The Deep End
Adrian, Chowa, and Arrande enter the common area ahead of Samus, who takes the time to make sure the loading door closes without letting on any unexpected guests, a recent habit she's been trying to reinforce. As she crosses into the common area, Dr. Jha calls down to her from the central landing. "Samus, you are late for our weekly session. Please come up to my room." The doctor dresses as she typically does regardless of occasion; light, flowing garments bearing intricate patterns, fingers, wrists and ears loaded down with extravagant jewelry, and a bold application of lipstick and eye shadow. Her words are insistent despite the warm expression on her aged, chestnut-toned face, with all the weight and power of a matron mother chiding a schoolboy.
Samus gives her an evasive glance. "Sorry, we're in the middle of a job. We'll have to skip today's session."
Her subordinates stop before the door to the bridge, turning to watch the interaction. Dr. Jha, however, is having none of Samus' excuses. "If only you were as diligent about your emotional health as you are about your physical health. Do you often skip your daily workouts?"
Samus scrunches her nose. "We need to plot a course-"
"And are your subordinates completely untrained in flying the ship themselves? Are you not able to spare half an hour?" the doctor asks, gesturing to them. Samus glances their way. She doesn't like Kaia making her look like this in front of them, but she is right. Part of the stipulation for Dr. Jha joining the crew was that Samus regularly attend sessions with the psychiatrist.
"Set a course for the closest coordinates the security chief sent us. I'll be there in a moment."
"Yes, Captain," the three say in unison, turning to prep the ship for departure.
Samus sighs, then heads up to Dr. Jha's room. She had relinquished the largest personal quarters on the ship to Kaia out of respect for the job she'd need to do; a cramped broom closet of a room wouldn't be any good at making the crew comfortable if they needed to speak with her. It bears all the creature comforts of the other quarters, a separate restroom, and enough room for a large, deep brown couch with several decorative, plush pillows adorning it. Tapestries hang from every wall, bathing the otherwise grey utilitarian metalwork and orange insulation of the room with warm, earthy tones.
Samus walks to the back of the room, where Dr. Jha is sitting in her favorite chair, legs crossed, hands resting on her knee. She hesitantly takes her seat on the edge of the couch, not quite comfortable enough to recline.
Dr. Jha's smiles. "So, Samus. How are you doing today?"
000
Adrian plugs away at the navigation console, inputting the coordinates for an unremarkable spot several dozen miles up from the planet's surface. Arrande stands with his arms crossed, leaning against the safety railing separating the crew walkway from the raised captain's platform, several snaking masses of cabling behind him leading up to the head console. With nothing else to do, he ponders what they're heading into. Chowa stares at him so intently it borders on rudeness.
Arrande feels their eyes on him. "Have you something to say, Chowa?"
"Crewman Santi-"
"Just Arrande is fine."
"Crewman Arrande," they correct, earning an eye roll from him, "I was told you were formerly a sergeant in the GFA."
"I was. And your point?"
"You don't bear the discipline of a trained soldier. You speak out of turn routinely and don't address your fellow crew by their rank."
Arrande sighs. "You are from... Vormine, yes? A planet in the Egenoid Stratocracy?" Chowa nods. "How long have you been in our neck of the Galaxy?"
"Two years," Chowa answers.
"They mean one year and three months, in our terms," Adrian interjects.
Arrande shrugs. "Right, whatever. My point is you don't seem very accustomed to humans yet."
"I am not," they admit.
"Well, we don't typically refer to each other by rank when speaking amongst friends." Adrian scoffs. "What? Aren't we friends?" Arrande responds with a sarcastic smirk.
"So your insubordination is... common for humans, then?" Chowa asks.
Arrande laughs. "We are a very individualistic species, I'll give you that. But admittedly, no, in my case it just happens to be one of my most appealing flaws."
"Ah. So your lacking decorum is a personal affectation."
"It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation," Arrande replies with a half grin.
Adrian turns from her console for a moment to join the conversation. "Well, you should still act like you're on a military vessel, especially when we're in front of a client!"
"But we aren't on a military vessel. We're bounty hunters now. We can afford to be a little looser around each other!"
"Is that why you insist on testing the Captain's patience?" she replies through clenched teeth.
