whether she could do something…unorthodox…to help her find the Chozo. Stupid well-worded, confusing, fair person… She was the one who said nothing, usually. Unconfrontational, hiding everything away.
Adam looked away. "You can work out the location with your computer," he said, and exited the room. That wasn't like him… Samus waited until his steps receded, and then, with the emotion seeping up from its pulsing depths in her chest, she burst out in quiet frustration.
"It's not the same. How could I ever—ever imagine that I could bring him back? There's no purpose! I can't speak to him…if it's going to be like this, what have I done? Why couldn't he just stay dead? It might've been easier… maybe I should've just died back there. Save the trouble." The words came out in a sharply exhaled string, and she slammed her palm down on the control panel, the slap stinging her chapped skin. It was all useless. Lifeless.
Then…
"Do you know how the computer determines an entity has entered the range of its sensors, Lady?" The voice cut through her ears and went straight to the brain, needling Samus's temper into another flare. "Yes, they teach everybody that at the federation. Must-know info." A muscle began to twitch in the huntress's forearm.
"Really?"
"No. Why do I care?"
The computerized voice continued as if it hadn't heard the question. "Every living creature's brain sends out tiny waves of energy, which can be detected by, among other things, the right equipment at a certain radius. This, along with movement, visual, and heat signals, shows what and/or who is entering the area the computer functions in.
"The signal is never the same for two different people—rather like a psychic fingerprint. Beings with higher thought process generally give off stronger waves than those that are more…animalistic. Take a human, for instance, versus a common pigeon."
At the moment, Samus felt she could care less whether she was more radioactive than one of those annoying birds that seemed to have mutant forms at any spaceport you went to. And yet, that one part of her that was always active, always conscious just below conscious, was soaking up the information and storing it in the back of her head, interested. The anger slipped away grudgingly, however she tried to hang onto it.
"If that's how it's going to be, you tell me: why should I care?"
"There are cases when the other three of the factors are detected without the brain waves—usually a machine or other nonthinking stimuli. However, except for the possible explanation that something has the ability, and the motive, to fool the physical sensors, there is no scientifically plausible explanation for the detection of brain waves in the absence of all three other factors."
Why would the computer tell her this? Samus stared hard at the screen, as if its bleeping statistics would reveal the answers to all her problems. Something she was wishing a lot lately. She managed to make her voice nonchalant, seeing as though, as she remembered, she was angry.
"And what has that got to do with me?"
"The point is," ADAM pronounced, "when you entered the ship two hours ago, you were…accompanied…by an enormous amount of un-accounted-for brain energy. None of the ship's other sensors picked up anything; however, around you and your friend Adam, whom you were carrying at the time—without apparent effort or comprehension—this energy seemed to emanate, as far as the sensors indicate, from nowhere. "
Samus blinked. Something was rising in her chest, in her mind: a strange rush of disbelief, hope, a whisper of grey mist that swirled her thoughts into a jumble that she couldn't understand. It was like something she'd forgotten but just now remembered…or something she thought head forgotten her.
Fly, she thought, staring past the screen, back, to a silent, desperate prayer with confusion ahead and destruction behind. And then, later, a despair conquered by an irresistible urge to get up, to go on, not to give up just yet.
ADAM was still speaking, and Samus reverted to the present in time to hear "…Remarkable thing is that not only did this energy have no origin, it appeared not in simple waves but in contained patterns, similar to a digital outline, which, when drawn out on the sensors, resemble nothing so much as—"
"Chozo." Samus breathed. On the computer screen, the normal monitoring of the ship's functions sinking to accommodate the picture, was an image: an outline in shivering white lines. A bipedal, birdlike creature, deprived of wings when evolution decided that flexible arms and fingers were more necessary for their survival than their ability to fly. Their minds more necessary than their nevertheless strong bodies.
It came back to her then, in dreamlike quality. Whispers, words inside her mind. She'd thought she was hallucinating—that she was making things up.
Daughter, be strong—it's not over yet. Hope, Warrior. Love. Let these last when all else is gone, and find more than you ever lost. There is another side to everything…we didn't raise you to die cold. Just look—there will be a way. Live, and fight your life another day.
Just a few words—words that said an eternity. The Huntress, the Chozo Hatchling, just stood there, eyes fixed on the image of something she thought she'd lost forever.
One of them, anyway.
(Allright, I know I'm drawing this out. Unfortunately, I have this strange attraction to over-dramatize these sad little pathetic scenes that the characters and readers have to enure.
Oy.
Until next chapter, then…in the hope that it isn't as long a wait as this!)
