She lay on her back in the hot, humid darkness of the cabin. Her eyes were closed, her breathing slow and even. The low hum of the ship's engines echoed through the hull in rhythmic, mechanical counterpoint to her respiration. But she was not asleep.
With a sigh she rolled on to her side and reached for the data display beside her bed. It flickered briefly before turning on and she turned her face away from the sudden brightness. Four hours. That's how long she had until the ship docked, four more hours with only her memories and regrets for company.
She turned off the data display and slumped back onto the bed and closed her eyes. For a few moments, lights danced beneath her closed eyelids, retinal ghosts from the data display. Then darkness. And then…
Jagged shards of ice ripped upwards from the ground and hurtled towards her….
Roars echoed up the generator shaft as something huge and metallic rocketed towards her, something with blazing eyes and claws as sharp as the wind…
Abruptly, she was back in the present and she hauled herself up into sitting a position. This was why she couldn't sleep. Every time she closed her eyes there was another memory waiting for her, another regret. Another image forced it's way into her mind…
The space pirate lay against the wall, its body horribly mangled by her hyper blasts. Bits of its armour had melted into the flesh and elsewhere that same flesh bubbled and boiled like so much poorly cooked meat…
Her gorge rose and she stumbled out of the bedroom and into the bathroom. She emptied her stomach a moment later but the images refused to stop.
Her arm shoved down Ridley's throat, the acrid scent of burning flesh, the splatter of gore on her suit…
Completely drained, she slumped against the toilet and dry heaved till she was sure she must have torn her stomach open. Wiping the back of her hand across her mouth, she dragged herself to her feet. A wraith stared back at her in the mirror. Tremors shook her body as she turned on the sink and spat, filled her mouth with water then spat again. Yet still, the taste of bile and vomit lingered.
The reptilicus charged with a cry. Sparks arced along the wall as she leapt up and over his energy whip and landed behind him. Before he could recove,r she fired. Blood sprayed outwards in a horrid crimson cloud as the blast caught him in the back and tore him wide open.
Looking down at her hands she could almost see the blood. Quickly, she turned the taps on and washed her hands. Only when the skin was red and nearly raw did she finally stop. In the corner of the bathroom the shower gleamed invitingly and she took only a moment to shrug off her clothing before she stepped inside it.
The water was warm, but not warm enough. She turned the heat up till it was nearly scalding then leaned back against the walls. Water washed over her and she felt her muscles slowly begin to relax. Little by little, she let herself slide down the wall until she sitting, her knees drawn up to her chest, on the floor of the shower.
Why wouldn't it stop? She just wanted it all to go away. The memories, the regrets, all of it, she just wanted it to all go away. Was that so much to ask? A bitter smile crossed her face. No one had ever said that saving the galaxy would be easy. But then, no one had ever said it would be this hard either.
Pressed against the shower wall with the hot, hot water pouring down on her like some kind of cleansing rain she felt a fresh wave of tiredness wash over her. For a second she tried to fight it, tried to keep her eyes open but it was all just too much. She slept.
Down the tunnel went, down, down, down into the brooding deep. Tendrils of phazon ran along the walls, thick pulsing veins of abhorrent, unnatural life. Below her was the planet's heart and it stank to the skies of corruption.
There was no time to waste – she could already feel the acid burn of the phazon in her blood. She jumped. Shapes flickered past her, small, blue trails of phazon-fire. Further down the tunnel something roared, something big. Blindly, she reached for the tunnel walls to slow her descent and felt them give like so much bloated flesh in her grasp.
On and on she fell till at last she struck the bottom. Then she got up and pressed on, pressed on through a maze of passages and tunnels and vast gargantuan halls all drawn together into a kaleidoscopic nightmare lit by tremulous blue light. Black had always been the colour of her fear. It had been black the night the space pirates had come for her family, black inside the mammoth cavern where she'd fought the monstrous terror at the heart of Tallon IV. But the blue was somehow worse, a vividly different shade of horror.
And then she was at the bottom, at the heart of it all and there in front of her was the cause of everything…
Dark Samus. Corruption made
flesh.
Chaos followed. Later she would have only a few vague impressions and a wordless sense of horror at what transpired. She remembered the flash of phazon, the mad scramble for position as she and her dark other fought across the chamber. And then the Aurora unit rising from the depths like some nameless, hideous monster from the tales the Chozo told to pass the long winter nights.
Then after the battle came the frantic rush for the surface as the planet died and collapsed around her. All the way up she was tormented by images of her entombment, of being trapped in the bowels of a fetid dead world as it blew itself to pieces. So she climbed. Blindly, desperately, raggedly, she climbed.
Half way up it began, a high-pitched keening wail that cut right through the rumble of the planet's death throes and imbedded itself in her skull. The leviathans were crying, half in fear and half in rage, all of them.
She got to the surface and saw her ship in the distance. The shadow of something huge swept over her and she looked up. A leviathan hung low in the sky. It was headed right for her she realised with a sudden surge of panic. If the planet couldn't kill her then its children would.
As the gigantic creature tumbled through the sky towards her she ran for her ship. The ground came apart as she ran. Viscous rivers of phazon oozed and bubbled up like blood from a wound. And the noise, she would never, ever, ever forget the noise. A cacophony of cries filled the sky and she felt the brush of things alien and terrible against her mind as the leviathans reached out for anything, absolutely anything at all that could save them or their world.
Phazon had formed a thick crust around the hull of her ship. Frantically, she clawed at the vile blue substance as the leviathan drew ever closer to impact. But the phazon refused to budge and she didn't dare shoot it with her arm-cannon. A low shuddering roar drew her eyes back to the sky and she knew then with sudden and total certainty that she was dead. The leviathan was just too close now.
As her hands hammered at the phazon on the hull she heard the leviathan's high, warbling cry of victory and then the world fell away. Bright blue filled her vision, bright blue then black –
She lashed out and felt pain ripple along her limbs as her arms and legs skittered off the hard ceramic walls of the shower. For a moment nothing registered. She was back on Phaaze, back with all the… the…
Slowly, she came to her senses. Cold water poured down on her and she wondered just how long she'd been in the shower. There were bruises on her arms and legs where they'd hit the walls of the shower. Groaning, she forced herself to stand and stagger out of the shower.
The data display on the wall beside the mirror told her she'd been out for at least three hours and she pressed her head against the cold metal wall. One hundred and eighty minutes. It had seemed like an eternity. And it was getting worse. The longest the memories had ever gone before had been an hour and half. How much longer, she wondered, before she never woke, before she was trapped forever in her memories of that bloated and malevolent blue world. Ice filled her veins at the thought. Death would be better than that.
"We are now approaching the planet Zebes." The tinny voice of her computer's AI shocked her out of her thoughts. "Please prepare to enter orbit."
As she turned to leave the bathroom, glad to have something else on her mind, she dared one glance at the mirror. She stopped. Her face stared back at her, lips drawn into a tight line, brows furrowed. That wasn't what caught her attention though. It might have been a trick of the light, or maybe the angle she looked from but her eyes seemed different. Bluer. The colour of a dead world's blood.
A shiver ran down her spine. How long would it be? How long before the face that stared back at her from the mirror was no longer her own?
XXX
Author's Notes and Legal Disclaimer
Obviously I do not own Metroid. I am not making one cent out of this.
So… what did you think? I've always been a huge fan of the Metroid series and being an Australian I've only just gotten my hands on Metroid Prime 3. The game is great and this is something that popped into my head after I finished it.
As always, I'm interested in your opinions. Drop me a line and tell me what you think.