Two.
The Chozo sit in a dark room of cold metal. Most huddle against the four walls of their bleak hiding place, some sit, talons resting on another's shoulder, or leaning against their neighbor. Even so there is little comfort. Once regal robes and sashes and armor plates lay tattered and soiled on the backs of their owners, their weapons tarnished in disuse.
Samus realizes they are waiting for something, likely their death. She is not told this—only knows it so surely for that is the way dreams are and dreams are always a contrived vision. For what seems like an age she wanders among them, a nonentity. Glimpsing each face in turn, she receives no acknowledgment, but finds a tired acceptance in every liquid black eye.
Now she is floating above them, as if a cloud of smoke swirling on the ceiling. A door opens at one end of the square room. Light pours through in a spreading triangle, fanning out over the floor, wide over the back wall. It is a white light, harsh, revealing every crumb of squalor, every speck of vulnerability in washed out detail.
Samus's heart aches as she witnesses the unfortunate people's final moments below her. If only she could know such as them in waking life! Her brain races with panic. And yet, she is not possessed by these emotions. They seem separate from her somehow, unrelated and unimportant. It is not real, she tells herself, and manages to half believe it.
The Chozo warriors rush into the breach and are cut down by bolts of light brighter than the light of the open door. For the rest, the elderly and the young, are blades—dancing with white reflections at first, opaque with dark fluid soon after. Last come stomping feet that are heavy and swift as they rise and fall.
Samus sees the attackers only as blurs, rushing into the metal cell like rats to a meal. It is enough to know that they are dark in color, a detail Samus dismisses, for isn't black the brain's first way of labeling evil?
As the vision below her empties of life, a Chozo elder rises to his feet from the back of the room and locks onto her line of sight, immaterial as it is. He is taller than the rest, gaunt, with eyes like pockets of midnight.
This does not alarm Samus. By her age nightmares hold no surprises. She waits, ready to hear and see.
"Hatchling, the time for fulfilling your life's holy mission draws to its end," he says in a voice infinitely solemn and wise.
I am no longer a hatchling by any measure, Samus thinks back. If the Chozo hears, he does not show it.
"Take back your weapons," he continues, "given to you so long ago. Strike down our enemies. But it will be a close thing. Dishonor and death waits below the smiles of those you trust. Study close their hollow shells that you may divine their true natures."
Then his voice is a roar that echoes over distances unmeasured and unseen. He holds his long thin arms into the air. "Hatchling! Do not forget your charge. Avenge! For you are the last!" With that said the shadowy wraiths descend on the elder at last, daggers of light sparkling in black fists.
The sound of thunder crashed through her mind then, louder than any storm witnessed awake.
Samus woke up then, not jerking awkwardly as if from a nightmare, but rather she simply opened her eyes and sat up. The distant roar of thunder still echoed in her ears. She checked the time, 02:58 hours, two minutes before she meant to rise.
It took less than half an hour for her to wash, dress, and gather her belongings. She thought little of the dream. It did not disturb her. She would have been dead long ago if she had taken the warnings and omens of every nightmare seriously, Chozo in origin or not. In her youth, she had been taught that Chozo shamans could send important messages through dreams and waking visions. But the Chozo had been gone for a long time, and there were none left to send such a message. What mattered was here and now. And the warning at the end, what of that? Samus needed no reminding that Nuvwick or any other mysterious benefactors were untrustworthy. She gave the whole venture a fifty-fifty split. It could be that Nuvwick and a few others truly wanted to see her back in action, or perhaps it was a trap of sorts. Either way, if she had a chance to regain her second half, she knew she must take it. The alternative was worse than any betrayal.
Wearing a plain red jacket, tan pants, and a wide brimmed hat, Samus set out to the bus stop, a gym bag slung over one shoulder. Neotamnna Prime was a city that never slept, a galactic melting pot. Many species remained nocturnal. They filled the streets and buildings, shopping, having breakfast with their families, going to work. Lives like any other played out under the stars. Samus blended right into the crowds, far from being the only humanoid out that night.
Above the skyscrapers loomed two moons, one with a pink cast to its rocky surface, the other opaque with volcanic glass and ash, rivers of lava so large they could be seen as thin lines of red veining its surface. Samus switched from bus to walking and back again, working her way north to the city's industrial zone. By the time she found the marker described on the data stick, the time was 04:47 hours. The trip had taken longer than she expected. The marker was a restaurant named Min's Café. There were two signs labeling it so, one over the front entrance, as was usual, and a battered second which hung over the alley that stood between the café and the neighboring building.
Samus stepped lightly into the ally, eyes darting back and forth, straining to spot attackers in hiding. Shadows lay behind every object, inside every hole and nook. But no ambush came. The only light in the ally arrived from an overhanging bulb, revolving in a slow circle with the night's breeze, casting a circle of orange light over the center of the grit covered ally floor. Just to the right of this spotlight sat a pale blue polymer dumpster.
