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Samus' fight raced through the halls of the Pirate ship. Her visor displays were still notifying her that the suit's screw attack components had been dissolved into energy to absorb that first high speed impact. At least it hadn't been any of the more crucial systems; she could deal with that one ability being cannibalized. Her weapon still worked and she was currently blazing a path of destruction through a vessel that did not expect boarding via meteor.

A gun clattered across the ground as a purple-shelled Pirate slowly slipped down from the dent it had left in the far wall. Samus held out her right arm and shot off three blasts through the smoke and frost that now filled the room, hitting three cameras in each corner. A tap at her temple shifted her view and through the far wall she saw the dim x-ray outlines of five heavily armed pirates gathering in the next room to stem her advance. As she watched, one was angrily hitting its arm presumably trying to get some view of her room from the dead cameras.

So she waited. A few seconds passed as Samus idly shifted her weight back and forth. She took another look at her suit shield readouts. She'd managed to absorb enough energy from that last power main she'd gained access to that the suit was almost back up to her current operating capacity. Behind the wall, the pirates were still panicking. Samus briefly flicked her visor back to normal view and looked at that wall again without penetrating scans. Then she returned to watching the marshaling strike team through the wall but she wondered at what she'd just seen. This was the first time she had ever seen art on a pirate vessel. It was...disturbing.

The Pirates finally lost their patience or worked up their nerve. They moved over to open the door and were instantly met by the shrapnel of said door exploding under a charged super missile blast. The first to stand up screamed as the next shot from her gun froze three quarters of its body into a grisly statue. Samus hoped she'd managed to download enough of Adam's personality before the gunship blew. It would be a hassle to rip him out of the Diomedes servers. The remaining Pirates were screeching as Samus leapt through the air, dodging their shots in order to line up one of her own as her weapon shifted and glowed with charging energy. The enhanced plasma shot pierced through three of them and they fell back, trailing smoke and viscera. Her suit shield power indicator flowed upwards.

After a moment the shield indicator ticked up slightly one more time. Apparently one of the Pirates had taken longer to die than she would have guessed. Energy is matter, matter is life, life is thought, and thought is energy. Old lessons, drilled into her head long ago. The suit's harvest system was merely a practical demonstration.

These Pirates were a motley bunch. She briefly scanned the scattered bodies that littered this vaulted hall. There were purple shelled Zebezian tribes, the claws and fangs of the Talon fleet, and one example of the thin detrigrade legs and four eyes of the gene-line that had been on top of the home-world ladder during the phazon assault. What was it that brought these dregs together? Samus remembered the strange art in the other hall. There had been two abstract bipedal figures, presumably Pirates, floating in a web of swirling patterns. She wondered which group had painted it.

Then a low crackling roar rumbled through the long corridors, bouncing off bulkheads and ruined Pirate bodies. Samus' weapon snapped up, an attack already charging as her heart thudded so hard she felt her teeth vibrate. Her visor said that it was just a sound over the ship speakers, but Samus recognized that voice without needing the suit to list out the identification. That screech was etched on her bones. Ridley was on this ship.

Samus burst forward, ripping through bulkheads, firing off missiles into any open hatchway as she made her way towards the ship's center. As she ran, Ridley's voice echoed around her, every speaker screaming threats and orders to the Pirate crew. Samus retreated into the calm of battle meditation. She'd killed Ridely so many times before. He was the Pirate's perfect general, bred for war and cloned endlessly, modified to the absolute peak of their society's ability, dispatched to anywhere they needed a champion. And she'd killed him over twelve times.

So, this splinter fleet had their own Ridely; unexpected but at least they would only have the one. Ridely, the 'ultimate commander', never tolerated any perceived threat to his authority even from himself. Samus' left hand threw out a grapple beam to draw the next Pirate close as a briefly living shield against his comrades' fire. Then she fired from behind it and a second later her shield energy levels ticked up a few more times. She advanced, as behind her one of the ship's primary engine rooms exploded under her departing missile barrage.

