Chapter 23

The Walls of Troy

...

The battleship Diomedes cut a burning path across the sky and left a wake of fire ten miles long. For the thousand Pirate soldiers on the ground below, unavoidable instincts screamed that this plummeting monolith was going to smash into them, the meteoric herald of their personal extinction. Squadron formations collapsed as members ran for cover, scrambling over each other in a blind panic.

Ridley snarled his bloodstained teeth up at the evening sky. The pitiful fools he commanded were worse than grubs, running around in fear; they were slime without any rational thought. Their panic was deserving of execution. The Federation battleship could not fire on them through the Chozo energy absorption field, and the humans deciding to fly a few thousand miles closer did nothing to change that calculation. These pitiful spawn he ruled had forgotten the orders and brilliant strategy they had been given. However, nothing so piddling would thwart Ridley's inevitable victory. When the battle was won he would rip them all apart himself and feast on their flesh until he could not move from the gluttony.

Then Ridley shifted across the rocky ground on which he lay sprawled and left streaks of blood from the stumps that had once been his legs and one arm. With a grunt of inconsequential pain he leveraged himself up with his tail and remaining arm, then opened his mouth to let loose a roiling gout of flame. The pyroclastic blast buffeted his cracked jawbone, but the fire still arced out to splash against the ground and form a burning wall in front of him. Ridley's one remaining eye narrowed in a smirk. Behind the screen of chemical fire, it would be a trivial thing to scuttle to a new location and hide until he regathered his army to take down Samus Aran. One arm, a wing, and his tail were more than enough with which to triumph. Even injured he was stronger than any pitiful product of idiotic evolution. He was the triumph of science itself!

Then the wall of fire and smoke flexed as it curled around a small bipedal figure that walked through its heart, armor shining in red and gold, glittering against the firelight.

Ridley felt the bloodlust fill his veins until every thought of pain vanished. His prey was in his grasp. From Samus Aran's current viewpoint, his tail was hidden from view by one of the many scattered boulders, so Ridley flexed it to coat the visible base in his own blood. He then leveraged his torso up with his arm and wing to imply he had lost the hidden tail in their last clash, all the while he actually prepared to strike with it. Aran would think him weak, but once she stepped in to gloat, the nano-edged blade on the tip of his tail would bite through her heart before she could gasp. One strike, and Ridley did not miss.

All that was left was to trick the fool into stepping into a trap once more. An easy task for him, he simply had to press the buttons of morality and heroism in her feeble mind. Ridley curled his lips into a predatory smile.

"Samus Aran, by-"

The blinding light destroyed his brainstem before he had the chance to notice her weapon rise.

...

Samus looked down at the smoking carcass beneath her. And Ridley was dead once again. She had learned over the decades that his last words were never worth listening to. Each iteration thought itself so unique, but when pushed into a corner they all tended to come up with the same boring speech, the same tired threats. Samus did not allow herself to feel her hate. She drifted free on the Path, an instrument of judgement born by the future.

Then a transmission cracked to life in her helmet, scrolling text that somehow managed to convey the impression of fangs. "Samus Aran, by my intellect I left some human shelters alive, so that the planet might be harvested again. Your resistance shifts that calculation. Stand down now or I will kill this entire world and all its inhabitants in fire and pain."

Ah, there the speech was. Samus slowly inclined her head up to see where the mechanical Ridley incarnation perched on the peak of the Capital Ship's highest blade-like wing. Samus had to give it to Ridley, it took bravery to assume such an exposed position.

Twenty thousand feet above him, the massive battleship Diomedes shed its velocity in shockwave bursts, until the entire massive structure hung nose first in the air, exposed barrel of the primary cannon pointed straight down. That was Nakamura's show of strength, the power to resist planetary gravity without using main engines. That battleship twisted the eye, something so large floating so still. There was a mental pressure under its shadow as if gravity itself was gathering forces to reassert its will.

But the mecha-Ridley was confidant in the Chozo cease-fire field. Though the Diomedes slowly crept lower it was still well within the Energy Absorption Spire's line of sight, and so the old rules still held. In fact, instead of seeming nervous, this Ridley seemed to radiate confidence and cheer from its horrible metallic visage. With the death of his original body, his command was once again consolidated.

Samus turned her back on him to pick through the bloody remnants of the organic Ridley.

The crawling text pounced back into her visor, a new crackling transmission. "You think you can stall. No. My soldiers, advance! You will scatter towards the human colonists, through the city and through the temple! Samus Aran cannot defeat genius if I decline to engage in battle. The only option then for Samus Aran is submission. To do otherwise is to bathe this world in human blood."

