Chapter Text
The first star was a comet, burning red. Bloodred; fire red; the dragon's tail.
- Daenerys Targaryen's thoughts
Samus Aran’s Gunship glided quietly through the space gate the Thalasseins had been kind enough to let her use. Almost immediately after crossing the threshold, her cloaks went up, and her ship was now virtually undetectable. It was her second time back in the Tetra Galaxy, and she was not feeling nostalgic.
But an urgent message from Adam and the Thoha had brought her back here.
From the Galactic Federation’s side, she learned that Space Pirate operations were intensifying raids against Sector-C713. But they were not focused on anything in particular; that in itself was highly unusual. Adam Malkovich had warned her about this as soon as he was assigned to protect the humans living there.
But at the same time, from her adopted family the Chozo, she was told that a massive purchase of Retrogression Crystals was made from the Cedracons. They were not a particularly violent or benevolent race themselves, but they had a strong claim over their local solar system within their controlled asteroid belt, allowing them to freely trade with the Thoha.
The Cedracons were one of the few older races that had encountered the Phaze Leviathans deployed using Retrogression Crystals. With every wormhole opened by those living meteorites as they travelled through space, they theoretically closed behind them as the Leviathan passed through. The Cedracons could detect those closed gates using those crystals.
But finding a single wormhole in space was like finding a leaf in a forest. They could not discover the source of this plague if they had no idea how many times a Phaze Leviathan had to warp in order to arrive at their destination. It was not something even the Leviathans themselves understood.
But it seemed that the Pirates were starting to get creative in their search for this origin.
A distraction in Sector-C713, with an uncharacteristic purchase for one of the few materials capable of detecting Leviathan Wormholes, and now a hidden lab in Tetra?
Space Pirates never bought anything. But the Cedracons were far too well insulated to threaten quickly. Whatever they got from the Pirates in exchange had to be good. They were quick enough to inform Samus where the Space Pirates went, just to shoo her along when she brought it up.
She stalked that ship all the way to a Thalassein outpost, where they were kind enough to house her and give her a mission under false pretenses for permission to use their wormhole. Thalasseins did not like Space Pirates anymore than she did, and they were happy enough to inform her about the suspicious activity they had been monitoring in exchange for money.
Pirates had been moving ships through here for a long time. Construction, refuelling, and more soldiers. Thalasseins didn’t give up use of their wormhole until they were compensated or threatened. The Pirates chose the latter.
That was just the problem with them: Space Pirates didn’t have enough competition, so they were just sloppy sometimes. They ought to have paid off the Thalasseins like they did the Cedracons.
But she was here now, still on the tail of the one she had chased from Cedracon. Her Gunship had already hacked their communication lines, and she was allowing the program to translate for her.
She didn’t understand everything; a lot of it was just related to the other traffic that would be arriving soon, but she was under the impression that something new was about to be tested.
Samus got a bad feeling about that. But she could find the lab now without trailing the Pirates in front of her by tracing their messages.
She pulled her Gunship back and flew in the direction of this secret lab. It would likely take a few hours, and she could rest until then. She flipped on "Manual mode" and relaxed into her chair.
As Samus Aran drifted off, she was completely unaware that the order had already been given for the command to start reverse engineering a method to open a collapsed wormhole.
When she woke back up, that lab was in view. Cameras showed a few guard drones orbiting around it, but it was surprisingly barren.
It resembled an elongated drop of water, with a “point” made from Retrogression Crystals. But she couldn’t tell from this distance what it was meant to be.
A new weapon? A satellite? She had to move closer to board their vessel.
As her ship cruised closer, she could begin hacking communications again. The news reported back to her was less casual now.
They did something. No - they were doing something, studying it, but it was growing out of control. Evacuation was suggested before it was shot down as an impossibility.
Samus’s gut clenched, but she flew in closer anyway. Typically space stations started imploding AFTER she got in, but she couldn’t allow vague warnings to turn her away. She had to get her hands on whatever data the Space Pirates had on the origin of Leviathans.
Her first sign that things were going from bad to dire was seeing the guard drones orbiting the ship begin to drift away. They never did that unless they were getting ready to send a warning to other Space Pirates in the area. She shot them down.
A sudden wrenching on her ship had her hands tightly grip the manual controls. The reports from the Pirates were getting increasingly incoherent, adding to the confusion.
“Warning! You are being pulled into a vacuum! You must evacuate immediately!” Her ship's most urgent warnings went straight to her helm.
Her heart sank into her stomach as she saw what was being generated from those Regression Crystals.
Those crazy bastards had tried opening a Leviathan Wormhole. And they succeeded. Without calculating the sheer force and gravity such a wormhole would generate to allow something a Leviathan’s size to pass through. It was closer to a black hole now.
Their lab was fucked. Samus Aran would follow soon. She overturned warnings and steadily raised her speed. But was too late.
That wormhole was only growing bigger. She could see the lab being pulled in, pieces of it tearing off, burning up, and being sucked in as it struggled to stay outside.
That would be her Gunship soon if she didn’t make a quick choice.
She uncloaked her ship and began wormhole preparations. She allowed the gravity pulling at her to tilt her ship around, and she engaged thrusters to push forward against the gravity, slowing her pull inside.
It was a matter of waiting now. She had to allow as much of the lab to fall in first as she could. Wormholes weren't designed for multiple vessels, and there was a very real chance that once in, a stray piece of construction could smash into her Gunship and kill her.
But if she delayed going in too long, if she continued pushing back against gravity, her ship could still be torn apart. Her sweaty hands tightened on the controls as she tried turning her ship to fall at an angle towards the wormhole rather than straight towards it.
She was close enough to see a few escape pods try desperately to launch out. But they immediately burned up and were sucked back into that strange red gate.
In the end, the wormhole expanded far too big for any of them to fight anymore. Her heart fell at how much debris would enter with her, but she was determined to survive.
She prepared her guns and readied anti-asteroid protocols.
Falling in, there was no light. Nothing to indicate there was anything at the end of the tunnel. All she could see and scan was nothingness with a vague sense of motion. Up until the first fragment collided with her side and her monitor screamed a warning. She swore out loud and sharply steered her ship to avoid anything else in that area.
She felt as though she was travelling for ages, the only interruption when something smashed against the sides of her vessel. Damage began to accumulate, and the creaking of metal around her was beginning to intensify even without anything wrecking her ship.
When she finally came out the other side, her hands were shaking on her controls. Her Gunship was tough enough to take a few knocks around, but nobody could have predicted she would be experimenting with a new kind of travel.
