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Chapter Text

My name is Samus Aran.

When I first thought to make this transmission, I believed it would be as a fugitive of the Galactic Federation, but truly, not even I could predict where my future lay. 

In the events of my last mission, one more fraught with the past than I realized, I look back upon the ramifications of my human life. Does the future once again hold the consequences of the past?

I am choosing to declassify a previous mission I undertook for the Galactic Federation years before, on a ship shaped like a bottle, emitting what was known as a baby's cry.

I wasn't supposed to be there, and yet I was. 

Another survivor is here with me, though it cost him his life to do so. 

It started with an act of mercy that nearly destroyed everything. I knew better, at the time, but a single inaction can destroy an empire.

A single child, watching its parents die in front of them can change everything.

The infant metroid from the planet SR-388.

Unlike me, it had been too young to know why it was suddenly in a world with no one else like it, like me, it wanted to befriend its parents' murderer. 

Ridley had some sense, I think, to try to kill me when he did. A child left to grow up after a massacre does nothing but cause harm, and that is something both I and Ridley know.

In the end, however, the baby Metroid saved me. Even now, when I close my eyes, I still see the sparkling of jelly flesh as it explodes around me, raining its life down on me as Mother Brain looms gigantic over me.

The sparkling resolve in the glasses of a Federation scientist who smirked down at me as he gleefully tells me he's polished my suit. It was a mistake in my youth, when I was enlisted in the Galactic Army, to sign over my suit to them, thinking that I would be at home in my own second skin that they could modify, rather than the cold gray all the other troopers wore.

It has saved my life, but I know the cost of owing anyone more than you can pay back, and the brutality of them cashing in.

Baby's Cry. A distress signal beamed out across the cosmos. 

The outside of the ship was nondescript, the small core of human habitation choking out the section of the bridge from the larger zoo that lay beneath it, still anchored to the vessel. The idea had been that when these ships became too dangerous, human lives could flee to the main sector and be flung off to safety to be recovered later. The distress beacon was coming from that section, signaling that there had been an attempt to dislodge the habitation quarters from the bottleship, one that had failed.

Whatever happened there happened so quickly that the main sector had been compromised, resulting in only one scenario. The threat had spread to the upper quarters and the evacuation had been canceled. Even as I maneuvered my ship to land, the call faded from my sensors, the wail of the child no more than an echo.

Stillborn.

The looming shape of a Galactic transport ship was unmissable, unusual. It could have been a response to the now dead cry.

It wasn't.

My armor clad feet made a crisp cold sound on the steel beneath me, the noise echoing into silence. This ship seemed a lot smaller on the outside and far away, I sometimes forget how large things can be, built by mortal hands.

Cathedrals. Worshiping what? The Chozo don't believe in gods anymore than humans do, but they are spiritual, their structures built to last even after they passed through. The rest of the universe has said they died out but even now the spirit of the Chozo live on. I once saw their ghosts, corrupted by phazon from the other side of the galaxy, and I've seen their ghosts reflecting back at me. 

There is faint noise up ahead, the sound of explosives, loud enough that my approach was almost muffled. It was novel having guns shoved in my face without the flash of fired rounds, though not novel enough to have me hesitate before I also aim, swinging my arm cannon to ready position as I count how many men were in front of me. Five?

Six.

The final one materializes out of the shadows, a ghost even then. 

Adam Malkovitch.

Somehow I knew it even before he spoke.

Anthony recognized me next, the one that was almost as big as I was in his power armor, his cheerful voice rang out as he soothes the other guys, convincing them to lower their guns.

As he does so, it's out of respect for Anthony that I also lower mine-- that and if I acted on the disgust that boils in the back of my throat as Adam speaks, calling me an outsider, I would never find Federation work again.

Outsider, the word was deliberate, meant to cut me to the core. The reminder that I had left Adam, my commanding officer and this squad to become a freelancer. A Bounty Hunter, something I knew he considered to be filthy. Not bound by the morals of the Federation, and paid to do the dirty work that would be too dangerous for regulation workers. Not that they would ever unionize.

He turns away from me, they all do, even Anthony, who was the slowest, his dark eyes lingering on my face. I have been dismissed.

The nice thing about freelance work  means that I can choose the projects I'm passionate about in my free time. 

I hang back, watching the explosion that does nothing to the door in front of them, barely even charring the face of it. As they're discussing, Adam moves closer to the door, and I take aim.

I miss him, but the missile hits its target, causing him to whip around and growl at me.

"This is a Federation mission, and you are not to interfere," He snaps, the door smoldering open behind him, " Do you understand?!"

I don't need to laugh at him, Anthony chuckling for me. It had been Anthony's idea after all, having nodded me toward the door.

If six grown men in the Galactic Federation Army can't open a single door, what really was the point listening to them?

I should have realized then, that if the door had remained closed, all of them would have made it out alive. I killed them as soon as I opened the path forward. 

Adam turns again, summoning his squadron to follow at his heels, deeming me beneath his time and energy. Outsider, he does not need to say it twice.

I expected it to sting more. His brother and I were friends, once, remembering the feeling of what it was like to be around a human family. Adam had been family, once.

No longer. 

He had thrown that away, Adam had no need for family.

I had no need for Adam.

Chapter Text

However, it intrigued me. Adam could have chased me away, if only with threat to my ongoing contracts with the Federation. Had he really pressed it, I would have had to drop it, and the bottle ship. It intrigued me, and after all, as long as I didn't interfere…

It galled me to take orders when I wasn't on assignment, and I wouldn't be turning back now. As long as I didn't blow anything else up, it was like I wasn't even here.

At least that's the justification I gave myself before plunging into the depths that lurked behind the door I had blasted open.

As I headed through a series of doors, I was met with a familiar-- and nearly impossible sight. A reo, like the ones I had seen as a child on Zebes startled me, and another one, rushing me off the catwalk to the grating down below. They had nested here, I could tell from the amount of them, and there was moss growing on the floor. 

It wasn't deliberate, them living here, and as I climbed up, I found geemers as well. It was like seeing the spirits of the dead. No less of a threat either, last time I saw spirits of the dead, they tried to kill me on Tallon IV. 

I had destroyed my home, the world that I grew up on and lived with the Chozo, I rendered into dust. As far as I knew, save for the five alien creatures I had saved myself, nothing on Zebes had survived. Geemers, reos, skree-bats.

Ridley.

Burned back into space dust, waiting for the eons to put them back together again.

As I made my way deeper into the ship, reos continued to leap out at me, viciously attacking anything that moved. Up ahead, from deeper in, there is the sound of gunfire, hardly surprising from what I've been encountering. What surprised me was how close I was getting to it. A squad of six shouldn't be struggling to take down reos or geemers.

Shouldn't.

On the planet Aether, an entire platoon had been wiped out, having run out of ammo to the world's constant assault, unable to escape the planet's poisoned and divided atmosphere. I had been lucky, blessed by the hands of the Chozo, with a suit that created bursts of energy that needed no ammo, so that even when I was at my most powerless I would always be defended.

The Federation has been after my technology for years, ever since I joined their army. Before I came, the Galactic Federation and the galaxy at large did not know or had forgotten that the Chozo had been warriors once. 

My suit is an antique from times before human understanding, and is more advanced than anything they could dream of; partly because humans have forgotten how to dream once they were surrounded by the metal and trappings of their science.

It wasn't long until I had caught up to the group, standing around something. I barely had time to see what it was-- A dead body covered in green slime. Blood? There were creatures that could change a human's blood to green if their saliva got into the open wounds. Most of the men seemed repulsed by this, it was clear he had been dead for a while and the smell… 

They had been foolish enough to open their suits up, the ship having breathable air. I knew what he smelled like, the dead animal smell attacked by denizens of Zebes.

His body begins to jerk and wriggle, and I expect him to stand up, puppeted by the forces of the Ing--

No, it was just a bug hatching out of him. One of many inside of him, I'm sure of it. 

One of the squad kicks it up to shoot at it, only stopping when someone puts their hand on him.

Green. 

Not like the dead body, but green as in fresh. Fresh blood, inexperienced. They would all die here, I knew it. I could see it in Adam's face too, that small clenching of his jaw.

I had seen that expression before.

It made me angry.

He was willing to watch all of these men die, and he knew it. 

The words stuck behind my teeth, Adam turning slightly to watch me, a hard look in his eyes, daring me to say something. His eyes widen slightly, his opening in something like awe-- the scuttling of feet causes all of us to turn, bugs climbing up the wall, collecting themselves around something, boiling up like an infection from the ceiling and dropping to the floor in a splattering of insect bodies. It rises up, revealing a malevolent orange eye, purple limbs flickering erierily in the light.

The guns were ineffective. 

I wasn't going to let them die like this, my arm cannon firing almost with its own violation. Part of me wanted to be petty, to punish Adam for all the times he did nothing, but…

I would not let these men die for a grudge of a past inaction. 

My powerbeam was nothing. The carapaces of the insects were highly reflective, it was like shooting a mirror, the beam bouncing off and hurtling through the air at an angle. Instinctively, I switch to my missiles, but then restrain myself, stepping back and stopping from firing.

If I shoot a missile here and it reflects back, the explosion may kill one of the men. 

Adam looks at me, and then his squadron.

"I'm authorizing freeze gun use," He snaps out, "Samus, I'm authorizing the use of missiles."

I don't resent this order, spoken through his helmet, he's made a recording of himself to me. As long as that helmet survives long enough to reconnect to the main Federation network, I have been officially contracted and given clearance to cause a bit of collateral damage.

After all, it was what I was known for.

Luckily for all of us, my missiles don't reflect. The amalgamation roars in pain, and like that, the rest of the team are including me in their plans. 

"Concentrate your fire on one area!" Adam barks out the order "Samus, you attack the frozen spot!"

I do not need to be told. Within seconds the thing is down and the eye, a bug itself, crumples under the blast of my missile.

The troopers stop to catch their breath, Anthony and Adam the only ones who seem used to this. I look at the other four, one of them crying about the bugs, wondering why Adam Malkovich, a general in the Federation Army, would have chosen to bring these troopers with him. I couldn't help but think a little lowly of them, back when I enrolled in the Federation's forces I had a gold foiled view of the Federation. They could do no wrong.

I had always believed as a child that if the Federation's forces had been there the day my colony was attacked that everything would have been fine. I enrolled to be part of that protection force, believing that all they needed was more bodies to be able to carry out what I thought was their mission.

I was young and inexperienced.

Anthony saunters up to me, clunking his metal shoulder to my left arm, grinning up at me from his visor. 

"Not bad, princess." He says, playfully as ever, "Sometime you're gunna have to teach me how you shoot like that."

"Sometime you'll have to get good enough to learn." I fire back, slipping almost easily into the banter of my youth. 

Before we can get too into it, Adam walks up to me, sliding back his visor, his face serious.

"Samus," He says, "It looks like I'm going to have to ask your co-operation on this mission. But- I'm going to have to ask that you listen to my commands. You don't move unless I say so, you don't fire until I say so." 

I don't say anything, my face hidden behind the green of my visor. 

Adam had once been a friend, a trusted confidant. My superior officer. 

The Chozo hadn't prepared me for life with humans, not after my parents had died and they took me to live with them. I saw a lot of Old Bird in the features of Adam, his large nose and the wrinkles under his eyes. Hawkish, was the term they used for humans who looked like this, and he was hawkish. 

I found it easier to speak to him than the others at first, even Anthony, who's teasing demeanor always seemed somewhere between light-hearted and feeling like a threat. He knew the details of my past, of the space pirates. Why I enlisted. 

Most of the men had heard a woman was joining their squad, and I had been an oddity. I was taller than most of the men, for one thing, and hadn't caught up to the growth spurt that had left me as awkward as a fledgling outside of the ease of my suit. The Chozo had modified my DNA when I came into their care, imbuing me with their own essence, making me the last child of the Chozo. 

The others could smell that I wasn't quite human, and not quite what they expected a woman to be. Even then, in my bare feet I felt undressed, too short, looking at the world from the wrong perspective, and would wear what some men called 'ridiculously large' platform shoes whenever I could.

I wasn't a woman to them, I was the Giantess. Something to be feared. 

Women started to enlist a lot after my time, some even tell me that I had inspired them to do so. It makes me glad that they could find hope in me, a will to fight, but back then, I was alone. Old Bird and the others were gone, and I was left to be among tiny men. 

Ian had explained it to me, on one of the times we had sat down together on a break, his leg propped up on the arm of the couch, his body twisted to look at the holo-screen.

