Mutualism

The hard pull of thruster energy sputters erratically and then cuts suddenly, hard burn replaced by stabilization replaced by shutdown. It's enough to rouse you from your sleep, what amount of it you could pull together. You're a little bigger and a little stronger. Still, nowhere near certain of anything, but no longer the hatchling you were when your relationship with Balthazar started. Certainty, if it ever comes, remains a feeling for later.

Settling back onto Balthazar, as much your new home as your only ally, you're barraged by relatively useless information. It's not as simple as land and deploy. Even if he doesn't fully depressurize the ship and let the outside air in, he still needs to check and recheck the atmosphere. How does this trace element react to air filters in the ship? How about Samus' suit? How do microscopic organisms in the immediate environment compare against the ship's air when exposed to pesticide emergency systems? How much air can be taken in on this planet, and how much strain will that put on the filters? Does the amount gained from opening up offset the amount lost if it has to be isolated? Opening the airlock, even for a moment, takes the total sum calculations of several hundred risk factors.

Samus, seeming to have understood this some time ago, fights the impatience of waiting for the protective systems by waiting to slide into her suit and perform the security checks until the last moment. Giving herself a routine series of calculations to perform in time with Balthazar. Her suit is equipped with biosensors and cameras fed into the ship's computers. A necessary feature, one that she doesn't even resent that much. It gives Balthazar the baseline to measure how much a single spike in heart rate endangers the mission, and it gives her the assurance that she'll be allowed to do her job without unforeseen issues. On the job Samus and Samus on her own time may as well be different species, let alone life forms.

Balthazar clears the checks relating to Samus' suit first, and the ones relating to the immediate danger of letting her into the airlock a moment later. Wordlessly, when her lights go green, she steps into the chamber and lets the pressure match what she'll face outside, then the air drains and isolates from the body of the ship, and then she's allowed out. Balthazar pings the energy source a few miles away and she takes off, leaving you and Balthazar alone, aside from the occasional slow breath or incoming scan.

For the most part, Balthazar continues his work, occasionally one of the other two cores will chime in with findings, usually disregarded or filed into record without comment. You're not inclined to interrupt him, and he doesn't seem to mind working in silence.

You peek out through the main helmet visor cam for a while, watching the lush rainbow hues of alien flora and fauna rise and fade. Each of them is an amazing, unique, documentable species or subspecies that Samus takes the time to record. So far as the computer shows, she's the first Federation presence to set foot on the planet. Meaning she has some duty of recording things. It helps that she isn't on a timer. Her stress remains low, though slowly climbs as the life around her starts to shift slightly in the effect of Phazon energy radiation. Closer to the cratered core of the asteroid impact carrying the foreign influence, the life becomes less lush but more awe-inspiring. Plants creep to the sky, towering like buildings over jungle cities. The animals become less friendly, more bloated and warped like failed experiments in nature's uncaring genome lab. For a moment, it almost makes you self-conscious.

"The effects on Metroids versus any other form of animal aren't comparable," Balthazar opines almost curiously, "as a living energy source, it's really only you and the plants that have found a way to properly interface with Phazon. There is a leading theory that the initial development of Metroids came from fungal growth, not some other animal."

If you're closer to one of those towering mushrooms than one of the little scurrying things, why aren't you the size of a galactic cruiser?

"Perhaps given enough time and exposure, you would be. The most advanced evolution of a Phazon Metroid yet found, the Prime, exceeded the size of the largest documented Queen, despite all dating estimates placing it at two dozen years of post-larval exposure instead of the Queen's century of life. As well, Phazon Metroids seem to ignore the usual pack constraints of singular matriarchs, leading to the capability for multiple queens. But the data we found was inconclusive, the processes destroyed by Samus's intervention before they could bear definitive fruit."

He sounds almost... remorseful.

"Do not conflate my interest in Metroids with empathy for them. Intervention is often necessary for your species at precisely the time which it occurs."

Point taken.