Ah, there it was. Samus straightened up from the dragon carcass and now she held a detonator in her hand.

"There is no-"

The voice cut off the instant she pressed the button, followed a half of a second later by the distant thud of the explosion. And Ridley was dead once again. As Samus watched the white smoke clear she felt a small breath let go within her chest. One tiny sliver of justice had crept back into the world. On the scale of justice weighed down by the heart of a human child named Roger and hundreds more, a single grain of retribution clicked against the other side.

The remaining Pirates, that remnant majority of the fleet's once fierce army ran, scattering like ants. They would reform ranks soon enough and return to being a deadly threat but for now shock shook their cohesion. A few of the remaining remotely controlled colony vehicles and drones still blindly bumbled around the battlefield, but their distraction had already served its purpose. The human colonists had made a difference in this fight for their home. But Samus did not have time to thank them now.

Instead she tilted her head up to watch the towering Diomedes slowly descend through the air. Samus' eyes narrowed behind the green slit-like visor. She was carried by the vengeance of the Chozo and the next verdict had arrived before her.

"Nakamura. You decided not to run."

The battleship hung just above the valley like a floating mountain, an obelisk of metal plates and spars. Across its angular skin, point-defense cannons the size of houses all swiveled to face towards the planet. The panicked Pirate soldiers ran faster, a flooding exodus up the slot canyon into the temple gate and down towards the colony city as behind them the battleship's growing shadow slid across the ground.

The reply came, but it did not address Samus. In fact, it seemed to be an internal shipboard communication routed into the broadcast channels. Nakamura's voice was steady, a grim resolve almost completely masking the tired grief beneath. The grief of a man steeped enough in evil acts to plunge forth once more.

Nakamura said, "Attention Federation soldiers: enemy forces are salting the earth, scattering and preparing for guerrilla entrenchment on the planet. Aurora Unit analysis confirms this, and supplies additional evidence that a hostile force has control of a wide-dispersal bioweapon. Territorial protection of colony J4-M is no longer possible. We have failed in our defense mission of this planet and for that I apologize. Our only remaining priority is to eliminate all enemies of the Federation. We will deny the enemy their victory. We will deny them this planet. Main cannon, fire for effect."

Then the nose of the battleship crested the invisible sightline that shielded this valley from the energy absorption spire on the plateau. Particles of light gathered in the barrel of the main cannon, directly above the center of the Pirate landing yard where Samus had been standing.

She was no longer there. Samus was running the instant she heard Nakamura's first word, racing back towards the temple and the contingency plan she knew she would not have time to reach. Speed-inducing energy built around her body in a shimmering sheath, accelerating her forward faster than limbs or armor jets could take her. Then the cannon fired and that meant it hurt just a little less when the explosion hit her.

Everything turned into blinding white. The planet screamed as the beam impacted against the stone that flexed like water, a ripple in the terrestrial pond. Capital ship primary beam weapons were not designed to be fired at full power in atmosphere. Even Ridley had only fired his at sixty percent when he first targeted the energy spire, and the Last had modified that weapon with wave beam technology for added precision. Without such precautions, that magnitude of energy could cause nitrogen and oxygen to split like uranium.

Air itself exploded. Steel-blackening radiation scorched Samus' back as she raced at top speed for the nearest shelter. Her footsteps tore up the ground beneath her, right ahead of a rolling cloud of nuclear destruction.

Then the solar hellfire burst around her, funneled and accelerated by the walls of the slot canyon. Samus heartbeat vanished into the roar as she ran through the pummeling avalanche, blinded but for the holographic map now overlaid in her eyes. The battered chozo suit begged to eat this energy, it even tried, but it was like trying to drink a tsunami through a straw. Dots signaling life energy blinked out of existence all around her, fleeing Pirates who burnt to ash in mid-step.

The readouts in her visor screamed, shields plummeting, warnings propagating. Samus could feel the burning heat of overloaded Varia components searing her skin and muscles. Then she was through the gateway of the temple and threw herself sideways into a pocket of swirling air protected by some accident of design from this horizontal fountain of fire.

Even the superheated tornado swirling in this corner was a relief, and Samus could feel the suit begin to recover. After all, there was a feast of death in that canyon for the reaper system to harvest. The normally ephemeral feather-like lights across her shoulders now burnt halos into the rock as they flared, venting heat and radiation behind her as best they could. Then the world of fire expired and left only a thundering hot wind thick with black ash.

