Metroid: Initializing - Chapter 16: The Successors

Jamoru, once misnamed the Federation's "jungle world," was merely a life-bearing planet like many others - vast, nuanced, diverse, and patched with multiple biomes, only one of which supported tropical rainforests, and for some reason, the Jamori survived generations of industrialized civilization without drastically changing their biosphere. They were an anomalous case study in long-term homeostasis, and the various races of the Federation - including the humans - were dying to know how the Jamori pulled it off.

All the more reason to save their planet from the Space Pirate invasion. The blockade was tens of thousands of ships strong, and nearly every Federation craft that attempted to penetrate it was arrested, boarded, robbed, and turned away...if lucky enough not to have been shot down.

Mauk and his crew had long before primed their weapons in preparation for an uninterrupted landing sequence, and that was exactly what they were going to have. At the edge of the pirates' tracking range, he halted and locked into sympathetic orbit, staying equidistant to, but on the opposite side of, their sun. The pirates had no idea that any opposition remained in that sector.

"We're going to attempt our least favorite thing," said the commander. "We will make our entry without use of a ship."

"That's right," said Lieutenant Hirokazu. "Apparently it's physically possible to do a space jump from this distance, provided we calculate the exact second to fire retro boosters and hold completely still. We're only taking volunteers on this one because of the danger factor. Any takers?"

Eleven hands went up, including Higgs, Aldrin, and Hammer, in addition to Mauk and Hirokazu who had planned this suicide mission.

"So to be clear," said the lieutenant, "you are going to leave the ship right now in an atmospheric re-entry suit and skydive a distance of more than 300 million kilometers, and you will have to execute it perfectly or die. It's the only way through the blockade. Once on the ground you can disrupt their central communication hub and expose the planet. Does that still meet with your approval?"

No one refused the mission.

"Alright," said Mauk, "Let's make it happen. Suit up!"

The thirteen volunteers dressed in stiff heat-resistant armor and were joint-locked and given muscle relaxers to prevent any unintended movement. They would spend their first fifteen hours and thirty-seven minutes completely still, riding the laws of angular momentum over the sun and feet-first into Jamoru's north pole, undetected by the thousands of Space Pirates blocking the planet. From out in space, seven-hundred four seconds before they heard it, the ship from which they launched transmitted the signal to fire their retroboosters until such time as they were able to splash into the atmosphere at a safe speed and angle their descent toward the capital city of Jamo Jamo, where intelligence reports confirmed a Space Pirate mission control camp having been erected.

At eight thousand meters from the surface the team deployed their tungsten fiber parachutes and touched down outside of town, where they were able to rendezvous with the local resistance. Leading the remains of the rag-tag human and Jamori warriors was none other than Kreatz, dashingly decked in a long black coat and armed with a buckler and glowing power glaive, very likely seized from a downed pirate.

"How'd you get here?" Kreatz asked in surprise. "Has the blockade let up?"

"We space-jumped," Higgs explained.

Unaffected, Kreatz glanced from Higgs to Mauk. "You were right about humans being insane, but good to see you, man!" Kreatz exclaimed, smacking Mauk's thick arm.

"Let's go kill some pirates," said Higgs, readying his charge gun.

"Oh don't worry, friend," Kreatz smiled. "There will be several hundred for each of us."

---

Samus ran as fast as she could down the tunnel to Tourian, screw attacking and freezing enemy creatures along the way. Ridley wasn't her goal; Mother Brain was. Yet as she ran, the orange dot on the lower ring of her HUD's threat detector grew toward the center, setting off an alarm in her helmet. She turned around, only to feel the debilitating thrust of Ridley's hand sweeping her from her feet and flying her to a turn in the tunnel, then impacting her head and back to the wall.

"You don't run away from me, Chozo whore. This time my orders and my desire are in agreement. Prepare to die!"

"Kraid swallowed me whole, and I still defeated him," Samus hissed in a breathless voice. "What could you possibly do?"

The billows of smoke reddened and illuminated as Ridley laughed through his clenched beak, and as he held Samus he drew a long, hot, plasma-saturated breath. He would have blasted it full into his victim's face too...if not for her preemptive use of a charged ice shot aimed at his rigid uvula. He instantly dropped her and clenched both hands around his throat, massaging frantically.

From her recumbent position on the cave floor she fired a rapid sequence of shots, counting to herself, ice-ice-missile ice-ice-missile, verifying that his exoskeleton was brittle enough to receive optimal damage from each explosive triplet.