"It's a hold over from before." He said, "You know, all of this. The Federation, the army, how they act in it. Most people who join the army are from core worlds, some from correctional planets where they were born as kids. My brother and I were, it's the deal we made to get offworld and not having to find work there. The women aren't supposed to fight, or do hard labor. They're treated all right, even on correction worlds, but they're too important of a resource."

Resource.

I didn't think much of it at the time, didn't think of the logistics of it, why they would be considered a resource of any kind. Like the Chozo, I was sterile. I had always been. Ian had told me that this too was common.

"At least on the core worlds." He had said, almost cheerfully, "Something went wrong, population control. They said they could reverse it, but most of the women who opted for it weren't able to reverse it. It's funny to me because the correctional worlds are a resource now. Everything has changed in my lifetime!"

Ian told me a lot of things, my access to the humans. He'd surf the net and show me old things from the time before the humans left earth, watching my face to see if I found the clip funny, or explain it if I didn't.

One stuck with me more than the others, an animated clip of humans calling themselves mermaids, singing and dancing on the stage for other animated people, culminating into a thumbs down that caused them to get yelled at.

"Well?" Ian asks, grinning, "Isn't it great?"

I look at him, and he does the thumbs down gesture. He explained that it was rude, both here and back then, like how the song was rude.

The thumbs up sign had been used by the Galactic Federation for generations, indicating acknowledgment. Another anachronism, though a simple salute would have served the same purpose. I always thought that they looked stupid, hands outstretched and pointing upwards, waiting for something to come by and land on them.

Men from core worlds and correctional colonies pointing their thumbs up to the sky, men who never thought of women unless they could carry a child.

The next briefing, I put my thumb down, rejecting all of this.

Adam respected me, back then. He would end each briefing after this by calling me 'Lady', designating me as something feminine that was more than just a womb. "Any objections, Lady?" He would say, allowing me to object to this strange place I had found myself in while showing complete understanding of the orders that I had been given. 

The others would laugh at me, assuming I didn't know how rude I was being.

They didn't expect I was capable of being subtle, not me. Not the Giantess. 

In a way, I was rejecting Adam too. When I left, I was leaving something he stood for. The choices he had made had cost him his soul, and they would have cost me mine if I had stayed. 

Faced with Adam again, the only thing I wanted to do was shoot him.

But I had already seen too much of the Bottle ship to turn back now. He had put me in an uncomfortable position and he knew it, I either had to agree or I had to leave.

So I agreed.

Chapter Text

The mission briefing was simple.

The Bottle Ship was supposed to have been decommissioned, it was operating again for some reason, and it was our job to find someone who was alive enough to tell us what that reason was.

My powerbombs were to remain offline for the entirety of this mission. I was not to vaporize any living humans.

Simple enough, but I resented the way he told me, as if talking to a child. 

It gave me some little hope to see him talking like this. A thought that maybe, this time, he did not bring these men here to die.

Unsurprisingly there's interference in the facility that prevents their intercoms from working. Federation tech, after all. Also unsurprisingly, mine works. Adam can have a direct feed from my helmet; he can watch while he makes bad decisions.

On my way to activate the power in the main sector, of course relegated to turning the lights on, I encountered something strange.

Most of my missions I end up in close proximity with Chozo technology, the remains of an empire that spanned the galaxy, eons before even their own remembrance. When I knew them, the last Chozo were engaged in the attempt to make reparations for the things they had done. It wasn't enough. It never is.

Most planets have the Chozo's touch on them, but decommissioned spaceships don't usually have Chozo technology on them.

So what then is an energy tank for my suit doing in their ventilation system?

It seemed stranger still, blood red rather than a glowing blue.

It was on my mind as I headed back to Adam for my next mission, turning it in my thoughts as one turned a pebble for inspection, wondering if it was a geode. Wondering what lay just under the surface of this ship, of the Federation's interest in it.

As I walked, I didn't notice the catwalk sliding out from beneath me until it was too late, sending me plummeting to the ground below. Hoppers fell with me, coming from seemingly nowhere- the room had been empty before I had turned the power on.

Hidden in this room lay a missile compatible with my suit- the second one I had seen in the Bottle Ship. Missiles weren't as strange as energy tanks, the Federation modified my suit a long time ago to use their tech- what was strange was the quantity of the missiles, single missiles being scattered about rather than the increase of five I've come to expect.

The energy tank and the missiles… what did it mean?

The bridge had been out, but not shut down. It slid back into place at a touch of the control panel.

Had it been a malfunction? The system rebooting with the power turning on? I didn't see anything, but I hadn't been expecting to see anything. I had been lost in my thoughts. The next room seemed to support this, the panels on the walls having fallen down, though the elevator was fully functional. 

Jumping at shadows. The facility was making me feel uneasy. Echoing with the past.

Adam sends me to Sector 1, curt, impersonal. The voice of a general. 

This was the first time I have taken direct orders since the Phazon incident, and it felt strange. Back then I knew the stakes. I couldn't do it alone, the threat had been too great. Here though?

It was uncomfortable. Overbearing. It was what I had signed up for by following the squadron in. So I headed to Sector 1, with only a small taste of bitter regret in my mouth. It reminded me of the artificially sweet candy that Ian had shared with me a long time ago. 

On my way down, the red of an energy tank catches my eye, and I go to grab it. Expecting to be granted more shielding, instead, my suit informs me that I have collected an energy part. That confused me, until now, these have been all or nothing. Not broken up into pieces.

It doesn't take me long to get into the sector elevator room, nor on the elevator going down, the pleasant voice of the woman telling me how I shouldn't go alone or without a weapon. It should be fine, seeing as I have with me the Chozo's last gifts and the only weapon I would want to use. It seemed laughable that anything on this ship could hurt me.

I, who had scoured worlds, destroyed the Metroid population, and demolished two planets. I had seen evil incarnate, using my image and I had killed her. 

I had killed Zebes.

Zebes, my home.

My second home. I knew the surface well, the plants, the smells, the sound of the creatures who lived there.

What lay before me in Sector 1 was the forest of Zebes. I watched a creature shaped like a flytrap eat a reo, hidden in the lush plant life.

It was so familiar to me, the soft cries of the animals, the shades of green, the vibrant shades of tropical plants. 

My mother was a botanist, always surrounded by plants and trees, her garden was the colony I was born into. I can't remember her face anymore, when I try all that comes back to me is the face of Old Bird, tending to a little tree. He told me that humans called the art Bonsai, of cultivating a tree to perfection in a little pot.

On the days I can't remember her name, I call my mother Bonsai. 

This jungle before me reminded me of that, of my mother. Of Old Bird. Of the little tree.

That's about when the giant invisible lizards attacked.

That too was nostalgic.

The deeper I went into this sector, the more at home I felt. The Chozo had given me my power suit for this reason.

Their home was not a hospitable place to humans, and I was not a child to sit inside and wait to be entertained. Fledgling, that's what they called me. I was their fledgling, their child, and they loved me very much. I lived with Old Bird but I knew every Chozo on Zebes by name and touch, and the shape of their feathers.

My suit was presented to me in a ceremony that hadn't been done in centuries when I was old enough to start learning how to use it, the gleaming orange metal hidden in a pile of molted feathers, waiting for me to reach out and clear them away. 

I found it almost immediately.

Old Bird afterwards confided in me that back in the old days, it would take some youth ages to find their suits, or even not at all, regarding the feather mounds as piles of trash. He wouldn't stop preening about how quickly I had noticed the feathers and went to investigate. 

Of course I had. At the time I wasn't allowed to wander too far, and everything was something I wanted to see. Even trash was something new to me, and when I cleared away the first layer and saw the green visor, I grew ecstatic, digging until it was free.

It hissed, popping its seams, open from the back, waiting. I had stepped into it, and oh, life. 

I had been wearing the slick material necessary for interface for some time, the Chozo having crafted it for me, and had me doing intense gymnastics in the high soled shoes they included in it.

Back then the suit was smaller, the lightest version of the suit that they could give me, the arm cannon module missing. It wouldn't be until I was on the first mission where I found the Metroids that I would gain a suit this light and mobile again. I was too small for the full suit at the time, but the Chozo knew I should get adapted to it while I could. Even with their DNA, and the slow growth it brought, I would still mature faster than they had, and some things were easier learned young. 

I did not take to it effortlessly like it is now, it took me years, joining and leaving the Galactic Army, becoming a bounty hunter and revisiting Zebes to use my suit well enough to use the morph ball. 

I was thinking a lot about the Chozo then, missing them. Missing Old Bird. Wanting to go home to a planet they had left a long time ago. 

I went there once, on my own. There was nothing as far as the eye could see but asteroids and stars, no hint that life ever lived there. Not even a ghost of what had been the last stronghold of the Chozo. The place where I found most of their gifts for me. 

Due to a suit malfunction, I had lost the morph ball upgrade between visits to Zebes. This was around the third time such a malfunction had occurred. 

It was after all, an antique. 

If these powers were stripped away again, I'd have to hope that my amputated and changed suit can crawl; or remove it so I can slip between cracks. 

Of course there is always the strong possibility that there lay Chozo tech on other worlds, but even then, it is a large galaxy.

It wasn't long until I came across a large, cagelike booth, inside lay a dead man with black marks instead of the Zebes trademark green. Hanging like smog in the air was malevolence, the feeling that I was being watched. The body looked like it had been charred in some places, not for food but for fun. 

It was fresher too, than the others. Like it had waited until someone had come to check on it, like it had waited until someone thought to save it from whatever had happened.

As I left, I came across a small, furry little bird-like creature playing with a fruit. Adam's voice startled me as I watched it, flipping around to see the hatch behind me unlock. It was the first time he decided to use my com system, and I had assumed that while I had feed to him, he did not have feed to me.

I was wrong.

As I walked, I felt eyes on me. I turned to see the harmless little creature looking at me, and with a sense of uneasiness, I left.

Chapter Text

The rooms had a holographic skin over it, feeling so much like the open loved worlds of the Chozo. I would have wanted to stay in that artificial bliss, but that's all it was. Artificial. Fake. A replacement for something so completely lost that even shades of it bring some sense of relief.

I wasn't the only one who thought that, because soon enough, right after I turned off the perception filter, a creature with heads on both ends of its body attacked me. 

It was tougher than the other animals I had encountered before, ripping into me several times.

If the Federation hadn't granted me a prototype shield recharge after my completion of the final Zebes mission, it is not an understatement to state that I would have died. The amount of times I have been inside a creature's mouth and needed to bomb it to escape is too numerous to count. That animal added three more to the tally.

It was frustrating, I knew I had the weapons in my arsenal to obliterate it, but Adam was watching my every move. Perhaps, he thought it was funny, staring down the gullet of a monster thinking it could eat me.

None of the creatures held inside of them the life essence that Chozo technology can metabolize. 

As I turned the corner, I came across a door that led to a bathroom. I was hoping to find someone cowering inside, like those old disaster movies they used to make ages ago, but instead something yellow waited for me on the floor. I stared at it in almost disbelief, before bending down and picking it up.

It was a piece of my arm cannon. 

Here lay one of the pieces I had thought gotten lost in the heat of the hyperbeam, destroyed beyond all repair. It took me seconds to slip it back into place, and it took even less time to see that my equipment was working better.

What were pieces of my suit doing on this decommissioned Bottle Ship?

What was it doing in the women's bathroom? Had someone brought it here? 

...Why? 

It worried me a great deal than I wanted to admit. The energy tanks, the missiles. My gun.

Something was wrong here, something I didn't yet see. 

At the time it was unthinkable to me what the truth ended up being.

Not long after that, my anxiety was replaced with a sheer, sharp pleasure of destroying some security drones, fitting their module into my suit, giving me a scatter shot with my arm cannon, a tool that I would be putting to use quite soon to blast giant worms into paste. It was…. Deliciously effective.

I slid down through a purple hive, the ground littered with large larva. Harmless in this state, and quiet. Strange, I thought I saw something more, but I moved on, no need to kill the helpless.

A scream splits the air, familiar and close, louder than I ever expected something to be in the silence that has enveloped me since stepping onto the Bottle Ship. The air filled with flying insects, and I found that these too, I knew. Like the ones in the caves of Zebes. Annoying things, but I knew how to deal with them.

In the rubble of the ruined hive and the dead queen, there was a small sound of feeding. I had thought it cute when I first saw it, but now, here again, with its teeth bared and tongue out, I realized that this creature must have been inside that chamber with the dead researcher. It turns to look at me, and howls, the same scream that had aggravated the flying insects.

It had used me to get food for it. 

The realization revolted me, and I was all too eager to leave it when Adam told me to go. Enjoy your feast, little one. It would be the last one I would give you.