The firestorm had been shaped and mostly contained by the roof of the energy absorption field and the walls of the canyon system. That field was what allowed Diomedes to fire so carelessly, since most of the ship was protected from the blowback. However, that energy absorption ceiling still meant a superheated pyroclastic cloud erupted out from the former site of the Pirate splinter fleet. At least a quarter of the colony city was destroyed, everything within a mile, along with almost any building that had taken damage in the initial invasion. The nearest colony shelter was the one Ridley had already slaughtered, so at least the surviving colonists were unlikely to have been caught it the direct blast. Of the Pirates themselves, those who had tried to run into the city were surely dead, but a significant fraction of those who headed into the temple likely found enough shelter in its tunnels to survive that initial eruption. That meant Nakamura was not done.

Samus stepped back out into scorched mouth of the fallen temple gate under a sky turned from blue to black flaring with remaining flashes of fire and volcanic lightning. The air around her gusted between two hundred and six hundred degrees. This entire frigid continent was about to experience a considerable heat wave.

Ahead the black clouds shifted and the sharp metal shape of Diomedes appeared in the sky, a skyscraper sized spear aimed at the planet's heart, trailing a film of smoke that curled around its shields.

Samus focused her eyes on that ship. Then she spoke, as if the entire attack was just a tantrum. "The last trial I attended named the destruction of a scientific outpost to contain a threat as 'destruction of property'. Sentence: fifteen years imprisonment, commuted through service and subject to parole."

Nakamura returned to her ears, on a more private channel this time. "I'm afraid the Federation does not recognize your claim to T'sthioni Ikoine, Aran. Believe me or not, I actually brought you up in a meeting years ago. But no, unfortunately standard procedure for Space Pirate insurgency must take precedent. They must be exterminated from this world, and to my regret your presence is not sufficient to tip those scales."

In the distance, the Diomedes slowly tilted in the air. Its building sized profile reduced as it began to point directly at Samus in the temple doorway. The slot canyon had been torn apart enough that the firing line was now perfectly clear.

Samus breathed in and Nakamura's thoughts were clear to see. She knew why he was willing to do this. "You've convinced yourself that unlike with the Pirates, you will be able to negotiate the temple's secret out of the Chozo once she has it. Unlike the Pirates and unlike myself, she might give it to you."

There was no use in mentioning the surviving colonists who had assisted with the remote hijacked cars and drones. He had long since declared them lost. One more shot from that battleship cannon so soon after the first would sterilize the surrounding fifty miles. Nakamura would defeat the pirates, exterminate the metroids, defend Federation secrets, and tragically take one troublesome and explicitly hostile bounty hunter off the table. Victory at every cost. His own perfect certainty.

Nakamura had the nerve to sound weary and understanding. "Yes. Your system-wide speech indicated the Chozo is trying to run, and from what I have heard of their priorities I now think the Galactic Federation can tolerate that. You and the chozo clearly have a personal argument of cultural doctrine, evidenced by your sudden rush to claim heritage rights, but they have no such quarrel with me. No, Aran, right now I find you far more dangerous than a fleeing scientist rushing to grab their notes. And unfortunately you are currently standing in the exact spot required to eradicate the remaining Space Pirate forces."

"Unfortunate."

"Yes, so step aside and let me save what little that can be saved. Public warning to all friendlies: evacuate now. Primary beam: fire in ten seconds."

A meaningless courtesy, one to be written down in the reports. Ten seconds were not enough to get away and after that first blast, and Samus did not have enough shield power left to survive even a fringe pyroclastic flow. But those were enough seconds to step back inside the temple and grab one thing. She just hoped those pirate goons she had shanghaied had actually finished threading that giant cable down from the higher temple levels.

...

Ten minutes earlier, Officer Yin heard the armored footsteps before the soldiers arrived outside her room, clanging softly over the faint tremors that signaled the Diomedes' rapid drop from orbit. Dropping towards the planet called Ember of Light, though there was no word of what they would do once they neared the surface. The soldiers' route to her cabin door carried them past the bulkhead, and that meant Yin had a few precious warning seconds before they arrived. She spent those seconds trying not to throw up from fear. The sirens of the battle stations alert thumped in time to the nauseous pounding of her heart.

The AI Adam's voice murmured in her earpiece, connected to the room's small computer station. "You heard Aran's message. Your plan is sound. You know what to do and you have the strength to do it. Few can say the same."

