...

Samus couldn't breath. Then she shoved the stuffed bear a little more to the side so it wasn't squeezed against her stomach anymore and she had more room under the bed. She pressed her fingers against her mouth as she tried to stifle her giggles. The corner of a purple bedspread hung down over the side so the young girl had two trapezoidal windows to look out from her secret hiding spot. The giggles returned as a pair of shoes stepped through the door and stopped.

"Samus, I don't have time for this right now. You need to brush your hair before your lesson and you're already almost late."

At this Samus could no longer restrain the noise and a brief snort of laughter burst out. At once there was a heavy sigh and a hand reached down to grab an edge of the blue patterned blanket that Samus had taken great pains to spread out under her bed prior to executing this plan. However, now that precaution seemed to have doomed her as a tug on the sheet corner sent her legs sliding out to be exposed to her mother's reproachful face.

"No, mom, no fair!" Samus yelled from half under the bed as she tried to wiggle her little legs back under their hiding place.

"Out right now, missy, or I pull you by your ankles. I imagine you'll get a nasty bonk but that'd be your fault wouldn't it? Come on, up."

Reluctantly, Samus pushed her way out from under the bed, pulling her t-shirt back down over her belly while treating her mother to the best face of rebellious dissatisfaction a six-year-old could muster.

Her mother did not seem to be impressed. Her brownish blonde hair was tied up in a pony tail and her work device was in her hand vainly blinking out text to an audience that was currently dealing with an excessively wiggly daughter. "Up up up. You know it starts at one thirty. Do you have your stuff in your backpack?"

"Yeah." Samus grumbled in a vaguely ground-ward direction. Her little pack was over in the corner, stuffed with a colorful folder of loose papers and a plastic recorder instrument that poked out through the zipper. The backpack had a picture of a bird on it. It was blue.

Her mother was glancing at the screen in her hand, trying to figure out whatever she had been looking at before her daughter decided to institute guerrilla warfare against music lessons. "Thank you. Now, your hair? Go brush so you don't keep Mister Alvarez waiting."

Samus stomped over to her bathroom and attacked her shoulder-length blonde hair with the brush for a few fierce swipes until it quickly became obvious that the display was hurting her far more than anyone else. No one was watching her defiance.

Hair tamed and backpack wrangled Samus stepped out into the empty front hallway and glanced around uncertainly. "Mom?"

"I'll be there in just a second," her mother called from the other end of the house, having jumped onto some other activity already.

Samus muttered to herself on the general topic of parents complaining to her about not being ready and then always finding something else to do at the last minute. She lightly kicked her foot against the little emergency breathers box set in the wall by the front door.

Then her mother came bustling back, the screen now stowed somewhere and a tired smile on her face. "All right, we can go. Got your backpack? Your practice sheets?"

"Uh huh." Samus crossed her arms in a show of exasperation. "Is dad coming home for lunch today?"

Her mother tapped the panel beside the door and it slid open easily. She followed Samus outside as she answered, "He'll be back by the time you're done with your lesson. We'll have the rest of that stir fry from Friday, ok?" Then out on the sidewalk she leaned down to give Samus a hug. "Have a good time, honey."

Samus squirmed slightly as bits of her mother's hair got in her face. "Mom. You don't need to watch me. I can go by myself." Really, it was only a block and a half. She could see Mister Alvarez's door already from here.

"Maybe not, but I want to. Now go on."

Samus turned and started off down the sidewalk, waving vaguely behind her. It was embarrassing. Luís already took the trolly line two whole stops by himself to get over here and he was only a year older than her, but Samus had her mother standing on the street-side watching her walk along as if she'd manage to get lost in sixty yards. But soon enough Samus forgot to be irritated and instead glanced up at the muted sky above. It was actually bright today and the sun shone down as a slightly diffuse orb above the transparent flexible dome that covered her neighborhood of the colony city. The shadow of one of the dome support struts crossed the sidewalk and Samus hopped into one of the little triangle gaps in it to avoid touching the dark as she passed.

Then she reached Mister Alvarez's door and reached up on her toes to tap the standard panel beside it. The door slid open and she could hear Mister Alvarez laying out homework for the kid before her. Samus thought her name was Kay.