This was what the info on the data stick had told her to look for. Lifting the crusty lid open, Samus dug around with one arm inside the foul smelling darkness. Her hand eventually bumped into something solid and heavy with a sleek metal surface. Pulling it free from the empty food containers and soiled napkins she brought it into the light—a hefty metal briefcase with a thumbprint scanner. Placing her thumb on the shiny black sensor, the lock chimed a cheery note and the case clicked open. Inside were the technician's outfit and id badge she would need to pass the initial layers of security. Nuvwick was good to his word, at least this far.
The time was now 05:01. She would be late if she did not hurry.
Shuffling back into the shadows, Samus removed her jacket and shoes, pulling on the technician jumpsuit over her street clothes. Next on were the brown work boots from the briefcase. Samus tied her hair behind her head in a loose ponytail before pulling out the blush and eyeliner from her own backpack. Makeup wasn't her thing, but every last trick was needed to hide her all-too-familiar face. If it turned out to be a rush job, all the better, Samus figured. She could not recall any technician beauty queens.
Shoving everything into the armored briefcase, Samus set out, still on foot, down the street of Mir's Café, the road that would lead her to Installation #407.
The shiny and red stoned commercial buildings fell away to hulking fortresses of dull white metal and gray cement like a scab giving way to pale skin. Samus entered the industrial zone.
The zone was kept relatively free of crime, at least of the unorganized variety, by numerous patrols of private security forces; the business end of Neotamnna Prime was quite and calm. Still three blocks away from #407, Samus began to spy the Federation guards keeping a close watch on the road. Samus knew they were Federation because they were the only guards that dressed in civilian clothing: some as workers looking over their tools at five in the morning, to bums, huddling next to barrel fires with a flask of liquor in their hands and a gun under their soiled trench coats. They watched from windows and courtyards and curbsides, mere wisps of ghosts in comparison to the flashy rent-a-soldiers that stood tall and proud in plain view, guarding their contractor's property in neon blazers that reflected obscene amounts of brash color into the night.
Samus allowed no eye contact for any of them, even as she felt the gaze of many faces tug at hers for a response they could measure. She kept her pace quick, never close to running, but never slow. Slumping, she let the bill of her hat shadow over her eyes.
This will never work. Anybody can see that it's me. I'll be caught, then I'll go to prison. This is suicide. Samus had to tip the corner of her mouth up in amusement. How long had it been since she last sweated the odds? A shiver of sudden excitement shook her spine. It had been too long.
No one approached her and soon the vast paved lot of Installation #407 passed beneath her boots. The facility itself only had two stories above ground, rambling over half a square mile. Samus noted a large open yard, uncluttered by any supplies, set on the back of the lot away from the street. It occupied nearly a fourth of the installation grounds. This, she knew, would split open to reveal the spaceship bay.
Here there were Federation troops in uniform, the black and gray power armor suits of the military. They stopped her twice, once at the outer gates, then at the front door checkpoint. Each time Samus's face was the very picture of complacency. Just another working stiff facing the same old shit on a different day.
After scanning the id badge pinned to her chest, they let her through without hassle.
Inside, the first thing to do was check in with the receptionist. The stiff lipped woman behind the front desk asked why she was a full eight minutes late, to which Samus shrugged and mumbled something about forgetting her tools.
"And just what are you supposed to be jabbing at today, my bright little wrench jockey?" the receptionist asked, purple lipstick encrusted a mouth that broke into a cheerless sneer.
Without hesitation Samus replied, "Cryogenic storage leakage in the condensing coils."
"I've been informed of no such repairs. Where's Sandra? She's our usual cryo technician. She gets here on time."
Again Samus shrugged, allowing her jaw to go slightly slack. "Sick, I think. Double check, please." In truth, the night before Sandra had found an envelope tucked under her pillow full of standards and a note saying she should check in sick this morning.
The receptionist's expression soured as she produced a clipboard and scanned the list of names. This time Samus did hold her breath.
At last the witch tossed the board aside with a snap of the arm, as if deciding not to hurl it in Samus's face at the last second. "Okay, you're clear to go. Be quick about it." Samus accepted a slip of polyglass on which was scribed, by microscopic lasers, the level two key code, and vanished down the halls, eager to be away from the other woman's scrutinizing gaze.
There were plenty of locked doors between her and the target, but Nuvwick had given her the only key she would ever need.
After being escorted to the second basement cryo storage units by a level two guard, she pretended to set to work, turning screws, removing panels, waiting for her escort to wander off. He did so after a few minutes, leaving her alone.