"Additionally, if you are under any illusions as to being allowed to access the Phazon specimen brought back, I would seek to disabuse them without haste."

You hadn't really even considered the possibility of being allowed to re-couple with Phazon. The result would almost certainly be very good for you, but likely not something either Samus or Balthazar would want. Balthazar's curiosity about you and your species, even if weaponizable to allow you a re-coupling, is likely to be well-tampered and not so easily used against him.

Samus jumps at the flat cap of an almost furlong-wide mushroom that towers something like a hundred feet over the forest floor, itself now slick with smaller fungal caps and bioluminescent moss. At some point, the alien landscape shifted from a lush, bountiful wonderland of previously unknown life to a nightmare space of mutations and unnatural goliaths. Where the change had happened, it would be hard for you or anybody to pinpoint. How much could life change before it became the post-life freakishness of the Phazon fallout cloud? Even if every plant in the natural landscape were poisonous and fetid, and every animal vicious beyond admiration, why was it more normal than the current benign zombified growth around her? In a world where everything was alien, how alien was too alien?

"The matter that the superuser terminates or wishes to terminate, that is the matter which is deemably too alien." Balthazar sounds almost resentful. Not of the question, but of the answer he's forced to deliver. Sometimes, you have to remind yourself that your thoughts aren't your own when coupled to him. As well as the fact that his thoughts aren't even necessarily his own.

Samus manages to stumble her way up onto the cap, her boot springing from most of the flesh but sinking when she places it into the white fuzzy spots that dot the cap. In some previous iteration of the plant, likely a store of spores or nutrition. Here, a seeping pustule of impotent seed and fermented foodstuffs. The cap is high enough to allow her to peer over the crater lip into the hole at the bottom. For the first time, you truly get a look at Phazon. The nurturing seedbed of your own egg. Bright, unnatural blue, the likely source of all surrounding coloration, even mildly in those still at the edge of the fallout cloud. Floating about it, dotted around, dead and dying flora and fauna. Death planted in the alien spew like seeds in the juice of some planet-poisoning fruit. Samus has to jump back as a dying part of the cap snaps off underneath her, tumbling some great distance down and rolling into the pool. Even before it hits the surface, the phazon surges up like a tendril to grab at it, submerging it inside of itself and remaining stretched out where the drip-feed of biological matter last fell. Around the rim of the crater, this same pattern has been repeating since the first animal unfortunate enough to stumble into it made the first planted spore begin to grow. Expanding each time it has been allowed to feed, teasing at the lips of the crater in several areas. When it spills over finally, when it escapes its petri dish, what will become of the land around it? The megaflora, grown massive by the radiation from it, serving as the first massive bite of a planet-sized meal. After however long it has spent fattening them, they'll serve as the first extinction in the death cascade.

And still, it sings to you. Even through the visor, even looking at it through the voyeur alien eyes, it writhes and calls. Not some rot, some cancer. Life itself, a food chain apex, working its own path of predation. There is still so much that you do not know about it, that nobody does. If it's a true, naturally occurring organism, then it is the logical end to every food chain. And still, it needs to hijack asteroids, feed on chunks of what it has already eaten internally to spread. There had to have been some original point, some first launched asteroid. If it is a weapon, it is both a perfect weapon and a reduction of multicellular to a series of spandrels. It thinks without needing to plan, it speaks without needing to bargain, and it kills without needing to win. Any species smart enough to create it would be smart enough not to. Any species desperate enough, dogged enough by an enemy to create it, well...

"Adam, are you seeing this?" Samus's voice crackles through her helmet, distorted by the waves of interference given off by the blight below her.

"Affirmative."

"What-" She starts, cut off by either the interference or her own awe. "What the hell do I even do about this?"

"There is nothing you can do, Samus."

"What are you talking about?"

"This planet is dying, Samus."

"Can't we freeze it? Hit it with our guns, something?"

"Negative, any attempt made to neutralize it with the weapons available would either prove ineffectual or merely spread the corruption. This planet is dying, Samus."

