Celastrus - Prologue: From the Ashes

By J. Rolande, aka Moonlight Sonata 2004

"...I've reflected upon his words and I see the wisdom in them. We are all bound by our experiences. They are the limits of our being, however imagination is the true limit of our consciousness. But in the end, the human soul will ever reach for the truth... and ever fall just short. This is what Adam taught me and what I've discovered for myself...."

Samus sighed and took another swig from the bottle of liquor dangling from her hand. "Oh, forget it," she muttered, staring at the computer screen, the words now blurry and unclear. It had been a stupid idea to try and get her thoughts out in a journal. Damned conventional means of therapy... she'd rather cause destruction than resort to such ridiculous forms of "treatment." That would certainly make her feel better about everything that had happened recently, and maybe, just maybe fill up the gaping emptiness within her. She didn't even know why she felt the need to work through her thoughts and feelings; what had happened, had happened and there could be no changing it. To regret it or wish she could change the choices she'd made would do nothing but burden her with unnecessary guilt and self-doubt.

With another sigh, this one loaded with feelings of frustration, she downed another swig, feeling the alcohol burn her esophagus and hit her stomach, where it would seep through the stomach wall and into her bloodstream. There it would course through her body, to be oxidized, only for her to need to repeat the process all over again, ad nauseam. It was a vicious, dull cycle that she'd been repeating for days now. Unfortunately, tolerance prevented her from achieving the blessed oblivion she wanted so badly.

If asked she'd probably say there were a lot of things she regretted, but didn't dwell on them since she couldn't change them and understood that. The past was done; there was no reversing the damage, or unsaying words that should not have been said. There was no resurrection of the people she, as a bounty hunter, had killed. How many had fallen victim to her predatory nature? Dozens? Certainly. Hundreds? Probably. Thousands? Maybe not that many, but who knew? She'd lost count long ago. All the faces blurred in her mind, a fearsome fusion of indistinguishable features and forgotten situations. Their cries for mercy wailed furiously, but could only beat in vain against the bastion built from her long-dead conscience. Finally, all protests were silenced by a cannon blast, and placed aside to be battled at a later time. There was no undoing any of it; thus it was Samus' policy not to dwell on things she could neither control nor change.

She doubted changing her past actions would make her truly happy, though. For some people, happiness came easily. To them, simple pleasures yielded the greatest rewards. For others, only the finest, most grand pleasures would do, but still, they attained happiness' were capable of attaining happiness. Some found happiness in success and power, and others in money. Samus Aran had success; she was far and away the best bounty hunter in the Federation, and the only one able to boast a 100% completion rate. With that success had come money. Lots of money. No one, not even Samus herself, knew just how much money she had distributed in the various accounts throughout the known galaxy. She paid bankers and investors to take care of her money; the more money she'd made, the less valuable it had become to her. Instead of a thing of value, money had become a representation of the killing that was her profession.

At one time, the thrill of the bounty hunt in and of itself had brought happiness, but those days were gone. She was past thirty now; younger hunters raised on her legend were rising in the ranks. One day, not so far off, she would be past her prime and obsolete: little more than a memory. The money wouldn't matter, the success wouldn't matter, and the simple pleasures sure as hell wouldn't matter. She knew that this was the way of things, but it did not make it any less depressing.

What was happiness to her, anyway? She supposed it meant feeling 'less' empty. When she closed in on her prey, the emptiness subsided. When she collected her bounty, the emptiness lessened a little more. But then the feelings of contentment would ebb, leaving her back to the same state of emotional void she'd started at before.

"Milady?" Asked Adam’s computerized voice, catching her attention. "Are you all right?"

"Yes, Adam, I'm wonderful. Just wonderful. Bloody magnificent, even," she said, too weary to snap at him. The computerized version of her former CO had the tendency to ask questions to which the answers should have been obvious, but instead he found himself oblivious. It was one of the downsides of being incorporeal, she supposed; having one's mind reduced to a computer program probably left a lot to be desired in terms of interpreting the unspoken. The real Adam would simply look her in the eye for a moment and then nod in implicit understanding. The real Adam...

Inwardly she groaned and moved to take another swig from her bottle, but the bottle was empty. She cursed under her breath and leaned her head back against the pilot's seat, rubbing her throbbing temples. The real Adam wasn't here any more and the last thing she needed now, when she felt like this, was to remember that. She found herself still thinking about Adam, the real Adam, not the computerized version that she now dealt with.

Colonel Adam Malkovitch was the epitome of the Military Man: he was decorated Federation military personnel who had earned more medals and ribbons than most people knew existed. He had been in special services for a time, until injury forced him to retire from that realm of service. But he was a career military man, so he took on commanding a brigade of troops; a brigade that included a sullen, angry young woman by the slightly unusual name of Samus Aran. Most of the young men and women of the brigade had been raised in military families, or felt the need to perform a civic duty. Others wanted to get the benefits being a veteran brought along with it. A few just wanted to start over. Everyone had their reasons for being there, but Samus did not. No one knew where she'd come from; she simply showed up one day with a new uniform, a chip on her shoulder, and one of the best military minds, if the most volatile temper, of anyone within the brigade, comparable only to Malkovitch himself.