On the way to the rendezvous point, I find myself in the water a lot. Too much. Adam hadn't authorized the use of the gravity suit so it was slow going for me; though I didn't know if he knew that I had access to that. One of the annoying things about this mission, of which there were many, was that I was counting on a man who had direct knowledge of my abilities twenty years ago and relied on reports for what had changed in the interim.

I had no doubt that he was kept up to date, but there was also the matter of whether or not he could recall those reports. I knew that as long as I could proceed that he wouldn't deem it necessary. I wouldn't complain, Adam was the same back then as well, stinginess disguised as stiffness. 

I also knew better than anyone that Adam didn't care if I died. 

That was the thought I chewed on as I passed room after room, the sound of my gunshots and cries of creatures filling the time. Had I been alone, I would have put on some music, allowing the environment to filter through my suit and have the system choose to compose something.

The music of the Chozo was part of their worship, and was included in every part of their life. It's fitting that I would be in silence after the destruction of Zebes, but it weighed on me as heavily as water did. I felt like I was drowning even on dry land.

The biosphere testing chamber was an empty field with sparse trees. The most planet Earth-like environment I had seen in the Bottle Ship. It was eere, and empty. I hurried through it, feeling like a bug crawling across an open floor, heading into the building that towered on the other side of the room.

The building was worse by far. Too close, the walls were closing in on me, dust and death hanging thick on the air, dread coating my tongue. Security drones lay on the floor, and while I knew they were never alive, all I could think is that they were dead. Not just an absence of life, but things that had been slaughtered unaware.

A door ahead of me was wrenched open, and I knew there had been someone here before me. Recently.

Anything could be waiting for me up ahead.

With caution I moved forward, wary, ready for a fight.

James Pierce.

That's what the name tag read, the trooper crouching by the computer terminal. My instincts said that he had broken something, just moments before I got here.

Before I could act upon my suspicion, three other troopers sprung up behind me, just as wary as I had been. With a sense of relief at seeing my golden back, Anthony relaxes, as do the other two. 

"Where's Lyle?" James asks, and I think I know the name. The trooper with the fear of bugs, the trigger happy fool.

"Must be late," Anthony says, "We didn't see him on our way here."

Typical Adam, I was the last to know that everyone had been called here. Lyle was the one who was assigned to Sector 1, had I known that I was to meet up with the others I would have kept my eyes out for him. I may be anti-social but I was never one to let a teammate stay behind. Not one as anxious as Lyle. 

"The computer seems to have self destruct." The one without the mustache says, going to sit down by the computer James, the one with the mustache, had been at. "It's fragmented into parts but I might be able to fix it."

"The CO is right," Anthony says, taking charge of the situation, "We might be able to find more information here. While Maurice is working his magic, let's go check things out."

We acknowledge him, and the other two troopers move out, leaving me, Maurice, and Anthony in the room with the large window. Anthony heads to the window and calls me over, nodding to the view.

"Hey, Princess." He says, "Look familiar?"

It does, from this angle.

It doesn't stop him from stating the obvious.

"It looks like the training ground for the Federation." 

Inside me, dread starts to take form, the energy tanks, the spare parts of my gun, the creature who had made me kill for it. The enemies I had been struggling to kill on my way here.

I don't know why, but in that moment I reached out to him, gripping his metal arm in my metal grip, turning to look at his face.

"Hey," He says gently, shifting his grip on his gun to touch my hand, "I know how you feel. This whole ship has been giving me the creeps, Samus. It's been giving all of us the creeps. I'm not gonna lie and say it's fine, we don't know that yet. Though, it's kind of comforting to know it's got you spooked too; at least that way I know I don't have to play too brave, huh Princess?"

I smile at that and let him go, watching him walk away. I turn back to the training grounds, before taking a look around the room.

On the walls are screens, the green of the rooms I just came from, the white of ice and the red of fire. On one of the white screens, I see a glimpse of yellow, just for a moment, like a bright flash of sunshine on gold. 

I don't say anything about it, and turn in to go deeper into the building.

Princess. 

Anthony started calling me that not long after Adam started calling me Lady, the word calling back long forgotten and almost unpleasant memories. The first time he called me it, I had frozen, caught between the urge to laugh and fight him, needing to prove myself in some way. It was a strange departure from the other words thrown my way, and in some respects just as bizarre.

Transvestite, gender pretender, hermaphrodite, big bird…

I didn't have any context for any of them, except for the last one only in the respect that I was large and raised by the Chozo. The Giantess is what they settled on around rank, and I suppose I should be grateful for that. Nor did I wish to repeat what they had said around Ian, not wanting to gain any insight into it.

I didn't like many humans, but I didn't dislike them either. I didn't understand them, though I knew enough to know that I was being insulted. When Anthony called me Princess that first time, I didn't know if I was being insulted again, by a direct teammate. 

My father called me Princess. 

With the memory of my father's voice came the other memory, the last memory.

Not just that, though, it also brought the smell of sunshine on the early daffodils, the small little butter cups and my favorite lilies. 

I don't think Anthony expected the unguarded expression that had crossed my face when he said it, and he was quick to drop the bravado for a moment and quietly assured me that he wasn't looking for a fight or to tease me too badly. 

"After all, Princess Peach could probably still kick my ass even if I'm in full battle gear," He had joked, "Nothing wrong with princesses, especially when they're armed with missiles. Even more reason to respect 'em, right Samus?"

I had laughed then, and allowed it, and still kicked his ass the next time we sparred.

The small comfort of Anthony's voice and comment, as well as the memories it brings doesn't last long. The oppressive atmosphere pushes down on me again as I make my way through the exam center. It wasn't just the training grounds that had been familiar, it was this place. The frozen rations, the chairs.

From the freshness of the food, whatever had happened here happened recently, less than a week I would say. Of course I could say the same from just examining the bodies I had found littered through the ship. 

This was Federation technology, clearly. Made for the sensiblies of humans, comfortable enough for them.

They had no sense of beauty. 

The Federation architecture was a stark difference to the halls of the Chozo, who had built as an act of worship and atonement for their past. Working with the nature of the land instead of against it, allowing the structures they built to become wild as they aged.

How long had it been since I performed my rites?

After Zebes… time seemed to have stopped, and the traditions I held seemed to fade against the hole in the universe that I had caused.

The harm that I had done seemed unstageable, the lives I had taken too numerous to bear. 

I was a hunter, but this was not mearly genocide, this had been annihilation. Genocide at least meant some other life could craw into the cracks, but now there were no lives at all where Zebes had been. 

Frankly, the environment I found myself in now was something that disinterested me greatly, and at worst only served to remind me how far I was from that which used to house my home.

I entered a room that had the faint sound of an alarm, the door locking behind me. The five doors that I could open led to dead ends, the alarm beeping away in the background. I was being watched. I opened the third door, and the face of the dead met mine.

Chapter Text

A space pirate! Here!

As it fell, the alarm fizzled out and stopped, the beeping having come from the husk of the dead body. 

On its chest was emblazoned an emblem I knew well. 

The Galactic Federation, an icon that once had given me hope now filled me with sick disgust and dread.

"A Zebesian." Adam commented over my com, "It's been cybernetically enhanced."

"No," I said, with more force than necessary, "Not a Zebesian, the Space Pirates may have colonized Zebes after destroying the remaining Chozo, but they weren't of Zebes."

Adam doesn't say anything to that, leaving me to my thoughts.

"Everyone! Gather 'round!"

The shout comes from Anthony, and when we regroup, Maurice shows us what he's found.

"This facility is under control of the Galactic Federation," He says, but none of us are shocked by this. It's something we knew already, but now it's been confirmed. "They've been testing creatures from various worlds to determine their viability as bioweapons. This facility is under control by Madeline Burgman."

It was a short report, a summary that we all came to by looking at the data in front of us. 

The testing on organic, living things for use as bioweapons was illegal in the Federation. However, illegal or not, it has happened here. 

When I had brought back the Metroid, this was the life I had condemned it to. I knew that, but when it came time for me to kill it, I did not only hesitate, but failed to complete the mission. I could not kill it, and instead gave it to the Federation, believing that their morals would find some use for it that wasn't war.

I had been weak. My weakness had created a negative space in the universe, a black hole that threatened to consume everything.

Had I killed it when I had a chance, Ridley would not have stolen it.

I would not have chased. Zebes would still be standing. 

More than that, I had done, on orders for the Federation, an act that would prove to be more dangerous than even I would know for some time.

I put at risk everything the Chozo had strived for with my incomplete act of genocide and my incomplete act of mercy.

SR-388 wasn't a mistake for the Chozo; it had been their last stand.

I, the last of the Chozo, had doomed them to fail. 

At the time, I only knew of my failure on Zebes.

"Madeline might still be in the building." Anthony says, "We better spread out to look for her."

"I'll stay here and see if I can crack this." Maurice says, fingers tapping away, "If not, then it's time for James to take over."

"It should be a snap for me to hack into this thing," James says, and his smirk makes me want to bring my arm cannon around. One of many reasons I prefer to work alone. "But compiling it is gunna take a while."

We had no proof Madeline didn't lay dead with the others, but it was the best we had to go on. I made my way into a similar room as I had just come from, though this time all five doors were open and led to catwalks that looped around.

As I stepped into one, something wet fell behind me, causing me to look up.

These Space Pirates were a lot different than the one I found before, at least in the respect of them being very much alive.

"Samus!" Anthony yelled, trying to get to me as Space Pirates dropped from the ceiling.

"My orders are that all soldiers pull back from the area," Adam's clipped tone echoed across the building's intercom, "Saums, you take care of all enemy targets."

His concern for me was touching, really. How could I not be more invested in what Adam thought of me.

Despite orders, Anthony was still charging to the door when it closed and locked in front of his face.

Of course there was no issue for me, I had been killing these things since they invaded Zebes, even with their cybernetic armor.

As one began firing a missile toward me, the first thought that flashed through my head was 'ah, so there's where my missiles went'.

It was almost funny. 

In that moment of ridicule I had been the closest I had gotten yet to figuring out the shape of what had taken place on the Bottle Ship than before.

My work done, I headed back to meet up with the others.

All four of them were outside firing at some furry purple monstrosity. It looks up at me, seeing me. 

I rush outside, heading to see if Anthony is all right-- 

And that's when things go from bad to worse. Anthony holds out his hand, in the symbol of stop or go back, but to me I think it's the symbol of come here or help. I wasn't thinking about humans except for how to save them.

It takes me only a moment to correct my mistake. 

A moment too long.

Chapter Text

The purple thing pins me down, leaping from where it was climbing up the building. I watch as things burrow out of the ground, those demon armadillos that have been a consistent pain in my ass. Reos fly up, and I look at the purple monster, just in time to dodge a strike from a deadly sharp tail.

My beam is infective against it, and my missiles too slow. I'm only able to fire a handful of hits at it, not enough to convince it to let me go.

Any other animal would have done so, but this thing wanted not only to eat me, but to make me suffer. Rage emanates from it and it bites down on my armor, trying to crack me open like a nut.

A blast as hot as a sun flies above me, slicing into the hide of the beast, splattering me in green blood. My energy shield fizzles it off as I spring up, seeing Anthony standing wide legged, the dust still swirling at his feet as he recuperates his balance from the blast of his plasma cannon. 

The beast had gone sprawling through the air, but took about as long as I did to get up, flinging itself at a nearby wall, having it crumple under its weight as easily as one crumpled foil. 

Every day I'm grateful for the Chozo's gifts.

Anthony puts up his gun, swinging it almost easily on his back as he strolls over to me, a careless smile on his face.

"You okay, Princess?" He asks, my response a somewhat adrenaline fueled punch to his shoulder. It wasn't every day that I owed my life to someone else, after all, and I wasn't sure what to say.

"I wanted to provide cover sooner, but this thing takes forever to charge," He said blithely, showing off the slowly blinking light. "I'll save the next shot for you, not that you'll need it!"

I rolled my eyes at that, but was saved from making a response by the voice of James calling us over.

"What is it?" Anthony says, the casual tone falling away from his voice as space blue legs come into view.

"It's Lyle," James says to me, looking directly at me. I didn't like they way he was looking at me. "He's down."

"He looks like a pile of rags." Said the remaining trooper I had neglected to learn the name of, "What happens to someone to make them look like that?"

I had seen a body ripped into tatters like that, and charred. I had a hunch that I would find my culprit close by, and I turned, finding the bright green blood of the monster Anthony had shot on the ground behind me. Following the trail to a Federation jeep, I found the little white husk of the bird creature I had seen twice before, open like something had crawled out of it like a creature from those old horror movies Ian loved.