Despite the painful trauma he was suffering, Ridley felt enough rage within him to stand and walk through her concussive snowstorm, seizing her gushing arm cannon and pointing it straight up. He pushed hundreds of cubic meters of yellow-hot fire upon fire directly into her face, but Samus, charging her restrained gun, used its kick to wrench herself free of his grasp. And rather than dive away, she darted between the monster's legs and morph-balled up, leaving three bombs under him. He recoiled when they went off, distracted enough to turn around...and receive a faceful of screw attack.

"We're done here," muttered Ridley, frustrated at the duration of the battle, and when Samus came in for another screw attack, he snatched her out of the air and took flight back to the glowing orange pools in the center of Norfair.

He threw her into the first lava he saw, but she was quick to freeze the spot under her and land skidding, using the momentum to spring to an unmelted island behind her. Ridley charged forth, dodging a missile that sailed under him harmlessly, unaware that milliseconds before, another carefully placed missile loosened a heavy stalactite which stabbed him square in the back as it fell, driving him entirely beneath the surface of the lava.

Samus vanished from the scene, not waiting around to note the consequence of her seismic disturbance.

---

Mauk's team stopped, their jaws pulled low in utter astonishment as they gazed upon the ruins of the commander's former home. The Space Pirates leveled all of Jamo Jamo's commercial district before moving in and setting up a base, so what Mauk beheld looked oddly out of place: endless burning rubble surrounding a complex of connected self-erecting building modules, topped off by an array of large antennae coordinating the frigates above, which in turn delegated instructions to a squad of fighters each. The central hub Mauk stared at was a weakness in the pirates' stranglehold on Jamoru, but to even  approach it, the resistance needed to sneak past patrols, gun turrets, and a number of drastically altered foot soldiers few had ever seen in person: berserker knights.

"Berserker knights?" said Mauk, intrigued. "Sounds impressive. What are they?"

Kreatz explained, "Officially they're modified Zebesians given weapons too heavy for normal infantry. We've had a hell of a time trying to take these monsters down. Dup over there killed our first, but we're still not sure how he did it."

"Have you tried a skeledrill?"

"Listen, Mauk, if you're willing to get close enough, be my guest."

Without another word, Mauk broke from position and moved in. He could handle a few pirates easily, but he was very eager to examine one of these berserker knights despite their superior size, Mauk weighing only about half as much. He had to maneuver around crumbling walls, exploded hover cars, and a few piles of undistinguished rubble before seeing two berserker knights on guard patrol.

They stood to immense height, but otherwise resembled any other Zebesian - humanoid digitigrades with segmented chitin-plated bodies and two crablike chelae - except these knights glowed at the seams with some pale-blue waste material, giving then an even more alien appearance. Crouched behind a broken wall, Mauk noticed evidence of their breathing; they could be choked. A thermal scan revealed that something pulsed within them, possibly indicative of a heart though it was impossible to locate from a distance.

"Kreatz, are you getting these readings?" Mauk whispered into his wrist.

"Yes. So how do you suppose we kill them?"

"Let's have you and Dup move in on my mark. Higgs can cover us."

"They heard," said Kreatz. "See you in five."

Just then the berserker knight looked up as the sound of a Jamori warcry grew in intensity at such a rate as to indicate an aerial attack. It was Dup, of the same species as Mauk but younger and etched with tattoos, his mane sculpted into a braided mohawk. The shirtless warrior flew in with a stolen pincer cannon over one hand and an industrial plasma torch in the other. Mauk was impressed at this striking example of the old Jamori warrior spirit and was thus inspired to stop acting so human and spring from cover to lend a fist.

Mauk flung himself over his barricade and screamed in his own language, "Peace on Jamoru!" He landed in front of the nearer berserker, dodged a swinging claw and connected an inconsequential punch to the enemy's abdomen. The berserker knight kicked Mauk off his feet and aimed a charging pincer cannon, but was halted by a shocking stab from behind. The enormous pirate emitted a blue glow and fell to his knees - or rather, was guided to his knees by Dup, who had stabbed the fiend in the back with his hand-held plasma torch.

"They're bonded to their weapon system," said the younger Jamori. "Looks like you can overload it when they charge up."

"Good thing," said Commander Mauk, "that I was able to persuade him to charge up." The two laughed as Dup helped Mauk to his feet.

"Where's Kreatz?" Dup wondered.

The ensuing explosion provided a possible answer.

"Hey guys!" Kreatz yelled from the outer gate of the compound. "We're going in!"