Her energy-recharge system was smoking; she was fairly certain that communications and printers were down, and her ship was pushing her to land so it could begin urgent repairs. Thankfully, fuel was still reaching her engines, so she was on a beeline away from that Leviathan Wormhole.
Watching that red streak shrinking from her back view was the most beautiful thing she had seen since nearly dying to it.
She tried to triangulate her position using the stars in the area, but her map seemed to be damaged. She had to use observations of the space around her to build a new map from the ground up to guide her towards a larger body within the Habitable Zone of a sun.
From a distance, it didn’t look too bad. Since she was the first one here, Galactic Federation tech immediately designated it: W35-4V. Very creative. One moon, plenty of green and brown, and with the amount of methane gas it was producing, it was safe to say that it was populated.
This had its own problems, but her ship was too damaged to fly anywhere else now. Anywhere colder or warmer would negatively impact repair.
Samus took a deep breath and finally steered her ship towards the planet beneath her.
She would need to rotate once around the planet to test the atmosphere; it would be impossible to predict where her ship could fall otherwise. If she were to have any control over that, it was preferable that she would land somewhere more isolated. No point scaring the shit out of possible wildlife for no reason.
Her vessel began to tilt down, and she quickly adjusted it so that it would only land once she was closer to the north. She doubted many were living it up in the North Pole.
Her monitor surprised her then by piping up.
“Samus Aran, would you like to deploy your ejection pod once we begin our descent? A crash from this height is very dangerous, and you may be injured.”
Her eyebrows touched her hairline. Getting the chance to eject prior to a crash? It almost felt like a good omen. As soon as she agreed, the metal around her began to slowly stretch and contort even as she was strapped in.
The same material that her suit was made from was now drawing data from her to cover and protect Samus from further injury. Chozo-made things were thankfully usually neuromorphic & used biohybrid computing: That was why she had her chair replaced with one made by them, even if she still preferred driving human tech.
Even as her escape pod closed in over her, even as she felt herself curl into a ball and morph within her shell, Samus could not help but wonder what kind of a world she would land in?
Far below Samus, below her spaceship hurtling towards Westeros, many eyes stared up at the light that had bloomed across the sky.
A young man shouted for his master’s attention.
An even smaller girl clutching her eggs in the desert.
A red priest, peering deeply into her fire and startling back when a streak of light destroyed her focus.
Armies, scores of them, stood still murmuring as a crowd. Each of them gave a name more magnificent than the last for the long streak of light in the sky.
Even the animals stood still.
And far into the north, a great many score of eyes, different from the others, all lifted as One.
Samus Aran was fully encased by her chair when it sprang out and through the roof of her Gunship. The misshapen orb was still pulsating even as it burned through the atmosphere on the same path as her vessel.
Her Gunship, now free of any fragile living occupant, maintained fuel for repairs as it sailed over the Shivering Sea. Perhaps it could have used more care to remain hidden, but such orders were only prioritized had it the knowledge.
The few men and women still remaining at Thenn screamed and cowered as a flaming wreckage dropped from the clouds. A child, dropped by his mother in the ensuing panic, could not even let out a cry as the terrifying wreck screamed over them.
But the sky did not fall, and even as the last among them gulped down their sobs, that fiery light disappeared over and past the mountains.
And then it was over. Nothing but a dark, cloudy line in the sky, breaking the white.
They did not hear the impact, nor feel the resulting earthquake. But something else did.
For the first time since the decision to corral the humans, the Others converged as One to make a rapid unanimous decision. The younger among them were still angry, confused, and bloodthirsty. Overground, beneath the ice, the deformed and mad snapped at any still living creatures, indignantly raw from the unwelcome changes. But the oldest among them looked towards the Red Comet.
It didn’t change things. It couldn’t possibly. They had lived long enough to witness all manner of comets, meteorites and shooting stars. But there were memories latent in their wights minds that stretched with aching desperation towards that red light. Feelings that were too valuable to abandon in their charges, too addicting not to consume over and over again.
They were hopeful. They were hungry. They were angry, they were sad, and then they were CURIOUS above all.
It would be foolish not to investigate something delivered to their home.
Closing Their eyes, all the Others paused, the exceptions being those that cut themselves off forcefully from their kin. The continued construction of Ice Blades and Armour was more important than ever as the Long Night approached.
Searching among Themselves, this unified mind was pleased to find One Among Them, a lone soldier who stood at the rear of the fleeing humans.
Others placed strategically deep in the woods terrified the humans. They killed any who came too close, and they were expanding their territories as the cold grew day by day.
One Among Others jolted to life, far, far away from the others. An ancient horror creeping awake, limbs and armour cracking as it moved for the first time in months. The unholy glow in Their empty sockets blinked first, then bloomed bright blue that covered the pupils and sclera.
The horse that it sat on creaked to life beneath him, a frozen skeleton picked clean by scavengers, saved the flesh that had been frozen into black ice. It adjusted faster than even the rider, shaking the rotten reins in its hands.
Without so much as a tug, both rider and steed turned the same direction and began to travel towards the Red Comet.
Samus curled in on herself; she felt her physical body begin to dematerialize, converting her into energy, her fragile human body now neatly tucked away. Without a physical mind, her suit’s internal quantum computer booted up, allowing her to still be conscious of the world around her.
The belt that once bound her to this chair snapped as her suit cut it into pieces. Almost immediately, the soft material stuck to the pulsating metal around her.
Whatever interior did not go towards reinforcing the outside disintegrated, locked itself together again, and melted again. Over and over again it did this, until everything between Samus and her vessel was covered and suspended in a honeycomb-like structure.
The landing was rough. Even in a ball, encased snugger than a yolk in an egg. The thrashing, noise, and jerking were more than she thought this “shell” protecting her could handle. But eventually, she felt the world around her roll to a stop.
She had to break out of all of this. Communicating that desire to material whose first priority was to protect her wasn’t easy. She had to force her way back into materialization again by morphing herself halfway and back over and over again.
It took an unwieldy amount of squirming around to even get within punching distance, but she did it.
First a leg, then an arm smashed out of the steaming orb, pulling the metal apart with terrific squeals as she wrenched herself out.
Landing on the ground belly first, it took her a few seconds to readjust. Gravity… good. Decent, in fact. Her helm was already sampling the atmosphere around her.
She was surrounded by white. Her visor slowly melted away the snow that was blocking her view. Turning a full circle, she saw a long, black trail from her journey down, sliding across the snow and through trees that ended abruptly over a ledge. She seemed to have landed in a valley, great mountains stretching onwards around her. There didn’t seem to be any signs of life.