It was twenty minutes into the music lesson when the alarms went off. Mister Alvarez jerked back in his fluffy stuffed armchair and stood up as quickly as he could but he told Samus to stay in her chair and keep practicing the finger positions for the next song. He told her the alarm would probably stop in a moment. But Samus watched him hurriedly shuffle over to one of the computer stations and peer at the information it was flashing out. He looked back at Samus and told her everything was fine, they just had to stay inside for a moment until the all clear notice sounded. Samus slowly put down her recorder. Mister Alvarez had white hair but he hadn't learned to lie very well.

Samus felt something rumble under her chair. She jumped down so she could have her feet on the floor. She'd only felt it for a moment but it had been like when they were doing construction nearby; a big whump against the earth. Mister Alvarez told her that everything was going to be ok and to get back into her chair, but his voice was getting louder and he was breathing heavily. He was lying. Samus ran over to his couch and climbed up to look out the window behind it.

At first everything looked normal. It was just her street and her town, with the sun shining up outside the dome. Then she saw a distant streak of fire trail down from the sky and land out beyond the rocky hills around the city. Her heart began to pound. Someone had crashed. That was a ship falling. Her eyes squinted and focused. There were other shapes in the sky, other lights flashing and swerving. Then all the building sides across the street from her window suddenly flashed brighter than looking at the sun. An instant later the ground jumped and shook with a terrible boom.

Samus screamed and Mister Alvarez's soft but bony hand grabbed her arm and pulled her back from the window. He was yelling at her to get into the center of the house but she was crying and she didn't know what was happening. The emergency box by his front door was open and he was trying to get the clear breathing mask on over her head. Somewhere in the quiet behind Samus' eyes a little voice of hers was saying that he was doing it wrong. Grown ups were supposed to put on their mask first and then help her if she hadn't gotten hers on yet. Missus Yang had told them that. There'd been pictures. It had been a panda bear showing them what to do.

The ground shook again and everything in the house rattled. The alarms were still blaring, but somehow that last shaking had resettled something in Samus' mind. She wasn't screaming anymore and she couldn't tell if she was still crying. The mask meant she couldn't touch her cheeks to check. Mister Alvarez leaned in the corner, clutching a screen as he held it very close to his face, muttering wordlessly to himself as the blood drained from his face with each word he read. Samus took one last look at him and then bolted for the front door.

Mister Alvarez screamed after her but Samus could feel that her own fear had retreated for a minute. She was thinking more clearly even as her throat hurt with worry. If an emergency happened you were supposed to stay in place. But if a big emergency happened the important thing was making sure her parents found her. Her mom and dad were both back at home, so if she ran back they would be able to stay in place instead of coming after her. Two people staying in place instead of just one. She jumped up to slap the door panel and Mister Alvarez' front door slid open.

Outside it was windy. Samus kept running but she didn't understand that. Inside the colony it was only windy in certain places, near where the air systems were. But she reflexively squinted her eyes against dust that whipped her bare legs even as it pattered off her clear breathing hood. A bit of hair was in her mouth but she couldn't reach it inside the hood so she just tried to spit it out as she ran. All the sounds were dulled and muted but the sound of her breathing. Then a shadow covered the street and she stopped. She was alone out here and she looked up. A huge ship hovered outside, up over the dome. It was black and it hid the sun. Then objects began dropping down from it, straight through the top of dome.

It only took a moment before the wind began to shift. It intensified and the sound of it beating against her breathing hood was all Samus could hear. The dome was ripped and it felt like the world was screaming. No, that was ok. Missus Yang had told her how to deal with that. She already had her hood on. All the houses could seal themselves and had their own air lines and even then it would take a while to empty the whole dome even through a big rip. They could fix rips. She just had to get home and she was almost there. Then Samus realized that she was still standing motionless on the sidewalk.

She turned and continued running even as the ground shook again. There was flickering orange light in the distance, like fire. Then a screeching sound was drawing nearer and Samus looked up to see a long ship the size of a house pass over head, inside the dome. It was black and purple and as she watched it slowed to a hover a few blocks away. Dark shapes dropped down from it. They were shaped almost like people.