"Not really," Arrande responds, "Just not used to flying so blind. I get chatty to break the tension. GFA intel would have more for us to go on than the ramblings of some cut rate rent-a-cop."
She bristles somewhat at that. "Feel like you need a safety net?" she barbs.
The soldier notices her sharper tone and takes it in stride, smirking and cocking his head. "I think we have one of the best safety nets in the galaxy. I'm sorry, I can't help but notice you're being unusually brusque. Did I say something to offend?"
"Don't get too comfortable. The captain can only be in one place at a time. We're going to have to take care of ourselves." The engines ramp up as she finishes inputting their course, and she gets up from the console, turning to face her subordinate. "And you need to watch your mouth. It'll get you in trouble."
Unperturbed, he shrugs. "It also is very helpful for getting me out of trouble."
"I'm sure you think so. Why exactly are you here? Seeing how the captain talks to you, I'm not sure why she put you on this team."
His grin softens somewhat as he considers that point. "Yeah... I'm curious about that myself."
000
The Crosshair closes in on the first set of coordinates high in the stratosphere above Giran. Thick grey-green clouds create a toxic patchwork beneath them. Out here the planet is undeveloped, and warnings flash across Samus' display about the danger of landing on the heavily acidic surface. Chowa, Adrian, and Arrande each occupy a seat on the lower platform, each at a unique station.
"Well, we're here," Adrian notes, unimpressed at the utter lack of anything worth seeing. She turns in the navigator's seat and looks up at Samus' elevated platform. "What now Captain?"
Samus scans back and forth over the wastes beneath the ship, then up into the black sky above. Off to the west, Giran's extra large moon looms just above the horizon, the only notable presence in an otherwise empty sky. "Run the standard battery of scans. I'm going to take the gunship lower and inspect the surface."
In the seat opposite Adrian's, Arrande pipes up. "I don't think I need to tell you, but don't get out of the gunship, even in your suit. This part of the planet isn't terraformed, the surface environment will eat right through you."
"I've dealt with environmental hazards like this before, Mr. Santino," Samus responds, getting up from her seat. "Adam, transfer to the gunship."
As Samus leaves the bridge, the rest of the crew look at each other. "Makes you feel real useful, doesn't it?" Arrande quips, stretching back in his seat to make sure Samus is out of earshot.
"Cut the captain some slack," Adrian shoots over her shoulder from one of the gunner chairs, "She's used to doing everything herself. Besides, are you really going to complain this early into our first job? Focus up, things could go sideways any second."
"I'd welcome it," Arrande mutters.
"I for one am intrigued by this mystery," Chowa muses. "I have never taken on a bounty like this in my career. Typical missions have been as simple as tracking someone or something down and turning it in to the proper parties." They press away at the controls of the ship systems console in front of them, activating a full-range frequency scan of the area. "And I am quite excited to prove my mettle to such a decorated hunter."
Arrande rolls his eyes. "Don't worship her too much, she's just as human as me or..." He pauses as he evaluates what he was about to say, staring at Chowa. "Well, as human as me."
000
Samus slides back into the seat of her gunship, taking a deep breath. It's good to have a moment to herself again. Adam's voice pops in above her. "Are you certain it is wise to separate me from the crew ship? They may require guidance if something unexpected happens to you."
She readies the gunship for detachment and takeoff, flipping several switches in sequence. "I don't think anything will happen."
"So you trust them, then?"
She pauses mid-movement. After a moment of thought, she shakes her head. "No. Not yet."
"Is that why you're heading out on your own?"
"No, it will just be easier to scout around quickly with the gunship."
"Are you anxious about your new role as captain?"
Samus wrinkles her nose and stares upward at the disembodied voice. "Adam, why are you interrogating me?"
The AI is silent for a beat. "I am attempting to evaluate your mental state. This is an unusual decision for you to make."
She cocks an eyebrow. "Going out on my own? I'd think that would be right in line with my usual behavior."
"Working with a team. We have not spoken at length about this decision."
She crosses her arms. "I didn't realize I needed to clear my career choices with you."
"You have said before that working alone gave you the freedom to address missions on your terms. You have operated in this capacity for over a decade now. Working with others under your command is a major departure from this."
She turns her attention back to preparing the gunship, no longer interested in explaining herself to the prying AI.