“Area analysis complete. Would you like to review what we have found?”
There was no nodding or verbal clarification needed. Her armour was functioning at full capacity and tuned into her body. As soon as she desired it, the characters disappeared.
“The current temperature is approximately negative 27 degrees. The oxygen present is between 19% and 19.98 percent, a stable atmosphere. Prior to ejecting, we have already observed warmer regions on this planet’s surface.”
She turned to the wreckage and fired a tracking pod at the still smoking orb from her hand. It quickly bored itself into the metal. She had to find her ship before another planet full of-
“Alert! Gunship connection re-established. Primary operations online to begin internal damage diagnostics summary. Mobile energy-recharge system: damaged. Microfactories: intact. Sophonic communicator: damaged. Scanners: online now. Abnormal movements have been detected near your vessel.”
She closed her eyes. Why? Why her?
“Alert! Abnormal movements confirmed near your moored ship. Automatic distress signal emitted.”
Her teeth gnashed together, anger pushing its way to the surface past weariness. A distress beacon was like serving your own ass on a silver platter to any hostile species within the area. But anti-thievery protocols overrode most inputted orders on uncontacted planets.
This was why she hated landing on populated uncontacted planets. You have one recorded instance of a pre-Type One civilization acquiring Galactic Federation tech, and now all Galactic Federation tech was more locked up than a Chozon hermit.
All other information blinked away from her visor. Only a target remained. That connection to her ship.
She gave a running start, and then curled up and sped off in that direction.
A wight was not deployed for their ingenuity or their stability, the Other thought.
But as it stood far back from the hunched corpses that were trying to pull burnt pieces of themselves off the smoking metal, it felt something close to gratitude for their warning. Once They had learned how hot this thing was, human flesh was quite useful in determining if it could be approached.
No one expected anything normal when Their representative finally reached the Red Comet itself, not the light it had breathed into the sky to reach them.
Meteorites They were familiar with, those that appeared more frequently than comets. And enough fragments had fallen from the heavens to teach Them that what they saw soaring across the sky were likely rock inflamed by dragon's breath.
But this Red Comet was not even a piece fallen off the moon as the more creative among Them hypothesized.
This was constructed. By the stars themselves.
And what a bizarre, evil thing it was. Made of nothing They had ever seen, smoking hatefully of heat even hours after plummeting into the snow and ice.
Worse, it felt alive.
Buzzing, chirring, whirling, squealing, barking, tweeting; it was impossible to make sense of the cacophony of noise that came from it.
They had thrown a javelin straight at it, hoping to silence the Comet. But it merely bounced off the cursed thing! Worse still, a high-pitched shrill noise had come off it. It was so loud that a few wights dropped to the ground, their frozen eardrums shattering inside their heads.
But it tapered off, returning to blinking and chirping again instead of a shrill scream. Still, the vessel had cooled enough for Them to approach closer.
A clear pane of green crystal showed that the comet had an interior. Inside, there seemed to be light shining back. Magic? Magic from the heavens? Now that was an area of study that interested all of Them.
There was an enormous hole behind that green crystal on top of the Comet. The way the metal sprouted out reminded the Others of watching trees implode from the inside out when the temperature suddenly dropped. A borrowed memory came to Them, something that used to be very important. An… egg?
Did something hatch out of the Comet? There were no tracks spotted.
The Other scaled to the top, spear tightly in hand. Steeling Themselves (as much as an independent body could) They jumped inside. Its greaves hissed on contact, but One Among Others did not burn. It was only uncomfortably warm.
All around it were blinking lights of various sizes. It stood still, only observing. Some of those panes of light stood shorter or wider, but They could see magical runes illuminated on those panes.
It tried to touch them first with Their weapon, then tentatively touch it with its hand. Both went through as though he were nothing more than a shade. Strangely, some other panes of light could be touched by Their hand. It felt warm and smooth. Disgusting.
Being surrounded by dull winding metal, harsh lines, and rigid squares put Them on edge. They had felt as though they were being watched from the moment they entered this place.
But there was no natural world in here, no eyes to perceive. Everything he was surrounded by felt… unhuman, dead but still functioning independently. Like encountering a wight created by someone not of Them.
Whatever this Comet was, if it could not be explained, it had to be destroyed.
With consensus from the Others, more would arrive with tools, with chains, with anything capable of excavating this horror.
Because if it could not be destroyed, it had to be buried.
The horse outside gave a long, reedy cry, the reason revealing itself just as he peered out through the steed’s eyes.
There seemed to be something quickly approaching Them.
Samus felt angrier and angrier as she continued speeding down across the snow as fast as she could.
Mountainous slopes were not easy to navigate; there were too many obstacles in the way. At first, Samus tried weaving around the vegetation. But this snail's pace quickly left her frustrated. Trees clipped by her massive shoulders splintered or fell as she rushed forward.
Her internal barometer was reporting that the temperature was dropping steadily, and life around her was rapidly thinning out. Trees no longer grew in clusters; the forest began to thin.
Once the ground was flat, she intermittently ran to navigate the taller ledges and morphed to travel faster across the snow. Each time she did this, her visor gave her another update as though it might have been worried that Samus wasn’t paying attention.
“Abnormal movement detected.”
“Alert! Unlawful entry detected! You may be held liable!”
“Alert! Your hull has collided with an unknown object!”
“Alert! Unlawful entry detected! You may be held liable!”
She couldn’t even turn these off! Goddamned Federation!
Finally, within three hundred metres of her ship, she morphed back into her bipedal state. She was still running towards her destination, but it was a lighter jog now. All her focus was ahead.
Thermal signatures revealed that the dark spots huddled together against the white were barely a few degrees above freezing. Two among them were even colder than the others.
They were still too far away to see clearly, even as they thronged among themselves, but she could swear they were also bipedal. If there was oxygen present on this planet, there was a medium here that would allow them to register her words. Just in case, she made sure to amplify the noise well above and beyond her normal speaking voice.
“I am Samus Aran! I am here to retrieve my property!”
Her voice was modulated, not too low, not too high. The aliens far off in the distance stopped. Good. They could hear her.
“You have been recorded tampering with Galactic Federation and Chozo technology! If you value your lives, you will step back!”
Now they were moving towards her. She walked slowly towards them, with both arms raised.
“I have commanded you by the authority of the Galactic Federation and as the Promised One among the Chozo to step back! I will not allow you to steal what does not belong to you! I shoot to kill!”