Samus pulled the installation's floor plans from her front pocket and spread it out on the floor, away from an expanding pool of coolant. The Installation was unimaginative in its design. Each floor consisted of a square within a square, the inner square being the offices and laboratories boxed in with one another. The people who worked in these offices and labs would not arrive until 07:00. An unbroken hallway of brushed steel formed the outer square, with an elevator on the western side and a staircase on the east. The stairs were out. Too many cameras inside the stairwell, and the guards would hear and see anything coming down them. Samus could handle a single man, but here there were plenty, and in close quarters without a weapon things could get tricky. Putting out the sensors also presented difficulties. At the first sign of tampering or breakdown the level of alarm would be raised and the area thoroughly swept. That left the grav-lift elevator. It was now 05:30 hours. The current shift of guards was to be relieved at 06:00, after a long, boring night of work. They were tired and sluggish, which translated to more openings in which to slip through in patrols. It would be possible to make her way down the elevator shaft, passing security clearance as she went, hiding from guards until she was inside the inner square of the tenth basement level. No cameras watched the elevator shaft itself, just the inside of the lift and the hallway entrance. That left only the laser grid to deal with.
Folding the paper up and putting it away, Samus returned to her repairs for a few minutes. Then, she opened the briefcase and took out two slim metal tools. Having all she required, Samus closed the case and tucked it under a nearby desk. It was time to make excuses. She stood up, stretched her arms and yawned, lumbering from the lab and through the hall around to the east side. The two guards she met in the break room barely glanced up from their coffee and calorie sticks at her approach. Their helmets were removed and sitting on the table. "I'm going to use the elevator, going up to the first floor to get something. You need to go with me?"
"Nope," one guard said. "You've got your card with you right? Don't want to have to escort your ass down here again."
"Don't worry," she replied with a dry smile. As Samus left, one of the soldiers radioed control, and told them of her impending arrival on the ground floor.
"Have you ever heard such speech?" asked one guard to the other.
"Sounds perhaps she was raised by her grandparents," said the other. Samus didn't bother listening to the rest.
Reaching the elevator, Samus removed one of the small cylindrical tools for her pants pocket. One visual/heat camera covered the entrance to the elevator, as expected. Samus moved in front of the camera's view of the call button panel, in a stance she hoped those watching in control wouldn't find suspicious. With the press of a finger on the metal rod's side, a thin slat of metal emerged. Samus slid this into the elevator's security override, a small hole that looked like a data serial port. Samus continued to hunch around, appearing to be a mere technician, half asleep and pressing in the "up" button, while the tool—a type of key only carried by top intelligence agents of the Federation—told the elevator to stay put while fooling the doors into opening without a carriage behind them, something they would ordinarily never do.
After a twenty second eternity, the doors peeled open. Samus stepped inside the elevator shaft, taking her place on the service ladder embedded into the shaft's wall just to the right of the doors. A quick check confirmed the elevator car itself remained high overhead, on the top floor. Doors closed behind, a metallic eyelid blinking shut. Hanging onto the slim rungs of the ladder, Samus could glance over her shoulder and spot the series of white eyes hidden in the circular silver elevator shaft, each projecting a laser beam, that, if passed through by anything over than the elevator car itself, would trigger the security measures. The lasers themselves were invisible, no need to color them here for the usual dramatic effect. And the security feature of this elevator, Nuvwick's notes had told her, was a particularly grisly one. If a foreign body were to be detected by the laser grind, the elevator itself would speed up, rising or dropping into the intruder with all the velocity and force of a small spacecraft traveling at escape velocity. There would be nothing left but some bloody gristle smeared along the smooth walls, or perhaps only a fine red mist wafting in the filtered air.
Had they seen anything suspicious before the doors closed? she wondered. What did it matter? They would notice soon enough that no one had arrived on the ground floor. She had to hurry, but couldn't afford the slightest error.
Putting the key away, she produced the second tool, similar in appearance to the first, but this one a little fatter. Depressing the bottom side of the tube caused what looked like a miniature satellite dish to fold out on the other side, overlapping sections of the tool popping out like an old fashioned telescope. This one was a hand held spatial disruptor, a device that could broadcast minute fluctuations in the space-time continuum. Samus knew it cost a small fortune, perhaps just enough proof that Nuvwick was for real if he was willing to trust something like this in the hands of a down-on-her luck bounty hunter. Just one shot of this thing could shut down a laser emitter without triggering any tampering countermeasures. That is, as long as she didn't over do it. One half second too long, and down would come the elevator to deliver her on one last ride.
The hunter had just enough room to reverse her direction on the ladder. Head first she eased down each bar, the disruptor clenched in teeth.
She came to the first emitter, little more than an ivory disk of metal amidst the sheen of its surroundings. It had been placed at just the angle to catch anything passing by on the ladder. Removing the wand from her teeth, taking the greatest of cares not to drop it, Samus pointed the disruptor and held the trigger down for little more than a second. The disruptor made a high pitched bleating noise, while a brittle, plastic snap sounded from the laser itself. The hunter took a long hard look at the disk, but could see not visible change. Had it been enough?
