REPERCUSIONS
Another day, another annoying debriefing session with the federation reps. 'Honestly' she thought, 'I don't think they can tell their end from a hole in the ground'. She'd been there for 3 hours answering some of the stupidest questions to date.
---
"Hello Samus." Said the plainly dressed man
"Robert," Samus replied
He sighed.
"So, let's get started then" he said in a tone soaked in boredom
"OK." Said Samus in an equally monotonous voice, "We started the search at the location of the ambush…"
"And where was this?" he interrupted in the same bored tone
"You know damn well where. Right outside the Corinthian system!" she said
"I just ensuring that we're on the same page and…" It continued this manner for well over three hours
But, she was finally done and headed home. When she was a little whiles off she started to see the smoke.
---
She surveyed the scene.
There was a large scorch mark on the landing pad, indicating a hasty take off by what appeared to be a shuttle craft. There was a red trail leading from the house to the scorch mark. It didn't take a forensic expert to tell what that meant. Then there was the house itself. The fire had burned itself out, leaving a smoking wreck in its wake. She took a plasma pistol and went into the house. She was met by the smell of burnt flesh and smoke. Advancing cautiously through the wreckage she nearly tripped over the carcass of a dead pirate.
Her fears were confirmed. They'd attacked her house and taken Nicole and Butch.
All she could think was, 'FUCK!!! You fucking idiotic moron. You knew this would happen if established connections with someone. Now Nicole is gone and you dragged the kid into it …' her thoughts trailed off when she saw the kid's empty armor laying against the wall. There were scorch marks all around and on it and the shoulder, and armoring for the left arm was about ten feet away. It looked like the pirates had used it for target practice before leaving. She went through the wreckage following the red trail. It stopped in the bed room. She went inside stepping over at least a dozen pirate bodies to get to the door. She notices that most of them had similar wounds, bullet holes. That meant that Butch and Nicky had to have made their stand here. She went inside and found that there were more bodies, all of them pirates, hundreds of shell casings, and Butch's jammed assault rifle. It was clear what happened, 'so the pirates storm in, the kid tries to hold them, his rifle jams, they take both of them on the shuttle and fly off. Fuck, man I screwed up, DAMN ROBERT! He held me there, DAMN HIM!' she searched for anything she could use and started out the door when the "empty" armor suddenly moaned. Samus did a double take, 'What the fuck…?' She walked over and realized the armor's occupant was still inside.
---
She screamed
All she could feel was pain.
She tasted copper.
She screamed again
She blacked out, still screaming
---
"Butch?"
A groan.
"What happened?"
Another groan.
"Butch talk to me."
"What… the fuck… happened?" he said groggily, the words obviously taking extreme effort
"I was hoping you could tell me Butch." She said
Suddenly it all came flooding back to him.
"The Dragon." He said quietly
"What?" Samus said, getting that familiar feeling of dread in her stomach
"A giant… black… dragon, that's the… the first thing th… that I remember." He said, dangerously short of breath, he spoke between gasps, "He … he… he shot at me wi…with something… from… his eyes." He was panting now, hyperventilating. Samus knew he was going into shock; she'd have to work fast.
"He…took her… couldn't … stop him." Butch was fading fast.
"Don't talk. I'll be right back." Samus said, she then ran to the kitchen. Searching through the wreckage she found it, a medical kit. She ran back to Butch and tried to remove the helmet.
She couldn't
Butch then, like a metal Frankenstein, reached his right hand up; unsealed the helmet, reached in, and popped out a deep dent in the side of his helmet. As he withdrew his gauntleted glove she saw that it was slick with blood and … something else. He then lifted the helmet up and off his head. She quickly attached the respirator without even looking and went to her ship for more supplies. She didn't notice the white orb that fell out of Butch's helmet and on to the floor.
---
She awoke
She bit down the urge to scream.
She took a deep breath and bit down again as her half crushed lungs re-inflated.
Nicole brought up her head and looked around. She was in a roughly 20x20 brig cell. The facilities and bedding dictated that this was meant for human prisoners. 'Wait' she thought 'what other kind of prisoners are there, the Covenant didn't let them take prisoners, suicidal bastards'
Then everything came back to her.
