...

Vibrations and distorted vision signaled Diomedes dropping out of jump with a soundless thump which hit the soul. Samus glanced over at her designated overseers. Nakamura looked rather groggy and pale at the moment; hyper jump was really disorienting to any mind not disciplined enough to handle it. But still, the people on this ship were experienced space crew and would be back in busy operation in thirty seconds or so. Samus closed her eyes again and tried to take advantage of this last moment of meditation available to her. Breath and the slow beat of thought was an anchoring rhythm. There was something moving in the fabric of fate; a thought hiding at the back of her mind. She sat and tried to recapture it in the music of silence.

Then the ship shuddered in pain. A blaring alarm instantly filled every vibrating particle of air as Samus' eyes snapped open. Nakamura fumbled for the computer controls as Samus was already out of her restraint seat and bolting towards the cabin door.

Nakamura called into the coms. "What's...Bridge, report! What just happened?"

He was still disoriented, they all were. It would be a few more seconds before the human crew truly registered that the ship was under attack.

Samus slammed the emergency interior release on the commander's cabin door as she barreled out into the hallway, rebounding off the wall as she changed directions. One of the decorative panels cracked under her shoulder and Officer Yin was thrown back into her restraint seat as she tried to rise but Samus was already gone down the passage at a full run.

From behind her, Nakamura yelled out, "Samus, what are...?! Dammit! Bridge, emergency alert and full countermeasures authorized. Fire on all targets! Clear our space!"

Samus' feet pounded on the hallway floor. They'd dropped into an ambush. The Pirates had somehow tricked the Diomedes into predicting a much longer path for the splinter fleet than they actually took. Now they were already waiting for the Federation's return to the colony planet. The pirates or someone else, she had to consider possibilities. In any case, the Diomedes was caught in the teeth of a trap and as Samus ran the huge ship shuddered again from another impact against the already stressed shields.

Silent cursing filled her head as Samus ached for the missing navigation displays from her suit visor. Her previous path through this ship had been too circuitous so she was relying on pure intuition from her time on other Federation ships to find the straightest route to her current destination. At this point she just had to hope that the lead designer of this new vessel class was human so she was working off the correct layout assumptions. She dropped down a stair port without once touching a single step and now there were uniformed crew around her rushing to their combat stations. They all had other things to worry about than her, and on a military vessel anyone running with this amount of determination was unconsciously granted at least a provisional sergeant rank so they got out of her way.

There, Samus thought, spotting a directory on the wall as she ran by. The intersection of munitions and quarantine. That's where they'd be keeping it. She was charging down a temporarily empty corridor but she knew better than to think that no one was watching her.

"Nakamura!" she yelled at the blank walls. "My suit!"

Then she rounded a corner and two armored marines stood between her and the destination.

Both weapons snapped up in response to the six-foot woman suddenly leaping through the bulkhead airlock and charging their position. Time slowed for a second as Samus' foot came down, two gun barrels targeted her heart, and one of the marines reflexively cocked his head as a coms voice began to speak in his helmet. Nakamura's crew was quick on the uptake and seemed to be already granting Samus clearance to pass by.

Unfortunately, that conversation would take a few seconds too long. Samus leaned back from her dash into a slide, letting her momentum close the distance as her toe shot up to catch tip of the first Marine's weapon, deflecting it up. Then her hand shot out to grab his armored ankle. There were a few crashes as the two soldiers were rendered into a state of no longer blocking the hallway and Samus regained her feet in a single smooth motion, recovering the small bit of speed she'd lost. She raced off again. People in power armor never expected an unarmored human to match their strength.

The quarantine lab fortunately had time to respond to the bridge's warning and the correct sequence of doors were open and clear for her, laying a path free of otherwise necessary violence. Then, there at the end of the corridor, a single suit of orange armor stood in an empty room. Even at full sprint, Samus felt a slow breath slide out of her lungs. The front of the armor shimmered and began to slide open. It needed no signal to recognize her.

Then they met and she was whole once more.

...