Cursing under her breath, she thrust her hand back and forth in front of the emitter. Nothing happened. The elevator stayed put. Samus climbed down and continued to the next.
She was efficient, her disruptor bursts tight and controlled, and still she cursed at the slow progress. She had done better under worse conditions before, she knew. The lasers on the opposite side of the hole from the ladder were the worst. They took a little longer at this distance by about half a second, and it grew increasingly harder to draw an accurate bead on them. It wasn't too long before her vision blurred slightly, forcing her to wiggle the tool around until enough hit to do the job.
About three quarters of the way down the shaft, something sighed overhead. The sound of anti-gravity pads coming to life, and the sound of air hissing as it rushed through the crack between elevator and wall. The car lowered one floor and stopped. Samus's heart beat in her chest like prey feeling the clenching jaws of a predator.
Eight minutes had passed, she estimated, by the time she arrived at the bottom. They were probably searching everywhere for her now. This worried her more than she liked, but without much in the way of weapons she could only grit her teeth and refocus on the task at hand.
The final doorway was like the others, except thicker. There were six nodes, or locks, hiding inside the wall around the door, where the frame would be if there had been one. Each one would have to be hit with a heavy dose of the disruption fields before giving away. Three lasers remained that crisscrossed the shaft's final few feet, one stood in the way of easy access to the door. She chose not to tamper with them, and began on the two highest locks from higher up on the ladder.
These finished easily enough, a barely audible hiss of metal signaling their release, and Samus crept down a little farther, moving right to the next two.
Above her, the elevator car hissed and lowered down to the first basement.
Finishing with the middle locks, Samus noted that the closest laser angled up over her path to the floor, blocking off the entrance's lowest third. There was no way to get as close to the remaining two locks as she had with the others without crossing it. She had disabled ten on her trip down, how much longer would she remain lucky? Caution won in the end.
Scooting forward a few desperate inches Samus fired the disruptor at the door's lowest corner closest to her. She held it there for a good minute, the beeping driving her close to rage. Finally, she heard the lock slide open. Every second that passed carried a greater threat of discovery, of capture. Samus looked long and hard at the far corner for a few seconds, estimating how much longer it would take at this distance, then made her decision. She would risk tampering with one last laser.
First, the hunter reversed her direction on the ladder. When the door opened, she wanted to reach the other side on her feet. She stuck out her arm at the disk and fired. The laser emitter did not simply crack like the others, but shattered outward in a small burst of shrapnel. Overhead, a harsh electric note shrilled over and over. Bree! Bree! Bree!
The elevator's security system had activated.
It wouldn't take long for the car to reach her, no more than a few seconds she realized. Knowing it was her only chance, Samus jumped to the shaft's bottom. Here the threshold of the tenth basement came to the halfway point between her hips and knees. She thrust the disruptor onto the last remaining lock, over the place in the metal she knew it to be.
Almost at once the last lock node released, and the door's shutter fell open with a limp, nerveless movement. From above came a constant scream, growing louder by the millisecond, close enough now to hurt her ears. Samus threw herself into the entrance.
There was a truly awful moment when the half open shutters pushed back against her, preventing entry. If she let out her own scream at this point, it was impossible to tell, the sound of the elevator's approach consumed everything. A hot rush of wind washed over the back of her neck.
Instinct moved the hunter to push with all she had. She felt the metal plates slide over, could see the hallway just beyond, could feel the slick floor tiles under her boots.
The elevator came down behind her then. Its heat washed over her, generated by the friction and overworked anti-gravity pads. I'm dead, she despaired, it'll pull me back in by my hair and crush me!
Samus finished falling forward onto the polished floor of the tenth basement. She was inside the outer square. Reaching behind her head she found the technician's ponytail, still tied in its neat little bundle. Samus allowed herself a grim chuckle, then kippered to her feet. Her muscles felt like rubber but she kept moving.There wasn'tmuch time.
There had been no crash. The elevator car had stopped at what must have been a few centimeters from the shaft's floor, a marvel of Federation engineering. The siren continued to blare out its evenly spaced beat. From both left and right, around the hall's two corners came the sound of footsteps, running full tilt in heavy footwear.
Samus pocketed the disruptor and brought out the master key. In the twitch of an eyelid she had the key's interface shoved into the nearest door's lock. The lock gave away easily. Dashing inside, Samus closed the door quickly and silently behind her, and turned to face the inner corridors of the Federation labs.
The hallway had a thin red carpet on the floor, and walls painted an off cream color. It was only wide enough for one human to pass through in comfort. Doors made of dark steel with shiny chrome knobs punctuated the hall at irregular patterns.
She made her way forward, crouched, stepping forward heel first to remain quite. Security would begin their sweeps any second now, and she did not wish to give them a head start by making noise.