Reverting back to reality, Samus inhaled the aroma of alcohol from the empty bottle and wondered if that would at least give her a slight buzz. She was too tired to get up and find another bottle. She knew she had one; she made sure to stock up at the last spaceport she'd landed at. She'd known it might be a while before she'd stop again; the Federation was looking for her. They "wanted to talk with her" about the events surrounding the Biologic Space Lab incident. But Samus Aran, shrewd and efficient Bounty Hunter, knew a euphemism when she heard one, and knew that "talking" translated to arrest and charges of treason against the Federation.

"Milady..." Adam said again.

"What?" She snapped, her drunkenness starting to pass already. Damned tolerance, she thought.

"I thought you might like to know I'm picking up signs of a Federation vessel in the area," he said. "Since it seems you are intent on running from your problems rather than face them head on."

"I face my enemies head on, but only fair ones," she said, dropping the bottle on the cockpit floor with a clank. "The Federation doesn't fight fair anymore. Sending me into a death trap... they probably even took bets on how long I’d make it."

"You’re angry and drunk, Milady," Adam stated plainly. "I’ll change the coordinates."

"Fine. You're the CO," she said sarcastically, leaning back in the seat. She pushed her hair back from her face and closed her eyes. Unbidden, an image of the real Adam came to mind. It had been years since she'd seen him, but his face was always fresh and clear in her memory. His rough features... a nose, slightly crooked from being broken one time too many... the chiseled lines around his mouth and eyes that made him look carved out of stone... and then his eyes, a calming, grayish blue that contrasted with the severity of the rest of his face, all flashed into her intoxicated brain, and she could do nothing to stop, nor did she know that she wanted to any more. She kept her eyes closed and spoke to the computer again. "I’m sorry, Adam. I shouldn’t take my frustration out on you."

"It’s fine, Milady," he said, sounding as understanding as a computer could. "I understand that the present circumstances must be... trying."

"Trying is not the word for it," she said, slouching down further. The pain in her head was pounding now. "You've been gone for a long time. All these years I've known about your death. I watched the Epsilon go down knowing you were the one to enable the self-destruct mechanism...knowing you were there in the central reactor core while I was there watching..." She broke off, aware that she was about to begin crying. Only once had she allowed Adam to see her cry, and then, she couldn't control it. She'd been young and inexperienced. She was older now and had seen much of the way of the universe since then. Much of what she'd seen, hell, much of what she'd done, was enough to cause others to weep uncontrollably for days. But she was stronger than that.

"It's reasonable to cry, Milady," Adam said. "Tears are a manifestation of our emotions."

"So are many things," she said flatly.

Adam was silent, as was Samus. Wordlessly she engaged the cloaking devices and set her ship on autopilot. She was furious with herself for bringing that up again. But having Adam here now, when by all laws of life and death he should not be, flooded her with memories that were wistful, beautiful, and painful all at the same time. From the first day the gruff, computerized voice spoke to her she'd felt the tugging in her heart, and even as she risked her very life aboard the BSL station, memories of him had played through her mind. At some points in the mission, memories of Adam had kept her going. And when she'd realized at the end of it all that it truly was Adam Malkovitch, her former CO it had been almost too much to deal with. She half-jokingly blamed him for the heavy drinking she'd been doing since fleeing SR388's orbit. He made a good scapegoat for everything that had been going wrong lately.

Adam Malkovitch had had a perfect military mind, but he'd also had what Samus herself lacked: the capacity to be complete. So much of her was missing as a result of her odd upbringing. While others ostracized her and criticized what they could not understand, Adam sought to comprehend her on her level. He never asked her to be anything other than what she was. Perhaps it was that which earned her trust. Trust was not a value she'd learned among the Chozo; they were always suspicious, always carrying a chip on the shoulder and a hole in the heart.

Samus had been raised as a Chozo, and even carried their blood within her. But she was just as much a homo sapiens as the next human, and knew she needed something, anything, to fill the gap left from her Chozo upbringing. Drinking helped, but only until she developed a tolerance. Physical fighting had helped sometimes too, but was a sure-fire way to lose her position in the military, and at that point in her life, she needed a semi-stable lifestyle; even if she herself was not stable. Even as a Bounty Hunter, when behaving unstably and killing for money was acceptable, that did little to fill the great void within her heart and soul.

Only one thing had ever filled the void; and not only filled it, but caused it to overflow. Unconsciously she reached out and touched the computer screen, biting on her lip. Now more than ever, she was aware of just how alone she was. There had been the mutual break with the Chozo some dozen years before now... and of course the Federation had now betrayed her. She'd never been big on human relationships; knowing that any given day could mean a new bounty to hunt and the possibility of killing someone she'd connected with was something Samus just preferred to avoid. Only once in her life had she truly allowed herself to trust another person, and for that brief and blissful time she had miraculously not felt empty or lonely. But now that human was dead, ashes scattered throughout space while his mind was translated into bytes of data on a computer harddrive. And while she was grateful to have at least that during her travels through the galaxy, it did not fill in the gaps the way she needed it to.

Wordlessly she got up and stumbled over to a compartment where she'd stored another bottle of liquor. 150 Proof. Good, she'd need it. Here in the cold dark of space, there was nothing left to do but get drunk and remember.