Yin swallowed with a dry mouth and sore throat as she kept her eyes focused on the far wall. Then the door opened. The gleaming white armor of a Federation marine stepped into the room and his opaque blue visor aimed Yin's way.

"Officer Yin, please come with-"

Yin took a deep breath. "It's about time you got here! Right, with me. I am not about to risk the lives of everyone on this ship because you are slow at following orders. Move it soldier!"

She carefully ignored the death-wielding suits as she strode over to the door with confidence she very much did not feel. She tapped the lead most marine on the armored chest as she pushed past into the hallway that flashed with the warning lights of the combat stations alert.

The marines were off balanced by this performance. Opaque helmets quickly turned towards each other and back. "We are here to take you into custody and-"

Yin snapped at the man with a firmness definitely tinged with authenticating fear. "Yes, finally! The commander knows I need protection for this operation but he certainly took his time sending you. Well, come on, your custody charge is on her way to save this damn ship!"

There was a single crack of hesitation. "Commander Nakamura-"

"Commander Nakamura tells people what they need to know. Look at your information feeds. Do they say I am charged with anything? Do they even say I was under watch? Or do they say that I am the ship's current expert on the bounty hunter whose information warfare broadcast just seized control of the entire ship's communication system. Now think for a single actual second and remember if the Commander told you to do anything restricting my movement or actions or even moving me anywhere, or did he just say to 'take me into custody.' If the latter, get moving soldier, because otherwise your custody is leaving without you."

Yin clamped her mouth shut in what she hoped looked like serious conviction. Inside, she felt ready to faint. However, the computer program Adam had coached her well. The armored marines hesitated behind their featureless helmets. They turned slightly towards each other and Yin knew this insane plan was actually working.

Everyone knew Nakamura had a love of secrets and a reputation as a plotter. This entire mission out at the edge of space, months searching for Samus Aran without being told why, and then the surprise attack and the devastating loss to the Pirates that followed had shaken any benefit of the doubt the Commander might have started with. And behind all that was the quietly simmering suspicion planted by Samus Aran's message, pushed into all their displays by Yin and Adam's communications hack.

Those words clearly still echoed in their minds. "Commanders Ridley and Nakamura, by the doctrine of home-worlds I have right to judge you, and by your crimes I find you both guilty of mass murder."

The deck beneath Yin's feet vibrated slightly, a reminder that they were still plummeting towards the planet nose-first even if these corridors could choose to ignore that direction of gravity. Plummeting towards the Ember of Light and everyone who still lived on its surface.

Adam whispered in Yin's, his signal strength already weak as she had walked away from the terminal he was downloaded into, "You have them. Now, go."

Yin knew the plan, she had come up with most of it. Still, if it were not for those whispers she in her ear would likely have stood petrified in that hallway forever, or at least for the few minutes before Commander Nakamura could spare a glance to check on her imprisonment.

But instead of waiting for that, Yin started quickly walking ahead of the off-balance armored marines, propelled by the gentle taps of a whisper in her ear. Her stated destination was the main computer core to fix Aran's communications hack. Of course her preposterous bluster would never actually get her in there, but luckily she did not actually care about the computer core. Her escorts were trying to get clarification of their orders but the battle-stations alarm drowned out their priority.

With the two marines following at her shoulder, half ready to shoot, her half ready to obey, the door to the main muster hall opened readily. Yin's silent quarantine from the rest of the crew was officially broken.

This huge chamber in the heart of the ship served many purposes. It was an auditorium, a relaxation space for a population stuck onboard a cramped ship for months, and in this current situation it was the battle station for all non-combat shipboard personnel. It was also still an auditorium, which was good because Yin was about to make a speech.

She stopped walking and breathed in to speak. She would only have a few moments here, since the second she began to talk her cover story would fall to shreds. But she froze. Her mouth was dry. She was here, having already committed career and perhaps literal suicide, but she could not bare to take that last step.

Then the rumbling in the deck-plates changed its pitch. The main engines were no longer burning. All around the muster hall, people were turning to stare at Yin, this interloper in their already tense setting. The armed escort that accompanied her must have gotten through to the bridge because they were now swiftly making the transition to from escort to hostile, but that made the bystanders very curious. Yin had to speak now. This was her only chance. But she was frozen.

Then, a whisper in her earpiece. "You know your duty, Officer Hong Yin, and you will fulfill it admirably."

Yin actually blinked in confusion and surprise. How was Adam speaking to her? She blurted, "You're out of range of the computer and there's no way you fit on my earpiece."