A small black polymer sign was placed next to each doorframe, denoting the nature of each interior. These she did not bother to read, the floor plans memorized in exhaustive detail. Being a bounty hunter meant knowing one's environment.
As she padded silently along, her knees began to complain about her stealthy posture. That they would tire so soon dismayed her. She had yet to hear further sounds of pursuit, a fact that raised a flag of caution within her head. This was dismissed. Well beyond the point of no return, Samus asked herself if she was ready to give everything, to die for this suit of armor. The answer welled up from within her, and it was absolute.
Traveling at a good pace, it did not take her long to find the right door. "Reclaimed Systems Storage," the sign just overhead read. The master key did its job once more, and she was inside.
Except for a soft glow in the far right corner of the room, there was no light. Machines and stored devices of all shapes and sizes loomed in the near black like petrified monsters. The air she breathed carried the harsh sour smell of cleaning chemicals, like the kind used in military hospitals.
It took Samus an extra few seconds to work her way to the glow's source, the room was so cluttered with junk that she could not find a direct path. She ended up stubbing a toe twice.
There, in the room's back corner, she found a bank of backlit steel glass containers. Most of them held weapons of various alien models. In the middle, set into an upright mold of frosted steel glass, rested her power suit. The signature scarlet helmet remained from the original design, most everything else had changed over the years with upgrades beyond counting. What it had kept was its supremacy of function and form.
Samus wasted no time pulling the hatch open. A horrible moment of doubt seized her then: did the Chozo armor remain in working condition? These last thirty years must have seen it disassembled and put back together a thousand times. What if there were parts missing, stored elsewhere?
She had to know now; delaying any longer seemed madness. As she reached out to open the suit she noted with wonder that her hands trembled. Tears seeped to the edges of her eyes, but did not emerge as her fingers trailed down the textured metal skin of the outer armor, finding the hidden release programmed so long ago to respond to her presence alone. In an instant the suit purred to life under her touch.
They could never take it apart, she thought with pride, They could never so much as open it without me!
Samus shed her clothing down to her underwear, a suit of skintight synthetic membrane that covered her like an acrobat's leotard. She entered the suit, activated its systems, ran diagnostics. The Chozo armor closed back over her, drawing tighter than any layer of skin, closer than any lover's embrace.
Her right hand glided into the arm cannon, finding the switches and triggers just as she remembered them. Each responded instantly, graceful under her practiced fingers as the arm cannon changed shape to accommodate the myriad of weapons modes. Now the tears came, sparse and ice cold on her cheeks.
She emerged from the storage unit, the suit's movement silky smooth, her body's aches and pains left behind.
A glance at the HUD informed Samus of a hearty supply of missiles and super missiles waiting in stock, as well as every beam she had ever collected. The space jump boots were online, as well as the varia and gravity suits, along with her morph ball functionality. Even the screw attack remained.
This struck the hunter as too good to be true. More warnings sprouted in the back of her mind, less faint than before, but she had no time to consider them for the lab's lights turned on.
At the room's opposite wall, above a metal staircase, sat an office with a glass front overlooking the entire room. Two space pirate guards sat within. For a second nobody moved—Samus stared at them and they stared back. One of the pirates held a meat doughnut covered in white icing, halfway lifted to his gaping maw, the other a personal computing device clutched in its claw, not yet powered up. It appeared that they were just commencing their workday.
Everything that happened next was a blur.
The pirate holding the doughnut dropped it and scrambled for his weapon holster, while his partner lurched for a communications terminal.
Samus, seeing that she had them by surprise, fired a volley of missiles at the office windows. The first two shattered the glass. The rest filled the small room with concentrated concussive blasts.
The bounty hunter did not stick around to find out if they survived. As the last missile detonated in a blossom of fire, she was out the door and running down the hall at top speed, heading east.
If she could reach the spaceship bay she might find her old gunship, or failing that, hijack another and make her escape.
The Speed Dash upgrade of her suit kicked in as she ran down the straight corridor, increasing her velocity, setting the red carpet on fire. Her armor glowed with power, flashing afterimages trailing behind her.
She plowed through the hallway door's steel like it was fiber wood and, finding no security soldiers to stop her, continued straight ahead into the east basement exit just as easily. The hall beyond was the same as everything else outside the laboratories, unadorned steel.
Samus kept running down the hall until meeting a corner that turned north. Here, she knew from the map in her brain, was a security checkpoint she would have to pass. She hoped they knew she was coming.
Slowing to a brisk jog and turning the corner Samus found herself in a rectangular room with a low ceiling. There were four guards standing outside their station, but they were not ready for her.
Three of them were human, the other a space pirate. All four reached for their weapons, but stopped when it became obvious this intruder in the power armor had them all covered with its arm cannon.
Samus switched to the plasma beam, and said, "Leave," pointing back the way she had come. The suit transmitted her voice exactly, for she believed voice masking's place in her life over.