"Looks like that monster from before entered Sector 3," Adam's voice cut through my thoughts like a knife. "Samus, follow it."

Lyle's body lay behind me, and I left him and the others to head down into the sweltering heat boiling up from the opening to Sector 3.

The room I fell into was covered in green blood, and it was clear that the monster was willing to tear holes in anything to get somewhere else.

From behind me, the blast of an explosion was felt, and I knew enough about destroying buildings to assume that something far above me, from where I had just come from, exploded.

Adam doesn't comment on it when he talks to me, simply explaining that no; he would not be authorizing anything else until later. 

I wondered if Adam had known before they came that this facility was developing bioweapons. In my opinion there were only two options.

The first being that he had known and had selected people he had thought were competent for the job, or…

He had known and chosen those who were expendable enough for the job.

A Federation General with five troopers and one of those five being afraid of insects to the point of incompetence. 

I had assumed that my presence would have been enough to help save someone, especially the one that had been in the same sector with me from the start. I felt slow and frustrated that his death happened right under my nose, that I hadn't seen him, that I couldn't help him. 

I was lost in these regrets as I stepped out onto the glass walled enclosures. Red as far as the eye could see. I stop, watching a whale jumping out of the lava.

Lava. Lovely.

Adam knew that there was lava when he called me. 

I sigh and move on, and nearly get bitten in half by the lava whale.

In moments I'm out in the lava field, running for my life from a very hungry fish while I take damage from the sweltering heat. In the next room I get the pleasure of fighting space pirates while being assaulted by flaming reo.

My com buzzes and Adam decided to let me use one of my more powerful features.

Approximately four hours after the rest of the troopers, I finally got to use the ice beam.

Stay classy, Adam. 

Another piece of my arm cannon was hidden in this room. Had I not been working on avoiding being burned alive, I would have thought more on this.

There is nothing more miserable in this universe than tracking through lava rooms while having heat protection without using your heat protection. If Adam was expecting me to complain and ask for his help, he had another thing coming. This was doable, I knew it was. Agonizing but doable. 

As I was climbing up the interior of a volcano, arms made of fire lashed out at me, draining my energy as lava creeped up behind me. At I reached the top, Adam's voice crackled into my com, finally telling me to activate my Varia Suit, the comforting firey orange that had been missing from my suit flooding back onto my limbs.

It may have been my elation or the back up power reserves, but my energy was back at full bars, and I was ready to fight.

Freezing its limbs gave me the ability to crawl on its monstrous ugly head, blasting its brains with the ice beam Adam so kindly let me use. Save for the one time the monster pulled me off of it, it went down with hardly much of a fight.

With its death, the lava receded with it. 

I made my way to a room full of lava in front of me, noting the grappling point in the room. Adam didn't tell me to turn back, and I have to make a decision on what to do next.

It's only after I decide to turn back that Adam tells me to head to Sector 2. If I had jumped in the lava, would he have me proceed? He decides to leave that 'freak of nature' for later, and I'm almost relieved. Maybe by the time I face it again, I might be able to scratch it with the meager weaponry Adam has decided I'm safe to use. 

I'm not the one causing parts of the Bottle Ship to explode. 

Survivors in Sector 2… that's what Adam had said. A flash of yellow in the expanse of white. 

Had that been Madeline in the blizzard?

If I found her, would she be able to answer the questions I was having?

Would she know about what pieces of my suit were doing here? 

Adam knew more than he was letting on, but was he here because he needed to know more, or because he wanted to stop anything from getting out?

It all came down to the single question I was avoiding since I stepped onto this ship and saw him, years after I left him and the Federation behind.

Did I trust Adam Malkavitch with my life?

I put the thought aside for now, knowing that I wouldn't need it unless I found someone alive. I would decide then, what I would do.

Where my loyalties lay.

Chapter Text

The ice sector was cold, even with my Varia suit active the chill of the outside air seeped in as I breathed. Never cold enough to form ice on me or in the suit, but still present enough to be crisp. Invigorating. 

It was lovely here, the ice not having been fully tamed, only contained. I liked it more than lava, the colors glittering pleasantly in my eyes as I explored room after room.

With my warm colors, I knew I was the only thing that stood out against the snow. Anyone would see my approach if they were looking out for me.

Beneath my weight, an ice bridge gave out, plummeting me to the ground beneath it. That's the third time, and each time I have been met with an enemy waiting for me. This enemy was equipped with a bone skull and a weight that was crushing. It was there that I found that the control I had over my missiles wasn't just cumbersome due to being held down by the monster stabbing me with its tail, but actively bad when I used them for combat.

In the next room at a navigation booth, I took the time to examine my gun-- the first time I had really done so since the planet Zebes. 

I had reported back to the Federation as soon as I got away from the debris field of Zebes, the dust causing interference with my equipment. 

I had set the auto-pilot to intercept with the fleet, and I…

I don't remember much after that. The feeling of being empty, of having all the water being poured out of a pot. Or maybe more akin to being the pot and being shattered.

Like Zebes.

Time moved on without me, and my voice mechanical as I gave my report to the Federation consul.

Mission complete, the planet Zebes had been annihilated.

There had been gasps.

Some people cheered.

Everything had seemed…

Not normal, but not alarming. Not until now.

After my missions and before the next one, I took time to myself, to examine myself and worship as the Chozo had done. To give up those things that I had found on my journey that belonged to the Chozo and release them as energy back into the universe.

Their artifacts had been stolen, not as technology but as energy and resources taken to create them. Their power was little eddies of energy that had been cut off from the flow of everything. 

It had been their last wish for me that had I found items made in the manner of the old ones, that I give back their gifts to the universe, to allow me to truly free their souls from their regret of haven taking too much.

Their technology was everywhere.

I would never run out of worlds to find the touch of the Chozo.

I had not done so after the fall of Zebes.

Examining my gun now, I see that it wasn't because I had done the Last Rites that my power had been diminished, but because someone who knew my suit almost as well as I did had taken parts out of it, leaving what remained of it a mess.

"Samus." Adam's voice crackles over the com, the last voice I wanted to hear right now. "You're taking a long time to head forward, is your suit damaged?"

Did he know? My arm cannon hums mechanically as it snaps back into place, almost as smoothly as it was supposed to, and I lift my head.

"I'm functional." I say, but not confirming or denying the damage. "Disregard my delay." 

The next few rooms open up into ice landscapes, no doubt using the holograms to give them a far and away look to them.

Perhaps I had judged them too harshly when I said that they had no beauty, these humans.

It was terrible that their art took the form of teeth and claws and genetically enhanced space pirates.

What gave me pause in the seemingly never ending halls of ice was the desiccated corpse of one of those hardy boneheaded creatures, it looked as if it had been sucked dry by the fangs of a metroid.

Impossible, I thought. Sector 2 held the metroid's greatest weakness, the cold temperature would have turned those soft jelly bodies to ice before it could get this deep, and I had killed the rest of the metroid kind. The last metriod died on Zebes, to be buried in space with its creators. 

Here in this place, surrounded by ice, despite just seeing proof of an enemy I knew well, it was somehow… Hard for me to grasp the truth.

I think even then I had to have known. 

I am not a fool, but when one puts their faith in a symbol of hope, it feels as if their hope will crumble with that symbol. 

If I had accepted then what I knew now, I would have crumbled. Everyone who had looked up to me as their symbol would have seen me fall.

I found myself staring at a purple lake several rooms past where I had found the corpse that had troubled me. I shook off my thoughts and pressed on, focusing on the mission at hand.

I soon found myself back in that purple lake, as if the ship was forcing me to confront my thoughts I was having.

Being in water like this, I had a fair amount of time to think as I navigated the strange gravity of the water.

The Federation would not have been the first ones to have cloned the metriods.

Surely, they would have refrained themselves from doing so? Why then pay me to wipe out the metroid threat if they were going to create their own elsewhere?

I did not follow that thought any further. I did not have proof of my suspicions, and I did not need to be paranoid of those who had so far had shown restraint. More restraint than Ridley and his space pirates had shown.

My thoughts had distracted me, and these space pirates- though perhaps knowing where these originated now, I should call them something else, though I hardly know what-- nearly wiped the floor with me. They were a challenge for a distracted mind and served well to put mine back on track.

Extremely frustrating considering the next thing I run into is a wall of ice.

I turn and stalk away from yet another roadblock in my journey. 

Perhaps sensing my frustration, Adam authorizes my speedbooster, quite literally telling me to ram into my problems. 

I could do that. 

Happy too, even.

On the other side of the ice wall, I land back inside a room very close to the elevator that had dropped me down here. In the other wall of ice was a reserve tank, modified in a strange way. It would not hold energy, but allow the Federation tech they had given me to restore an extra unit of shielding. Possibly for use in their own troopers; the Chozo tech was unmistakable.

Using the abilities of the speedboost and shinespark, I plunged deeper into the frozen heart of Sector 2.

Chapter Text

When I came to the room, I knew it. This had been the room that I seen on the screen in Sector 1, just a speck of yellow in the snow.

If anyone was alive here, it would be here, or just up ahead.

A gigantic tree beast blocked my way.

I had spent much of my time mastering the new, strange way my missles now worked, ever since descovering they were behaving oddly. Even with the power of my blast, it took several shots to down the beast and move forward, heading to the frosted windows I saw above me, searching for any glimpse of life.

It wasn't the windows that caught my attention, but the dead and frozen body on the ground.

I knew him.

"Maurice."

My voice seemed strange to me in this place of ice, and as I stared at him, I felt eyes on me. I turned, and in the windows I saw her. Blonde hair. White coat. 

She ran from me, as if I was something frightening. 

I should have thought to run after her, to catch her, but- I didn't want to catch her. I wanted her to talk to me. I head inside, down the stairs, and saw her peaking out of the crates.

"Adam," I said, my voice calm, "I'm going to engage in some diplomacy."

"Keep your comlink active." Adam says, "We're looking for information, not a fight."

"Understood."

I take off my helmet, but as I do so, the rest of the suit seems to flicker and destabilize around me, causing me to stumble forward, my helmet in my blue clad hands, the rest of the suit gone.

Hands on mine keep me from tipping forward, and I look up to see eyes on mine, the blue of ice I've been admiring on my way here.

"I'm Samus Aran," I say, "I'm here to rescue you."

"Rescue me?" She asks, eyes wide, red mouth slightly parted. "You're not with them?"

I stand up straight, holding my bulky helmet under one arm as I pass a hand through my sweaty forelock, still damp from the fight with the creature outside and my sprint into the building to catch up with her.

"You'll have to be more specific than just them," I inform her, "l am a freelance bounty hunter, and I'm here because I received a distress signal. Above all else, I'm here to find any survivors and make sure they continue to survive."

She doesn't say anything for a moment, reaching out to touch my side in an effort to assure herself that I'm real.

The touch tickles, and despite myself a laugh forces its way out of my throat, though I'm quick to cover it up. Old Bird informed me that the tickling sensation was a reaction of a body not sure if a touch was the beginning of a threat or kindness, and I had always been a little nervous about being touched. 

"It really is you." She whispers, her fingers working up my ribs, "I had seen the reports, but this is… you are fascinating."

"Reports?" I said, a little warily, leaning my weight back on my heels.

"Samus Aran," She says, forming my name carefully, tasting the sound. "My name is Madeline Burgman."

Madeline! 

This was the woman who was supposed to be in charge of everything! Without thinking, my hand flashes out, gripping her shoulder, wanting to demand from her all the answers to the questions I had broiling inside of me. My equipment, this place- the metroids. Surely they can't be trying to bring the metroids here.

What I wasn't expecting was for her to grip me back, the warmth of her hand on my neck, causing me to lose grip of my helmet and letting it roll. 

I wasn't used to touching humans, and I hadn't been planning to lose contact with my suit like I had. As fractured as my attention had been with the loss of Zebes, and the creeping fear that I had been exposed to here, I wasn't prepared to deal with the realization that while I thought of myself as one of the Chozo, in a human's grip, I was human too.

She pulled me in close, and I kissed her.

That was not what she had intended to happen, she had been tracking my signal and knew I had been broadcasting to someone inside the Bottle Ship despite the signal jam. She had assumed that I must have been contacting the Federation CO on site, the make of my suit causing her to assume that I had been a shock trooper for the Federation.

She explained this after our lips fell apart, her hand keeping my head bowed, even though she had to stretch up on her toes to whisper into my ear. 

As she spoke to me, I watched my helmet on the floor, the screen flickering a low green as it stared back at us, Adam watching the expression on my face. I didn't whisper back, only letting Madeline tell her story to me.

