(Whoa…I just thought about it. this is the LAST chapter of So I Thought…the end you've all been waiting for.

Hmm.

Well, I completely butchered my writing style last time, due to an overdose of romance and Friday-night-insanity, so I'm trying to get back on track. For the final stretch.

Well, here goes nothing.)

XVI: Not the End

X X X

Matthew Arastrough stared at the viewscreen in front of him.

This could not be possible. There must be something wrong with the location, with the computers, with his mind…

It could not be.

The copilot of federation unit 31A, the head of Arastrough's fleet, walked over, the boots of his combat suit attempting with little success to muffle his steps. "Something wrong, Sir?"

Arastrough swiveled from his seat at the control panel and gestured out the expansive cockpit window. "Something wrong? Look out there. Look at that, and tell me there's nothing wrong." His eyebrows creased together at an alarming angle; cautiously, his copilot stepped to the window and peered out.

Kelta-Z was gone.

In its place there was a swirling cloud of rubble, orbiting listlessly around a chunk of ash-blackened, misshapen rock probably a few miles square, at the least. "Check the coordinates, Dustin," Arastrough barked. "There must be some mistake." A few moments, a frantic tapping of keys, and the navigator turned back to his commander, a doomed expression fixed in the set of his lips and brow. "Correct, Sir. If I've checked once, I've checked a hundred times." He paled at the piercing glare of his superior, who leapt from his chair to pace the synth floor, lab coat rustling conspicuously in the silence.

It could not be.

He'd checked the last email from Yeldir as soon as it came in; the files had said that all was well—the pirates were unsuspecting, and Aran safely behind bars, or electric charge, as it were. Aran. Just her name made him shudder in revulsion. The treacherous little bounty hunter had made a fool out of him, ruined his best project yet...

That was it. Somehow, she'd escaped—somehow, in all Yeldir's deviousness, he'd failed to successfully contain Samus Aran. Arastrough's train of thought progressed rapidly, rationalizing, pumping out ideas at breakneck speed. If Yeldir hadn't contacted him by now, what with the 'change' in Kelta-Z…it COULD mean…

Murdered. Murdered by that woman again, Samus Aran.

A manic gleam crept into Arastrough's eyes, and he stopped pacing, sat down in front of the control panel once more.

"Change of plans. Back to HQ," he told Dustin. The navigator blinked, but didn't question. It was never a good idea, no matter how ludicrous the order.

One tense minute, as the command was relayed back throughout the rest of fleet; then the federation-grey, enormous craft turned in space and shot back to where it had come from. Arastrough wasn't smiling. He could afford to wait…Aran would come back. She was bound to.

There would be hell to pay for this.

X X X

The woman in question was lying on her back on another synth floor, this one that of a silver, hunter-class gunship on the other side of Sephaniza Matrim. Arms crossed behind her head, Samus stared up at the stars beyond the view portal that extended in an oval above her, silent.

Adam Malkovich was sitting in the pilot's seat. He was quiet at the moment; Samus had just finished telling what had happened, from planet Aressus to now.

"Now," he said finally, turning to look at the bounty hunter, "Where do you want to go?"

"Huh?"

"You must have had some destination in mind, when you set off to rescue me." There was a hint of amusement in Adam's voice; Samus switched her eyes from the heavens to his face for a moment to answer, since it was impossible to shrug in that position. "I don't know," she said, trailing off in the realization of the correct answer to that particular question.

It would have to be done sometime.

"HQ will be looking for me, I suppose…"

"Yes."

Samus levered herself upright, knowing her chapped skin would miss the cool of the floor, seeping up through her bodysuit, in a moment. She made a mental note to add some sort of burn cream to her first aid kit. If she got around to it.

The idea that had been growing in her mind for the last half hour or so, as the silver ship made its way away from the remains of Kelta-Z to an unknown destination, pressed at the back of her head—hopeless in its hope. It felt like treason, mentioning it, even now. Now, when she had every reason in the world to back her up.

Adam's eyes were intelligent. Sometimes too much so.

"Something wrong, Lady…Samus?"

There was one, intense, fractional second of silence. The air seemed to quiver. No, Samus's thoughts were shrieking. No. No. Say No.