She was leaving a trail of destruction behind her but it was almost purely incidental. She was searching for the artifact; the technological haul the Pirates had found deep out in space that wet their appetites for the J4M colony. However, the ship's computers were putting up a surprisingly firm resistance to her suit's scans; taking terminals off the network almost as quickly as she could access them. It was curiously good security for the Pirates to stand up against her Chozo tech but in doing so the defense betrayed itself. Samus plotted a course to the part of the ship that went dark to her the quickest. That was where their greatest treasure would be.

Then one final door exploded before her and Samus ran into an anticlimactically cramped room. After passing, and damaging, lab after lab and endless factory lines assembling new weapons she had expected this most secret chamber to be more dramatic. The dark room was still large and high ceilinged, important enough to be made accessible for even Ridley's great bulk, but the space was deserted and had a pervasive air of disuse. A single large cube, each side over twice Samus' height, took up most of the room. A dim golden light glowed from under the tarp that covered it.

Blue energy cracked around Samus' left hand as her grapple whip shot out and threw back the heavy tarp in a second. The cube was Chozo all right, she recognized the glowing golden lines that decorated its engraved metal sides. However, she had no idea what this thing could possibly be. Her scan gave back nothing but some low level power source and an encoded Chozo warning not to approach. The Pirates didn't even seem to be using the damn thing. There were no cables hooking it up to the ship computers, no disassembled components laid out to reveal their secrets. Just a lone abandoned box.

Then the room's only other door opened in a hail of blaster fire that heralded the end of investigation time. Samus threw herself behind the cube just in time to avoid most of the subsequent missile barrage as a full troop of armored Pirate commandos advanced at a full run. She needed to go. That first blaster volley had hit her unsettlingly hard. From cover her gun was already charging, devastating energy washing her face with white light as power built inside the barrel.

Her weapon-bound right hand made a sign and the gun morphed slightly, even as she sprang back to leap off the wall behind her. The charged beam spread out in wide stream of piercing energy, throwing the Pirates back as it cracked their power armor. Unfortunately two of them seemed to almost completely ignore that wave beam attack. Samus noticed the white lettering on their armor. Great, some of that advanced weapon-immunity armor. Someone had scavenged some stuff from the old Talon fleet. She really hated those.

The other Pirates were also standing back up far too quickly for Samus' liking. Her weapon changed configuration again as she quickly waved that arm in an arc, her visor lighting up with a flurry of missile locks. However, these Pirates were soldiers. They reacted in a spit second and threw up energy barriers from their off hands, setting a wall of oval shields in a semicircle before her. It would have been brilliant, if the gun that Samus was pointing their way was actually aiming at them.

Samus' arm shivered with recoil as a stream of missiles shot out in a sweeping arc. In the instant before they hit the Pirate barriers the missiles swerved up and over to slam into the mystery cube. Even that many explosions all converged on a single point was not enough to destroy Chozo metal, but it was enough to crack it. The super missile that followed it was what actually blew open a hole into some inner compartment of the cube, and the next was enough to thoroughly ruin whatever was inside. The one after that was mostly for fun.

Even Samus had to admit the next few missiles were probably redundant.

A moment later she skidding out into the hallway, her armored shins raising sparks as they left scratches in the metal floor. One of the Pirate elites was dead, another injured and confined by ice for the next couple seconds, but that still left too much firepower for Samus to want to deal with. Whatever that cube had been she had destroyed it. Luckily this ship's builder seemed to have really liked long straight corridors. Samus felt her heart fall back into a steady rhythm as she ran. Blaster fire impacted her from behind, draining her shields, but a sheathe of shimmering energy began to build up around her suit as she accelerated still faster. She ran and in a moment she was a blinding streak that crossed the length of the ship like lightning.

Scan said that the main hanger was through that next bulkhead in front of her. Samus squinted her eyes as there was a slight crunch. Then there was no longer a bulkhead and she was in the hanger.

Samus slammed to a screeching stop and then jerked to the side as her suit jets threw her off at an angle, dodging a blast of the hanger's point defense cannons. Ridely was screaming out over the ship coms again but he still hadn't decided to show his face. Unfortunately a great number of his underlings had. A rather great number. Samus was already firing but it was mostly suppressive at the moment as she quickly dashed for cover.