Her footsteps faltered as she noticed no, they weren’t just moving. They were running towards her, a whole crowd of them struggling through the snow. They were finally close enough for Samus to see some details.
Not for the first time in her long life, she wondered if her suit was malfunctioning again.
Humans? That was impossible.
Really? Yes. No human could be that cold and alive. She didn’t even know where they could have possibly originated, livor mortis distorting them so badly. And she knew that they had to be dead, because most of them were missing or dangling pieces of themselves people still needed to live. But they were still moving towards her against all odds.
Memories came to her then, a disorientating mixture of good and bad. Her mother and father. Adam and that terrible fight they had. And the human remains of K-2L that could be recovered.
Her momentary lapse into her own head did nothing to deter the wretches. They didn’t even look at her, many of their neck broken back or lolling forwards like dogs as they ran.
What scientific explanation, what evolutionary benefit could there be present here? This was sick.
How dare they try to taint the few good memories Samus still had?
She pointed her fusion cannon at the densest part of the crowd.
Another foolish human, wandering too far from their kind.
Whatever trepidation One Among Others felt dissipated as They realized it was merely a man.
This one was dressed in heavy armour, drabbed from head to toe in coincidentally the same color as the Comet. Was this one of their religious warriors? Someone who fashioned metal after a favored prophecy? Perhaps a more flamboyant Black Brother?
This warrior spoke loudly, abnormally so, their words echoing across the plains.
But every wight’s command was the same: to kill all humans. The rest of its brethren were still ruminating among Themselves whether They should continue to observe the Comet outside their territories or to start their journey towards it now.
But something was strange.
That armoured man, he seemed to lack a right hand. It ended at a stump. So why was he pointing it at the wights?
A light began to build, condense, and shine brightly within that arm. It held, suspended for a moment, illuminating the wielder’s body.
Like a miniature sun, One Among Others thought, fear finally alerting the rest of his kin.
There were times in Samus’ life where she wondered what would happen if she actually blasted an unprotected human with her cannon.
Most space-faring species modified themselves to be able to temporarily withstand the vacuum of space itself. A hit from her would hurt, but not actually pierce their hides. Watching metroids implode got boring fast.
Launching the charge beam, it seemed to glow brighter against the snow as it sallied forth. She was so glad to see that her weapons were functioning at full capacity.
This light illuminated even more damage she did not want to see: there was every stage of rot, exposed bone, hands blackened, genitals exposed, and tongues so swollen some looked like they had swallowed apples whole. But their eyes threw Samus off.
How could every last one of them have blue eyes? Glowing blue eyes?
And then the fragile charge burst upon contact.
An implosion of charred flesh, lightning arcing out and striking anything near the initial blast. She felt the ground itself shake, the land lacking any stray energy-dissipation tech that space stations held.
Nodding to herself, she pointed her arm cannon at the few seizing undead on the ground, most of them missing limbs, and began firing her beam at heads.
She was pleased to discover that even a normal beam was sufficient to split skulls. But disgusted to see that severed limbs still moved about independently.
An unbelievable screech came from behind the corpses being disassembled.
At first, Samus thought it might have been a stress hallucination. It was too similar to something she remembered from childhood (A centaur, her digitized memory corrected her. A mythological beast based on surviving records and oral history from prehistoric Earth cultural studies).
It was coming at her fast, a spear in its hand. The snow and the dead didn’t seem to deter it one bit. It looked pretty fragile, but at the speed it was approaching her, a charge beam might miss.
She placed her hand on her right arm, gripping the mechanism tight. She pulled it back, and the end split open, like a flower blooming into four petals. Her eyes were locked onto the rapidly approaching bogey, with her helm visor locking onto that target a moment later.
She noticed that it had very familiar bright blue eyes as she took a breath in…
… and exhaled, releasing a quick missile.
It hit that thing right in its shoulder, blasting it off the beast below him. The animal, not unaffected by the sudden wrenching of the rider off it, stumbled and crashed into the snowbank. She hadn’t noticed that it was actually running above the snow until then. Maybe that was why the dead were so slow?
Samus withdrew her left arm and allowed the cannon to fold back into its normal state.
A few more beams were fired at any suicidal attempts to kill her or flee. Even the beast it rode picked itself up, shook itself off, and tried to trample her before she blasted it to pieces.
She learned pretty quickly the only way to keep the dead down for good was to separate the brainstem from the rest of the body or to damage the brain so severely it couldn’t move the body. The noise was even more revolting up close; these things weren’t even capable of speech, just being loud.
Her helm filtered out the smell, but based on how the once frozen flesh was crackling and cooking around her, she could start attracting more of them here if they had good noses.
When nothing moved towards her anymore, she turned back to her ship. She saw it then, buried into the earth and obscured by the few pieces of foliage that grew around here. It seemed as though the aliens were trying to conceal it as best they could. Making her way towards it, a few more dead lurched out from behind trees or even beneath the snow.
She didn’t use her charge beam for the stragglers: One hard punch against the side of their heads with her cannon to cave it in or an encompassing, closing squeeze around their necks was sufficient to silence them forever. She was temporarily concerned that short of Chozo technology, they might have been impossible to put down for good.
(She did try to speak to one, held by the scruff of its neck by something that could have been a rotten shirt or scarf. It seemed younger, or maybe fresher than the others that had originally rushed her. The only response she received was a rabid animal’s snarling and jerking. She crushed its skull against the nearest protruding rock she could find.)
After making sure her ship wasn’t hiding any new crew and turning off the distress beacon, she finally circled back to the thing riding on top of the horse. She kept her cannon carefully trained on the alien, her helm scanning the being all the while.
It grossly resembled a human, even down to the armour and weapons that one of Samus’ primitive ancestors could have constructed. It did not seem to be made of flesh, carrying more of a resemblance to a marble statue. Its “hair” floated in the air unaffected by gravity, and it reminded Samus of Petrasyls and their tentacles.
“No Logbook entry found.” Unusual. Even new species shared something in common with the rest of the galaxy documented in her database.
It had a dented, steaming crater in its shoulder. Kneeling down closer, she could see that the creature's armour protected it from the worst of the damage, but it seemed to still be slowly melting from the heat. Its blood was as blue as its eyes.
The thing beneath her twitched to life and drove its javelin against the side of her head using its strong arm. Samus’ neck twinged, unprepared for the sudden blow; then she kicked the body below her in anger.