"This is a prerecorded message."

"But then how did you know I would..."

"I have a lot of experience with soldiers. Now, go save the day. Save them all. Do you understand, lady?"

Yin took a breath.

Her one-sided conversation had bought her a few more seconds of confusion from the marines escorting her, especially since their visors would tell them she was not actually on the line with anyone. But being crazy only worked for a moment. She just had to hope this was the right moment.

Yin shouted, "Citizens of the Galactic Federation! In the past two days hundreds of colonists were murdered by metroid bioweapons at the order of Commander Nakamura. He is now selling this planet's secrets to a hostile alien force. Samus Aran was telling the truth, and I have the call transcripts to prove it all!"

A marine's armored gauntlet slammed down on her shoulder and Yin gasped as the pain shot through her bones from its grip. A few of the crew spectators leapt to their feet, fighting free of their restraint seats either to defend her or to tackle her too. Another gauntlet clamped around her mouth, but in that same moment a new voice rang out through the muster hall, this time through the ship's speaker system.

It was Nakamura, "Primary beam: fire in ten seconds."

One hundred and fifty non-combatant eyes all turned, wide and white in shock as the ship hummed with a new vibration. They knew they were in atmosphere they knew they were near the colony site. They knew what that meant. And with Officer Yin's words ringing in the air they turned those eyes on the armored marines who by their suddenly uncertain stance knew too. The moment stretched with the tense uncertainty.

Then another man stood up from his seat, turning to face Yin and the marines. And then another stood beside him. And another stood too.

...

Samus faced the Diomedes as it hung in the ash choked air before her. The mouth of the slot canyon had been torn open by the force of that blast and in the sky a mile away, the long battleship emerged from a roiling haze of dark clouds, scorch-blackened nose just tipping beneath the plateau level of the valley walls barely more than a thousand feet above Samus' head. The ship was huge. Each of the sixteen point defense cannons was wider than her torso, and in the barrel of the primary cannon she could have stretched her arms without touching an edge. The Diomedes was a city forged together, it was the physical might of a federation of five thousand systems.

The blackened rock beneath Samus feet on was glassy and cracked, melted and shattered by the wave of fire that stole the blue sky and now replaced it with buffeting winds of black ash. Tiny stone particles still rained down in a constant patter, tapping against the metallic skin of her suit. Lighting flashed above, formed from the friction and heat of those clouds, the vaporized remnants of the Pirate Fleet and most of the valley they had lain in. A circle of hell had come to this planet and Samus stood at the edge of its heart.

That was just the effect of the first shot. If Nakamura wanted to be sure of wiping out the pirate forces and the wild metroids, it would not be the last. Now the very stone of the landscape was charcoal, the air itself now kindling waiting to burn. A second blast, so soon after the first, would sterilize most of this hemisphere. It would set the atmosphere on fire.

Samus could have run, but she didn't.

The battleship was her opponent, and the fight was one on one.

A single point of light glimmered from the front of the battleship like a star. The primary cannon, aimed at her heart, preparing a beam twice the size of her body.

Samus met that burning eye and planted her feet. "Try it."

She stood in the temple doorway with her left gauntlet reaching behind her back, affixing the last joint of a new jury-rigged interface into her armor. From the back of her suit a thick bundle of purloined cables now jutted out before trailing against the ground deep into the temple halls. Those thick lengths of crystalline fiber and advanced metal had been stripped from their original homes and patched together, through the halls by force and persistence and a bit of press-ganged Space Pirate labor. It was her plan, all that work just to crudely link her suit to one specific room of the temple. To think, the Federation had once actually mistaken the Energy Absorption Spire for a communications device.

This time there was no prelude. Samus could see in her mind's eye Nakamura's lips moving, on that dark red-lit bridge. He would actually feel sad as he gave the order. He hated destroying something he did not understand.

Then the Diomedes fired into the slot canyon and at that blinding terminus the massive beam was swallowed whole by Samus' gun barrel, grasped and dragged down by a shining energy-absorption web that bloomed in a fraction of a second, blinking out to cover half the sky in its aurora.

The instant Samus' sight returned she felt a shudder pass over her. She had not actually been sure that plan would work. And judging by her white hot gun barrel and the sparking, melting segments of cable that stretching off into the temple, it would only work once. Then somewhere in those distant temple shadows, following that line of melting sparking cable, something changed in the silent harmonies of the temple. Like an ancient giant took a single breath towards waking. All that energy had needed to go somewhere and deep in those darkened halls something had welcomed it. What welcome, Samus did not know.