Metal scraped metal as she thudded her back against a bit of solid looking machinery. She needed to get off this ship. Information flew across her eyes as she scanned the Pirate systems even as their powerful data security continued to push her back. Suit missile stocks were still pretty good though so she stuck her right arm out from behind her cover and shot out a few more at any target lock that popped up to her suit systems. In the middle of the following series of explosions a deeper rumbling traveled up her legs from the hanger floor. Samus looked up to see an inner hanger wall open up to reveal huge mechanical arms carrying a Pirate fighter craft out into launch position. Scan said it was a rush repair-and-relaunch job from something sustained in the battle outside. That could work.

Samus focused her attention for a moment back on the mass of Pirate troops on the other side of her cover and noticed that there was not much return fire happening at the moment. That meant it was time to move. Above, the Pirate fighter-ship's engines hummed up into ignition as the mechanical arms withdrew from it. Samus raced forward and jumped up, suit jets blasting to double the apex of her leap. She bounced off the hanger wall and leapt back again, thrusting out her left arm as the grapple beam deployed from the back of her hand. It attached to the fighter belly with a crackle of blue energy even as the engines roared to life in launch. Her speed added with the ship's carried her up and over in a tight swing, suit magnetics latching down on the top of the hull even as her grapple stretched and broke.

The ship burst forward out of the hanger, and Samus turned back at her attackers down on the deck, wearing a cocky grin. Then her smile slipped. Now that she could see them all at once, she recognized that there was a reason this maneuver of hers had been so easy. Most of the pirates were not shooting. True, some individuals and teams were unloading in her direction with futile desperation but squad after squad were simply standing there in the hanger and watching her go. Now that she thought of it she wasn't sure they had ever fired on her. Then the Pirate fighter carried her out into space beyond sight. The uneasy feeling in her stomach grew.

That feeling was not helped by the fact that someone had clued in the pilot of her ride to the fact that he had a very hostile barnacle attached to his hull. Samus could look down into the cockpit where the Pirate thrashed at his controls and sent the fighter into a chaotic mess of spins and rolls, desperate to fling her off his ship. That was annoying. Samus tapped her temple and the suit scans proceeded to disable some of his flight controls. Fortunately, whoever had been upgrading that Command Ship's software hadn't gotten to the fighters yet and the Chozo suit still smashed through these systems. Samus even got access to battle telemetry, though the news there was less good.

The Diomedes was a long way off. Evidently they'd made good advantage of the damage Samus had managed to do to the Pirate command ship's engines and had pulled away from the pursuit to actually near rounding the planet's horizon. The remaining GF fighters were pulling back too, though there was still a good amount of combat happening in the intervening space. In fact, as Samus' unwilling ride twirled and swerved through the black, she saw another briefly nearby pirate fighter that was still making a direct bee line towards the Diomedes, a path that cut deep down towards the planet's atmosphere. Another opportunity.

It was tricky timing but the suit handled the calculations. The virtual mark in space approached, then Samus jumped free of her frantic fighter and sailed through space on a high speed intercept course to this new ride. She just barely got within grapple range but managed to draw herself in as it continued to accelerate on towards the Federation ship. She was heading back into the fight.

With this ship's current orientation the planet hung above her, close enough to blot out half of space. White storms and white ice mixed with brownish green land and a few equatorial oceans. For the first time since arriving in this system Samus directed her suit to scan to place, to learn something about J-4M other than the fact that the Chozo had been there once and the humans were there now. Atmospheric data and a Federation data entry popped up and started scrolling for a second. Then those entries blinked and abruptly disappeared. They were replaced by a single word of text displayed across Samus' visor.

"Welcome"

That was decidedly ominous.

Then the Pirate fighter under her feet shook and the planet began spinning around her. Samus looked to the side with disbelieving exasperation at the hole some GF fighter had just shot through her ride. She really wished ships would stop getting shot out from under her. This was becoming a serious problem and the planet rapidly becoming much bigger was an even more serious one.