It sailed through the air, limp, and then smashed against a tree and back onto the frozen ground, screaming and writhing. She lifted her cannon to turn the thing into-
“Samus Aran: Alternative plan proposed.”
She lowered her weapon.
“Your Gunship’s microfactories remain functional. We lack the scientific knowledge or the analytical equipment needed to gauge what this creature is, but we should recycle it inside anyway. If the material is accepted, we can categorize it.”
That sounded like a good destination for something that parasitized itself off dead humans if the glowing blue eyes were a promising lead. She went toward the creature's weapon instead, leaving the thing to hiss behind her. It must have dropped it after she kicked it into the air.
Picking it up, a layer of frost began to spread over her hand and wrist.
Her suit immediately heated up in response to the extreme cold, but it was still spreading up her arm. The temperature was dropping at an alarming rate, but even the coldest things on this world were still touched by sunlight on the surface.
Her adopted family tested and refined their tools in quantum labs picokelvins above absolute zero, including her suit. The javelin in her hand began to shudder violently, then boil within as she steadily raised her external temperature to counter.
It shattered apart with a brilliant crack, echoing over the burning corpses around them. She turned, and was gladdened to see that shock and anger were something that could still be communicated across species. She wasn’t always that lucky.
She grabbed that thing by its ankle, ignored its renewed howling, and began to drag it toward her Gunship.
With its weapon destroyed by the Demon, It resorted to clawing at it with its talons and gauntlets. But the rest of its body was just as intolerably hot. They could swear that pieces of Itself unprotected by armour stuck and sizzled into nothing on the armour.
One Among Others screamed for its brethren; it screamed for the wights, it screamed for the Night King and his Queen to destroy this abomination. It wasn’t sure that the Demon was even listening, but it found itself suddenly wrenched around by the ankle and smashed against the side of the Red Comet.
Again and again the Demon beat One Among Others like a ragdoll against that foreign metal that refused to freeze. It finally stopped when it noticed that the exposed ankle bone it was now holding seemed to be made of milkglass.
The Others did not feel pain as a human or animal did, but they were capable of fearing for their individual safety. It wasn’t sure how injured it was, not without another One of Them to observe itself through Their eyes, but it felt frailer.
The Demon did not look at him as it jumped abnormally high to the top of the Comet and threw One Among Them in. It could only lie there and watch as it approached the green crystal on one side of the Comet.
It situated itself into the groove at the front and summoned light using magic: The same ugly, man-made shapes that the humans loved. This Demon seemed to be distracted, using its finger to flick through different panels of light.
The Other pushed itself up. And the Demon turned around.
Conflict, the first in a while, arose within It. Half of its brethren were shouting at One Among Others to destroy this Demon, even at the cost of an individual existence. The remaining half begged him to escape, to make his way home, to have his injuries studied. The Demon was still staring at him, unmoving.
Knowledge was more important in the long run. Better to know more than to die fruitlessly.
The Other lay back down on the ground prone. The Demon looked at him for a while longer and then slowly turned back around to their magic.
An army was coming towards them. All wights were being rerouted, streaming towards them on all sides. Whatever this Demon was, it didn’t stand a chance against Them all in the cold.
The very first thing Samus did was to launch several monitoring drones. There were some that were no longer operational, but she forced every last one airborne if they were capable. They would first check a radius around her, expanding slowly with each loop.
Routing their reports to her internal computer, Samus ordered her alter ego to sift through the incoming information and to alert her immediately with any potential POI.
Her eyes narrowed as she reviewed the damage compilation summaries the Gunship had generated while she was making her way towards it through mountains and undead.
It wasn’t good, but it wasn’t unresolvable either.
Communications being down wasn’t a surprise; non-essential equipment was always put towards the exterior. Her life support systems, printers & food were undamaged. But automatic repairs were something that needed fuel to happen. And her mobile-energy recharge system was cracked open.
She was no engineer, but it didn’t look like the silvery, effervescent fluid pouring out of the thing was easily replaceable. Luckily, it seemed that whatever fuel remained was being conserved.
Hmmm…
Would it be easier to print another energy system, or repair what she had? Most of her Gunship operations had their own independent power sources, a lifesaver when the newest trend of the galaxy seemed to be targeting the engines of poor bounty hunters.
But an energy-recharge system was practically its own miniature sun. The raw material required to create another from scratch would be unthinkable.
Her final decision rested on the environment around her. If this world possessed the material required, she could reprint a fusion engine. That was Earth tech available to humans even before they left their solar system. But if there wasn’t anything viable to use here, her printer storage could run dry, leaving her helpless in space without ammo.
She was operating on a ration now. But it wasn’t all bad: If she found the source of the leak, isolated it from the rest of the operations, and patched it, maybe she could temporarily navigate her ship to a safer location?
Preferably somewhere close to any mineral deposits. Let's see what the drones report back.
Let’s see: Snow, trees, plant life, animals- hmmmm…
She ordered one of the monitoring drones to follow that small creature. It smoothly dipped below the cloud lines and directly in front of the alien creature as it squealed in terror. Her eyebrows furrowed together as she identified her first specimen on this planet.
“Morphology: Urocitellus Parryii. It belongs to the Sciuridae family. This creature is better known as an "Arctic Ground Squirrel” and it is endemic to Earth, the origin planet for Homo Sapiens.”
She stopped. And peered down to the source on her Logbook for the information she was given. .
Just as she thought. This entry was generated from a report on the proposed differences inside the Sciuridae genetic makeup from Pre-Earth civilization data. No living specimens recorded until now.
How-
But how? How could this be possible?
Until now, she was willing to believe that these dead humans could have been survivors from a shipwreck similar to her own, or maybe they had been trafficked in by unscrupulous colonization cults to test if this world was habitable.
She ordered that same drone to scan the trees around them. Amazingly, there were Logbook entries for them too. Larix gmelinii, Picea glauca, more and more than she could possibly look into.
Samus thought back to her earliest recollections of what her parents, the Chozo, the Federation, and even the independent professional human historians had shared with her later about humanity’s migration from planet-bound to interstellar.
The tragedy that marked the need for human ascension was the Great Melting, when all humans were fleeing Earth en masse during the end of their birth world. Not even the Galactic Federation could claim to know where all the humans were at any given time as a result of this chaos (even if they projected the idea).
But Samus knew for a fact that the exodus of Earth was something that occurred over a period of time, not instantaneously. There must have been several ideas proposed near the end, some of them requiring more resources than others. There were legends of arks, great ships filled to the brim with seeds, human embryos, and animal cloning labs.