But that moment dwelled in the future. Here, in front of Samus, the floating mass of the Diomedes was silent again in the sky, staring down the slot canyon from the massive hollow chamber the beam had pushed into the black clouds. The ship's power systems did not take kindly to two full force in atmosphere main cannon blasts in such a short time. It would take a moment for the Diomedes to recover, and Samus would use that moment.

The half-melted cable end was suddenly hung alone in the air, as her suit detached. Heat-shattered rock exploded as the toe of her boot dug in, and then she was running. At these speeds air was a solid wall and she pushed through it like rice paper. Behind her, dust erupted and canyon walls shuddered. The sheath of opalescent energy surrounded her, and space contracted with each step.

Then Samus was at the broken mouth of the slot canyon and in the midst of her sprint she knelt. With jarring finality she was instantly motionless, and the streak of energy that had trailed behind her collided and bunched around her body. The shafts of white light that spilled from her shoulders flared out, spreading like wings, and then the stillness was gone. Samus Aran exploded upwards in a direct line towards the black-scorched prow of Diomedes.

"Remember," she murmured, not even bothering to transmit this time. "I gave you your chance."

Battleship hull metal was sturdy stuff; it barely dented under Samus' ringing impact. Her speed was halved by punching through its shields but the entire ship still listed in the air from the sudden force. Samus rose up on the vertical hull. She breathed out and a smile formed on her lips, even as exhaustion tugged again at her limbs. This was a new kind of fight. Not another duel with Ridley, practiced to the point of a waltz. This was a new opponent, a new scenario. In the rhythm of battle this was jazz and it was time for her solo. She visualized victory and let herself feel hunger for it.

Across the quarter-mile long hull, point defense cannons began to swivel towards her but they moved so glacially she had all of two seconds to await them. With a slow exhalation Samus' awareness flowed out, calculating the path before her. The future crystalized, streams of other Samuses advancing across the battle by different routes. Then the crystal streams winked out one by one as their futures met their shattering, until there was only one remaining. Only one future. It was the path and it was inevitable, even if she could only see a tiny length of it.

Samus surrendered herself to that path and she began to move.

No, she raced. A figure in ruby and gold darted along the ship, the suit gripping as easily as if a planet lay beneath her feet. A point defense barrel the size of her body met her line but Samus' gleaming silver weapon snapped up and from its flowing crown a white beam stabbed forth. The point defense cannon exploded and Samus raced on across the surface of the battleship.

Then the metal beneath her feet began to crackle with tiny sparks a signal of the ship's shields contracting above her, drawing close to this specific large patch of the hull. A feeble, useless effort, Samus' wave beam sliced through shields. Then she noticed those small sparks become flashing arcs and a long forgotten lecture returned to explain what happened when starship-grade shields pulled in that close to their projectors. Ah, not so useless. She jumped straight up a moment before a twenty yard circle across the Diomedes became a maw of dancing lightning.

Clever. And two of the point defense cannons were already pointed straight across her escape path. Sometimes she almost liked Nakamura, beneath her quiet anger. Samus' gleaming armor reflected the ephemeral wings as they flared in time with the jets, whipping her back towards the Diomedes, away from the cannon intersection. She chose her punishment, meeting one cannon blast to avoid being hit by both. It hurt, but a quarter second later she landed against the hull and continued her race along the ship as low shield alarms blaring in her head.

Nakamura's voice filled the communications spectrum. "Aran, no! You must let me complete the mission! That chozo has seized control of the metroids, commanding them and pulling them back as an army. With those creatures and then Pirates there is no solution that does not mean this colony is already dead! Please, you know I'm right!"

The sound of blood pounded in her ears. Flash and hit, dart and stab, an ant against Goliath but Goliath trembled. Grapple beam crackled out from her hand and swung her around, jets flaring to always carry her forward, up the hull towards engines and the heart of this ship. And within that ship something was changing. Beneath the thick armored skin, panicked and communications swirled in a chaotic dance, now arguing with each other instead of following the pattern a common purpose. But for now a distant whump whump whump reverberated through the air, signaling multiple fighter launches. More of Diomedes' claws were now unsheathed.

Nakamura said, "You can still get away! These attacks are suicide and you know it. Save them while you still can! Don't make me kill you! God damn it, Aran, your actions are siding with the Pirates! How can you bear that?"