The Pirate pilot's distress was very briefly increased as a sudden blast ripped his cockpit canopy off and an orange gauntlet reached in to rip him out of his seat before hurling him out into space. Samus swung into the newly vacuum-filled interior and set about trying to wrangle things into order as the suit patched into the ship computers. Unfortunately, what the ship computers told her was that core containment had been breached and the main reactor was a few seconds away from exploding. These Space Pirate constructs really weren't built to last. Samus spun the ship around to face away from the planet and set the engines for full bone-crushing burn, cutting speed as she prayed that the antimatter containment was failing more in the direction of five seconds rather than two. Faint orange flames began to lick around the edges of the shattered cockpit as they plummeted into the atmosphere.

Samus managed to fling herself out of the ship right as her suit said that it was now more improbable that the ship had not already exploded. The quickly following flash still thudded against her personal shields but at least she'd managed to get behind it so the explosion bled off a little more of her orbital velocity. That was nice. However, that meant that she was still left hurtling toward the planet's surface with reentry flames burning through her fingers. She was all out of ships.

Well, this was the first time she'd experienced free-fall reentry. It was actually rather pretty though likely to be fatal. She was above the planet's northern hemisphere where the massive polar ice caps eventually gave up against an expansive barren mountain range whose southern slopes were marked with dark lines, branching and joining as they led down to the equatorial lowlands that actually supported life. There was now a dim haze of panicked radio messages drifting up from the surface as the populated area rotated into view. A little blue icon blinked on near the horizon and slowly moved into Samus' view as the suit told her the human colony actually lay perfectly at the end of her uncontrolled descent.

Somehow that did more to add to the sinking sensation in Samus' stomach than the hurtling fall to her probable death. She'd made no effort to aim her trajectory and yet out of an entire planet she was aimed directly at the one place she could possibly want to go. There had been a few times in her life when she'd felt the touch of something like fate. She never liked it. Her second family had taught her that probability and chance was a mind of its own, the gestalt of all matter and thought in the universe. That it could have a will and a direction like all other things; a music to existence. But they had also taught her how to survive and right now that had to be her chief concern.

The friction flames around her suit had now increased to the point that they were interfering with her organic vision. Samus briefly flipped feet first, fired her widely insufficient suit jets, then returned to the flat limbs-spread areobraking position as she waiting for them to recharge. Over the nineteen minutes until impact she would have to repeat this two hundred and twenty eight times to of bleed off every last scrap of velocity that she could hope for. Unfortunately, the suit told her exactly how much she could hope for in the distance provided. She would hit the ground at five hundred and thirty eight miles per hour at a sixty degree angle. The visor displayed those particular numbers in red.

Absolute surety of death was oddly familiar. She'd made peace with death so many times before. The first had been when she was six years old. Her second family had saved her then. They had saved her body and then they had saved her mind. They taught her their view of existence; that nothing ever ended. Death might come at anytime but the discrete self was an illusion, just as the discrete now was an illusion. When Samus died she would not be gone. All the times she had been alive would always still exist. Every memory was still alive, and every future she had ever imagined was just as populated as when she first envisioned it. They were all equally true in their own way. The old lesson always helped in these times. It was designed to lead her to peace and to union with all the other minds that had ever roamed this universe.

However, Samus was nagged with a bit of guilt as she fell to her death, alternating suit jets and spreading against the bone rattling wind. This time she mostly just felt bored. She'd died too many times before. The ground was approaching. Outside her suit the wind was screaming.

Red alerts flashed across her visor as the suit gave up on organic reaction times and prepared for its worst case scenario. The mountains rose up below, now actually visible in relief. The suit glowed and hummed as it readied all remaining shields and any possible bits of matter that could be converted into energy to soften this impact. The mechanisms curled her into a ball as barriers shimmered into temporary existence around her. In the rapidly approaching distance Samus briefly saw a light glint off glass or metal down amid the dust. She supposed that was the human colony. The buildings sat at the mouth of a network of canyons or riverbeds that stretched up to the end of her projected path.

Then Samus saw the mountain Nakamura had shown her, looming high above that little human settlement. She saw the giant statue of an unknown seated Chozo carved out of its side. As she fell, the outstretched hand almost seemed like it was pointed at her. She smiled as the suit screamed warnings and alarms. She liked that.

Then she hit the ground.

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