She had run from me because she had seen another trooper freeze Maurice moments before I came, assuming that the Federation was coming after anyone who had known the truth of what happened here on the Bottle Ship.

"What we did here was illegal," She said, "But it was also authorized by the Federation itself. One of the top generals, Adam Malkovitch, signed off on it."

My breath caught in my throat, and it took a concerted effort not to let it show in my face.

"...It's him, isn't it." Madeline whispers, "The one who's watching."

I squeezed her shoulder once.

"There was so much about you, too." She says, "The Federation has a lot they want to know about you, Samus. If you're working with Adam, your life is in danger."

"I know." I say, my mouth dry and my voice small. I go to say more, but a noise echoes out through the room we're in, a small chugging noise that sounds like machinery starting. 

I spin Madeline around, out of the way as something huge crashes into the crates.

"Madeline, get out of here!" I shout, giving her a little shove toward the ramp, "Stay out of danger, I'll find you when it's safe, I promise!"

"What about you, your suit--?" She gasps, though she's quick enough to get going.

"I'll figure it out, I can take care of myself!"

I sounded a lot more confident than I was. As hard as I tried, my suit wasn't materializing, and the yellow monstrous forklift was flinging crates around like toys. I barely managed to recover my helmet from being crushed between two walls of steel, pulling it back on--

My visor flashes, giving me a status update on my suit's rebooting progress. So help me if this had once again uninstalled my morphball; the Chozo ritual was all well and good, but through it all I made a point to hang onto that upgrade whenever I could. The standard power suit simply wasn't efficient without it.

I wasn't thinking about the other upgrades at the moment, having to dodge and weave as the green light of the reforming suit swirled about me, clambering to the top of a crate and springing off of it to dodge a blow. The metal I landed on bent under the force of my weight, the flash of my power beam finally streaking through the air once more.

"Samus," Adam says in my ear, my teeth clenching, "Has your system been compromised? If you are not able to face opponents at this time, you should fall back and regroup."

"I'm fine." I say, my tone clipped, "This machine is nothing I can't handle."

My ice beam loads in, and I freeze the thing's shoulder. As it swings around, the blue color of the Federation's power suit comes into view, the emblem of that star blazing out silver against it.

If what Madeline had said was true, then this was the man who had killed Maurice. If I could catch him and make him talk, I would know in seconds if Adam really had been the one behind this bastardization of Zebes, and behind my suit's malfunctions.

What he had done when I left the Galactic Federation to become a Bounty Hunter told me that he was capable of anything. What Madeline had told me was something I wanted to believe, to blame everything on Adam. All of my pain and the fear that I had felt on this mission, the powerlessness of following orders…

I hated Adam.

At the same time, it was too easy to hate Adam. 

Everything seemed to be falling in place for me to turn my gun backwards and take on a new mission; one of forcing Adam to confess to being the darkness that hid behind the gleaming brightness of the Federation. 

There was no doubt in my mind that Adam had known what was going on here.

Had he come here because he wanted to expose it or destroy it?

That trooper who tried to kill Madeline and had killed Maurice was going to tell me everything.

Taking the forklift down wasn't much issue, my agonizingly slow missiles doing enough damage per hit that the machinery was soon too wrecked to function. Once it lay inert, I approached it, anger clouding my reason..

Beep beep BEEP BEEP

The familiar sticatio of a self-destruct sequence had me reeling back, the blast knocking me down, face forward.

"Samus?!" Adam's voice was in my ears, sounding actually worried. "Samus, respond! Respond!"

His voice faded out with my consciousness.

Chapter Text

When I sat up, I had a terrible headache. I expected to wake up dead. I placed my head in my hands, feeling dizzy. It's dark, and I'm cold. I blow into my hands, rubbing my arms, standing up as I look around. The forklift lay inert, the cockpit empty. A last ditch effort to distract me and escape. Whoever it had been had assumed that I'd be after them and overpower them if I saw where they went.

They were right; if I had seen them I would have. They hadn't expected a blast from the explosion would have been enough to knock me out. It shouldn't have been.

Madeline.

I look around but there's no sign of her, and back that way there is only ice. If there was a secret way the scientists got to this location, I hadn't seen it, and with my suit down… Well, the thin skintight blue sheath I was in wasn't built for sub zero temperatures.

There's a door open above me, and it doesn't take long for me to flip my way up to it, my body feeling like a feather compared to what I was used to. 

An elevator was past the door, and the ride down was brutal, my thoughts full of the information I had just learned, and the worry of my suit's malfunctions. The navigation room up ahead hits me with a blast of warm air as the door slides open, and I jump inside, letting the warmth sink into my body.

"Samus!" The voice comes from the console and I jump, whipping out my emergency pistol in the direction of the voice. "Stand down, if you shoot the equipment then I'll lose your signal."

It's Adam. 

Cautiously, I put my gun away, heading over to the panels to examine them. Until this point I didn't have a reason to. Standard Federation tech. 

"If I patch a signal through to my ship I might be able to reestablish a connection with my power suit." I say, already working the controls. 

I pause, looking up to where Adam's face is staring down into my own. Was it safe to use Federation tech to connect to my equipment?

…It was about twenty years too late for that question, if Madeline was to be believed.

"I thought you died." Adam says, "You should have listened to me."

"You didn't phrase it like an order." I reply, holding his eyes. "Besides, a blast like that shouldn't have been enough to knock out my systems like that. From the range I was in, I doubt it would have been lethal if I had been without it. Shouldn't you direct your concern to Maurice or Lyle?"

"It's because of them that I'm concerned." Adam shoots back, lifting a hand to hold his face, frustration crossing his features. "I know you don't hold a high opinion of men in general, but I didn't come here with incompetent people, Samus. I thought I chose the best of my plantoon. Having two men die on what should have been a reconnaissance mission is a tragedy."

"Oh, so your definition of a tragedy is two people dying, that's the limit?" 

I was lashing out, like a child. I was hurt, and scared, and angry. That anger never faded, despite how much I tried to control its bite. Caution told me I needed to hold my tongue, Adam wasn't safe, but anger had more sway than caution at the moment.

Adam doesn't say anything, his face hardening.

After a moment, he sighs.

"Can we agree that both of us are invested in the remaining safety of everyone on board?" He asks, his tone sardonic, "That's why you came along, isn't it?"

It was my turn to fall silent.

He was right, and I hated the fact that he was right. Adam straightens up, going back to the stiff backed General that had watched the explosion of a ship with someone on board without flinching, his clipped tones giving me my next orders.

"As soon as you've gotten your suit online and have run diagnostics, you are to go to Sector 3. The monster you fought from before has been affecting the lifeforms across the entire ship, its cries having made them markedly more aggressive. If any survivors are to remain alive, it is in our best interests to silence that creature permanently. If you encounter it, I'm authorizing your plasma beam."

I nod, lowering my head back down to the control panel to finish the commands to my ship, assuming he would hang up now.

"And Samus?"

I glanced up, seeing an expression that almost seemed familiar. The slightest shades of a smile, though had I not known how to read the face of a creature with a stiff beak, I would never have seen it.

"I'm compelled to remind you that diplomacy doesn't usually involve kissing."

"Cultural differences." I reply, lifting an eyebrow, "I thought the Federation was accommodating to those."

Adam nods curtly, and cuts the feed.

It's the closest we've come to joking since…

Well, since before I left the Federation. 

I look down at the controls, reaching up with one hand to wipe my face clear from the effects of cold on my body. I would hate it if Adam were still watching, and think I were in any way crying for him.

I stepped into the navigation booth, letting the light swirl around me and summoned my suit from my ship. 

It came a lot easier than with the fight with the fork lift, the familiar orange metal enclosing my body, the visor glowing as it appeared around my face. I slid into the morph ball with ease, firing off a few bombs, testing the range of motion I had as I slid out of the morph ball.

Before I left the room to continue my manual systems analysis while an automatic one was running, I made sure to reestablish my comlink with Adam.

"Remember, Samus, our goal now is to have everyone currently alive stay that way," Adam scolds me, "That includes you. Don't do anything foolish."

"Not anything that'll kill me, anyway." Was my response.

It's not long, maybe a handful of minutes at the most, do I encounter a dead end, and not long after that I get trapped in a transparent cell with the Federation Pirates firing my own wave beam back at me.

"Adam, now would be a good time to authorise the wave beam." I tell him, sliding between blasts. "Unless you really want to see what I look like dead."

"That won't be necessary." He assures me, "Permission to use wave beam granted."

For a moment, a single moment it feels like I'm back on a training mission with the Federation, showing off what I can do. Any moment now, Ian would run up to me and force me to go with him to eat some nasty, oily food called pizza-

Ian.

Madeline's words flooded back to me with the memory of Ian, her warning. 

I had found myself slipping into complacency over half of a joke that probably hadn't even been a joke on Adam's end. Humans don't have the faces of Chozo. Their stern looks didn't hold anything in their faces more than what there was already.

Adam had known I needed the wave beam before I got trapped, he could see as well as I could that the way forward was only through turning on a switch that was covered in glass.

Was I supposed to thank him for allowing me to use the tools I already had?

On my way to the main sector, I was confronted with a creature I had thought to be organic-- up until the point it fired several missiles towards me. 

Up until this point, none of the creatures I met had seemed viable as bio-weapons. The Federation Pirates were effective, but the Federation had been doing with them nothing the Space Pirates had already done to themselves. I had no doubt that if these were found by their brothers, that they would have been absorbed into their ranks without a hitch and turn their guns on the Federation without much convincing.

The Federation would probably deserve that betrayal. 

I wasn't able to kill the bio-missile, the thing having enough sense to fly off when I had damaged it. I put it out of my mind for now and focused on moving forward.

Like I had always done.

Chapter Text

In Sector 3, a door that I had been in had locked, and it took some backtracking to get it open again. When I went through it, I saw Anthony, getting attacked by the bio-missile.

Even before Adam authorized the grappling hook, I was aiming for the point. Whither he had told me or not, I was going to save Anthony.

It was a short, intense battle, leaving me stressed as the thing flew away again. I went over to Anthony, checking him over for any damage.

"I'm all right, Princess." He laughs, pushing me off of him, "That thing barely even touched me, though if you hadn't been here I would have been cooked." 

After a moment, he pulls off his helmet, sighing as he crouched down in a resting position.

"This isn't time to be taking a break." I told him, and he nods a little.

"I know, but if I know you, you haven't stopped since you got here." He says, pulling out some food rations and tossing them to me, "Besides, the area is secure for right now, we can chat for a few minutes."

Hesitantly, I sat down, pulling off my helmet as well. I handed the rations back for Anthony to open for me, focusing on keeping my suit materialized around me rather than fuss with opening the packaging. 

"Right, sorry about that." He says, pulling them open and handing them back, "So, you got the order too?"

"What order?" I asked, chewing my way through the first of the rations, "Adam has me tracking that monster from Sector 1."

"He had the whole squad meet up at a navigation room not too far from here," Anthony explains, "We're supposed to head to the Geothermal Electric-Power Generator chamber and find a magma exhaust to turn the power back on."

"Switch duty." I said, and Anthony laughs.

"Switch duty." He agrees, shaking his head, tossing back a few rations of his own, "Seemed a bit excessive to send the whole squad to do it, but I was the only one to show up."

Did Anthony know about Maurice?

Should I tell him?

"Say, how you feeling about the Commander anyway?" Anthony asks, and I freeze.

That memory that had been tugging at the corners of my mind since I saw Adam is pulled front and center, that horrible day when everything fell apart.

"Be careful, Ian." Adam was saying, "There are over 300 people onboard the shuttlecraft. It's up to you to repair the driveshaft."

Ian's cocky thumbs up cost him the few seconds he needed, the timer to the explosion appearing on screen.

Coldy, Adam started ordering the jettison of the driveshaft, no one could make it in that amount of time. No human, anyway.

"I can do it!" I said, my eyes blazing, "I can save Ian, Adam. I know I can, just give me the order." 

Adam ignored me like I wasn't there. 

Why wasn't he listening to me? Why didn't he look at me?

"Adam," I said, moving to be in his line of view, "You know I can do it. What are you waiting for, give me the order!"

"Sir, we have 4 minutes remaining, what are your orders?"

"Close shield doors and jettison when ready." Adam repeated.

"Adam, that's Ian," I said, pointing to the screen, "That's Ian! That's your little brother! We have to try!"

"My orders stand."

We all watched as the seconds ticked down, the driveshaft drifting peacefully away until…

Without a sound, it blew up. 

Anthony watches the expression on my face, his hand on my arm.

"You wouldn't be here if he had let you go." He says quietly. I pull my metal arm away from him.