Two human arks had actually been excavated during the era of Greater Space Exploration. Both of them had experienced life support system failures, not making it beyond the Milky Way. Not even the treasures on board were salvageable by the time their descendants found their tombs.
Who knew how many arks there really were?
But this planet: with its gravity and a stable atmosphere; it must have been too good to pass up. Especially if the ark that came here didn’t have the terraforming technology that humanity eventually exchanged with one of their interstellar neighbours. But the question was: how did they arrive?
How did prehistoric humanity manage to have travelled so far and survive to leave behind descendants when everyone else failed? She had a feeling it had to do with the wormhole she came in on. But she was venturing into dangerous territory by making this many assumptions.
She ordered the drone to return to its original position above the clouds, away from any prying eyes. Humans complicated the matter, but her mission was to still recover her ship, repair it, launch off this planet to dive headfirst back into a wormhole to hunt down the remaining pieces of a doomed species.
But as more and more new information poured in as her drones increased their range, she was less optimistic.
There was an increasing number of human-puppeteer aliens coming in with their undead minions; that wasn’t a surprise. The source of their anger towards her was likely a territorial dispute, considering how quick they were to kill her on sight. That wasn’t going to change so long as she was stuck here with her ship.
But the human settlements revealed near the ejected egg were like something out of her worst nightmares. There were no power stations, remote defense systems, not even greenhouses! Samus had only ever heard of human settlements regressed to this stage posited in hypothetical scenarios or in fiction novels.
Even if she managed to repair her ship in time and pilot it away from the encroaching hordes, wouldn’t that leave these regressed humans around her vulnerable? Maybe these aliens would understand that her leaving meant that the threat would go with her too?
Actually, just looking at the frozen pissant behind her turned any possible potential for communication from a long shot into a joke. What was more likely was that if they could not find her, they would turn this place over to kill whoever was left to feel better about their losses.
She turned around, heading towards her prisoner.
At least the chances of that ever materializing were getting lower.
The Demon finally turned away from its magic light squares and made its way to him. It had a bad feeling.
He grabbed One Among Them by the neck, seizing Them up and turning to face the wall behind him. A flat pane of metal opened from the ground up like a mouth to reveal a wall of twisting, sharpening, wormlike squirm of moving metal, grinding and threshing against each other rhythmically.
The Demon didn’t have a face that the Others could see.
But They could have sworn its eyes were upturned into crescents behind that strange green crystal as One of Their Own was casually tossed into that gnashing mouth.
That bastard actually still tried putting up a fight as Samus fed it face-first into the ammo printer. It was the safest bet; she frequently printed power bombs recycled from Bendezium ore. The crunching was horrific as its "face", "neck", and "shoulders" disappeared into the printer, but it was also oddly satisfying.
The limbs still sticking out of the printer thrashed violently, legs kicking out to slam against the wall and fingers tightly gripping the edges as if to prevent being sucked inside by the steadily churning metal. But that was before whatever the hell was keeping it alive finally gave up, and something weird began to happen.
It started to rapidly melt, the flesh sloughing off its body in rivulets as it poured down the wall. She couldn’t tell what it was, but it seemed to be mixed with the alien's blood, diluting the color. Was it smoking now too? She was glad she had her helm on; she did not want to breathe that shit in.
It began to rapidly shrink as the printer steadily chewed in what was left. Even the liquid pooling on the ground was steaming away. She peered closely at the bones that were now exposed as the flesh melted away.
Its skeletal anatomy was far too close to a human's for her liking. This alien likely evolved beside the colonists, or it could have been artificially created by using humans as a model. She had no idea.
When the bones melted away, she soon found herself alone again.
"Samus Aran, we have noted down any recognizable material, and we have recycled all else. But priorities have changed.”
It had indeed. She had no idea what the original colonists were thinking, but their short-sighted planning didn’t warrant-
“That is not what I meant. Phazon has been detected.”
What?
“Please check your ship monitor for a more comprehensive report.”
Godammit, godammit! She wasn’t the first alien to arrive here after all! What had beaten her to the punch?! Another experiment?
She lurched toward her monitor, feeling sick.
If Phazon was involved, that certainly explained how the non-human entities could look so human, didn’t it?! This made their nest even more critical to locate! But her ship was down! She didn’t even have the means of reaching them!
Checking in on the drones she sent towards the opposite direction of the army, she was surprised to see that the temperature was continuing to drop down to dangerous levels. Most planets with life didn’t try to drop below 80, but the drones were reporting a negative 86 degrees, including wind chill.
She was curious to see what Earth-endemic life could survive here. How long had this planet been infected? Before humans? After, if the Leviathan Wormhole didn't close nearly as quickly as they imagined? Shit.
Priorities: the drones needed time to find the roost of these monsters, and she had to battle the scouts coming to her now. Opening the printer monitor, she flicked through the list of recognized material.
Alright, Phazon had been detected. That was BAD. Other than that, it seemed as though the alien was made up primarily of water and its blood cryoprotectant and antifreeze proteins. Their cells looked nothing at all like animals or plants; they were bizarrely square and uniform. But all of this disappeared with the alien when it died; thankfully, her printers had a history she could flip through.
There was very little other biological material that could be identified. That was similar to the aliens she killed in the Phazon mines on Talon IV. It was probably best to use the tech discovered there to construct her weapons to fight these things now.
But the aliens' armour was made from water and aluminum, which was fantastic news for Samus.
Her printers could have worked with almost any material, but it would have required more fuel and time to manipulate matter on this great a scale. The best building materials were the ones that needed to be converted onto them anyway.
A few ideas were forming in her head…
At first They hurried to find this Demon.
Following the disappearance of their brethren, they slowed and convened among themselves even as they continued marching slower towards the Red Comet.
Death was not unfamiliar to Them, though it had been quite some time since they had experienced it. Mankind was more dangerous then, more slippery in their ways to hurt Them.
But what this Demon did to them was not death. It first dismantled Them.
There was no release. Only an unbearable continued separation of the self that should not have been possible. The Others had cut off that One Among Them before the sensation could drive their species mad as a whole.
What little they allowed themselves to peer into revealed a world of writhing metal and saw-toothed worms, each laying over the other to sever and slice whatever touched them into ribbons, then thinner slices, and then finally burned.
No. Not burned. Dismantled. Whatever held One Among Them together unfolded itself all at once, and with that; Death was finally actualized for the most unfortunate among Them as the very last of One Among Others finally dissipated into nothing at all.
But They did not die for nothing. Perhaps the wights could not harm this Demon, but they recalled the satisfaction of driving Their spear against the monster's head.