Samus ran down the empty sidewalk, feet pounding as hard as her chest with each desperate breath she drew. It was only thirty yards, then twelve, then she was there and she threw herself against her door but it wouldn't open when she hit the panel and she was stuck outside and she kept hitting the panel and it wasn't working and the wind was roaring all around her and she was so scared. Then the door opened. Strong arms pulled her inside and Samus screamed at the faceless mirror that clutched her. Then the moment passed and she recognized her mother with sunlight reflecting off her own breathing hood.

"Samus! What are you...?! How...?!" Then her mother gave up on speaking and just pulled her in for a hug so tight it made Samus' bones hurt. She never wanted it to end.

"Samus?!" Her father's voice boomed through the house, higher pitched than she had ever heard it from stress and worry. "I thought she was over with Ricardo?! Why was she outside?!"

"I don't know!" Her mother screamed back, hurting Samus' ears as her face was squeezed against her mother's chest, the plastic breathing hood smooshing uncomfortably against her cheek. Then her mother pulled her back a bit and looked down, her eyes wide with panic even as she spoke reassuringly at a breathless pace. "Are you ok? Are you ok, honey? It's ok. Everything's going to be all right. You're safe. You're safe." She looked back at her husband. "She hasn't said anything. What do we do now? Where do we go?"

Samus' father was pacing back and forth. His hand went up to rub his brow and was thwarted by his own breathing hood. He punched out at the wall and Samus winced. He saw that smallest of gestures and suddenly went very still for an instant as all his muscles tensed and released. He was very tall and his blue full-body mechanic's uniform almost made the hood seem like a normal part of his outfit. His eyes were blue too.

"All right," he said, now calm and in control. There was still a tremble in his voice. "City Hall still says to stay in place but we're right at the southeast corner of the dome. The tunnel to Central over there's through living rock, we actually have a chance of holding that. The defense force will be deploying from that direction, anyway. We'll make it inside and then to Central or one of the reinforced underground facilitates. The Pirates will just be grabbing what they can on the surface before Federation forces show up so they won't bother us in the secure places."

Samus' mother grabbed her daughter's shoulders. "Samus? Ok, honey? We're going to be going outside and I want you to hold onto me for every second. We're going over to the A-2 tunnel, remember that? And if you lose sight of me for any reason I want you to keep going there, and keep going inside until you see a police officer and go where they point you. Ok? Got that? We're all going together and we will follow you, ok?"

Samus could hear fear in her mother's voice and it made her chest hurt. She nodded. In a very small voice she said, "I left my backpack at Mister Alvarez's."

Her mother wasn't looking at her anymore. She was moving towards the rear door and her grip on Samus' forearm was so strong that it hurt. "That's ok, honey. Now we're going to be going fast so get ready." She looked over at her husband who had vanished into the other room for a brief second before returning. "What are you grabbing?"

"My toolbag. Could be important. I threw some of your necklaces in too. I didn't know-"

"Don't worry about that! We have to go now!"

"Mom? What about Mister Alvarez? And my friend Luís? Do we need to call them and tell them? Do they know where to go?"

Her mother still wasn't looking at her. She was just pressed against the rear door, moving back and forth to look out the narrow viewport. "It's ok, you don't need to worry about them. Everything will be fine. Now be ready to move with me. Ok? Stay with me."

The door opened and her parents hurried her out into the wind and blowing dust. Everything looked the same, but very different. The streets weren't empty anymore. There were other people out, running. Some of them didn't even have their hoods on and held arms up over their mouths as they staggered in the thinning air. It was cold out here.

Her father lead the way and her mother kept a tight grip on her wrist. Samus tried to grab back and return the hold but the angle was wrong for her hand to bend and the cold air stung her palm. So she clenched her fingers into a fist. Something was on fire and the grey smoke blew sideways to fill the intersection a block down the road. They were running past it.

There was a sound like fireworks and something bright flew out of the smoke. There were a bunch of them, like blinding streaks, and they hit the side of a building with cracks that hurt her ears even through the hood. Her father yelled but Samus could only hear her own heartbeat. Then a tall dark shape stepped out of the smoke and dust at the other end of the street.