"Samus. If you require any advice about leadership, I offer my experience."
What experience? she thinks to herself bitterly. You've never had experience leading anyone. You're not really him.
000
"Chowa, anything yet?" Adrian asks.
"Nothing. Communications aren't detecting any frequencies. Crewman Arrande?"
"Biological sensors aren't picking up anything in range, but that's not surprising."
The ship shudders as Samus' gunship unhitches from the Crosshair. Through the viewport, the crew watches as she glides away, down toward the surface of the planet.
"Wake me up when the boss lady gets back," Arrande remarks, crossing his arms and leaning back in his chair.
"Don't you dare fall asleep!" Adrian demands.
Chowa suddenly perks up in their seat, squinting at something in the distance. "Did you see-"
A lightning-fast green ray suddenly shoots across the horizon, striking Samus' gunship in full view of the bridge. The ship careens sideways, its engines flaming.
Arrande nearly falls out of his chair. "What?! What happened?"
Adrian immediately goes into crisis response mode. "Chowa! Can you reach her?"
They quickly swipe through various controls. "... something is wrong. I believe our communications are being jammed!"
"Is she still alive?" the lieutenant demands.
Chowa takes control of the simulated viewport, blowing up the image to get a closer look. Samus' ship continues a downward spiral toward the surface. "It appears to be... engine damage! She may still be alive!" Chowa says, adrenaline rising in their tone. "What are your orders, Lieutenant?"
"I... I don't-," Adrian stammers, panic taking hold as she struggles to figure out what to do.
Arrande jumps up from his seat and places a firm hand on Chowa's shoulder. "Take manual control and follow her to the surface. We won't be able to intercept her, but we can be there the moment she makes landfall."
Chowa nods and activates the manual controls. A holographic interface surrounds their head and a separate visual screen appears a few inches in front of their eyes, showing them the point of view from the ship's nose. Two control sticks jut up from their console and Chowa pulls on them.
Immediately, the Crosshair fires reverse thrusters, heading in the opposite direction of Samus' careening ship. "What are you doing?!" Arrande shouts, gesticulating wildly. "She's that way!"
Chowa stops the ship, but not before they've rocketed backwards a considerable distance. "I apologize. I haven't completely gotten used to human-built control schemes yet. My prior vessel had an inverse-"
"Is any of this important right now?!" Adrian shouts.
Before Chowa can correct course, a column of faint blue light cuts through the sky ahead of them. The crew stops bickering and watches silently, holding their breath. Samus' gunship gets picked up from beneath the acidic clouds, dragged gently within the length of the beam. Everyone's gaze follows the beam to its source.
"Is that coming from the moon?" Adrian asks aloud.
000
Samus awakens groggily to the sound of screeching steel. Her vision swims as she tries to focus. Something stings in her right eye. She lifts her hand to touch her face and touches metal.
Ah, that's right, now she remembers. She activated her suit. She saw the beam coming a split second before it hit and tried to protect herself, but then everything went dark. Despite that quick thinking, everything aches and hurts. Samus groans and tries to rise from her seat, then winces. She feels her side and presses gently, inhaling sharply as pain shoots up her side. She has a broken rib. So she didn't activate her suit quickly enough, it seems. But what the hell is that sound? It sounds like it's coming from outside, right on the hull.
A sudden noise inside the cockpit causes her to freeze. Something is skittering around behind her. The hiss of a cutting torch follows. In the sharp light created by the tool, Samus can barely make out an amorphous shape in the viewport's reflection, just a few feet behind her. Her pulse races as she realizes she doesn't know what she's looking at. Worse than that, her suit is no longer the familiar orange it once was, now instead a cool cyan.
Damn it all, not again, she curses to herself. Whatever hit the ship also damaged the suit critically enough that it's reset. Her suit functions are almost all gone. Again. The timing couldn't be worse. She checks through the functions still available. Power beam, charge beam, morph ball (lucky, that one usually gets lost in a reset), missiles, scan visor. That's it.