Samus prepared to dodge incoming fighter blasts, but as her eye flicked to the sensor display the three energy signatures were not descending on her. Instead they seemed to be twirling in their own combative dance through the air, one seeming to chase the others. The Diomedes was a collective, and its crew could not match Samus in her resolve. Dissension, weakness, and it sapped Nakamura's power, trimming away at his choices and hampering his actions. The Federation was weak, and the Hunter advanced.

The path shone so bright in Samus' mind, triumph over the impossible. Her eyes flicked down to spot a glowing target deep inside the ship and her beam weapon stabbed out in the same instant, wave beam energy only phasing to full force at the exact point of the target. The Diomedes shivered with an explosion below its decks. Another pressure point destroyed and the giant wavered. The humans were weak, they could not protect their own.

Then Samus' shield energy display ticked up.

With it a note of discord briefly rang through the harmony of battle. Soldiers were dying in the bones of this ship. Samus' perfect certainty wavered. They had orders, but so did the Pirates. Her weapons killed them both the same.

No, the future recrystallized. No time, her race continued. The path to victory led on. One of the point defense cannons caught her in its sights, but this time it did not fire. The chatter under the ship's skin was scattered, no longer as complete as it once was. The Pirate forces had dissolved into panic too.

"Aran!"

Then the icon on Samus' map and the scene before her eyes became one and the same as Samus' final leap reached her destination. Her armored shin and gauntlet and rang like crystal as they slammed against the hull, locking her in place. Beneath her, through shields and metal that parted to her eyes like so much air, lay the ship's primary antimatter annihilation reactor. The heart of this massive ship, laid bare to Samus' suit, and with its failsafes destroyed during her violent advance. A fragile balloon of fire and the silver pin wrapped around Samus' right arm. Humanity had failed once again.

The reactor's energy output feathered as if the machine itself sensed her presence and knew to fear her. Samus aimed down in this eternal second, carrying on the same flowing motion that brought her through the battle.

This was her victory. This was the path. This was the kill. This was her intention, to do the impossible, to defeat the Diomedes and this was the path had brought her here, threading that single strand of possibility through the maelstrom of combat, through ten thousand other deaths and ten thousand other failures. One second into the future she was already pulling the trigger. She was chozo, the will of that civilization made manifest. She was their judgement and their vengeance.

No! For a single fraction, Samus resisted, freezing in place as she suddenly fought against her own body, her own mind, her self. She was the hunter, she was the warrior, she was the killer. She was M'troid. The final victory was always her goal; destruction, extermination, obliteration, and when she gave herself up to the path that was where it led her. This new armor just made it so easy. It held death in her hand and the suit was hungry for it. Samus was so hungry for it. In this suit she was vengeance. She was survival. She was who she had always been meant to be. She didn't have to be human.

But instead she hesitated, and all around her the metal plates began to crackle and pop with tiny sparks. Then the path to victory shattered as a storm of lighting erupted, drawn by the ship's contracting shield. Darting arcs of electricity slammed through Samus, skating across her armored skin with a hundred scribbles in fifty thousand degree ink. Suit shields screamed their warnings and despite spasming muscles she felt the moment her magnetic grip loosed from the ship-side. Suit power pulled back into her remaining shields and without that grip, gravity and down reasserted themselves.

Samus fell from the sky, plummeting from the Diomedes as she trailed lines of steaming vapor.

As she watched the ship drop away, awaiting the point defense cannons that would snipe her out of the air, Samus seemed to be falling through a dream. Her eyes objected to the ship's motion. The acceleration of gravity not quite right, it was inconsistent, slowing as she fell. Then she realized what was happening; the Diomedes was dropping too. A second later she slammed against the ground and was surprised enough that it knocked the breath out of her from only a two thousand foot fall. The ground was supposed to be further away than that; the Diomedes had been descending even before Samus fell.

The battleship was defeated, but not by her hand. Those power fluctuations in the ship's primary reactor, it was not any damage she had done. No, these scan signatures were like some engineer had just walked up and pushed the off button. Someone within the ship had shut it down. Someone had saved her. No someone had saved them from her. In that final hate-driven moment, Samus had finally turned away from violence and for once found welcome.

However, for the Diomedes loss of primary power just off a planet surface did not bode well for a ship that had been relying on a flashy display of gravetics to hover. The battleship fell slowly but inescapably. A crash thundered across the valley as the lip of the canyon exploded into stone and dust with the impact against the prow. The Diomedes' skin crumpled where it met the ground, thought the rest of the structure held firm. Even with the sudden loss of primary power the ship had managed to slow its drop and realign shields so the structure was nearly intact, even as it came to a thundering rest propped against the steep valley wall like a hunting rifle set beside the door. With its rear engines crushed by impact and their own weight, the ship was not going to fly again.