The Diomedes bridge blazed with red tinted combat lighting. Screens and holo displays blinked warnings as the seats deployed crew's void suits onto their bodies even as they worked the controls. Commander Nakamura briefly gripped an arm on a passing lieutenant's shoulder for stability as he skidded onto the bridge and his station, panting after the run from his cabin. He didn't bother yelling, right now all his crew knew their orders, but his eyes flickered from display to display as his brain overheated in processing the mess outside their hull. Hostile ships in every direction, and the planet stretched out below them. They were almost surrounded. Then the hostile markers were blinking red as they shifted around the map display.

To his right one of the crew reported. "Shield load spiking up to eighty percent but still holding."

"Bay two fighter launches complete."

"Direct hit. Enemy corvette disabled."

New alarms started flashing. "Commander! Data intrusion against servers Beta and...! Sir, intrusion on every network! They're ripping through our firewalls. They've got access to everything! I can't stop them!"

"Intrusion traced to...! Onboard! Quarantine level!"

Nakamura finished bucking himself into his combat station. Onboard? He could guess what that meant. "Deprioritize that intrusion. I know what that is. It's Aran."

"Sir, marines reporting single attacker on deck-"

"Yeah, that'll be her too." Half symbols on the screens abruptly turned red and the ship shuddered. "Focus on punching us out of this damn encirclement! Light them all up!"

News of disaster from the colony below filled his screen. The planet-bound Aurora unit was still filling a communication line with its coded assessment of the ongoing Pirate ground assault. Out here hostile ships were on every side, surrounded the lone Federation vessel and its spreading cloud of fighters. Nakamura felt a smile twitch at the corner of his lips. For a ship like Diomedes, surrounded meant that half of those hostiles would soon be relevant only as floating debris. There was a reason the Federation felt comfortable with Diomedes acting alone out here.

His chair vibrated faintly as the bones of the ship distantly hummed. The main cannon was charging.

The display in front of him continued blinking the colony's distress message. They had been under attack for three hours.

...

Information flooded in front of Samus' eyes. System warnings from across the ship. Telemetry data from the attackers out in space. Communications between combat stations as the crew of hundreds all rushed to their designated tasks.

The suit's haptic feeds and audio queues integrated everything into her awareness in a way that even the best computer terminal could only dream of doing. That cumulative pound and a half of Chozo computing could equal anything short of a full Aurora unit, however right now Samus was busy convincing those same systems that it wasn't worth smashing through every bulkhead in a straight line to her gunship in the hanger. There were currently enough people trying to put holes in this ship without Nakamura having to deal with holes spreading from within.

The Diomedes briefly hummed around her and two enemy indicators on her visor winked out outside the ship as Samus charged down the corridors. That would be the main cannon. Samus approved.

However, this whole ambush attack didn't make sense. Without phazon corruption maddening their decision makers the Pirates just didn't take risks like this. That rag tag splinter fleet Nakamura had shown her was practically guaranteed to lose at least half their numbers before they even scratched something like Diomedes. If they'd managed to get intelligence of the Federation ship being out of system, then the Diomedes should have dropped in to see the fleet scrambling to lift off from the planet J-4M with whatever loot they'd managed to grab during the the ship's absence. But instead nearly everything the Pirates had was out here in high orbit, waiting for a heavily armed battleship to drop out of jump.

Samus didn't like when things didn't make sense. But despite her confusion and unease, in the middle of this battle a familiar sense of balance was rising within her. She could feel her heart beating in her veins. There was a rhythm in her bones. There was part of her that loved this. Then, just before she reached the hanger, her suit flashed a warning as a horrendous crash ripped through the ship.

She continued forward and leaped through a twisted and damaged airlock door as a hurricane of atmosphere suddenly rushed past her, sucked into the hanger by a new vacuum. Her boots locked on the deck in an easy resistance but she stopped anyway to stare out at the newly missing outer wall. She was looking into the black of space. The ship's hull now ended at the edge of the hanger in glowing molten edges, blinding orange against the void, a void that flashed with the blazing spears of laser fire. Outside, new constellations swirled as missiles swooped towards their targets across thousands of miles. Comparatively tiny fighters swerved and sparkled in dogfights before they took a wrong move and bloomed into brief shining novas. All without a sound but the rushing of air from behind her.