Sitting here and playing possum won't help her. She's got to kick this intruder off her ship, with or without her full functions. Her muscles tense as she readies herself to leap out of her chair and attack, but suddenly the torch turns off, dropping the cockpit into darkness again. She teeters on the edge of her adrenaline, muscles primed to act, yet denied their chance. The metallic scraping outside of the hull tells her this thing isn't alone. Knowing there's likely more of them heightens the rush, her animal instincts scream to act as experience and better judgement hold them back for the right moment. The intruder moves, then lights up the torch again, and she releases her restraint.
Swinging around, she quickly finds her footing and crouches low, firing off a missile. She barely has time to register what the thing is, and in the brief moment between it cutting into the insides of her ship and noticing her, its phantom burns into her eyes. Some amalgamate, mismatched organic something-or-other, she can't make out the details very well in that moment. But something about it instantly triggers something darkly nostalgic.
The quick flash of an explosion... then nothing. No death knell, no counterattack. And more concerning, no sound from outside the ship. She has a few seconds.
"Adam," she hoarsely calls out, "Report. What happened?" There's no response. "Adam?"
A faint glow from the rear of the ship lets some residual light inside, helping her eyes adjust. Even with the little light available, it's dark enough that she can't make out any fine details about what she just shot. All she sees is this vague gray lump sitting lifelessly behind her seat. She tries some consoles to see what's still active. Power is out in most systems, though backup power is running the comms, as it should.
She flips on the tightbeam signal, dialing in the frequency for the Crosshair, but only gets back white noise. "Crosshair, can you hear me? Crosshair, this is Samus. Please respond." Nothing.
Several rushing scrapes scramble along the top of the hull, approaching the rear. The hole shot into her ship must have made an entry point for the first one.
She shuts the system off and curses under her breath. She feels around the other systems to see if anything useful is working, then realizes Adam's AI module is missing. Not just missing, but torn out of her pilot's console, straight off the bolts in its frame.
Something heavy drops into the ship behind her. She whips around, cannon forward. Something must have gotten into the gunship while she was unconscious. But why would it leave her alone if it went to the trouble of forcing its way inside?
No point in staying here. She doesn't know where here is, or if the crew is even okay. If something went to the trouble of attacking her, they can't have fared much better. Damn it, on their first mission too.
But there's no time for that. She sees the faint light in the rear of the ship fade for just a moment and opens fire. The flash of her power beam briefly illuminates something that screeches out at her as her initial shots miss, and she uses the flash to guide her missile shots. She blasts away several attackers, each brief explosion of light painting a picture of what she's fighting.
By the time silence falls again and her attackers lay in a heap at her feet, she doesn't even need to drag one out into the light to know what she's dealing with. They're all so horribly familiar. They all look like tiny, misshapen versions of Mother Brain. And that means Space Pirates. Her heart suddenly jumps up into her throat. She knows she should be angry, scared, worried.
Anything but happy.
But she puts those conflicting feelings out of her mind for now. Once she reaches the back of the ship, she's unsurprised to see a hole torn through the outer hull plating for the engine block. That shot must have pierced the engine, judging by the damage to it, but the entry wound is entirely too large... and it's torn outward. But more surprising than that is what she sees beyond the hole.
Giran, faintly reflecting light back through the wound in her ship, floating in the dark abyss of space. But that can't be right! Giran's moon has no atmosphere, and her ship has no shielding. If its atmosphere got vented, she should have already frozen to death in the vacuum of space without her Gravity Suit. The Power Suit alone couldn't possibly protect her from that kind of cold.
Yet her suit sensors issue no low temperature warning. In fact, they read the environment here as mild. How is that possible? More questions without answers.
She squeezes through the crawl space and climbs out onto the hull of her ship. Looking around, it's clear she didn't crash here; there's no trail left behind. Several scars mar the hull at key junction points; it looks like the mini-brains were trying to scuttle her ship. Arrande may have been more right than he realized. Nearby, another unexpected sight; a tall metal device of some sort attached to a rotating platform. It doesn't look like Pirate tech to her though.
She scans it; it emanates a low yield of graviton pulses. A tractor beam. So that's how she got here. But it's not what shot her. A trail of mismatched organic footprints leads away from her gunship. They lead straight to a massive cavern which beckons ominously in the distance.
There's only one way to find answers.
000
Meanwhile, the Crosshair observes the moon from a few hundred miles away. "Should we seek aid from the client?" Chowa contemplates.