She shook her head. "It was just…well, I was thinking. Right now, hypothetically, neither of us have ties to…anyone, unless you have family you miss, or something…"

"I don't know, Samus. It's been four years. I sort of wonder what my friends are up to, but now, as I look back, there really wasn't much more to my life than work. It makes me think…" he looked at his hands, then back at Samus. "I doubt Ridley told you," he said, "but in the first two years I was at the base, I was in a coma. I was told later, by him, that I was found in crushed ship, pulled in as scrap metal by the space pirates. It seemed the cockpit had been smashed somehow, but the way it fell in left an air pocket. He never told me what I was doing in the ship. Now I know…I guess I always knew, just couldn't remember."

Samus's temper fizzled up at Ridley once again, dampened, in a strange way, by what the incomprehensible dragon had done—let her go.

This is not a favor, Aran.

She controlled her thoughts to hear Adam say, "Basically, I could disappear right now and nothing would really change. I don't know about what's happening in the world. About anything."

He paused for a moment.

"Why do you ask?"

Samus stared up at the dark open space above her head, stretching infinitely out into the freedoms that danced like stardust in the trails of her own hastily-shaken-off dreams; freedoms imagined, but never realized, in a mind that was in itself a cage. She thought she saw now, in a warped and twisted way, what Ridley had meant by his comment.

Oh, Hatchling, but such a cage.

"It would be so easy," she said, slowly, as if the words would fizzle out on their burning path from her mind to hang, forbidden, in the air, "just to…leave. After all, everything that waits for us back there…" there was no need to explain where there was; she knew he knew. "all there is is destruction. Not like I did at Kelta-Z, I mean. Legal issues, rumors, those damn little reporters…" Samus looped her arms around her knees and continued her scrutiny of the sky encircling the silver craft. "Right now…while there's still time…there's got to be a place, somewhere, that we could go. Just to get away. Leave the federation and all its problems, try to have…a life. A normal life, I mean."

Living, not just existing.

Adam said nothing for a long time. The stars, light years away, shed a pearly luminescence through the five-inch-thick reinforced plastiglass. If she tried, Samus could see the outlines of a few ancient Chozo constellations, warped and misshapen because of her own position, far from any Chozo homeworld. The mother and nestling; KFara the Elder…and the Hunter. The hero of legend, the protector of the universe.

Samus Aran?

Adam was speaking.

"It's tempting. But we both know the answer, I think."

She nodded and looked at his face. "I thought,' she said, "…I think…my mind is like a cage, Adam. There's what I can do, what I want to do, and there's what I will do, because of these…I guess you'd call them values, that have been pounded into my head since before I can remember. Like…"

"You can't hide from the world…so why try? You just can't give up and let despair take you. I mean, you CAN—it is mentally possible—but the way you, and I, were raised, it just isn't possible to give up and still do the right thing. Even though sometimes the right thing isn't what the law defines it as. We have a duty, Samus…to do the right thing. To care. Sometimes you just can't take the easy way out."

That was it, Samus thought. That was it, there—what her life was, in a nutshell. Everything the Chozo had taught her. Except… Ignoring her skin's perpetual burning, she stood, lifting her body easily off the ground with the help of one hand, and walked over beside her friend at the viewscreen. "But duty can't become your life," she said. "There's got to be…something to come back to. I just don't know what that is."

"You don't?"

Samus caught Adam's eye and smiled, for the first time in what felt like years. Reaching out, he caught her hand and set it gently underneath his on the control panel.

"Back to HQ, then," he said.

The silver ship made an abrupt turn, fired its engines, and blasted off to face the future.

Epilogue-

Across the long emptiness of space, light years away, a small escape ship floated in the middle of a separate galaxy, stationary for the moment. Its occupant was staring out the cockpit window, much as his enemy was at about this time; much as, but without the peace that had found the Huntress for the time being. The world was changing subtly, and he didn't like it.

Ruined.

Again.

He'd had her! What had he been thinking?

Ridley glared at the pale, distant, uncaring stars. Opportunity—too good a thing to waste on such hazy and unreliable concepts as emotion.

What had he been thinking?

The End…but not really.-

(Wow. It's over.

Wow.

Well, I'd like to thank all my reviewers— -grins- for all the great input and support for my story. I'm gonna miss your comments! My dad says I have to finish my other stories before starting new ones -pouts- (so unreasonable, isn't it?) but there ARE some ideas in the works. Soooo, with that in mind…

Until Next Mission! (Really this time.)

—Aran'sApprentice-Meahow )