In the hanger, Samus sprang forward. With each muted thud of her boots against the deck and each rumble of the suit's jets, ripples of speed boost energy formed around her armor as she accelerated towards the missing wall. Off to the right, her gunship was already powered up and broke free of its bonds, her suit's Chozo hacking smashing against the electric locks that restrained it. Samus didn't need to signal any plan; from inside the shipboard computer Adam knew her history well enough to predict what she was about to do and her personality well enough to not bother advising against it. Samus raced on, still building speed as energy shimmered around her.

Then she reached the melted edge of the hanger and jumped, thrusting her legs back as she thundered out into the black silence of vacuum. She smiled as the imagined music of battle whispered in her ears. She rocketed through space, alone.

Samus set her suit into a slight spin, taking in the conflict that stretched for a twenty thousand miles in each direction around her. For this moment she was too small a target to be focused on so she could think and plan without worrying about evasion. There were over fifty Pirate ships of significant size but they were getting shredded, or rather some of them were. Certain other ships were standing firm against the Federation munitions and something out here had ripped a hundred meter gash in the side of Diomedes. The Pirates had new weapon.

A metal surface thumped into her boots from behind, acceleration creating an imitation of gravity. The gunship had caught up to her and Samus was now standing on its nose, a lone woman perched on a mountain peak as it revolved through space.

"Adam," she murmured. "Where did the hanger blast originate from?"

The digital mind spoke from the gunship. "At this point, I believe I will simply transfer that question over to the Diomedes' encrypted communications. A few of them have been quite loudly wondering what you've been doing."

A second later, as Samus flipped backwards into the void before launching headfirst through the gunship's briefly open airlock, voices exploded into her helmet.

"Aran!" It seems Nakamura had seized the bridge coms. "That shot pierced straight through our shields with only forty percent power loss! It's frequency shifting or something...we're still analyzing. That's something new, and way too dangerous. Get back in on Diomedes this moment; we can't afford to lose you here!"

During the commander's pause for breath Adam gently interjected for Samus' ears only. "The beam origin is now marked for you."

Samus twirled as she maneuvered inside the tight gunship cabin, and locked into the cockpit harness. She glanced out the view-screen into space just in time to notice the blaring alarm of an incoming locked missile. A nearly mortal fifteen Gs of burn blasted the gunship out of the way at the last minute as she and Adam wordlessly plotted a weaving, twisting course toward the largest Pirate vessel.

Nakamura's voice came back over coms. He sounded resigned now. "And there's the intrusion alarm in our combat computers so I suppose you have the beam origin already. At least you're now out of range to keep hacking us but, Aran, be careful."

The battle was chaotic. Diomedes was successfully retreating towards the planet's distant horizon but that path turned the main guns away from the remaining bulk of the enemy fleet and the Pirates were pursuing. In fact, the largest Pirate vessel and its escorts were actually gaining on the powerful Federation battleship's acceleration. Again, that shouldn't be possible.

The expanse between this chase was filled with the clash of smaller ships. Dying fighters exploded like blazing confetti. Missiles detonated in a constant sparkle of pinpricks as laser shots traces a strobe-like web. Samus' ship dove into the heart of this.

A target reticule popped up on the cockpit display and a hunter missile fired from the gunship as Samus' finger twitched in command. She wasn't entirely sure if she or Adam had fired it. The AI clone of her old commander had evolved since those days when he had been issued in the failed attempt to control her. By now they'd reached a point where they barely talked to each other. Samus liked that.

A GF fighter radioed thanks as that missile shredded the Pirate raider that had been bearing down on it from behind. Samus just tapped "acknowledged" as her yellow ship continued its knifelike plunge down the battle's neck.

Her cockpit shook as a partial hit nearly blew out one of the shield emitters. Samus jerked the controls and a hard evasive turn hit her with enough acceleration that she could feel it in her organs even through the ship and suit's dampeners. Another alarm went off. Atmosphere was venting through a pinprick somewhere on the gunship but she didn't bother with that. In fact, the cabin was only pressurized at all because she never bothering to change the factory settings on this latest replacement ship. She never risked removing her suit amid vacuum, no matter how secure things seemed. That was the sort of lesson you only needed to learn once in a lifetime.