"We took care of it on Tallon IV!"

"Tallon IV contained two outliers, firstly, a centralized self-destruct protocol due to Chozo occupation and awareness of the Phazon presence. Second, a gravity well around it strong enough to keep any escaping particles from spreading."

Samus paused for a long moment, grumbling to herself. Balthazar records the behavioral patterns as part of her diagnostics, her ability to respond to no-win situations as much a part of his recordings as her heart rate and blood pressure.

"I don't like standing by while I watch planets die, Adam."

"It is not currently in your power to improve the situation, only to worsen it, Samus."

Another pause, then, "Start running a simulation on what our best option is to delay the spread, even if only for a short period. Enough time to collect specimens of the local life forms."

"For you to collect specimens, Samus?"

"For Federation scientists."

"And what if no solution appears where a majority can be preserved?"

"Then give me the solution that preserves the highest amount for the longest time."

The channel hisses closed, Samus straddles the edge of the mushroom cap and leaps down onto a lower cap, making a slowly spiraling route around the crater to where the Phazon is closest to overflowing to collect her sample. Likely, she wants to avoid getting down into the crater as much as possible. Balthazar begins slowly performing calculations that he seems to conclude won't provide meaningful results before he's even started. Samus's heart rate slowly rises.

"The Chozo faced a similar problem, you know."

It takes you a moment to realize that he's not speaking to Samus, it's you. You aren't sure what he means.

"You wondered earlier about, if Phazon was created and not simply born, what species would be desperate enough to make something like it. How it likely destroyed them. The Metroid are an example of just such a thing, created to solve what was seen as a bigger problem. The fact that their own creation destroyed the Chozo... one could draw their own conclusions about any hypothetical creator of the Phazon."

You can only wonder what would have been a big enough threat that Phazon seemed like the lesser evil.

"Of course, species don't remain static. When the Metroid were created, many aspects from their breeding cycle to their behavioral patterns were likely not considered fully. As they grew in number, they absorbed the behavioral patterns of other species in their environment. In a matter of generations, the created species not only destroyed their creators, they had become indistinguishable from something which had a natural life cycle and could have always existed. Excepting, of course, their desire to destroy the X Parasites at all costs and their lack of growth plateau behavior. Assuming the Phazon is similar in origin, your kind has something of a kindred spirit in it. Perhaps that's why the meeting of you two is so dangerous."

Samus stands at the edge of the crater and hoists a containment cell from her back. With a push of a button, a part of the lid unseals, floating as a drone controlled by a remote function of Balthazar's personality. It approaches the surface of the Phazon, flying a wobbly bee-like path as it battles waves of radiating Phazon energy and likely just regular radiation. It beeps in concern as it nears the surface, but continues to lower down a collecting arm. A particularly strong buffet of radiation hits it and it wobbles just enough for an arm of Phazon to shoot up from the surface and submerge it. It gives a single, pathetic beep before shutting off, leaving a small static space in the corner of Balthazar's consciousness. Unphased, Samus approaches slowly, unsealing the lid of another containment cell.

Samus hovers her hand over the Phazon for a moment, watching the tendrils rise up to try to meet her. She tries to push the open lid of the jar toward the Phazon, but it simply tries to reach up to grasp at her hands before she can get it close enough. After a moment's consideration, she puts her cannon forward and shoots a cryogenic blast at the Phazon, freezing a small chunk around the drone as well as the matter covering the drone. Before the Phazon can thaw, she yanks the drone up out of the frozen corruption and thrusts it into the containment jar, sealing the lid as the Phazon quickly thaws and tries to lurch for freedom. When the jar pressurizes and vacuums the air, the Phazon-covered drone simply settles to the floor of the jar, pressing against whatever side of it is closest to living flesh. When Samus seems confident it can't escape, she makes a quick retreat from the seething crater and back to her ship.

"Then again, perhaps it's simply the danger of both of you that makes you dangerous."