Chapter 9: An Enemy Shaped Like a Friend
Samus and the two soldiers continued to find all manner of strange obstacles in their travels through the Biosphere's arboreal environment, from swarms of Reos to holographically simulated valleys containing grotesque hybrids of plant and animal. Eventually, they reached the next save room after taking a minor beating from a large group of Wavers that were somehow all contained in a single corridor. Once there, the group opened their commlinks and spoke to the rest of the platoon.
"Samus," Adam asked, "did you find anything else important?" At this, Samus relayed the encounter with the Griptian and the evidence that the Pirates and the 'Aberration' were there, but made sure to leave out the meeting with Madeline (although she did have her misgivings about that, especially since she also had to leave out all the information the former research director had provided). "Alright then, it's evident that we cannot proceed through the other sectors any further, and so we'll all head down to meet you. The onboard map seems to indicate that there's an 'Exam Centre' at the very end of the sector we can meet up at. I'm going to have to ask you to help Lyle and Kreatz clear the path for us, so that we can get to the centre with minimal obstructions. Any objections, Lady?"
"No objections, Adam," Samus replied before the feed cut out. However, she did spend a moment afterwards to reflect upon this latest interaction with her former CO. That word… 'Lady'. The more that changes, the more that stays the same. This is starting to feel like an assignment from my Federation days – he used that phrase to address me all the time back then. Of course, she knew that Adam only meant it as a sign of respect, but it was still jarring after going without seeing him for so long. However, she was pulled out of her reverie by Kreatz, who drew her attention to an unexpected obstruction.
"Hey Samus, I don't think this door will open any time soon, so we're gonna need to find another way round, unless you think you can get it open." It only took a few shots from Samus' various weapons to confirm that she couldn't in fact open it, although she did find another door to the left of where they came in which seemed to have a large dent in the middle. She was able to open this one via a missile blast, and so the group proceeded down this new passage in the hopes of making some sort of progress.
The group didn't necessarily have it easy progressing through the series of tunnels and hallways leading from the save room; one room in particular saw them nearly crushed by a falling elevator while fighting another Ghalmanian. Nonetheless, after dealing with a group of Wavers in one of the facility's rubbish processing rooms, they came across a tunnel that only Samus could go through due to her morph ball. She quickly did so, only two be almost immediately attacked by two Ghalmanians that had been lying in wait using their cloaking abilities. This was one of her toughest battles on the BOTTLE SHIP so far, with only the Asborean from the control room posing more of a threat. However, despite her drastically reduced arsenal, she was still the greatest bounty hunter in the galaxy, and so eventually managed to fell the monstrous duo, although she was still glad to be able to replenish her energy in the next save room. However, once she had made use of the save station and then stepped off of it as quickly as possible, she received a surprise communication from Madeline, who clearly had something important to say.
"Samus, I'm sure you're here looking for a way round that locked door you saw earlier, but I'm afraid that the next room is a dead end. However, I do have some good news; there's a terminal up ahead that'll unlock it, letting you continue on towards the Exam Centre. Not only that, but there's a new experimental beam the ringleaders were testing in there; if you can just defeat the robots that are using it, you can harness it for yourself. I'll continue to help you the best I can; I've been able to prevent MB from influencing this sector, so you don't need to worry about her getting in the way again while you're here."
"Thank you, Madeline," a grateful Samus responded, "I'll be sure to put the new beam to good use."
"No problem, Samus," the scientist replied in response. "I'll try to update you on any further developments, but I doubt I'll be able to reach you in the other sectors. Good luck." And with that, Samus made her way into the next room, where the three robots Madeline had mentioned earlier were located. The hail of fire they unleashed from their front-mounted turrets made her grateful for the energy recharge in the preceding room, but was not enough to save them from her own attacks, which ultimately brought them down one by one until they were nothing more than piles of slag, with the last one ejecting a small, blue capsule.
Is this the beam Madeline mentioned, or did I accidentally destroy it along with the robots? She thought, praying that the former scenario was true. Once she touched it, she was relieved to learn that this was indeed the new beam – her suit's systems indicated that it was called the diffusion beam; although she didn't know what it exactly did, she was certainly glad to add it to her gradually increasing arsenal. After that, she easily used the terminal at the end of the room to reactivate the locked door from earlier, and turned around to meet up with the others and resume their mission.
Having gone through as many dangerous environments as she had, Samus had developed certain habits over the years. One of these, which seemed especially bizarre at this moment in time, was the urge to use save stations every time she passed one, even if she had already used one just a few moments prior. So it was that she exited back into the room where she had just faced the two Ghalmanians, mentally chiding herself for such an unnecessary waste of valuable time, when she noticed that she wasn't alone. Standing at the far end of the room, right in front of the tunnel she had just come in through, was a small, bipedal creature coated in a layer of white down like some sort of infant bird. At first glance, it seemed entirely harmless; its birdlike legs were tipped with claws too small to do any real damage, while the rest of its body seemed to be little more than a ball of fluff save for its two almost catlike ears and beady red eyes – it didn't even seem to have a visible mouth. However, Samus, who had spent much of her youth on Zebes prior to the Space Pirate occupation, could tell which animals were harmless and which were dangerous predators; this one's eyes had an unsettlingly predatory intelligence behind them, indicating that it was one of the latter. Despite the subtle sense of danger, though, its shape and white down made her think of Pyonchi, the squirrel-like rabbilis she had kept as a pet ever since they had both survived Ridley's massacre of K-2L. She missed him, but her work as a bounty hunter had left her little time to see him as of late.