The attack, Butch's defense, her capture, everything.
She shuddered; she hoped that Butch was alright. She remembered one of the pirates delivering a blow right on to Butch's face and he didn't get up. Then she had blacked out.
She could hear noises outside. Voices if she wasn't mistaken.
She tried to move closer. The pain redoubled. And the blackness claimed her again.
---
Samus was staring into a pit.
A Black hole
An empty abyss
The hole that used to house Butch's right eye.
She could barely look at the grotesque spectacle. The entire right side of his face was streaked with blood and sweat, the left, just sweat. He was battered, bruised, and to her understanding missing his entire left arm. She'd seen a lot of disturbing thing in her lifetime, hell she'd once found a dead marine and when she unsealed the helmet his grey matter dumped all over her. That had disgusted her, but this sight chilled her to the bone for reasons she couldn't place.
He started to stir.
"Butch?" she said tentatively
"Huh?"
"Are you alright?"
"I think you know the answer to that." He said with a trace of what might be a joking tone.
"I'm sorry." She said
"For what?"
"For not being here."
"Two things," he said taking a deep breath, "one, it's not your fault, how could you have known? Two, since when do you apologize?" he said
Samus looked at him again
"Does it hurt?" she asked
"Unbelievably." He said, "Can you give me my arm?"
"What?!? Why?!?" she asked incredulously
"So I can reattach it." He said simply
She looked at him like he was high, but got the arm and tossed it to Butch.
"Fuck! Don't throw it! It's gonna hard enough to fix without you helping! " said Butch. He looked at the shoulder,
"Damn, they destroyed the motor-neuron connection cable."
Samus did a double take,
"Cable? Wait, is that…"
"Yes, this is a prosthetic."
"God damnit Butch! You nearly gave me a heart attack! You could have told us you had prosthetic arm?!?"
"SAMUS!!" he yelled back before calming, "Please, about not telling you. Do you tell people about plastic surgery? Dental operations? Hm? You never asked so I never told you. So please, just calm down what wrong with you?"
She stopped 'Damn' she thought, 'what is wrong with me?'
This is what happens when you forge relationships in your line, you know that. You've known that since you meet her on that damn station.
'Shut up.' She thought, willing those thought away realizing Butch was talking to her.
"Hello? Earth to Samus, come in Samus."
"I'm sorry, zoned for a minute there. What'd you say?"
"I was saying, Is there any where we can go? We're not safe."
'Wait, that's it!' she thought
"I got it!" she said
"Got what?"
"I know where we can go!"
"Lead the way." Said Butch, attempting to get up before falling flat again, "goddamn it!"
---
Nicole woke up and groggily looked around the room. Then she suddenly blurted out in pain,
"DAMN IT!!" her legs hurt like a bitch.
Then she heard movement outside. Two guards entered the room, picked her up, and carried her out. They carried her into a room that was simple metal box with a table and a variety of medical tools and equipment.
Samus had given her a translator so that they could speak to each other without problems, and it could apparently translate Pirate as well.
"I don't understand why we're doing this. Why heal her bones when we're just going to rip them out of her anyways?" Said one of them
Another responded, he was apparently head doctor,
"Because we need a complete sample to replicate her genetic modifications, and her legs are vital to increasing our warriors speed and agility, that's why we're fixing her legs. Now shut up and get tools"
She was strapped to the table, then she felt something sting her neck and she knew no more.
---
They we're en route to the safe house, ETA 10 min. Samus just sat there, staring. Butch was in the bathroom cleaning himself off. And Adam sat in his layers of silicon thinking away the time.
Butch emerged from the bathroom and sat in the co-pilot seat, 'Nicky's seat' thought Samus, 'he's in Nicky's seat'
She turned to him and what she saw disturbed her to no end.
Butch face now bore scars from the event in the form of claw-like shrapnel wounds across the side of his face and on his arms from the initial explosion and the resulting melee. There was a strip of black cloth tied around his eye socket, and. Also, he wore a pair of worn jeans and a white T-shirt with the left sleeve pinned up that read
G
F
C
K
Y
R
S
L
F
Would you like to buy a vowel?