It was like a person in armor, but bigger, made of spikes and blades and claws. And it was wrong. It was shaped wrong. Then it threw back its head and a horrible chittering scream rang out against the wind. New black shapes appeared, crawling up over the houses and roofs. They raised their arms, there were flashes and something behind Samus exploded.

A slam hit Samus' chest as her mother's arm thrust against her hard enough to knock out her breath. Samus sailed back, thrown by a mother's desperate action. She landed on the sidewalk and pain shot through her as her head bounded off the pavement with a sickening clunk. Her shirt sleeve was ripped on the cement along with the skin of her elbow. She gasped repeatedly as she wobbled to stand up, in too much pain to cry. Her ears were ringing.

"Samus! Run!" Her mother was screaming.

Samus turned back and saw that the front of a building had fallen down. It was broken and her mother was lying down on the ground at the edge of the rubble only a few feet away. There was something heavy lying on her legs. Samus' father was trying to to lift it.

"Mom!"

"Samus!" Her mother's eyes locked onto her with such a fierce desperation that Samus couldn't breath. "Samus, run! You remember the plan! Run, now! Run!"

Her father was straining, trembling as his strong arms and legs still failed to lift the rubble. The side of his blue jumpsuit was stained with red streaks. Samus didn't know what to do. The dark and spiky shapes were getting closer.

Her mother screamed. "Run!"

Samus turned and ran. Her eyes were fixed on the sidewalk as she ran as fast as she could ever remember. She was still dizzy. Her lungs pounded, her throat burned, and her head still rang like it was stuffed with cotton. A swift shadow passed over the street. It was like the wing of a bird. A bird larger than any she had ever seen. Then an inhuman screech blasted from behind her. Samus still ran.

She dashed around a corner and saw her family's chosen escape path. It was burning. Vehicle wreckage was strewn across the tunnel mouth, blocking it. Samus saw people lying down over to the side, people in police uniforms. They weren't moving. She realized that she'd stopped running. She stumbled forward and back forth. She didn't know what to do. She turned back the way she'd came, begging to see her mom and dad running out to pick her up.

Instead, she saw huge shape crawling up a three story building a few blocks away. The thing reached the top and settled into a perch as it surveyed the smoking city. Huge bat-like wings flexed, partially furled against its back. A long neck snaked up to a huge reptilian head of teeth and its thin barbed tail trailed down beside its feet. It was holding something in its clawed hand. At this distance it looked like a doll. The doll was flailing and struggling. It was wearing a blue uniform.

Then the monster lifted up its hand and took a bite.

Samus ran. The edge of the dome was right here, the thick flexible material almost fully transparent. It was covered with small holes and rips, rips that were slowly spreading as the higher pressure air of the colony kept flowing out. Samus didn't remember even touching it, but then she was outside the dome. Dust and gravel shifted under her feet. It was so cold.

She'd been on trips out of the colony before, once for safety training and once with her class. They'd ridden in a bus for fifteen minutes to go look at a waterfall. The teacher had talked about terraforming. But they'd always made the kids wear atmosphere suits. She didn't have that now, only the emergency hood. Her fingers hurt so badly, every bit of her skin was burning with cold. Then she tripped as she tried to run up the rough and broken stone of a low hill. Her hands were bloody but they didn't hurt any worse than they had before.

She didn't know why she was running. Her head was ringing and she couldn't think. She couldn't scream. Every breath came in in rough and ragged gulps as her chest heaved in and out. Then she fell again. Her legs weren't working right. She was so tired. She got up and ran again down the other side of the hill, but her ankle was weak under her and she stumbled, half spinning as she struggled to stay upright. She could just see the top of the city dome over the hill. The huge black ship was hovering over it as smaller craft swarmed like a cloud of flies. Then she turned away and ran again, into the burning cold and the pain.

Finally, past empty roads and rough hills, Samus reached the point where she couldn't run anymore. She couldn't feel anything in her limbs other than a distant and tingling pain. Her legs were too weak, they wouldn't lift when she told them too. The little indicator on her hood was orange now. It was supposed to be green. Samus fell down. The rocks were rough and so cold. They poked her bones. She couldn't stand up. She couldn't think. She just lay there, chest heaving as the orange indicator on the hood slowly darkened into red. She looked back into the distance and watched the dark ships above the dome come back together and together rose up into the sky. Then they were gone. They left behind only smoke. Smoke drifting up to make clouds.