Nobody moved to the exit, but a couple of the humans took their hands off the grips of their guns.
The space pirate waited until her cannon was not pointed at him, and in one swift jerk brought up his own arm-mounted blaster to fire. With ghost-like speed Samus aimed and double tapped the security guard in the chest with raw, red bolts of pure heat. His body reduced to ash on the spot, a few embers of charred carbon tinged with red fire scattered on the ground. The guard standing closest to the former pirate had what looked like a bad case of sunburn on every inch of exposed skin.
They didn't need to be told twice. Each one fled. Samus watched them go, debating to herself whether she should shoot them in the back or not. Finishing a job you start was a holy rule of bounty hunting, but today she could care less about the rules.
Where were the other guards? There should have been an army of them by now, after the elevator alarm. Why did no one seem prepared? She felt a fresh surge of paranoia then, eating away at the edges of her elation. This reeked of a disaster, even as things were turning out so well. There was nothing to do about it now, except move on, and watch.
Following the hall north from the checkpoint she emerged onto the bottom floor of the cavernous spaceport. It was designed much like the parking garages of antiquity, a series of open levels stacked over each other, connected by rising walkways all built around a square empty expanse at the center. Once a spaceship was ready to go, it would simply hover out from the ramps, into the central space, and fly up out of the ceiling gate, the same gate that appeared as an empty cement lot from the street outside.
Samus looked up now and saw that the gate ten stories above her head remained closed, as expected. It would be best take a ship, even if it wasn't hers, and worry about opening the way second. She began by scanning the ships of the bottom level, determined to work her way upwards. There wasn't much time left, security of some sort was bound to be here any second to stop her. The port was dead silent save for the Ithump/I of her steps on the fabricated stone.
The bottom level proved useless. The only ships stored here were in disrepair and in no shape to fly.
Samus followed a ramp up to the second level and continued her fast paced scanning. Here the lighting was poor. Deep patches of shadow enveloped much of the parking ramp. She took time to scan corners and dark areas for ambushes, despite her increasing sense of urgency. The port was still as silent as deep space. This wasn't right at all. Where were her enemies?
While examining a particularly promising two-man space cruiser there came from a few yards behind her a loud hissing, like sand paper scraped over sheet metal. Samus whirled around, already switching to her thermal visor.
She did not require heat vision, however, for the thing had crawled down from its perch atop the next spaceship over and skulked into the closest spotlight.
It was the same species as Ridley—for a second Samus thought it was Ridley, back from the grave. But it was not the same creature, she saw now, the differences becoming obvious after a good look. It had the gangly skeletal figure of its kind, bound in slim muscles that flexed like cords of iron. Its scaly hide was the color of rotting oranges. Liquid egg yolk eyes stared down unpleasantly at her from a long snout lined with rows of needle teeth.
"My name is Drooga, and I'm here to make sure you go no further," it rasped in a voice like steam bursting from a pipe.
Samus kept her arm cannon to her side and squared herself in directly in front of the space dragon, keeping about forty feet of distance between them. "And what are you doing here? Some pup maggot of Ridley's come crawling out from the dung heap for revenge?"
"Ridley never lived long enough to sire young, as you well know," Drooga continued. "Though I find reason enough to hate you now that I've laid eyes on your decrepit frame, mine is a different purpose, O my sister."
Samus knew better than to inquire about his possible employer. Space dragons never talked. "I'm sister to no one. Leave or die, it's makes no difference to me."
Drooga let out another low, grating hiss. Unfurling leathery wings, he took two steps forward. "You should thank me for killing you. Better that such a sad thing die now than remain alive for the dishonor waiting on—"
Samus's right arm arced up in a blur, firing the first missile before her aim was level. Five more rockets followed, but only the first three hit. Drooga winced as the missile casings shattered on his chest. He was off his feet before the other projectiles found him and darted head on for Samus, wings beating furiously.
The bounty hunter, seeing that she was losing personal space, switched to super missiles and launched them at the charging beast. To her chagrin, Drooga barrel rolled out of harm's way with room to spare.
The space dragon hit her at full speed before she could move. His talons caught her left side, spinning her around. Drooga followed up by lashing out with long bony arms, knocking the hunter off her feet, and flinging her off the second level ledge to land on the floor below.
Ignoring the pain, Samus rose to her feet and charged up the wave beam. The space dragon was flying through the central clearing, turning in the air for another flying strike. Now she had time to lock the shot. She fired, hitting the base joint of one wing. He did not slow.
Samus stood her ground and continued to pelt him with charged shots as he homed in. Once again only a few hit. Drooga was deft at flying, more so than others of his kind. He would corkscrew to the side, or drop altitude suddenly, dodging her salvos with an almost lazy ease.