Samus, of course, shouldn't have understand the writing, but spending time with Nicky had given her a slight understanding of English and she laughed at it, more than she had in a long time.
"So," Butch asked, making conversation, "where exactly are we headed?"
"It's old space station atmosphere compartment near the Corinthian system."
Images of oxygen recycling tanks and mixers filled Butch's head.
Seeing the look Butch gave her she elaborated,
"It is basically a park, sealed in a large glass dome with artificial gravity. It produces the oxygen and recycles the carbon dioxide of the station."
"Where and how did you get this exactly?"
"Well that module is where I meet Nicole."
"Oooohhhhh, care to elaborate?"
"Well, Nicole was originally trapped in the 21st century by an anomaly, the same kind the cruiser generates and that brought you here. From what we can tell it acts with the properties of an elastic band. It shot her back in time then over compensated and shot her too far forward to this time. The break through with the cruiser is that it can control the jumps through space-time, allowing the transportation of matter to almost any time a place in the universe. Anyway, I digress, so Nicole was shot here by the anomaly and she brought some unwanted friends, she called them the covenant. They attacked her station and she fled in a fighter and docked at the station I was at. The Covenant and Pirates have a funny sense of timing, 'cause they both attacked at the same time. Nicole and I both retreated to the module and sealed it, but not before some of them got in. Nicole and I worked together and beat them, but they destroyed the station. We ejected the module from the station and went to orbit around Corinthia. We kept it, it was sort of a Forward Operating Base/Zen Garden deal, and no one knows about it but the two of us."
"Three of us now." Said Butch
"Right." Said Samus
---
Nicole woke up to voices outside her cell,
"We have to wait Captain. If we operate now we could get corrupted DNA samples." Said a voice she recognized as the head pirate from the medical room
"How long do we need to wait?" asked a second pirate voice
"One maybe two days." Replied the first pirate
"You'd better hope it's sooner, Lord Ridley grows impatient." Said the second pirate, she then heard footsteps walking away.
"You'd better be worth it, stupid human." Said the first, then he walked away as well, leaving Nicole alone with her thoughts.
---
Samus looked on in amazement as Butch went about his work.
As soon as they'd docked at the station Butch had grabbed two boxes of gathered tools and his prosthetic and went to work. He went to a metal bench and began to take apart the arm. He'd discovered, to his delight, that the main motor functions were intact. Then he investigated the precision motors had shorted out. He then found that even with the motor repairs he wasn't done. The arm wouldn't attach to the socket. He diagnosed the problem and made the repairs within four hours. It turned out that the pirates had stripped the locking mechanisms in the arm. So he was forced to repair the mechanisms by hand, which was a serious pain. He then locked on the prosthetic and went through a series of exercises taught to him by the military to test the dexterity of his arm, the motors were working perfectly. He was doing the exercises when he tripped over some thing. He picked it up and looked at it; it looked like a handle of something. He accidently thumbed the activator switch and yelped when the plasma sword sprang to life. He fell over and found a second sword. He looked at them and an idea came to mind.
---
Samus had been sleeping peacefully while Butch made the necessary repairs to his prosthetic limb. When she awoke she realized that it'd been 6 hours since they'd landed and they'd accomplished little. She turned to Butch and did a double take.
Butch had a purplish blue blade extending from the armor on each arm.
"What the fuck?!?!"
"Oh, you're up," he said, "I thought I might need a melee weapon and I found this and another one like it in the grass. So I separated the two generators and attached one to my armor, the other wouldn't attach to my armor for my left arm so I grafted directly to my prosthetic. "
"Then where's the other thing?"
"Oh, check this out!"
He held up his assault rifle, upside-down and backwards, so that the stock was facing Samus. There were three thin spike-like blades on the stock pointing forward, one of them was pointing up and there was one of those plasma blades attached to the bottom. The he flipped the gun around to point the barrel forward the plasma blade deactivated and the three spikes folded into the stock and a second plasma sword activated acting as a bayonet.
"Cool, huh?"
"Nice, but let's focus, we need a plan."
They then sat down and planed their assault.
End of Part 3
These is my new chapter, hopefully it's better than the last one, but that's up to YOU!!! R&R, kthnxbye!