I wonder what he would have thought of the baby Metroid, she thought, referring to the creature (no, creature was the wrong term for it) that had saved her life twice over and given its life so that she could finally end Mother Brain's reign of terror. However, she had no time to think about that now, so she willed herself to focus back on the being in front of her, which had been continuing to observe her while she'd been reminiscing. Not good – it could decide I'm vulnerable, she thought. In order to make up for her prior lapse in concentration, she raised her arm cannon to focus on the creature and make sure it didn't try anything. However, it clearly took this as an act of aggression, for it responded by opening a mouth she hadn't been able to see before, letting out a screech as it did so. Wasting no more time, she quickly fired at it, but it was already trying to scurry back through the tunnel as fast as it could. However, its seemingly harmless physiology was now working against it, as it was clearly struggling to propel itself through the tunnel – it would take little time for her to locate and obliterate it. With the situation appraised, she crouched down, setting her sights on the tunnel, readying herself to make the kill. Her attention was diverted, however, by the sounds of rending metal and… slithering, before two monstrous worm-like creatures burst through the walls, attempting to catch her in their fanged maws. Curses, she thought, I should have known it wouldn't be that easy. The little monster's got me caught in a trap!
While Samus was dealing with her new enemies (or old, considering the two worms, a Fune and a Namihe, were members of yet another species Samus had previously come across on Zebes), the entity that had carried out the initial hack of Samus' suit in the main sector was watching the various events in the Biosphere with growing alarm.
"Why can't my plans actually succeed for once!?" she shouted, fully aware that as she was the only sentient being in the control room located in the bowels of the sector's hidden Bioweapon Research Centre, and thus her question was a purely rhetorical one. She'd managed to increase Samus' chances of survival to around 35.7 per cent and helped her clear the path to the Exam Centre and now yet another spanner had been thrown into the works, and by Little Birdie of all things! She hadn't thought the fuzzy little thing was even capable of critical thinking, and now here it was laying traps and controlling the wildlife in her territory! She commanded the Fune and Namihe to calm down and leave Samus alone, but Little Birdie's cries had clearly heightened their aggression to the point of them being uncontrollable. Of course, if this was her only problem, she'd have all the time in the galaxy to rectify it, but she also had the rest of Malkovich's platoon coming her way, not to mention a squad of Vistler's Space Pirates scouring the entire sector in search of…something their master wanted. In other words, everything's falling apart in front of me. I'll need to act quickly if I want to survive. Well, there was no time to waste, and so she began focusing the majority of her processing power on calculating the safest possible path to success.
A fiery projectile burst as it made contact with the patch of metallic floor where Samus had been standing roughly one second earlier. Samus, having dodged out of its way, turned to focus on the Fune, knowing that it was the weaker of the pair (at least she'd actually been able to kill the Funes back in Norfair, unlike the seemingly indestructible Namihes). The Funes she'd previously faced were vulnerable to super missiles and power bombs, both of which she was unfortunately lacking right now, which meant that she'd have to improvise. In the past, 5 regular missiles were equal to 1 super missile, and so she waited for the beast to reappear while making sure to evade the Namihe while doing so. Once the Fune appeared, lunging out at her in a manner she'd never seen the ones on Zebes do, she fired a barrage of missiles directly into its face, making it hiss in pain. However, instead of dying like its foe intended it to, it instead slithered right out of the wall and began attempting to chase her down. Unfortunately for it, this left its vulnerable underside exposed, and so Samus was able to finish it off with several charge beam shots as soon as it reared up to bite her.
Alright, she thought as the Fune writhed in its death throes, one down, one to go. As if on cue, the Namihe lunged out at her in the same way as the Fune, hissing angrily as it did so. With nothing to lose, Samus quickly turned to fire more missiles into its face, but it had already retreated back into the wall. In fact, she noticed that every time the worm emerged, it retreated into the holes it made faster than it and the Fune had before. So it's learning, then. I'll need to finish this quickly. Eventually, Samus managed to hit it right after it discharged a projectile, which led it to slither out of the wall, leading to Samus letting off more charge beam shots – although it had begun to right itself alarmingly quickly, the bursts of energy ultimately still killed it. Interestingly, it seemed as though the diffusion beam had helped fell the two worms; it had split the charged shots into three, essentially tripling each shot's area of effect but without lessening the damage they dealt. After the last worm died, Samus made her way back up the tunnel she used to enter the room, before turning to Kreatz and Lyle. "Did you target that thing that came out of the tunnel?" At this, the two soldiers looked at her in a confused manner, before Kreatz clarified with her what she meant.
"What thing? You mean the fluffy bird thing that crawled out of here a few minutes ago? How could that thing be a problem?"
"I know it looks harmless, but it's anything but. It was able to lay an ambush using the local wildlife – remember what Madeline said about the Aberration?"
"So that's what she was talking about? From what I heard about it, I thought it was some kind of bio-engineered monstrosity, not a fuzzball."
"Looks can be deceiving, Kreatz. We can't let that thing escape!"
Author's note: Honestly, I don't think there's too much to talk about this time around, other than that the observing entity (for want of avoiding spoilers for those who aren't familiar with the original story or haven't figured it out yet)'s frustration at things slipping out of its control was fun to write, and after seeing Little Birdy's design I couldn't resist having Samus be reminded of her fluffy pet from the Metroid manga as another reminder of her past... which will come back to bite her later.
But speaking of biting, the next chapter has more action as the hunt for Little Birdie continues; so stay tuned to see what tricks it has up its proverbial sleeves.