---

And while Mauk fought to retake his home planet and disrupt its blockade, Mother Brain began to grow desperate as Samus closed in on the new cerebratorium located far below the city of Tourian, so much so that despite her reservations, she had to activate the newest soldiers of her telepathically controlled army.

Samus met these adult metroid upon her arrival into the ultra-modern metallic halls of Mother Brain's lair. The creatures swarmed the intruder, ready to tighten their four palps around Samus and feast on the abundant energy of the Varia suit and the strong young woman inside. Samus eventually learned that the jelly inside their visceral cavities could be easily frozen and shattered. This seemed the only viable method of keeping them down permanently. Otherwise they absorbed and deflected missiles and flew at their prey in clusters, creating one hazardous situation after another.

Samus knew the omniscient supercomputer to be in the next room; Mother Brain's presence could be felt in the ardent flocking of the metroid as two of them penetrated Samus's icy volley and latched on, steadily reducing her shield capacity. And somewhere, within the chaos, she could hear Mother Brain's cloying desire to set the universe right, to wipe the slate clean and make life pure again - to stop creatures from dominating, exploiting, parasitizing, feeding off each other. Nature itself was immoral and needed to be stopped, reconfigured, zeroed out and restructured into organisms that process energy directly and sidestep the scarcity, the greed, the hunger that mediate all you know, Samus. The pirates are the match, and metroid the flame, and from the ashes shall spring the daring, brave new cotyledons of a peaceful galactic order!

Samus knew what was happening. No one got so philosophical under a swarm of hungry metroid. She collapsed into the morph ball and planted three simultaneous bombs, sending the creatures in all directions. She set one more bomb, kicking herself across the room at the final aperture, behind which waited Mother Brain within her highly fortified defense system.

---

It was 2075 by the Galactic calendar. By then the temple erected to contain the blight on Tallon IV was cracked and failing, leaving the leviathan exposed. From Zebesian orbit, the Space Pirate science vessel Orpheon turned raw data from the neighboring planet into a 3D model of the source of that world's corruption. A gray meteorite, curved and spiraled like the shell of an ocean-bound mollusk with two flailing tentacles spreading luminescent blue haze into the atmosphere, the leviathan was buried halfway into Tallon IV's crust, killing...changing local wildlife and mutating the ethereal acolytes who rebelled against their intensely scientific Chozo brethren of Zebes.

Orpheon's crew sent the information to Mother Brain, who for some reason was unresponsive. The captain knew that he had to keep an eye on Tallon IV should the brain's experiments with metroid prove fruitless. What was this leviathan anyway? Could it be used against the Federation? It was too early to say, but once Mother Brain became available to receive new research proposals, she would doubtlessly send the Orpheon - and perhaps a whole science team - to plunder the Chozo archives and investigate that glowing blue substance. Until then, Zebes's pirates stood ready, awaiting orders from their silent capital.

---

"Alright Samus," she reminded herself, "don't think."

And with that, she burst into the cerebratorium, her mind clear of the inner noise. Seeing the plasma rounds at all trajectories, and rings of high-energy gasses drift along randomly and casting a glint on the moat of hydrofluoric acid, she planned the next ten moves in the complicated dance of survival. Samus dodged, leapt, parried, and flipped through the density of Mother Brain's defenses, all the while mindful of the waves of psionic power blazing from that one heavy eye.

"Please stop," begged the brain, "for I can give you untold power."

"I may not survive," Samus yelled as she smashed a glass plasma conduit, "but at least I'll die uncorrupted!"

She fired a charged ice bolt, breaking Mother's glass home and solidifying the exposed eye, and much as she killed other soft, gelatinous creatures, the brain eventually fell to the power of the Varia suit. Then the whole room shook as six of Mother Brain's probes flew in and surrounded Samus in a dancing hexagon of light. She ignored them, aiming straight for the bleeding, throbbing cortex and draining the last of her missile reserves while fragmented, incoherent thoughts picked at her mind, and bolts of plasma and rings of charged gas bounced clanking off her body armor in splashes of light.

"You can't control me!" Samus yelled over the slick red explosions.

Failing in their attempt to generate a shield, the probes fell. The guns turned down. Mother Brain slumped, bleeding in her broken glass vessel as the light flashed red and a series of numbers flickered over the hologram projector, counting the remaining seconds of the chamber's self-destruction sequence.

"Two minutes," grunted Samus. "Plenty of time."