"I've saved a lot more people in the span of five minutes in an area larger than that." I growled, "I couldn't save everything, but I damn well know what I'm capable of. If Adam hadn't underestimated me, he would still have a brother."

Anthony sighs, finishing the last of his rations.

"Man, things like that make me glad I'll never become an officer." He says, lightly, "I can't imagine having to make that choice. If something like that happened now…"

He trails off.

"I'd still try to save them." I told him, "Even if it was Adam's sorry hide."

"Yeah, that sounds about right, coming from you." He grins, standing up. He pats his plasma cannon. "I'm still saving that shot, Princess. Thanks for the save."

I nod. After finishing my rations, I stand up, pulling my helmet back on. We go to the edge and toss our garbage into the lava waiting down below, watching it fizz for a moment before heading out separate ways. 

It wasn't long until I saw another old friend, this time being the giant lava whale that had chased me through the sector the first time I was here and literally dying of heat exhaustion. It was kind enough to eat one of the grappling points that I was freeing on the way to opening a door. Once I had gotten out into the lava field proper, it decided to attack me. 

Sector 3 had to be the liveliest sector yet.

With the grappling hook inside of its mouth, it turned out to be one of the strangest experiences I have ever had fishing.

When I was done, Adam tells me some bad news.

The creature I was tracking was heading right toward Anthony.

The missile bio-weapon was in my way once again, this damn thing back for another round. I knocked it out of the sky and hurried on, not wanting Anthony to face the fearsome purple creature on his own.

I felt ready, as I backtracked through areas that I had been in before, my weaponry was chewing up enemies that had given me trouble before, and as soon as I saw that ugly thing again, I was going to blow it wide open with my plasma beam.

Anthony wouldn't even have time to fire his cannon. 

Hung on the wall, mirroring a symbol I had seen a long time ago in the Federation, lay the dull purple husk of the creature. The upside down cross.

What had it represented again? 

There was no point in looking for symbology in the husk of the creature.

All I knew is that it was out, and it was larger, and I had no idea what it looked like.

In the geothermal power plant, I found one of my energy tanks and another piece of my gun.

I was ready.

It was time to face what lay beyond.

Chapter Text

I was cautious as I walked forward not knowing what I would find. A red dot traced my body, the trooper from before!

I turned, my gun wherring as it aimed, pointed at the suit of Federation issued power armor.

"Samus!" Anthony's voice, serious and loud, "Get out of the way!"

His aim moved beyond me, something large and leathery flapping behind me. I move quickly, regrouping with Anthony without another word.

"Damn, that thing is fast, we better clear out. Where the exit at?" 

I turn and look, in time to see whatever it is destroying our only way out with firey breath.

"We're stuck," Anthony says, grimly, "This ain't good. Only one thing to do now, huh, tear this thing up!"

"Wait," I said, holding my hand out, "Leave this one to me, don't waste your plasma."

I was that confidant I could take anything, anything this ship had to offer me alone.

To get the light I would need to see, I would need to use my supermissiles. 

Just a step behind me, Adam tells me to do exactly that.

Thanks Adam.

The red light of the magma glowed around us, and framed by the light of the fire lay a nightmare. 

I knew what this was.

Who this was.

Ridley. 

I was frozen stiff, despite myself. This wasn't just ice in my limbs, it was crystal, as hard and impenetrable as stone.

Ridley kept coming back, always he came back.

I knew that, I should have been prepared for it, even here, even though I saw him fly to pieces on a planet that was space dust. He was supposed to be dead and he kept coming back--

His voice was loud in my head, though all reports swore that Ridley did not talk, and yet he was speaking to me. He dragged up those memories that I could not think about, showing them to me over and over and over again. The red of my father's blood dripping down his teeth, I saw chunks of him, I saw chunks of what used to be my father, and I knew that in moments I would be like that. Nothing but blood and visera.

No one knew what it was like to have him inside of your head. No one could know what it was like when Ridley spoke to you, using the last sounds of your father's voice to make you fear him.

Fainly, far away, I hear someone screaming. Saying my name, but that doesn't matter any more, nothing mattered except for Ridley.

"Samus!" Closer by, the voice of Anthony. I look, and I'm grabbed by the giant claw of Ridley, launched into the air.

I'm dragged along the side of a wall, my suit losing cohesion around me, unable to keep me protected from the onslaught of the monster.

"Let. Her. Go."

The words are punctuated by the blast of a plasma canon, sending me flying. Barely in the nick of time, I form my suit around me.

"Don't you know how to treat a lady?!" Anthony's taunt is thrown out into the air as a challenge, "Man, you got no style! Imma have to give you a lesson in subtlety!"

"Anthony!" I scream, my voice harsh from the shouting I had done before, "Don't do it!"

"Come on!" Anthony growls, and I know his taunt is all air, all sound. He can't back it up.

As he's flung over the edge, anger and frustration boil up in me, this was the third time on this stupid FUCKING ship that I had been unable to save anyone from death.

The crystal broke, and I activated my plasma beam, ready to burn Ridley from the memory of the galaxy, and my own.

This wasn't the real Ridley.

He had gone down too quickly, too fast.

Whatever this had been, it wasn't the monster who killed my father.

Who killed the Chozo.

I turned my back on the body and went to look at Anthony's plasma cannon, my eyes lingering in it.

I had forgotten something about Ridley. He knew how to play dead.

He pounced on me, but he missed, and missed again. With the element of surprise gone, he burned a hole in the bulkhead and left to go lick his wounds.

I wondered if Anthony was conscious as he hit the bottom.

I couldn't stand the thought.

Even though I wish I could have said something, some words that would have encapsulated Anthony's life at the moment of his passing, I simply found myself like I was at the moment of Zebes' demise.

Empty.

I left.

Chapter Text

Adam hadn't told me what to do next, but I wasn't necessarily worried about that. Ridley had damaged my comlink when he introduced my face to the wall. My plan was to use a navigation booth to reestablish a connection.

I left Sector 3, and on my way to a navigation booth, I saw a man in Federation colors.

Was this the forklift guy, or had Adam left his spot for some reason? I decided to follow him, to find out what Adam hadn't been telling me about this cursed ship. Sector 1, the door that had been locked since I left opened for this man, and I waited, taking the next elevator down.

I tried to connect to Adam with the navigation booth up ahead, but there was no response. I proceeded on, my suspicion growing.

He had noticed me following and had shot out the bridge he had used. 

I sidle up to the edge of the bridge, something like a smirk pulling at my lips

"Any objections, Adam?"

Not receiving a response, I finally activated my space jump, and my screw attack.

Oh, how I missed you.

I could fly once again, on wings made of energy and death.

The elevator ahead of me took me to a large room with computers, the Bioweapon Research Center. Had we found this room when we first came to sector 1, Lyle might have still been alive. I go to the computer to start typing on it, when someone walks in behind me.

Madeline.

She started when she saw me, backing up a few steps.

"Madeline," I said, "It's me, Samus. I'm not going to hurt you."

"I know." She says, but her body says something different. I take a step back, giving her the room she desperately wanted.

"I saw someone coming this way," I told her, "With the Federation. I'm worried that they might try to hurt you."

"So you believe me." She said, her fists by her sides, a look on her face.

"I don't know." I admitted, turning my head aside. "I know that there is someone on this ship that has been killing the others, but aside from that, I don't have any proof. What you said about Adam, from before- I… I don't know what to think anymore."

"You want proof." She says. 

"I want answers."

She nods, going to sit down at the computer, her fingers flying as she speaks.

"Had you been anyone else, I would have treated you differently, but… I think you, of all people should know what's going on here."

Data flickered up, and there it was before me, no summary needed.

As I had suspected, the Federation had stolen from me, my weaponry and energy taken from me to be used as research for their ends. The regeneration that they had given me was a pacifier meant to keep me from looking too deeply into the workings of the Federation.

More than that, everything in this facility had been cloned over the years from particles of DNA left on my suit. 

That despicable asshole who had given my suit a "polish" had been doing things to me that I hadn't been aware of.

I felt violated.

"What about Adam," I said, unconsciously putting my hand to my arm cannon, feeling the way that it hummed and clicked with parts missing.

"Ah of course." With a few more clicks, Adam's name.

And with it, the words I had hoped never to see. Metroid DNA dissection and use for bio-weapons.

They were planning to clone an army of Metroids and use them against the enimes of the Federation, and Adam was the one credited with the idea.

With the DNA of the final metroid they had found on my suit.

I expected to be angry, to be vindicated that Adam had been lying to me, to feel… To feel something.

The part of me that felt betrayal when it came to Adam had frozen shut. Instead it landed in the emptiness where the planet Zebes used to be. 

Where Anthony used to live.

All that was left was a nightmare recreation of Zebes used for war.

"What about Mother Brain?" I said, softly, "The Chozo created her alongside the metroids to control them."

Even then I knew that much about the Chozo's secrets. I knew my family had created the metroids; and named them as well. I had always assumed that they were a remnant from Before, and that the Chozo would have wanted me to…

Well.

I was wrong. 

"Not a clone." Madeline said, stiffly, "An A.I. made to recreate her thought patterns."

"No," I said, shaking myself, "That's not right. An A.I. wouldn't be enough, the metroids wouldn't bond to a computer."

".... You're right."

It was almost a whisper. 

I put my hand on her shoulder.

"Whoever you're protecting," I said softly, "I'm not going after them. It's the metroids that are the issue, not the A.I."

She falls quiet at this, her hand coming up to hold my own, even though I couldn't feel it through my metal skin.

"The Federation wants both." She said, "Could you really justify sparing one and not the other?"

"I'm not a part of the Federation." I assured her. "But I know you know why we have to make sure the metroids are kept out of anyone's hands."

"I do." She says, "Mother Brain's clone; they gave it a human shape and called it MB. It was the only way they could get the baby metroids to bond with it."

"Her." I said softly. Madeline nods.

"Her." She agreed. "She's the reason why the creatures on the facility went crazy and killed everyone. She killed them. Do you think someone like that deserves to make it off the facility alive?"

"My job is to murder." I turned to face down at her. "I have my justifications for it, but from the perspective of the people I kill, I am the monster. I am not here to pass moral judgement, Madeline, I wanted to save those I could when I came. If MB will let me, I will save her too."

Madeline says nothing to that, looking down at the computer.

"We may not have much time." I said, "By now the distress signal probably reached the Federation proper; Adam's team was  reconnaissance at most, and something like this had to have backing by more than just him. I need you to tell me where the metroids and MB are. I'll get her out if I can."

"She got out already." Madeline said, "But I will tell you where they keep the metroids."

It was in a sector that didn't appear on any maps, in a recreation of Tourian. The labs of the Chozo. 

"It… it may be dangerous for you." Madeline told me as I left, "This place was designed around you, you know."

"I have to try." I said, "If I don't come back, go to my ship and use the codes I gave you. I want at least someone to survive this."

"Isn't it a little risky to give strangers codes to you ship?"

"They'll activate post-mortem." 

She had no further questions for me.

"Oh and Samus?" Her words, calling me back again, like she didn't want me to go, stalled me a little longer. I turned slightly to look at her. "Um… in case I didn't see you again, I wanted to thank you."

"Thank me?" That startled me. As far as I was aware, I hadn't actually done anything yet.

"For the kiss." She said, "It was nice… meeting you."

I couldn't respond, merely turning around, raising a hand as I walked away.

What I wanted to say was lost in the weight of everything else that had happened in the past six hours, the many deaths that had taken place, the renewed grief of Ian's tragic end. I felt as if I couldn't say anything even if I had something to say, each encounter I had with the metroids carried with it a real risk of death.

It made the going easier in some ways, and more difficult in others. I was glad that she had been happy to meet me, that for- at the very minimum- one person on this ship I represented something more than a harbinger of death that I had been for the others, and for that same reason I did not want to go meet my own death.

It was the right thing to do, and I had to do it.

I had spent the life of Zebes preventing the last metroid from falling into the hands of warmongers, what was my own in comparison?

Chapter Text

When I encountered the bio-missile for the fourth time, I ripped its life from it, and took back from it the upgrade the Federation had taken from me after the events of the Phazon incident; the seeker missiles.

The first time I had gotten this upgrade, I had lost it not to the Rite of the Chozo, but had given it back to those who had developed it. The Luminoth; who had considered themselves spiritual cousins of a sort to the Chozo and were almost as ancient. They held themselves apart from the Federation, and as far as I know, have become a somewhat insular community as they tend their damaged world. 

It was not a great surprise when I had found the Chozo had developed similar technology, though in their way of things, it had been faster and more optimized for the type of combat the Chozo still partook in then.