Samus's right elbow began to hurt as if a white-hot rivet had been driven into the bone. She gritted her teeth and kept firing. Drooga swooped and she sidestepped. The dragon caught her anyway, this time raking her chest, pushing her over. To add insult to injury his long bony tail cracked out and lashed her body as he flew by overhead. With a shriek of victory he flew away to circle around for another attack.
Drooga had the time to swoop around, reverse direction, and dive again by the time Samus shakily rose to standing. She berated herself, cursing his speed. A cruel voice from the back of her mind suggested that the problem wasn't so much Drooga's nimble wings but her age catching up with her at last. Samus banished the thought the second it formed.
Time ran out, Drooga was almost upon her. She needed to even the score, fast, and had a plan to do just that.
She fired a couple of standard missiles at the rushing dragon, each just a fraction too wide to hit their mark. Drooga had expected accurate shots, causing him to overcompensate and take one in the face. He shrieked with anger and dropped on the bounty hunter.
Samus feigned a step to the left, then dropped down into the morph ball instead. Drooga missed, and paid for it as a super missile shattered itself over his nether regions. More shots than he could count hammered his body before gaining cover behind the black metal support pillars of the second level.
Drooga remained on the second level, darting in and out behind pillars and ships until he had circled back around, closing in on Samus's position. The bounty hunter couldn't maintain a bead on the dragon. Her mouth a thin line, the skin on her face drawn tight with concentration and pain, she though only to strike him again and not upon how close he had drawn.
One moment Samus was spraying a dark corner between two pillars with charged plasma, and the next he was upon her. He sprang from the shadows, shaking off the fire until they were face to face. His maw hinged open, pouring rolling fire onto her head while his tail became a flurry of blows, thrusting inward with the spear-like tip.
Samus did her best to evade the blows and return fire, but her enemy was strong and fleet and vital, younger by far. The life energy of the suit vanished from its power tanks. Her breathing was heavy and ragged, her muscles felt full of molten lead. No, it's way too soon to be getting tired! This never would've…, she hated to finish the thought, but could not escape it: This never would've happened thirty years ago. There was no denying that her every move was slower than the one before it. She could only give ground. Seeing Samus cornered, Drooga coiled his tail around one of her ankles, and flung her to the other side of the room.
The Chozo battle armor hit with a sickening CHUNK. Samus did not get to her feet. Drooga waited to see what she would do, but the armor suit remained still, face down on the floor.
Finally the dragon grew impatient and began to creep forward, his head weaving slightly to and fro. Samus waited until he stood over her, then rolled over, jumped onto her feet and pounced. As the bounty hunter leapt upwards at the startled space dragon she curled in her legs and arms and head with practiced ease. An ethereal, pulsing aura of many colors surrounded her body as she collided with Drooga's chest, a human cannon ball with so much more to offer.
Drooga's cry of pain would have blown her eardrums if she hadn't been wearing her helmet. The space dragon lurched away, wings beating and tail whipping, but he could not escape the solid blows of pure energy that ruined his flesh. Samus kept jumping in midair, crashing into her enemy as he fled, as if launching off the very breeze rushing from his wings.
Finding himself cornered for the first time in his life, Drooga braced himself and did what he did best. Attack.
When the space dragon reached out to wrap his arms around her, Samus only chuckled to herself and pressed on with no idea of what would come next. With the hunter squeezed close in his arms, nerves shocked and skin burning, he let loose one final war cry and dived for the spaceport floor. Samus tried to jump loose but his bony arms held her fast.
They hit the porous cement floor hard enough to send deep cracks veining out from the point of impact. Drooga had landed belly first with the hunter under him. The crushing blow forced Samus into immobility, stopping the screw attack and draining the last of her energy reserves. Alarms sounded inside her helmet, letting her know that the power suit could bare no more damage. Her body told her much the same, sharp pain its own warning.
Drooga crawled off of her and stood back, cocking his head to the side in the manner of someone inspecting a job well done.
If this was her day to die, she decided, it would be on her feet, fighting. An eerie calm spread first into her heart, then up into her brain, and then finally the rest of her. The numbing sensation of it made it easier to force her twitching muscles into movement. It was so simple, after all. Just get up like so many times before, and shoot the thing hunched in front of her until it dies. That easy.
The dragon did not move, retaining his pose as she brought herself to standing. Samus took aim at Drooga's head. The missiles were gone, but a charged spazer beam would work just as well. She held down the trigger, watching with satisfaction as the arm cannon gathered green energy into a ball at the barrel's end.
Then the green light went out, the energy dissipating like a puff of smoke.
Samus blinked, then pulled the trigger again and found she could not move her arm. Even before she tested movement in the rest of the suit, she knew the Chozo armor had gone to sleep. It felt heavy and dead on her body where before it had pulsed with life against her skin. She would remain a statue until the armor was removed and the AI restarted. Worst still, she had no idea who or what had done this.
It was then that people began filing out of several docked space cruisers around her.