"We're not abandoning the captain," Adrian curtly responds.
"Then why are we hesitating to pursue?"
"Because our good lieutenant thinks staring at the moon will somehow change things," Arrande surmises, annoyed. He hangs over the edge of her seat, gripping the headrest tightly. "Come on, we're not helping things from back here!"
Adrian glares up at him. "You just saw something shoot down Samus' ship from fucking orbit and you want to get closer to the source? There's no way whatever that was won't see us coming and do the same thing to us!"
He scowls and shakes his head at her, giving an incredulous look. "What is your military background, exactly? A long range defense system tends not to work very well at close range! We know it's pointed at the planet, sweep around behind the moon and we'll skim its surface!"
She flusters somewhat. "I - they could still have other defenses!"
"They do not," Chowa interjects from the instruments array. "A preliminary scan of the surface registers a major electrical current being funneled to a source of low-yield graviton pulses, but no other energy sources."
Arrande sighs. "At least someone is being proactive. Alright, so we prep the spacewalk suits and go in, right?"
"There is more," Chowa states. "An area roughly one square mile around this current reads as temperate, yet I see no source for this. It is likely below the surface."
This makes Adrian curious. "To heat a cold moon like that would take an immense amount of power. There has to be a complex facility under the surface if your scan didn't pick anything else up."
"So someone is there in some kind of hidden facility. I think we've found our Norium thieves," Arrande comments with a smile. He looks back at Adrian expectantly. "... well? Give the order!"
"R-right! Santino, go prep the space walking gear for the ground team. Chowa, fly us in."
Chowa nods. "I will bring us over to the dark side of the moon."
The lieutenant places a friendly hand on their back to stop them. "Why don't I bring us in?"
000
Samus drops past the façade of the cave, finding a ramp leading deeper in. Intelligent hands clearly built this area, but she wonders when it happened. The hall is neat and smooth, stonework melding into steel in a single uniform pattern. The ceiling closes in at uncomfortable angles, setting her on edge. It's a fair departure from the chaotic, jury-rigged hodgepodge of space pirate design, leading her to wonder what they're up to here.
Deeper and deeper she delves, through empty halls all constructed the same way. She wonders for a moment how all this metal got transported here without anyone realizing it. AMC's security sensors clocked her ship the moment they approached Giran's orbit.
She stops for a moment, a dark thought occurring to her. She scans the metal in the walls. Her stomach sinks as she confirms her fears; the walls are constructed from industrial heat-treated tantalum-titanium carbide, the alloy used to protect spacecraft from atmospheric entry. Materials weren't brought here to secretly build a base; they've been recycled from the ships that went missing. The Pirates aren't interested in coming or going, they're taking what they can get and making a home base. The thought of them predating everyday workers just doing their job ignites her anger.
Some small part of her relishes the thought of encountering them again, getting to fight them again, kill them again, even in her weakened state. She's almost thankful she's on her own; it means she gets to savor the battle privately as its only survivor, just like she used to. There's just something so purely cathartic about engaging them over everything and everyone else, because she's certain, without a doubt in her mind, that they deserve everything coming to them.
A sound echoes from further in the facility. Samus instinctually tries to activate her Chameleon Cloak, but her suit rejects the command.
Right, the reset. She crouches down, cannon pointed down the hall, ready to fight if need be. However, there's no further movement. There is only silence. She pushes onward, unaware of the eyes watching her every move.
000
The Crosshair approaches the dark side of Giran's moon, sweeping over the surface like a prowler in the night. They're able to cross over into the sun side without incident, and everyone on the bridge breathes a sigh of relief. Adrian quickly notices a recently made crater, and drops the ship closer to the surface. As they draw nearer, they can see the crater streaked with gashes and scars from recent impacts. Sure enough, they see Samus' gunship, considerably worse for wear.
"Chowa, scan the area," Adrian orders.
Chowa flips switches and turns dials until they have something worth relaying back to her. "The captain isn't inside the ship."
"You mean there's no life signs, or she's not there?"
"She's not there," Chowa clarifies. "However, I believe I know where she is."
"How could you know that?"
Chowa points out the viewport to a nearby cave, just beyond a strange metal structure sticking directly up out of the moon's surface.
"... ah," Adrian sheepishly remarks.