With my arm cannon the way it was, I was expecting the slower, more stately way the Luminoth technology had controlled, used to seal away points of interest rather than for quick combat.

As I approached the sector elevator, I heard the computer's voice speaking, the sound eerily echoing to itself, though I could not make out what it was saying. It was the sound of ghosts conversing to themselves over how they died.

My path took me to the ice sector, the sound here faintly reminiscent of the cries of the metroids overlaid with the sound of the computer.

That was fitting.

The life had been sucked out of this project by the uncontrolled metroids; their threat the reason that things had spiralled out of control and why the Federation, craving power, had put so many people in danger. As naive as I was, I believed that this was the only facility that held metroids in the Federation.

Old Bird always had chastised me for being narrow minded. Too focused on what was just up ahead to foresee the consequences of an action.

Some modifications had been done, I noted, when I finally got to the chamber that held a door that could be opened with the seeker missiles. Not wholly obnoxious ones either.

As I made my way to sector 0, the roar of some beast I had not yet seen was heard, and the gravity shifted. 

I thought on how, while still small but ferocious, Madeline had told me they had kept Ridley as a pet. 

If that thing had been a pet; what had they kept locked away?

The gravity shifted again, making my suit almost unbearably heavy to move.

I had been fussy earlier about being in water.

Compared to this, the water was like moving at shinespark speeds.

The gravity changes ceased as I entered a circular room with what seemed to be an antenna inside of it. The room was tall, and to leave it, I would have to climb.

I was two thirds of the way up when I noticed what looked to be a segmented turret hanging down from above. I would have to be cautious, I did not want to dodge blasts from a security turret of that size. 

I approached the door.

There were metallic sounds from behind me, the door locking as the turret activated.

It bends, blasting upwards into the ceiling, something struggling to get loose.

Its long arms flail as it drops from the ceiling, pulling out sparking electrical wires as it floats in midair. Something that large could float in midair. 

Red eyes glare balefully from its metal face, large serrated metal teeth grinning out at me.

Its face alone was as tall as my body.

Its tail glowed silver, and the gravity changed, making me heavier while it fired blasts at me. Freezing it didn't cause it to fall, but did allow me to fire missiles aimed toward its face. Cracking it only caused it to get angrier, tail glowing again, making me as heavy as I had been before, making m  slow and unable to dodge.

It wasn't long until I had broken its face open, revealing what kind of creature that lay beneath. Six yellow eyes set in a gummy green face, mouth shaped like rubber. Its cries were shrill and painful as it staggered to the ground, and then lay still.

It couldn't stand contact with the air.

What a painful existence they had given to this thing.

As I made my way forward to Sector 0, I was stopped by the familiar kind of rumbling I had experienced over the years. Someone had started the engines of the Bottle Ship, and was moving the facility. For what purpose, I didn't know. I was focused now, I needed to get to the metroids before we got wherever we were going.

This part of the facility was newer than the rest. Cleaner, less traveled. While the rest of it had been part of a decommissioned vessel at one point in time, this part had been crafted for its purpose. Long curving hallways proceeded a vaulting hall, the kind of hall I had seen used in the Federation for celebration.

They had planned to have this be a triumphant moment, showing the top brass their ultimate weapons. No, they wouldn't get to see this come to fruition. 

Something watches me as I move forward, something I had seen before but could not see yet. As I turned to look at it, it floats softly in the air, like the realization of a dream. 

It was a Metroid, like the one I had seen hatching on SR-388, and this time I wouldn't hesitate.

From behind me, bullets ripped through the air, shredding the delicate flesh of the metroid, causing the jelly that keeped it cohesive to leak out onto the floor as it fell to the ground.

Before I could turn to see the shooter, I felt a blast of ice on my back, cold and piercing, before spreading like fire into my limbs.

I screamed as my suit lost cohesion around me, feeling the malfunctions that had plagued me as pure pain. With my suit evaporated like steam, I couldn't stay standing, instead watching the metroid from before twitching as its final impulses of life still controlled it from a spot next to it on the floor.

I must have lost consciousness.

Chapter Text

When I awoke, someone was crouching over me, a wall against my back.

My lip snarled, but there were no words that came out.

"I'm sorry." 

Those were the last words I ever expected to hear from Adam. 

Pain mixed with confusion, my hands clenching feebly from their place at my side. I didn't want to hear apologies, I wanted answers.

My eyes went to the dead metroid, and Adam's did too. After a moment, he unholsters his gun and shoots an ice blast at the remains. The shot steams off of the jelly, though we both know that this metroid is dead.

"It was one of the things they did." Adam explains, "Removed the Metroid's fatal weakness from them, and put it into you."

"Am I part Metroid now?" I growled out after a moment, my voice thick with pain and disgust.

His answer then was no.

The true answer was not yet.

"When they found the DNA on your suit, they thought it would be… ironic." Adam explains, his grip tightening on his gun for a moment before he holstered it. "I was brought in as a consultant on the project before they greenlit it. I told them then that they could not count on your support if you found them out, and that you had a special talent for finding things out. When asked for proof, I reminded them of the Phazon incident. Some chalked it up to luck, but I don't believe luck has much to do with you."

"High praise from a man who hates me." 

Adam doesn't say anything for a moment, turning his face away.

"I could have saved him, Adam." I said, bringing my hand up, balling it into a fist. "I could have saved Ian, but you didn't even look at me when you dismissed me."

"I know."

Those were also the last words I ever expected from Adam. 

"Then why didn't you let me save him?"

The words were flatter than I expected them to be, the strength going out of my limbs, my hand falling back to the side.

"Because they would have used him." 

Adam's tone matched my own, the words hanging like dead insects in the air.

"The Federation has high minded ideals," He says after a moment, "Peace in the Galaxy, a place where everyone can feel included and live a life of their choosing. However, there are entire worlds of unpeople, Samus. It's not even something that is much of a concern to the citizens of the Federation, they're criminals and the children of criminals. You didn't need to learn the history of humanity because you were outside of it, but facilities like this, while illegal, don't even begin to scratch the surface of what was done to make them illegal."

"I thought it was because people knew better than to use living things like toys." I said, trying to sound snippish, not wanting to delve into the implications of that.

Adam shakes his head.

"Humanity made mistakes in their youth." He said, "The people who run these kinds of facilities in the Federation are still eager to make those kinds of mistakes. The correctional planets exist because the people who were sentenced to live on them were treated kinder than what they had done. Their families were sentenced with them because there is no way justice could have been done in the length of a single lifetime. Ian and I thought we were finding an out by joining the Federation's army, but we weren't. If Ian had not died on that mission, he would have been arrested and used as collateral against me."

"You sacrificed your brother for a rank." I said, my eyes going wide, horrified.

Adam doesn't answer right away.

"He knew what he was doing." Adam said, not meeting my eyes, "Ian didn't make mistakes."

"You could have told me," I said, anger boiling up within me now, "If I had known, I could have taken Ian and left, we could have been safe."

"If you had known, you would have been collateral." Adam says, "In some ways you still are."

"I left." I said, bitterness on my tongue.

"You still work with the Federation." Adam points out.

I said nothing.

"Samus." He said, standing up, bringing his gun to bear. "This facility is moving on an interception course with Federation HQ. The evidence on board might be enough to finally burn the shadows from the heart of the Federation. However, there are some points that still need answering. I believe I was being used as a scapegoat for a faction of the Federation that will die out if exposed; on the off chance that I am wrong, you should decline any further maintenance to your suit and take care of that yourself. I believe the pieces on board this Bottle Ship are all that the Federation had taken from you, make an effort to retrieve them all."

I nodded.

"Second; I believe all members of the squadron I brought with me are dead. You will need to retrieve my helmet to authenticate your presence here."

Again, I nodded.

"Third of all; The woman you met was not Madeline Burgman. According to Federation records-- and my own logs-- she does not exist."

My breath caught in my throat, and I startled forward.

"Adam- what are you saying?!" I asked, my suit beginning to flicker around me.

"I'm saying that I trust your judgement, Samus."

He is walking forward, away from me. As the doors to Sector 0 open, he walks through them, turning to look at me stumbling forward, fighting with my re-materilizing suit.

"Any objections, Lady?"

The doors shut and lock behind him. Even if I could speak, he couldn't hear me. Sector 0 begins to detach, Adam looking back up at me as he works the control panel on his side of the door.

The last time he sees me, I'm giving him the thumbs down sign, slightly obscured by my reforming arm cannon.

He begins to shoot the walls of Sector 0, causing enough damage to activate the self-destruct sequence in the recreated labs of Tourian.

The explosion was too close to the ship, even with the way the engine was propelling us out of the way. The pathway to Sector 0 was falling to peices behind me as I ran, and the blast doors weren't closing properly. Federation Pirates were shooting at me, though if they had gotten in here on accident or as part of security measures I didn't know.

I found myself slipping out into space, and as I float up, I activate my final suit upgrade. The gravity suit glows purple as I drop down to the floor, charging forward before this section of the hall could drop away.

I was almost up at full power, the only thing left out of my arsenal are my power bombs. Those were the only thing I would not be activating, the explosion having the ability to tear human flesh and bone into atoms. 

My objective remained the same, if there was any life I could save on this ship, I would save it. 

The woman who was not Madeline Burgman was waiting for me.

It was only when I reached safety on the other side that I realized there was one peice of this puzzle that I had not given much thought to. Maurice's death. If the woman was to be believed, and I did because of being attacked by the forklift with the Federation pilot, there had been someone who came with Adam's team willing to kill each other. 

I knew Anthony would never kill a team member, and Lyle had been too dead to do anything. That left only James and the other member of the team as the shooter. What I now knew about Adam implied that while he had come here in order to expose an operation that would have otherwise been pinned on him if he failed, someone had been snuck onto his team to prevent the truth from getting out. 

Had both men been plants to destroy Adam's last plan, or had one killed the others to strangle Adam's last hope for redemption?

It occured to me then that all members of Adam's team he had with him had gone in with enough knowledge and conviction to choose, and that like Ian, they had accepted their death before the Bottle Ship.

Lyle might have been a coward around insects, but he had not been a coward on this mission.

These were men that believed in the goodness the Federation held, and it was my job to make sure their piercing ray of light made it to the center of the Federation's shadows.

Even now, it still is.

On my way back to the main sector, I crossed the path of the dead nightmare I had fought on the way to Sector 0. It was a little sad, seeing that dead thing laying there like a discarded toy, built only to be a weapon. What had gone into this monstrosity I couldn't begin to speculate, only that it had been alive in its own way.

And then it moved.

Now that I had my gravity suit, I could ignore some of its effects on me, but my missiles still sunk to the floor when I fired them. I would have to kill it for good this time, and not let a sense of pity for what had brought it into this world stay my hand.

The doors had locked behind me, it was a fight for my life. Not the first one I had been in, and hardly the last I would face.

No longer weighed down by its faceplate, its powers were stronger and had the ability to throw black holes to parts of the room.

This had been the kind of bio-weapon they had been hoping to create.

When it fell this time, it fell to pieces. I couldn't be sure that it was dead, its green face going dark, but its limbs had fallen off. I hoped it was dead, for its sake. It didn't deserve to suffer.

I left its corpse where it was and went on, chewing on my thoughts as I made my way back where I had left the woman in Sector 1. I had questions for her, questions I hoped she could answer.

I hoped she stayed out of sight from the man I had followed to her. In my rush to deal with the metroids I had forgotten to resolve that issue, a mistake that I hoped did not cost me the life of the one person I had found alive on this ship of death.

Bottle Ship. 

Humans used to build sailing ships in bottles, replicas of those great boats that had conquered the oceans of planet Earth.

This Bottle Ship was intended to conquer the oceans of space.

Chapter Text

I hurried back to the Bioweapons Research Center. Everything was quiet as I walked, the walls seeming to laugh at me.

I found myself in a room with the dead body of Ridley, his blood fresh behind me. He had been sucked dry, and I felt sick.

I knew what had happened to him, but if that was true then-- Had Adam died in Sector 0 for nothing?

I found them in a room full of stasis tubes, ths Federation soldier aiming his gun at the woman who wasn't Madeline Burgman's head. Moments before he pulled the trigger, I fired.

He had pulled back his visor to watch her last moments before she died, and couldn't protect himself from a single blast from my plasma beam.

The woman didn't scream, merely running soundlessly into my arms, my hand curling protectively over her back, heart pounding in my chest. 

"Samus, you have to get out of here," The woman said, "It isn't safe here, it isn't safe!"

The bulkhead slid open, and from the back of the room, stood a gigantic creature that I had seen before.

The Metroid Queen.

"I don't want you to hurt her!" The woman in my arms said, and I gave her a little squeeze.