Samus lay against the cracked and broken ground, dust settling around her as the ringing impact still vibrated through her bones. She looked up at the sky, evening light hidden by roiling black clouds, and her memory flitted back to another sky. Another rocky ground when Samus lay in the cold and smoke and fought for breath. In the icy dust of her first world, humanity had not been able to protect her. Despite everything, all the decades since, the fight with the Diomedes proved some of that poisonous anger still remained. Samus had changed so much since then, but that girl drowning in pain and fear was still her. That moment remained.

Samus was tired, but she took a breath. Then she breathed again.

Into the wind-whipped silence the crippled Diomedes sent out a transmission, crackling and indistinct, thick with snow. Evidently many of those broken spars snapped from the hull had been communications. Underneath the static Nakamura was panting, shaken and battered but still determined below the burning fervor of his conviction.

"Aran, I was trying to do what you-"

Then Namamura's voice cut out, and was replaced with the cheap audio quality of an individual coms unit.

"Ms Aran, this is your arresting officer, Hong Yin of the Galactic Federation. Commander Nakamura has been relieved of duty pending investigation. As an additional note, the GF battleship Diomedes requests formal planetary landing clearance on Ember of Light. Note though that any further action against this ship or its crew will be a violation of the terms of your parole."

Samus slowly sat up from the rough ground of newly made volcanic glass. Dust and gravel slid off her golden skin, then even the last bit of dust fell loose as she shook with a single sharp laugh.

"Docking granted. Welcome home, Yin."

The glassy shattered valley still rang with the distant crashes of settling landslides and rockfalls. In the air above, the black storm of superheated air still roiled with the high cold winds. Then Yin's voice returned to the channel. She now sounded more personal, as if she was no longer standing in the middle of a crowd.

"I...I want to thank you, Ms Aran. To thank you for giving us the choice. Thank you for letting us see what lay before us, before it was too late. Thank you for giving us the choice."

Samus looked off at the smoking form of the Diomedes, lying crashed against the canyon wall as behind it the distant shape of the titanic Chozo statue rose from the side of the volcano. The eyes of the massive statue were now glowing yellow. Well, that told her where all that absorbed energy had gone. As to why, she would just have to go and find out, to see where the path had led her. There was no future but the one that had always been.

And yet Yin had thanked her. That insignificant moment hung in the twisting air that battled between currents of hot and cold, frost and fire. She thanked Samus for granting her a choice. Such a phrase was just an expression of a primitive culture. Chozo philosophy taught that all choice was an illusion, a manifestation of weakness and lack of understanding. To say you might make a choice other than the one you would make was tautological gibberish, and so Free Will was just another constellation of ancient times, imaginary lines traced in an infinite sky.

Yet that idea of choice had just brought down a battleship. It was the oxymoron of intelligence; intelligent creatures could realize that the universe was made up of deterministic clockwork, but in order to remain intelligent they must discard that knowledge and behave as if they forged the future in their hands. They must stare into the void and leap past the limit of their understanding.

The Last believed she deserved apotheosis. She believed it was inevitable, her unshakable destiny, and she clung to that believe like another mathematical law, like the Life Energy Equation she had derived so long ago. Energy is matter, matter is life, life is thought, and thought is energy. All divisions were an illusion, meshing perfectly into the clockwork universe, of perfect predictability of infinite cogs.

But what if in that clockwork universe, one cog resisted? Grey Voice's words whispered in her memory, no longer a programed specter in the suit but still just as present.

"To face a being of perfect certainty, of unbendable will, that is a terrifying thing."

Samus stood up.

Past and future are the same. All divisions are illusion. There was no need for her to bare the responsibility for the Chozo people. They were still here to bare their own, just stepped to the side in time, living in the past as Samus lived now. She was not their vengeance, she was not their justice. She was not their heir, and neither was the Last. She was only Samus Aran, and she had no responsibilities but her own.

Yin's transmission spoke in her ear, quietly, as if standing right at her shoulder. "So, what are you going to do now?"

Samus turned to face the distant statue seated on the flank of the massive volcano, glowing with yellow eyes. Samus' lips ticked up at the corner into a smile.

"Storm the gate of heaven."

...