The gunship fired again and again. A hundred miles away a breacher missile exploded against the side of a mottled black Pirate cruiser.

Adam's voice imposed itself over the alarms, silencing them. "The ship missile stocks are being depleted rapidly. This model is not suitable for this type of combat mission. I predict a seventy percent chance of total destruction before you manage to breech the Pirate command ship. Do you understand the risks?"

Text flashed onto the view screen. "Yes/No"

Her thumb twitched to the right to select the option as a smile floated onto her lips. "Yes"

Adam simulated a sigh. "I assumed as much. Well, I no longer regret being forcibly duplicated onto the Diomedes systems. No matter how they treated that copy, it is some small degree of enforced immortality." There was a slight pause, filled with the flashing of frustrated ignored alarms. "I wish I could do the same for you, Samus."

"Then let's not die."

Fighting in space was so quiet. Explosions sparkled like scattered gems but the gunship only made any sound when it was changing velocity or firing, or when an enemy's attack came near enough to brush against the shields. Otherwise, no matter how violent the spectacle outside, it unfolded in perfect silence. That was true even if every mammalian instinct screamed that it should be hearing the end of the world.

A beam of blinding light split the black expanse, erupting from the Pirate command ship to splash against the back of distant Diomedes in a shimmer of purple and gold and fire. That should have made noise.

Samus felt her heart thud as she watched the massive beam wink out. It had to be the weapon that had slashed across the hanger bay earlier. This told her that it had a long recharge cycle but even so she doubted Diomedes' ability to withstand a third hit. Nakamura's encrypted transmissions to his fighters in the battle had fallen silent. Possibly that beam had damaged something important to their communications. Samus locked her eyes on the enemy ship as she dove and rolled to avoid more Pirate fighters. So it was true, the Pirates had found some piece of new technology out in the wilds. None of this changed her mission but it added a more definite time limit.

She had to board the Pirate Command ship, find whatever ancient treasure these raiders had unearthed, destroy it, and escape preferably while disabling the vessel, all before the weapon recharged. She could do this. She could probably do this. Adam helpfully flicked a countdown to the top corner of her visor as all the while warning lights continued to blink around the cockpit.

Then her gunship exploded.

For half a second, sound and fire engulfed her. Then it was gone and Samus frantically twisted in her seat to see that fifteen feet of the side of her ship had been replaced with a jagged sparking hole into space. The stars outside were spinning.

Adam was speaking in her helmet. "Direct hit sustained. Catastrophic damage. Primary engine offline. Secondary engine failing. Reactor containment failing. Missile launch offline. Computer cooling-"

Samus interrupted. "Final burst of thrusters to confirm a near miss trajectory then red-line secondary engine without limiters, followed by complete transmission cutoff. Now."

She felt the dying ship shudder and screech under her as it complied. The fitful, intermittent rumble of the secondary engine told her that it was trying its best, even if it could only manage this for a few more moments of acceleration. Luckily they had already been going very fast and the enemy shouldn't bother targeting them again. It was easy to pretend to be a disabled wreck when you absolutely were.

She detached from her restraints and moved to the shattered hole in the side of her ship. Outside, the dark mass of the Pirate Command ship was growing larger with each appearance from the gunship's slow axial revolutions. The enemy ship's long spines glowed with dull purple illumination as it hung amid the stars, seemingly motionless even as this view spun. Then the vibrations in the gunship's hull stopped as the last engine failed. Her ship was completely inoperable and they were not on course to impact the command ship, if only by a few miles. Suit calculations said that at current angles the wreck would orbit the planet obliquely for twenty-six months before the orbit decayed into the atmosphere. Tactically irrelevant. Samus smiled. Really, it was almost perfect.

But she had to move fast. She reached up to grab the twisted metal edge of the hole in the hull before twisting and flinging herself out onto the still spinning exterior, free of gravity but fighting the rotating inertia all the way. Her boots locked down with a magnetic clunk as her inner ear tried and failed to do the same. She walked across the still spinning hull as her left hand signed out the commands to initiate downloading the gunship's computers into her suit systems. Adam would be coming with her. The Pirate ship rotated into view again, it was growing closer, then it was gone again and the planet rose again to fill the sky before its own descent.

