Samus Aran: Plasma Cannon Guardian by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Samus-Aran-Plasma-Cannon-Guardian-1127016648

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Luminescent Scar

The silence of the Helios-7 relay station was a physical thing, a dense gel pressing against Samus Aran’s powered suit. It wasn’t the quiet of vacancy, but the hush of a consumed space. The primary solar array, a vast, glittering wing stretching into the blackness beyond the crater’s rim, should have been humming with converted energy. It was still. Samus moved through the observation blister, her boots leaving no echo on the polished basalt floor. The stars were a brutal, indifferent glitter.

“Arbiter,” a voice crackled in her helmet, tight with a control that was fraying at the edges. Commander Jorin. “Sensors show you’re in Bay Alpha. Do you have visual?”

“Negative on hostiles,” Samus replied, her voice filtered to a neutral metallic calm. “Structural integrity is nominal. But there’s… pitting.” She knelt, her suit’s external lights illuminating the floor. Not random damage. Delicate, fern-like patterns etched into the solid moon-rock composite, as if something impossibly hot and precise had traced frost patterns on glass.

“The panels,” Jorin insisted, the video feed from his secure bunker deep in the lunar crust flickering in her HUD. His face was drawn, eyes darting to monitors off-screen. “They’re dying. Our storage is at twelve percent. When the lights go out, the containment fields on the lower vaults fail. You understand what that means.”

She understood. Helios-7 wasn’t just a relay. It was a clandestine Xenobiology Depository. A morgue for cosmic horrors. “The source of the pitting?”

“Unknown. It started in the array. Spread inward. We lost external comms. Then the internal cameras in the array sector went dark, one by one. Not destroyed. Just… went dark.” He swallowed. “The last feed showed shadows. Moving wrong.”

Samus moved towards the airlock leading to the array catwalk. As the inner door sealed, Jorin’s voice dropped, becoming conspiratorial, almost intimate. “You know, they warned me about sending for you. The Federation brass. They said you were a blunt instrument. That you leave only ashes. But I’ve studied your missions, Arbiter. There’s a… elegance to your violence. A terrible beauty.”

The sentiment was a slick, oily thing in the sterile air. Samus ignored it. “Seal the bulkhead behind me.”

The outer door opened to vacuum. The catwalk, a slender spine of metal, stretched out over a kilometers-wide field of photovoltaic panels. They should have been a shimmering silver-blue. Now, they were a sickly, mottled grey, streaked with black veins. And they were moving. Not the panels, but what was on them.

At first, it seemed like a shimmer, a heat-haze on the panels’ surface. Then her visor’s zoom resolved it. Creatures. Each the size of her hand, with carapaces of mirrored chrome that reflected the stark earthlight. They moved in perfect, terrifying synchrony, a glinting, metallic tide. They had too many legs, jointed in absurd, insectile angles, and their heads were faceted crystals that refracted the distant sun into needle-thin lasers that scarred the panels wherever they glanced.

Metallic insectoids. Swarming. But this was no mindless consumption. This was surgical, artistic defilement.

As she watched, a cluster of them focused their crystalline heads on a single power coupling. Thin beams of coherent light converged, not burning, but annealing. The metal flowed like liquid, reforming into one of those same intricate, fern-like patterns before solidifying into useless, beautiful sculpture. They weren’t eating. They were redecorating.

“I see them,” Samus said.

“Can you engage?” Jorin’s voice was breathless.

A trio of the insectoids detached from the swarm. They didn’t skitter. They flowed through the vacuum, their mirrored undersides catching her suit’s lights. They landed on the catwalk railing, their faceted heads turning to study her. One raised its forelimbs, and with a delicate, almost courtly motion, began to etch the same pattern into the railing. It wasn’t hostile. It was… curious. Mimicking.

Samus leveled her arm cannon, charging a low-yield burst. “This is Samus Aran. You are damaging critical infrastructure. Desist or be removed.”

The creatures froze. The lead one tilted its head. Then, from a small orifice beneath its crystal face, a sound propagated through the metal of the catwalk, translated by her suit into a voice that was chillingly, recognizably her own.

“…*o
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