This Demon had but one mouth to actually kill them. Let’s see how he fared against a proper army.
Samus divided the work she had between herself and her ghost twin in stages: First, her quantum computer was focused on printing various plasma bombs of differing intensity. It stung to calculate that she would never have enough to leave this planet and to keep herself safe for the journey home.
No, it was increasingly obvious that in choosing to buy the inhabitants of this world more time, she was effectively confining herself to staying here for the long run.
If Tallon IV and Aether had taught her anything, it was that bullshit often snowballed. She had no doubt that the traces of Phazon that could be detected in her rudimentary equipment would never choose just one way to kill the humans on this planet. Mutagenesis simply preferred living material because of how receptive it was to change, but there was everything else to exploit here.
One thing at a time. Her drones needed to find their nest, her ship needed to restore flight, her suit needed to build the bombs capable of destroying the nest, and she had to start defending her property.
She pushed her cannon into the ammunition printer output as the first experimental bombs were delivered to her via Gunship. Same as when Samus morphed, these bombs were converted into energy until a later time when they could be deployed.
As soon as it was done, she turned around to jump outside and spun to launch herself forward. Outside, she began launching plasma bombs as far away from her ship as possible.
The snow would bury them soon.
Only a small number of Them were willing to charge in blindly. They had a feeling that the Demon had not demonstrated the full extent of his abilities.
They organized the wrights as platoons, disguising themselves among the dead humans by using helmets, hats, and clothes to cover themselves.
The dead would overwhelm and exhaust the Demon, while They moved in slowly, attacking only if an opening was observed. If that failed to kill the Demon, that was alright. They could simply slip away in the clash as more dead covered their retreat. And Another would try again.
The goal now was to exhaust and study the Demon as more and more of their brethren poured in from the Heartlands.
Samus Aran stood with his hands on her hips, legs akimbo as she resisted the urge to tap her foot.
It might have been too optimistic to hope that they would repeat the same strategy as last time, but she was hoping that they would trust in the advantage of numbers.
Instead, those bastards were hovering. They stood there, shuffling their feet and kicking rocks as she got more impatient by the hour.
There were so many dead pouring in that she didn’t even have to use her scanner to determine how many there were. The single drone positioned over all of them showed a thick ring of black against the snow with her ship in the middle.
Did they think she would run away?
But among the humans were other things, creatures that Samus did not recognize and would have to study later. Some of them seemed to be modified humans, towering over the rest. Or maybe it was just another mutation from Phazon.
She gritted her teeth as very familiar aliens flitted in and around the dead humans. It wasn’t something that could be perceived by the naked eye, but Samus now had two ways of tracking them.
The first was obviously the cold; they were colder than any bipedal creature could still be to move. The second was a very specific kind of Phazon radiation that only they emitted. The dead humans didn't have it, the beast didn't have it, and the shattered spear on the ground that she touched was absolutely swimming in it.
She would have to remember to keep some of these aliens alive to check if they were the source or just another drone for that source. Either way, the information was going to be shared with her drones if they needed any extra help finding their nest.
When the giants came in, They finally felt angrier than they had been afraid.
This Demon disturbed their plans. Good, careful plans that had been made many years before some of them were even created.
They had recently murdered six Black Brothers, likely a scouting party sent to find who had killed the two that came before them.
One had evaded them. Far too successfully without the involvement of witchcraft.
They had already prepared their forces to meet whatever search parties or forces the humans decided to send to them. These were the very same that were being rerouted to meet this Demon as their shield.
But it was all worth it to destroy this threat.
It was completely dark when they moved in, and it was as one.
She was quite impressed by the coordination demonstrated by the beings around her.
It was tempting to begin shooting immediately, but she needed them in range for the most damage. The mines were her starting bell. Double-checking the detonation command in her helm visor, she made sure that the explosives left on the outermost rim remained dead until all others had gone off.
There were probably going to be runners, and some delayed charges might route them back.
She rolled her neck and her hips.
This was going to be a long, long night.
The hardest part was holding back the dead.
They were so accustomed to rushing in. The wildings used to meet Them head-on before they learned to disappear into the woods, the rivers, and the sea.
The animals made it harder to control their basic urges and higher thinking. They would have to turn more people after this fight. They may even have to change their plans to allow for weaker forces to overtake the Wall.
But... if they could turn this Demon…
They walked towards him faster.
The world suddenly brightened. Those who survived were the Ones that heard the blast booming up beneath them.
Holding her arm steady, Samus began to turn slowly in a circle as she fired indiscriminately into anything that wasn’t snow. She heard and felt her Gunship begin to unload munitions overhead, letting gravity pull the charges back down on their hapless heads.
If she had to guess, there were at least a few hundred humans that she could see. Not counting the other things moving among them.
But killing them for good was hard. These undead had a bad habit of continuing to move even when taken apart. She found herself surrounded by a wall of dead soon.
Samus morphed into a ball and sped off between more lurching towards her. She weaved through the battlefield, faster on top of the snow and leaving behind bombs that scattered the dead. If anyone stood in her way, she simply boosted her way past their legs, flinging them into the air.
She morphed back in a thinner clearing, continuing to shoot as they changed direction. But the thicker snow here successfully hampered their movement. Repeating this every time the masses converged towards her assured she was never completely boxed in.
The problems were the puppeteers.
While Samus was focused on thinning out their forces, they used this distraction to launch several attacks against her.
First it was a slice across the back of her knees, then a jab at her neck, and now it was a javelin thrown directly at her head! They were clever, quickly darting away with a speed that the dead did not have.
But she could tell they were unaccustomed to the onslaught they were receiving. The second round of mines had already gone off, and the pits they had created tripped more than a few runners.
When she finally struck one of the puppet aliens with her cannon, she was shocked to see how delicate they were. A single graze by a beam meant that the rest of the body melted later.
She wondered why they were so strong and delicate at the same time.
There were many things she had to learn about these fascinating creatures. So instead of shooting the next one that tried to stab her in the groin, she brought her foot down on top of the aliens as hard as she could.
It screamed as she felt something crunch like glass beneath her foot. Taking a page from their book, she morphed away before the bastard had time to react.
They were likely already planning their retreat, and she needed to cripple as many of them as she could before she melted the rest or their friends carried them away.
Despite the overwhelming advantage on Samus’ side, it still took until daylight for her to finally stop to rest. She had to chase down quarries that were a lot more sure-footed and familiar with their terrain than she was. Even the dead gained quite some distance away when she was distracted.