Twelve elite Federation Space Police troops in black power armor suits encircled her, rifles raised. Every man's posture was relaxed, yet calculated and precise. Their leader stepped forward, and removed his helmet—a well-built man, with bright eyes as green as envy. His face was rawboned, large teeth, massive hands, a huge frame that filled his armor well. Worm-like lips split into a grin. "Get her out of there and bag her."
The whole while Drooga stood by and watched with glinting eyes, body bleeding and bruised all over but saying nothing until the armor had been removed. "How like a white worm, shucked from its shell you are," he remarked, and made a hoarse chocking noise that passed for cooing among space dragons.
Samus ignored him and the laughter that followed. The indignity of being shut down and forcefully removed from her life's treasure was too much even for her half dead body to contain. Now naked, she found the spaceport terribly cold. As they removed the final pieces, Samus remained limp, eyes rolled up under hooded eyelids. The act worked.
"Drooga must've broken every bone in her body," one elite remarked, face turned towards his commander.
The rifles were set aside as they began to pick her body up off the floor. "Too bad," said another. "I was rather hoping to see her in action without the suit."
"We might just yet, if ya know what I mean," said the first.
"No way! She's easily old enough to be all our great grandma," said a third. "She does look good for her age though…"
"Aye, and there's other ways to have fun with a—" the first soldier's voice became a shrill shriek of agony as Samus drove her fist three inches into his crotch. The bounty hunter could've sworn he screamed louder than Ridley in his death throes.
All the other soldiers jumped behind their visors in surprise while Samus buried her foot into the armored belly of another. The man did not scream, but drooped like a bag of stones, clutching his caved in stomach and puking bile and blood into his helmet.
There were curses shouted aplenty as each man dove for his rifle. The hunter continued to beat them with her bare hands and feet, the skin on her knuckles split and sticky with blood.
At last the team leader, having stood back the entire scene with an expression of mild amusement plastered on his face, stepped forward and smacked the stock of his rifle across the back of her knees. The hunter folded to the floor immediately. He followed with a vicious blow from the butt of the gun between her shoulder blades.
Samus cried out, unable to hide the pain that exploded in her back like a nova. They were all on her now, kicking and punching as if she were a Garteen giant on liquid rage and not a hundred-year-old woman.
Just as Samus felt she would black out, they stopped. A familiar voice echoed through all that empty air and worked its way into her ears. Turning her head towards the speaker proved strangely difficult. When at last she managed to plant one cheek on the floor, she found the world had become hazy and indefinite. "You've had two casualties, Lieutenant Justin Bailey. One dead, and the other not likely to see service again for quite a while. I expect better than this," the approaching voice said, much closer now.
"I didn't make the orders. My men were careless, that's all. I'll drill them harder till they learn better. No one expected an old woman to be so strong," replied the team leader, the same Justin as the one who had stood guard outside her flat just yesterday.
"A hard lesson learned by all, yes. It appears she's still with us."
Before her vision cleared fully, Samus remembered whom the voice belonged to. Leaning over her, still wearing the same robes and the same sweet smile he had last night, was Nuvwick Syreis. "I ordered her to be taken alive and relatively whole, Justin."
"Yes sir. Relatively, sir," Justin answered.
"Any other way she would not be taken," agreed Drooga, from somewhere behind.
"Suppose you are right." Nuvwick now spoke to her, his fat face an indistinct blob of white skin, "Hello, my dearest. Ah, I can see by your look that perhaps you expected this to happen to you, and that I would be the one to do it. Knew it was a trap all along, did you? Well…who's to blame for that, yes? Desperation makes hasty fools of us all, so it does, and now you are here like planned. The public will be told of your tragic death at the hands of military security as you attempted to infiltrate this very facility. Your funeral will be a strictly private, secret affair, so as to thwart those who would desecrate your tomb. It must be a relief to finally have your admirers out of your hair."
Samus returned his gaze, clouded eyes burning with hate. With all her remaining strength, the hunter raised her upper body, propping herself up on her elbows. Her voice came out thick and slow from between her smashed lips. "You, and all the others, will die, badly." Taking a deep breath, she wound up and spat a glob of bloody mucus onto Nuvwick's left sandal.
The senator frowned, shaking his head as if despairing of a delinquent child. "Hurt her no more than it takes to secure her aboard our vessel. Make sure you bring every piece of the armor."
After Nuvwick turned and left, Justin stepped back into view. "It may be against orders, but when some old bitch kills one of my men, and reduces the other's treats to paste, I don't let it slide." Fast enough to blur, Justin brought his foot back and kicked her in the stomach as hard as he could. Samus heard herself scream and felt a roiling pain so severe that she abandoned all dignity and curled into herself, shivering. "Looks like you take your licks. Badly." The elites shared a round of cruel laughter.
Then something hard smacked across the side of her head and this time she did black out.