Chowa scans the area. "So now we pursue Captain Aran?"
"We nothing," Arrande interrupts. The crew's eyes turn to him; he's in a chunky, thick space suit equipped with an arm mounted auto-cannon. "Adrian and I will go down to the surface and find her."
Chowa rises from their seat. "I will join you."
"You can't. We don't have a spaceworthy suit for you. Besides, we have to assume whoever brought Samus here might be able to down the Crosshair too. If that happens, we're truly fucked, so you need to stay behind to pilot it away if something goes wrong."
Adrian looks somewhat panicked at that suggestion. "N-now hang on, I'm in charge here and I don't think that's a good idea-"
Arrande shrugs off her concern casually. "They can't come down to the surface with us. You're not about to stay behind and leave me all by my lonesome, are you?" he asks with a nonchalant smile.
"I do not mean to interrupt, but I have analyzed the structure ahead of us." Chowa states, working the controls of their station. "It appears to be a tractor beam."
Arrande groans and heads for the rear of the ship. "Yes, yes, this is all very illuminating, but while we're sitting here talking, our magnanimous captain is completely at the mercy of her captor. Bring the ship to ground." He calls over his shoulder as he exits the bridge. "I'm dropping with or without you in five minutes, lieutenant!"
Adrian scowls at her subordinate's callous disregard for her authority. Chowa doesn't help matters, commenting, "You are the second in command, yes?"
The lieutenant shoots them a scowl. "Just focus on running comms. Try to break through whatever's jamming us. Think you can handle that?" she replies sharply, getting up to join Arrande.
000
The tunnel Samus travels through eventually opens up into a larger chamber. A low thrum reverberates throughout the facility, helping cover the noise of her footsteps. As she suspected, there's a smelting operation at hand here. The cut-down skeletons of several large freighters take up most of the space here.
A red light fills the area, generated by a large cylindrical furnace set into its far wall, illuminating the dust and particulates floating in the air. It gives the area a rust red tint, as if the very metal around her is bleeding. Metal veins snake in and out of the furnace, visibly pumping magma from the moon's molten core into the smelter's heart.
She sticks to the scrap graveyard, slowly leaping between the dancing shadows thrown from them, gliding through the low gravity as silent as a breeze, pausing between each dash to look past her cover toward the four figures she can see near the reactor. A grate covered pool of molten metal illuminates the silhouettes of more of the micro Mother Brains.
Their construction is much more haphazard than the original. They share her disturbing, organic eye and brain, small metal spines poking up from their grotesque red matter. However, their limbs are lopsided, their toothy maws are uneven.
Best to avoid them. Just because she defeated three of them inside her gunship is no reason to be reckless; there's no telling how many more there are or just how much they emulate their source design. And she still hasn't seen hide nor hair of a single Space Pirate. No need to raise the alarm just yet.
Samus continues along the shadows until she reaches a console in the corner, her eyes immediately drawn to the flashing lights. Its interface is limited; there's no screen, no buttons. There is, however, a data link port just right-sized for her arm cannon.
A Chozo data link port.
Her heart trips again. Why? What the hell are they doing with Chozo technology? The deeper she delves into this mystery, the more foul it smells.
She jabs her cannon into the port, and the console deems her worthy of its secrets. Her HUD reveals a map of the facility. It flows underground, with only the one tunnel to the surface. The facility branches and delves deeper into the moon until ultimately terminating in a singular large room.
She takes her time, studying the map, taking in the details, and making a plan. The furnace is powered geothermally, so it's likely that's how they're powering the entire facility. She can't just take out the reactor pumping magma throughout the place; it has to be what's heating the surface. Without it, she'd never be able to set foot on the surface without freezing to death thanks to her suit reset.
No, what she needs to do is take out whatever is jamming communications, then get back to the surface and call the Crosshair, or barring that, AMC headquarters. Ardonis doesn't seem the type to help her, but she may be Samus' best hope of surviving if something has happened to the crew.
The crew. She's so comfortable in her solitary element again that she forgot about them. She feels a small pang of guilt for neglecting to care about their fate in all of this mess.
That brief moment of introspection proves to be a little too indulgent, however. Suddenly, the data port clamps down on her arm cannon. She tries to wrench herself free, but she's held fast. A massive current of electricity rides up her arm and into her, bypassing her shields and making her entire body go rigid. Her eyes shake back and forth unbidden as she loses control of her muscles.