Time didn't pass. Samus couldn't think enough for it to. The only thought she had was when she realized that she was dying. She wondered what that was like.

A shadow fell over her. Samus saw the shadow and it meant nothing. Then there was a other shadow beside it and it meant nothing too. They were tall. They wore long robes. There was a face with a beak. Like a bird. Samus liked birds. She couldn't breath.

Then two huge hands reached down to scoop up the small child and held her cradled between them. The child's eyes closed.

...

Samus woke up looking at the dark blue sky of L-4M. Her vision was blurry and spotted until her eyes refocused and she realized that her helmet visor was coated with dust. She lay on her back, finding safety in her suit's embrace.

So, she was alive.

Data blinked across her visor. It corrected her to indicate that she was in fact barely alive. She'd been unconscious for eleven hours as the suit tried to repair the damage to itself and her. Samus' bones were reinforced beyond breaking but even the flexible structural lattice infused throughout her entire body had only been just enough to prevent her organs from being reduced to liquid from that deorbiting impact. Medical nannites had been at work in her brain, ameliorating the massive trauma, while the suit took over most of her blood processing from her involuntarily detached lungs, liver, and gut. Even so it had been close.

The suit did not have many resources left to work with. The list of missing hardware systems, all cannibalized by direct energy conversion to soften the impact, was still scrolling past Samus' eyes. Correction, to soften the impacts. Apparently, she'd hit the ground six times. Primary impact, blasted through the top of a hill, bounced off flat ground, hit a canyon wall, hit another canyon wall, then landed here. Samus now noticed that her view of the sky was bounded in one direction by rock. Oh, she was in a canyon. She turned her head and saw a precipitous drop. Halfway down the wall of a canyon. Her left hand hung out over air.

A warning message flashed in front of her eyes as Samus slowly sat up, the Chozo text advising against moving more than absolutely necessary. It would be another nineteen hours before the biological repairs were completely finished. Samus, gestured with her free hand, accessing the menus to reduce the anesthetic delivery. She immediately experienced a measure of regret but it was necessary. She needed to be sharp.

The damage to the suit was visually obvious. The bulging shoulder mounted Varia components were gone, as were all her booster jets, and her arm cannon was now at least ten percent slimmer. The suit shield generators were basically nonexistent. Everything had been reabsorbed to keep her alive through that one moment. She was as weak a newborn baby. Well, a newborn baby still strapped into the most advanced suit of power armor ever created in this galaxy, even in its current reduced state.

Samus sighed, and then once again regretted reducing the anesthetic. Time to get to work. She'd repaired the suit before. Many times before. Chozo wartech was sturdy. It just needed ingredients. Certain rare elements it was unable to synthesize for some specialized systems, and for the rest just power. Lots of power. She could do that.

She then realized that she had been sitting here on this bit of dusty rock for several minutes without processing a single thing about her surroundings. That sort of thing got people killed. Maybe she'd overestimated the extent to which her brain damage had been repaired.

She was lying on a rock ledge three-quarters of the way down the sun bathed wall of a deep canyon. In fact it was exceptionally deep for how narrow it was, the rim was several hundred feet above her. The suit scan revealed that while most of the planet's land at these latitudes was barren of all life but a type of lichen-analogue, these canyons preserved inside them a denser and warmer atmosphere. That certainly explained why the floor down below was almost pure dark green.

Samus grabbed hold of the edge of the rock ledge with her left hand and lowered herself down as far as that took her. The human colony was connected to this same canyon network, she'd seen it as she fell. She descended the cliff face, kicking new footholds in the rock when geology didn't comply, and tried to avoid the wall-clinging vines that grew more numerous and thicker the lower she got. The vegetation was dark here, the thin needlelike leaves almost black with pigment. They needed every bit sunlight and heat they could get here, day couldn't last long at the bottom of of a narrow canyon.