"I know." I said, "I don't want to hurt her either, but… You know what she was bred for, MB, what they'll do to both of you if they find you. This ship is on an intercept course, we don't have much time."

She holds to me tightly for a moment, and then pulls away, nodding.

"You know what you have to do." She says, her eyes red though she did her best not to cry, "Be quick, please."

"Get to safety." I said, touching her face with my cold metal hand, "If there is one thing I know how to do, it is destroy. I don't want to destroy you, too." 

She nods, going into one of the small rooms behind us, closing herself in, and as the door slid shut behind her, I could see the Metroid Queen begin to stir, the connection with her mistress severed.

As I stepped into the room with her, MB closed the bulkhead, surely knowing what must come next.

Metroid.

The word meant Ultimate Warrior in the language of the Chozo. I wondered if this was what they had imagined when they designed her.

She was beautiful, every inch of her perfect. The offspring inside of her were strong, but these could be frozen. I knew then that this had been their first clone of the Metroid from planet SR-388, preserved in the manner that she would have been had she grown up. A threat to the Galaxy, a tool that would be used for a sense of Justice that included the correctional internment camps that punished a criminal for generations. 

I thought then only that the universe should be rid of Ultimate Weapons, not what the Chozo had designed a Ultimate Warrior for. I hadn't understood the difference on SR-388, and I didn't understand it now, only focused on the effect this beautiful, utterly deadly creature would have on the Federation.

Her neck glowed with the inner light of mauve crystals, her maw breathing fire. Each crystal shattered delicately under the blast of my super missiles, spinning deadly shards into the air. When they were destroyed, she was down.

Long enough to catch her breath. Her head lifting up once again, teeth bared as her crocodilian head shook itself, purple compound eyes glittering in the low light.

"Intercepting Galactic Federation Orbit in 30 seconds."

It was the voice of the computer, informing all of us that our time was out.

My thoughts were full of Anthony and Adam. I would die here and join them soon, and those Adam had so desperately wanted to expose would cover up what had happened here and steal away this Queen and MB.

That kiss we had shared in Sector 2 had probably been her first, I realized, and when I had spoken about trying to save even an A.I. given the shape of a person, she must have thought I had known who she was. 

An A.I. patterned after Mother Brain.

Patterned after the minds of the Chozo.

I had been so close to finding someone like I was, a strange amalgamation of human and Chozo, and I missed the opportunity to help her because I had been too slow and I was going to die.

"Emergency brakes engaging." 

The cheerful voice of the computer heralded the shock that sent both I and the Metroid Queen toppling to the floor.

I was out of time. I stood up and blasted her stomach, she stood up to face me.

The inside of her mouth glowed, and I felt it.

In that glow, the power that had followed me through my years as a bounty hunter returned to me. The hands of the Chozo were on me, and I fired my grappling beam, their power surging through me as I curled up into a ball inside the Queen's mouth, exploding into the air as I laid a powerbomb. 

Dust, inert carbon lay around me, and from a side door, MB ran in. 

Wordlessly, we embraced, MB taking my hand to lead our way out of the Bioweapon Research Center.

Unfortunately for us, most of the doors had been locked, and the only way forward was--

"Oh no!" MB cried, moving to huddle behind me.

In front of us was a redheaded woman, with a gun on us. My gun comes up, hiding MB behind me as I slowly move us to a more defensible position.

"My name is Samus Aran." I said, trying to keep my voice calm, "I'm not here to hurt you."

"That's Madeline." MB whispers to me, "Don't let her see me!"

"Are you Madeline Burgman?" I ask, the woman coldly regarding me.

"What business is it of yours?" She asks. 

"I intercepted a distress beacon." I said, "I'm responding to it. I'm an independent bounty hunter, I know what's going on here. All of it, Madeline. I want to help."

"Then you know what that is behind you." She replies, and I can't help but bristle a little.

"A survivor." I reply, "I intend to get her out of here alive."

"It's manipulating you." Madeline says, "It's what it does. I bet it didn't even tell you what happened."

It.

The word shocked me though I know it shouldn't have.

They had created MB to control their federation pirates forces. at the time, much like the Mother Brain that the Chozo had created, all she had been was a brain in a jar. a thing meant to interact with the cybernetic enhancements installed in the federation pirates forces.

They had been working on this long before I had brought them the Metroid sample.

When I did, they began to have dreams of an army of Metroids.

The Metroids weren't like other animals, they couldn't be domesticated. Mindless, they called them, though I knew they were anything but.

They only gave MB a body to recreate what had happened to me and the hatching Metroid on SR-388. They made her look and feel human to trick a child into trusting them.

I don't think Madeline intended to get attached at first, but she did. Or at least I think she did.

MB grew faster than they expected, forming connections with the other scientists and loved to learn, the interactions with the metroids having changed her. She began to have differing opinions and began to grow angry.

Madeline had a choice. She could disipline her daughter as a daughter, accept the full responsibilities as a mother or...

She had made the decision to alter MB's programming, to remove the emotions she had formed. 

Madeline could have stopped it at any time. She was lacking what MB had, the heart to do what she set her mind to, and had the scientists do what she could not.

Looking away from the orders you give does not absolve you of giving those orders, nor does it give you deniability. It makes you a coward. It made her a coward.

It was then when she had been grabbed, that she had used her telepathic powers to summon the creatures to wage war on the scientists.

"Defective AI." Madeline said, spitting out the words, denying to us and herself she ever saw MB as human, "I- We had done something wrong and it began to go rogue like the original Mother Brain."

"You're right." I said, my voice bitter and sharp, "You abandoned your daughter. Mother Brain didn't just go rogue- She became sentient. She chose the Space Pirates because she saw something it has taken the rest of us years to see. The Galactic Federation, left unopposed, would become the very thing the Chozo sought to destroy!"

Madeline gasps, advancing angrily on me, gun charging. From the open door, a bolt of ice flew in, striking and freezing Madeline on the spot.

Federation troopers swarmed in, surrounding me and MB, their guns pointed at us, ordering us to freeze. I couldn't take all of them on and ensure MB's safety. If anyone had heard what I had just said, I would have been declared an enemy of the state. 

"Samus." MB said behind me, "Do you really think that about Mother Brain?"

I nodded, once.

The figure in the middle of the room began to melt, and glow like she was channeling fire from inside of her, creatures on the walls coming to life, the entire ship howling. I didn't know what was going on, MB still behind me, her eyes closed.

"No one saw me," She says so only I can hear, "Samus, you know who I am." 

In the middle of the room, I saw what she was doing. Madeline Burgman. MB. 

I pointed my gun at her, and fired. As long as I kept the woman behind me, she was Madeline Burgman. 

The frozen statue in front of us was fired on by the Federation Army.

The woman they thought was MB was reduced to frozen rubble. The creatures calmed down, folding in on themselves.

The woman behind me clung to my arm, my fist clenched as an old man in a soft gray shirt, his hat marking him as an admiral walked up to me, a smirk on his face.

"I heard what happened here." He said, his tone of a man who wanted to laugh, "Admirable job, Samus. You may leave the rest to us."

Men come up beside me to take the woman from my grasp. I didn't raise my gun, but everyone could hear the humming click of my arm cannon in that room, and the metallic crunch of my fist tightening on itself.

They stood back.

The admiral frowned, deciding to threaten me in another way.

"I heard about General Malkovitch." He said, "So sorry to hear that him and his entire team had been annihilated, but without them you're just an outsider. Terrible what happened to James especially."

James. The man I had shot to save MB.

So this was the angle he was going to go for.

"Given your predilection to transport illegal cargo like infant Metroids, you can understand why I can't allow you to linger here." He said, laughing now, "Time for the lady to go home. Someone, come escort the lady."

There was no respect in that tone of voice, and MB held me back from hitting him with my closed fist.

"Certainly." 

A hand grabbed my elbow right above my arm cannon, and I dug my feet in, resisting him.

"Come on, Princess."

I didn't say anything, but my immediate change in posture caught the admiral's eye.

"Who are you?" He said, his narrow little face screwing up, "I don't know you, identify yourself."

"Anthony Higgs, sir." Anthony said, standing at attention, "Galactic Federation Platoon 7. I need to secure the safety of any survivors. General Malkovich's orders, and the purpose of this mission. Authorized by the Chairman of the Federation… of course."

It was fun to see this man stutter in shock, approaching Anthony as if he had seen a ghost.

Anthony barreled on.

"But man, you guys made it here quick!" He said, his turn to suppress laughter, "If I hadn't stopped the engines, we might've missed each other."

His thumbs up to me was cocky and assured. 

I smiled.

Chapter Text

Inside my ship, we finally had a moment to relax, MB sleeping in the chair to my left, and Anthony chatting away in the chair to my right.

"It's crazy how something good could come out of something so bad." He said, rubbing his ice gun. He had been the one to freeze Madeline, and had just finished telling me the story of how he had frozen one of the magma men as he fell. "Though, I don't know what we're gunna do with her once we're out of here."

"I think I'll start by asking her what she wants." I reply, the smile still lingering in my lips.

The official story is a lot different than what I've recounted.

Officially, Madeline Burgman stood trial for her work on the Bottle Ship and had all of her research stripped from her, the Bottle Ship destroyed.

A cover up for the truth. While Madeline was ultimately thrown into disgrace, the fact that she had died was… delayed from public knowledge. Anthony didn't have any records from the point he fell from Ridley's attack, his suit damaged by his fall.

As for the survivor of the Bottle Ship, it was the knowledge that she was out there that kept them from covering up the incident entirely.

When she awoke, she told us what had happened on the Bottle Ship.

Madeline Burgman had told MB that her name was Melissa Burgman, MB assuming that the scientist had been claiming her like a daughter. She had known the scientists wanted her to bond with the hatchling metroids, and assumed that Madeline had been demonstrating for her the bond that parents form with their children. 

As she grew she began to get frustrated, being able to hear the pain that the scientists were inflicting on the creatures, and claiming that the beasts were mindless things.

"I heard their thoughts." MB said, "They knew what was happening to them, and they just wanted it to stop."

MB had been complacent because it's what Madeline had wanted, but when they came to take her away… Madeline just watched.

MB had decided to destroy humanity for the cruelty they were willing to employ without a second thought, to deem them all guilty and to destroy them. 

She had thought Adam was their leader, and had thought that I had been like her, something created by the Chozo, artificial. 

There had been a genuine want to have me join her on her crusade, and to use me at any cost. She had not been expecting me to kiss her and protect her without a second thought for myself. 

She hadn't been expecting Anthony to protect her either. 

"I'm not Melissa." She had said, pulling on the edge of her white coat. "I can't be Melissa, but I don't want to be just MB either. I'm not a thing. I'm not a machine."

"You could be Moira." Anthony said, looking over at her, "Yeah, you strike me as a Moira, I read a story about her once, where she was always trying to escape from the life they made her live, and ended up somewhere she could settle down. It may not have been the happiest ending in the world, but she did fine for herself."

"Moria." Her mouth formed the word carefully. "I think I like it. But what about the B?"

"Why not just Bea?" Anthony asked, giving a careless shrug, "Until you find something you want to replace it with, I don't see the problem with having you be a Bea."

Moira laughed then, and I could tell Anthony was right. She would do fine, as long as she was alive.

Officially, Moira Bea did not exist. There was a small inquiry about the whereabouts of my third passenger when I returned to the Federation with Anthony, but all of the researchers were accounted for, the single member of Adam's team to never turn up was a man called K.G. James Peirce was officially labeled a traitor post-mortem, denounced as a radical, the last few moments of his data corrupted by my blast.

Eyewitnesses at the scene didn't get a good look at who I had behind my back, and Anthony claims that I didn't have anyone but him on board my ship. 

Adam was a hero, who had found out a plot to undo the Federation under the galaxy's nose. He had given his life in the pursuit of truth against tyranny and had redeemed himself of the crime that his family had committed years ago, free in death.

Those who knew about the Bottle Ship project know that Moira is out there, and what she can do. They fear her, and for a time it seems as if the darkness recedes, that the Federation could finally be that shining hope I had dreamed of as a child.

End Transmission.

Chapter Text

Samus fell silent, her fingers working on the controls of the strange purple ship, Adam's light flashing gently as he processed the transcript.

"Well?" He asks, his voice the clipped metallic sound it had been since he had been brought back as a computer, "Clearly you went back for the helmet Adam left behind before the destruction of the Bottle Ship, but what happened to the woman?"

Samus smiled, pressing a few keys to open a secured transmission. 

"Hello, Moira." Samus said, the planet Aether crackling on screen for a moment. 

She had gone to stay with their cousins.