Too many had escaped. But the aliens she could not catch, she did her best to kill. Many of these monsters died via the superheated liquid their friends turned into, splashing onto them.
She was under no illusion she had accomplished anything significant. Samus doubted that they were capable of throwing everything they had at her with only a day and a half to mobilize. But she still turned back to those who could not escape and ordered the microfactories onboard to reactivate.
The Night King commanded all those close to the Demon to retreat back closer to the Heart of Winter. Everyone and everything else that was still positioned near the humans was to stay.
Their foe had proven that an increase in forces was irrelevant against its sorcery, so the only thing left to do was to call back the most valuable of their kind to regroup and to turn more humans to replenish the ones they lost.
If force could not move this Demon, they would use time. They had their own war machines that needed to be refined before they could be deployed in battle; those too could be tested on the Demon.
In the end, the goal was more soldiers. Their first defeat was assured when summer had returned. Now, They were to destroy anything capable of opposing Them again once the path opened itself.
Simply waiting had already worn down an enemy that nearly destroyed them once. They were a smear compared to powers that had pushed them back before.
Walking through the ice caverns that stretched deep below the land, what little fear or doubts he himself possessed was soothed by the presence of his Queen beneath him.
All around him, her melodious voice sang like an ancient fjord on the verge of breaking open.
His corpse Queen was summoning a Long Winter once again. The World itself was waking back up again. And there was no individual capable of stopping them all.
The first alien she had killed on this planet was ground down into pebble ice.
The next batch of aliens she got her hand on were among the first wave caught by the mines, their legs blown off but bodies still intact.
Even after losing limbs, most of them were still trying to crawl away using their hands and chins. They were quicker than Samus expected too, their light weight propelling them across the snow as their fingers dug into the ice.
Her foot crashed down on the back of one's head, and she was disappointed to see it was still alive after checking in on the twitching body beneath her. Applied extreme heat seemed like the only medium they were vulnerable to, even implosions simply injured them.
But never let anyone say that Samus wasn’t willing to push the very boundaries of science. She lifted her leg again and began to stomp on the thing's head beneath her over and over again. Maybe her foot could generate enough heat into the back of this fucker’s head?
She had already fed three more of them into the printer, including their weapons and armour. The remaining two she cuffed to her Gunship by their necks. They were free to amputate those if they wanted to escape.
There was very little new information, but her database drew on a similarity to the inhabitants of Phrygis. Their ability to work with ice was something that had been extensively studied and could potentially help them now.
Behind her, the drone that used to sit above her head was now harvesting the dead with its tractor beam. It collected bits of humans scattered around the battlefield and added them to the slowly rotating mass that was being carried beneath it.
When it could no longer contain what it currently held, it moved the bundle to a pit that a mine had left behind. It was filled to the brim with bodies. Samus made a quick stop at her printers to fill a few cans with oil before walking out.
Burning corpses wasn’t the kind of grunt work she ever expected to do again, but she was never, ever going to use any of these humans by repurposing their corpses into her printer or allow anything else to use them again. The thought of it made her flesh crawl.
After she poured the oil over the frozen bodies, she shot the outermost rim of that pit and fire caught. The wind and snow almost blew it out a few times, but the drone brought over dead branches and scraps of dry cloth when needed.
Angry, bored, and tired, she threw the alien she had been stomping on into the mass grave. It didn’t burn; it just started screeching all over again and trying to crawl out as quickly as its broken arms would allow it to.
She just threw it back in as the drone around her began collecting more humans and pieces of them to move to another empty pit. It seemed that, like humans, these aliens fought even when they knew they were going to die. It wasn't good that they also acquired the same psychological fallacies as humans; that would make them trickier to wipe out.
But as it would turn out, killing an alien on this planet with a good old-fashioned bonfire was a faster process than turning frozen humans into ash. She still forced herself to stay to ensure that there was nothing that could ever be used by anything ever again.
When the very last desiccated human burned away, as their exposed bones cracked and split in the air, she knew that she was done staying in this cursed place. She was going to try piloting her ship back to her eject pod. From there, the material should do its job and help fill in the cracks of her Gunship. And Samus would have an even better idea just how much flight time she had left.
But the drones' reports coming in from the background were worrying her.
Other than a few human-shaped heat signatures that could be found in settlements much too big for them, there was a concentrated cloud of methane detected coming in from the south. Far too much to just be animals; it matched human colonies.
Were the people endemic here organizing to fight back against these creatures? If these aliens were vulnerable to fire, perhaps the inhabitants of his world were less helpless than she had originally thought.
Maybe… she should…
No. Bad idea if she didn’t speak the language, understand the culture, or have any idea what these humans were like.
K-2L was the most idealized version of humanity she held in her head. And every time she had close encounters with humans after she lost her home, it was like another piece of that past was flushed down the toilet.
Because it was too different everywhere else. There were corners of the galaxy stuffed with so many humans, aliens, and spliced-together fusions of the two that you could scarcely know where to begin.
She learned almost as soon as she left K-2L what a lifetime of stunted needs could transform people into. Unfairness distorted people and aliens very quickly.
These humans native to this planet may not take kindly to Samus now. There were lots of good reasons to tell a bounty hunter to fuck off during war.
No. Going towards that colony would be a horrible idea. She had to start smaller and learn at least the basics of communication and their culture. Leaving these humans ignorantly vulnerable to mutagenesis was completely unacceptable. She had to learn more about what stage of infection this world was in.
So there was that village near her eject pod…
Her flight back to her pod was better left unlogged. Just getting the damn thing unstuck from the ground was its own maneuvering process. She had to blast the rock in front of her with her ship's cannons to push the entire vessel back and out of the crater it dug for itself.
She did her best to keep her ship above the cloud line, but metal was still creaking and shaking around her alarmingly. From the way her prisoners were screaming behind her, you’d have thought they were already going down.
The mobile energy recharge system was drooling fuel out on her deck at a rate that was distressing, but her monitor showed that operations would still stay online. Fuel was still being delivered to vital operations that kept her ship afloat.
It seemed that a broken recharge system meant inefficiently using fuel… until the microscopic flakes and bits of metal from her crash finally clogged the lines. Then it seemed her ship wouldn’t be able to stay airborne.
Samus activated the bug she had planted on her pod and turned her ship in its direction.
While the Free Folk of Thenn did not hear her Gunship crash, they were certainly close enough to spot her eject pod flying overhead and smash into their backyard.
A few days later, the Red Comet returned.
(Chapter Two: The People of Thenn)