Then Samus reached the end of her climb and dropped the last thirty feet to the dirt packed floor. The canyon was only about twenty feet across by this point, and there was a little strip of sand in the very middle, probably an intermittent stream. The native plants were fairly dense here, but still Samus found a narrow path near the far wall that made for easy walking. It was some sort of track, although made by what type of creature she didn't know. In any case it would serve her now, and lead her downstream to the mouth of this canyon. She began to walk faster. She'd noticed that she was not receiving any transmissions from the colony anymore, nor from Diomedes above. It was possible that she was simply shielded by the geology here but she was still very nervous. Garbled Pirate transmissions drifting straight down indicated that the splinter fleet still had an orbital presence to some degree. It was possible that the fight was still ongoing. She hoped so.

Walking gave her time to think and so her left hand worked in air, accessing virtual menus as Samus attempted to get the suit systems to load up what they could of Adam's personality. There was anesthetic in her brain, she needed a second voice to help help her plan. However, nearly instantly a message flashed in front of her eyes, "Integration Failed". Too many of Adam's core thought programs were missing even if most of his memory was safe. Samus breathed out. There were backups back on Diomedes of course, but not down here. Still, she set the suit to use some spare cycles attempting to grow an integration framework for Adam off in a virtual partition. She missed his silence too.

Leaves rustled and Samus' right arm snapped up to target the noise. Edging sideways, she tapped her temple, remembered that all her advanced vision modes had been cannibalized, and then knelt down to peer under the shivering bush. There was a small creature frozen back there, its round back covered with thin feather-like quills and its four eyes were wide and black. Scan said it was a common herbivore native to the planet's northern canyon lands; not endangered at all. It watched Samus, not daring to move but ready to sprint if she moved any closer. Samus' shield energy indicator quietly blinked red in the corner of her vision, reminding her of her dire straights.

She sighed and her power beam fired once. The shield meter ticked up slightly as a little limp form bounced off the far stone wall. She was here to protect thousands of sapient colonists from a Space Pirate attack that could still be under way. She needed every resource. Samus stood up and walked down the narrow path in the direction of the colony city.

After a few minutes she rounded a bend and, pushing past a small twisted tree, she saw that up above her the canyon briefly closed in a massive stone arch. The suit scan suggested that most of these canyons were originally ancient lava tubes from the volcanic mountain range nearby. This planet clearly had a very energetic past. In any case Samus now walked in the shade.

Then she emerged into the sunlight on the far side of the arch and almost kicked the back of a standing stone slab. It was polished, rectangular and clearly sapient made. Samus walked around it and looked down at words carved in neat Human Standard.

"Whistle Canyon Nature Park: Please stay on the trail"

She now felt a slight bit more guilty about the little creature. Well, it wasn't the first time Samus had been a poacher. Still, it didn't help that a little speaker by the sign for some reason misinterpreted her power suit's signature as a third grade class trip and was now cooing a recorded message about the water cycle and the importance of conserving local wildlife. Samus moved on, towards the simple metal wall stood across the canyon mouth a few yards beyond. The door in the middle had a simple low energy barrier across it, just enough to discourage any local wildlife from clawing at it. A little tap panel sat in the wall beside it, allowing any locals easy access back and forth.

Samus shot the door.

It sprang open with an electric squeal of protest as the energy field broke. Strictly speaking she could have just tapped the access pad with her finger or the touched door itself to let the suit scan do the rest but shooting also worked. She liked when shooting worked.

Then Samus stepped though the door onto a wide shelf occupied by a small paved parking lot as on each side the canyon walls raced apart into the distance. Below her lay the sprawling white and blue buildings of the colony city nestled in a wide valley. A few strands of smoke rose from the far distant edge but that was the only motion. The city was silent. Her suit scan picked up no free radio transmissions. No vehicles moved in the streets. As Samus' breath caught in the terrible stillness, even the orbital Pirate transmissions faded off the spectrum, hidden as they fell behind the planet. There was only silence and the distant sound of reverberating wind in the canyons like faint and sorrowful music.

Suddenly a new transmission alert appeared on her visor. A distant human signal emerged from the planet horizon and slowly pierced through the atmospheric static.

"...is GFS Diomedes. Colony L-4M. We've completed another orbit and are back in range. Continue Aurora, what's going on down there? Report!"

...