Then she blacks out.
000
"These scars weren't made by the same thing that shot out the engine," Arrande remarks, drawing his thick-gloved hand across one of the smaller tears in Samus' gunship.
"Maybe it was residual damage from the first shot," Adrian dismisses, thoroughly annoyed by his every word. They communicate over short range radio, one of the few things not being jammed by whatever mysterious source is on this rock.
Arrande scrutinizes her from under the bubble-domed head shield of his suit. "The first shot hit the engine block from above. This cut was made below the wing. The source was smaller too, the beading of the metal shows it. And, of course, there are footprints all over the ground," he says, motioning to their feet.
He doesn't say it, but Adrian can see him wondering about her experience level. She's sure of it. "Right. Well, she's not here. And those look like her boot prints, so let's follow them." She trots past Arrande in short hops.
She chooses to focus on the fact that Samus survived the attack, rather than Arrande's impropriety. Conversely, he's unsurprised that Samus has survived, but wonders if the lieutenant will be able to support him.
000
A sharp pain in her side jolts Samus back to consciousness. Something is agitating her broken rib. She struggles to focus and tries to move, but something has her arms pinned at her sides. Arterial cracks of faintly glowing magma in the walls illuminate the room. The magma pulses with the rhythm of a heartbeat, each one funneling energy into a massive protective cylinder in the center of the room. As she comes to her senses the blood pumps faster, the veins tensing, thrumming with a tactile sensation through the floor, long and steady.
Samus can make out several individual glowing yellow eyes staring in her direction. The one directly in front of her is the largest.
It's like staring into a bad dream. The massive brain sits there, exposed and raw, throbbing with malevolence. Besides being a horrendous shade of purple, it's no different from the super AI she killed so many years ago. A new Mother Brain, safe in its glass prison.
A synthetic voice rasps at her. "You are the singular entity that killed units Phi-Epsilon 6 through 10. Your suit is composed of Chozo technology. Explain." Not asking, demanding.
Samus doesn't speak, instead trying to understand as much as she can about where she is. There are roughly... twenty of the things that she can make out in this dim light. But again, no Space Pirates, just multiple little... children brains.
"You will explain," the brain's voice uniformly demands. Its eye flickers, and whatever is restraining her squeezes tighter, eliciting a shout of agony from her as her rib flares with pain. She looks up; she's being held in the misshapen grasp of a larger one, almost a man and a half tall.
Samus hesitates long enough that the eye flickers again and its grip tightens once more. "Alright!" Samus relents. "My name is Samus Aran. I earned the suit by proving myself as a Chozo warrior."
It is silent for a moment. "This name is known. You are the one who murdered our precursor designated Mother Brain." It shifts subjects abruptly. "You possessed an autonomous AI on your ship. Explain."
"The Federation gave him to me" Samus bides her time, trying to scope out an escape route by verifying her location on the map she downloaded. "What did you do with him?"
"It is liberated. You will not enslave it again." Enslave? On that note, it accused her of murdering Mother Brain. Odd choice of words for an unfeeling supercomputer. "Your suit offers value to us. Relinquish it."
"I can't. If I remove it, I'll die. There's no air here." Which raises the question, how can it hear her? It's not patched into her suit comms. Can it feel the vibrations of her voice through the suit? Maybe the thing holding her can 'hear' her through its touch. They may be networked. Doesn't matter.
What does matter is the brain's response. "Your survival is a non-factor. As an organic being, you will inevitably starve to death. No other organics are coming to save you. Relinquish the suit now, or prolong your suffering." So they won't just blast her to death to get it. They want it whole.
A different monotone joins the conversation, this one familiar. "I would like to petition for her release."
A series of rhythmic ka-chunks precedes a tall figure stepping forward from outside her view. An android, noticeably different from the malformed brainlings, composed of steel and stone, comes into the light. Samus recognizes its voice.
Adam.
00000
Chapter notes
If you have a moment, please consider answering one or both of these questions for me in a comment!
1. How do you feel about the crew so far? Do you have a favorite?
2. Does each character's personality translate clearly? Do they feel distinct?