She jumped into the vat and threw a leg over each of the warm fatty hemispheres of the dead brain and looked up. It was an empty shaft, in all probability leading to the site of the previous peacetime cerebratorium. Samus tapped instructions into the side of her arm cannon, broadcasting a signal to her ship and hoping the concrete and electromagnetic noise wasn't disrupting her transmission. She vaulted up, forty-five degrees to the gear-toothed lining of the shaft, using her screw attack function to zigzag up to the surface. The old capital was a mess of filthy neglected ruins, resting under a clear night sky.

00:59

Her ship was still nowhere in sight, so she re-entered her homing command and ran as fast as she could toward her intended landing site, firing her dorsal thrusters and slamming shoulder-first through the one confused battalion of pirates waiting at the wrong coordinates for some unknown reason.

00:27

There was the ship, obediently descending nose-down in anticipation of Samus's flying leap directly through the top aperture. She swung into the front seat and pulled directly up. The explosion - a silent flash of white - began to rock the air as a fiery dome expanded and consumed the entire city of Tourian. At twenty thousand meters, Samus felt it as light turbulence protracted over five minutes. There was no chance that Mother Brain could live through such a disaster, even if she had survived Samus's abuse. Orbital defenses scrambled to locate the small golden ship as it raced through the Zebesian ionosphere at fifty kilometers per second.

---

Lightyears away and so many months later, Samus writhed in her bed, hot from the high metabolic rate of her noisy brain as it assailed her emotions and stressed her body with the frenetic recollections of her most lucrative, but most traumatizing, gig as a bounty hunter. The bath had only done so much to relax her, and the Chozo cocktail didn't work as intended. She would need weeks of slow, solitary, inconspicuous space travel to allow her to collect her thoughts.

A jingling chime from her home's computer signaled an incoming message.

"Pull it up," she commanded.

"Yes, Samus," said the house.

The hologram projector displayed a 2D plane showing the elf-like though well-matured face of Kreatz, in a stylish black trenchcoat dusted with white smoke stains. His lips moved for several seconds before the audio kicked in.

"We sure missed you on Jamoru, lady. Pirates everywhere! Mauk and Higgs sailed in and helped me and Dup and the boys scramble the network so the Federation could take back the planet."

"Hi Samus," said Mauk, pushing Kreatz aside.

"Anyway," said Kreatz, re-entering view, "I heard about Mission Zero and how the market's been treating you. Come to Jamoru. Higgs bought this new bikini, and it looks terrible on him. Might look good on you though! There are so few opportunities for a decent vacation these days. This is exactly why we retook this planet."

Mauk pushed back in. "Don't mind him. He's an idiot."

Samus stared at the guys; they were clearly as giddy as she over the escape from a darker fate. There's something about the specter of death that stimulates that instinct of fecundity within all animals. Samus felt it and wanted to be among the guys again, on a planet of unspoiled jungles and beaches before some other dire threat would come calling for her full attention.

But she took her time, having collected a weighty sum from the Federation Assembly, to pay her rent four years ahead and do some last-minute shopping - without the need to rip out of her clothes and kill a genetically enhanced dessgeega in public. Couldn't she live her life as a human female for just a few weeks?

Not if Adam Malkovich had anything to say about it.

He called her and asked her out for a coffee - something she was told humans loved to drink. Who knows why? Samus was never at her best all jittery with bad breath and the low echo from her sympathetic nervous system of impending diarrhea. She took him up on his offer, but stuck with tea.

"Are you alright?" he asked without introduction.

"Honestly no," she said. "Have you and Platinum Chest located Old Bird yet?"

"No."

They sipped their libations and lapsed into deep reflection.

"Don't take this the wrong way," said Adam, "but I really care about you. I cared about Ian too. Never forget that."

"I know," said Samus. "I was wrong to oppose you at such a time. Why are you telling me this?"

"You'll find that my motivation for talking is to convey information, nothing more."

"Well...thank you."

"I owed you that," he said. "You going to visit the boys on Jamoru?"

"Probably. Perhaps when I get around to it."

"No objections here," said Adam.

Samus took her time on Daiban, and when her money finally ran out in the fall of 2079, she plunged into deep space on a circuitous route to Jamoru...when the baby's cry hit. Of all things, the Orpheon, a Space Pirate frigate, was requesting immediate assistance. Samus was ready to write them off, though she was still intrigued as to why the pirates would ask just anyone, even Samus Aran, for help. They were broadcasting from the FS-176 system. Was it a trap? More than anything, she was curious, so she set a course and opened her mind, not knowing where those vectors might take her.