Chapter 2: Equipment

"I have already assembled a strike team to accompany you," said Adam, guiding his visitor to the ship's armory. "I assure you, they are the finest in the Corps. Brilliant tacticians, brutal fighters, obedient to the end. They have all—"

"Point taken," said Samus.

"We have also granted the swiftest ship in the fleet to your command. The Silent had originally been intended for hit-and-run assaults, and can travel up to 40-optic. That should get you to Gearon in four standard years. Since the ship is small- it could be packed into Tyr's bay granted it was utterly empty- it has only one lifeboat and only for stasis tubes. That means someone will there will always be at least one person awake at a time."

"So I only have four people?"

"Don't worry, you'll be perfectly armed. You will have three nukes, all of which can be loaded into your beam cannon. Those are last resort, of course. Any use of atomics, by anyone, no matter their rank, will result in an automatic court martial, so you need a damn good excuse before you use them. Since you aren't military personnel, I had to go all the way up the chain of command, to the senior brass, to get you cleared. They don't doubt your obvious skill, of course, but they do doubt your judgment. You are very independent, Samus, which is as far from a military attitude as you can get. They actually had the oldest man with enough authority to sign the agreement, since he'll likely retire before you get back. So anyway, you'll also get a flamethrower- beam cannon compatible-, an ice beam, and enough missiles to cut a valley deeper than the Canyon Gaforge into solid diamond. Aha- here's the armory. You can pick out anything else you might want here."

She took five large rockets bound together by metal from a rack. "Super missiles?"

"Correct. We have a total of sixty here. You can take as many or as few as you desire."

Samus loaded each missile into her cannon. Her beam cannon could hold four beam cannons, up to a hundred eighty missiles, and twenty five super missiles at the moment. She grabbed super missiles until she was full. "Any beams?" she asked.

"We have an annihilator beam, a copy of the one you acquired on Aether. Unfortunately, I cannot wholly assure you of its ability to function properly. The technology you brought back was utterly mosium." The word had originally been part of an older Chozo dialect and had, over time, become English. It was one of their many words for alien, and meant literally an utterly unknown being, one which evolved in a different environment, and up to then had never interacted with their species. Though it was meant to serve only as a noun (the proper adjective would have been mosi), through misinterpretation it became much like our word for alien, which could be used also as an adjective. There was but one Chozo word referring to the foreign that was of a higher degree, that being O, or god. "We tried are best to mimic the weapon accurately, but it was without knowing for what purpose anyone of its parts served. In addition, we did not have knowledge of some of the materials used in the original and had no choice but to improvise with what we had."

"It…has been tested, I assume?"

"Yes, with mixed results. On an earlier model, the figures are as follows: 80 of the time it worked perfectly. 20 of the time it shut off…and, with one of our earliest prototypes, it exploded. Fortunately, with this new version, currently untested, we believe we have cleaned out all of the bugs."

"I hope so. Is this the only beam you have available?"

"We do have another…but it is even more experimental than the annihilator, far more dangerous to use. People have to come to call it the 'Zapper', and it's a suitable nickname. Some others have called it the "plasma blaster", usually jokingly. Basically, it throws lightning at its target, from which another bolt jumps. The bolt strikes the next target, and so forth. It can be assigned as many as eight targets at a time. When it runs out of targets its leaps at the nearest conductor and dies."

"I'll take it."

"What about the annihilator?"

"Does it work with GF guns?"

"Yes, in theory. It's dynamite on paper, of course, but…"

"I'll give it to one of my team, then. I'm confident they could put it to as good of use as I. Hell, I never really liked that the thing anyway."