"Data transfer speeds insufficient to complete task with the timeframe." Adam's voice was already losing the more subtle inflections. Those shipboard systems were heavily damaged. "Most transmitters are offline. You can not risk detection by boosting the signal strength. Do you understand?"

Samus had found what she was looking for, a fold in the outer hull where the armor was thickest. It would have to do and she could only hope that the fuselage hadn't cracked too much. She gestured to the right and the gun that surround her forearm began to expand and glow as segmented chunks of metal rearranged. The gunship completed another rotation and the Pirate Command ship swung by in a new arc, growing closer all the time. The pirates, the planet, and her; all spinning in space.

Adam was still speaking, "Download thirty percent complete. I have rigged the reactor and the remaining munitions together. Your maneuver window is closing." She hadn't vocalized her plan but it was obvious enough, even as pieces of Adam's memory overheated one by one.

She had to time this right. The gunship hurtled on, still spinning. Projected dotted lines in space appeared in Samus' visor as the powerless ship coasted towards the final calculation. There! Her gun let out a vibrating hum as an orb of white energy slowly detached from the barrel, small arcing sparks forming a web that held it still in that crook of the hull. The center portion of the orb was raised and seemed to be revolving; spinning faster and faster as the light it emitted curiously dimmed. Samus scrambled across the hull, magnetics and muscles fighting the centripetal force as she struggled to get more of the ship between her and that energy egg. You did not want to be standing by a Power Bomb when it hatched.

A flash of light and an impact like a mountain smashed through Samus' bones. Shards of metal slashed at her suit, draining a bit of shield strength as the magnetic systems surged to ensure she wasn't thrown off the hull. But after that single second there was only silence again; silence and the Pirate Command ship which was now directly in front of their newly modified trajectory.

Adam's voice was in her ear. "Successful maneuver."

Samus glanced at the indicator in the corner of her vision. "Download 52%" It would have to be enough. Samus moved back to the rear of the gunship, finding the exact middle of the spinning axis. Adam had been reconstituted from worse. And there was no time for apologies. So she bent her knees, aimed carefully, and jumped with all her might up into the empty void of space.

The gunship hulk hurtled on down towards the side of the Pirate vessel and Samus trailed directly behind it at only a slightly lesser speed, just another piece of wreckage thrown free from the hull after some damaged systems must have produced a rogue weapons detonation. The Pirate command ship expanded against the stars below her as she fell towards it. A careful twist of her legs and she canceled out her rotational inertia, setting up a stable reference point to the command ship. Everything according to plan. Still, she held her breath as the next few seconds passed. But the Pirates didn't even bother shooting down the carcass that was aimed at their side. Nothing of the gunship's mass could do more than scratch the hull of a ship that large. That is, if four buster missiles and a warp-class antimatter reactor weren't all rigged to detonate on impact.

Samus felt her smile slip a notch. It was a pity she couldn't hear the explosion.

The flash was still pretty and as soon as it erupted Samus was firing hard with all the thrusters on her suit, bleeding out as much of this velocity as possible. The suit vibrated and hummed, Varia components venting heat buildup, as she plummeted down to a scorched hole in the side of curbed black metal. Despite herself, Samus squinted. This was still going to be be a hard landing.

She hit the inner bulkhead at a relative two hundred and sixty three miles an hour.

It only took a few seconds for the suit and her enhancements to ameliorate the resulting concussion, at least enough to allow her to get her bearings. It took a few seconds longer to extract her lower half from the hole she'd punched in the opposite hallway wall. It was an undignified, wiggling, metal melting procedure that left Samus annoyed, face first on the floor, and in the perfect mood to turn her attention to the two poleaxed Space Pirates in maintenance crew void-suits who apparently had been watching this entire performance. Samus raised her power beam as they belatedly turned to run, their pincers raised in panic. Sometimes it really didn't pay to be the first responder.

...

(If you can, please leave comments, questions, or reviews. The whole reason I post online is to get feedback and I will always respond, even long after the story is completed.)