Marisa is determined to get the lowest possible combined Aran number (for someone who is not herself Samus Aran, who is defined as having Aran number 0), which is 2.

She's already coauthored a paper with her friend Samus on some fascinating physics experiments involving her wondrous ancient technology. That is, she stole some artifacts and played with them for a bit, and then graciously offered coauthorship. Which leaves only one pending collaboration.

"If you loan me that gravitic weapon, I think I can actually crush it," says Marisa, holding up a hand and emphatically miming the crushing of an object. "Like, apply force towards the center across the whole surface. It's gotta fracture somewhere."

"I think you are vastly underestimating the mass of a planet," says Samus, fidgeting uncomfortably. "Your energy output is around that of a capital ship's battery. It is not geologically impressive."

"That's why I need to borrow your gravitic weapon! Plus that makes it a real collaboration. I'm not sure flying in your spaceship counts."

They are conversing in a cramped galley in Samus's gunship, which has a crew capacity of 3 only in the optimistic world of starship dealers. Marisa does not occupy much space bodily, but has amply compensated by surrounding herself in a nest of note paper, covered in magical and mathematical notation.

Samus barely fits inside this galley on a good day, and looms (somehow, timidly) over the witch and her notes.

"I used it to do things like pull rubble blockages out of shafts. I know you can get more power out of it," which is what she's worried about, even if she knows she'll eventually relent, "but I don't think it's any sort of literal force multiplier."

"No, you're not getting it. I can apply something to the entire surface of a small planet, I'm pretty sure." She retrieves some incomprehensible pages from a lower stratum of her pile and holds them up as if in explanation. "Pretty sure," she repeats, setting the papers down off to the side. "But, like, at that scale, it'd just be heat. Probably a decent amount of heat, but. I need to work something else in there. I have some gravitics, but out of thirdhand books, and honestly it's mostly fantasy doing the heavy lifting in those spells, I didn't have any idea what was going on."

"I can't really understand your calculations," she says, looking away. "I've only got a pilot's grasp of physics. But planets are just not on the same order of magnitude as what I've seen from you."

She uncurls from her hunched-over posture (a bit; space is limited), stretching her arms.

"Why not just drop a comparably massive moon on it?" She can't believe she's making suggestions.

"That takes forever. And more importantly, it's just not you. You destroy planets all the time with, uh, bombs or whatever, why are you acting like it's so difficult?"

Samus puts a hand over her face, massaging her brow as if to relieve a headache (in fact, she mostly just has the urge to cover her face, and picked up the specific mannerism from annoyed naval officers).

"My people's geothermal power systems, like the rest of our technology, work on our grasp of physics. Not mine, I have a technician's understanding at best. Nearly every time I've seen a planet destroyed, it was because a pirate clan wrecked every safety feature and tuned one for unsustainable output, and some explosion or other destabilized it. I'm not actually some sort of... planet murderer."

"Uh-huh, uh-huh. I see. So the really you-style way to blow up a planet is to overload a super advanced archaeotech geothermal plant."

Samus looks out sharply from behind her fingers. "We're not doing that. I don't actually want to erase my people's legacy from the galaxy, you know."

"No no, I'm just talking about style here. Man, I have no idea how a geothermal plant like that would even begin to work. I can just make it all up."

Samus relaxes a bit, taking her hand off her face. "Okay, okay. That's fine." Marisa explained this to her before. Sufficiently advanced technology which is indistinguishable from magic apparently counts as magic from a magician's perspective.

"Still going to want to see one in action, sorry." Marisa grins up at Samus. "But it can stay a pristine museum piece. No one respects museum pieces more than me."

"You stole Excalibur from the British Museum." This was apparently some kind of legendary sword from the British culture; a while back, Marisa was waving it around and bragging about it, though it didn't really look that special. "And you sold it at a secondhand shop."

"That sword belongs in a museum. And now it's hanging up in the legendary swords section next to Kusanagi. Sometimes you have to repatriate things like that. That British museum is full of stolen artifacts."

"It's a British legend."

"It's a British legend."

Samus grimaces. "Okay, so you want to take notes on a working Chozo geothermal installation."

"Doesn't have to be working, I don't think."

"Not sure I've ever seen one break down. Besides from tampering."

Marisa smiles. "Just add the bus fare to my tab, ma'am."

Samus smiles back a little. "I'm higher-class than a bus."

She extricates herself from the galley and slides into a much more comfortable position in the pilot's seat, reviewing her log entries. MM341γ looks like a good candidate; she has a set of precalculated jumps 5 hops long to reach it from here, and it was fairly boring when she explored its caverns. There's a research station with a crew of around 20, no colony, no drydock bureaucracy, and in theory the local admiral extorts tolls if he's got a ship in system but generally no one extorts her.

(Sometimes they do. She just pays them.)

A heavily armed lone pilot like Samus computes her own jumps, of course, and introduces a bit of randomness into a general target volume. So her "precomputed" jumps take ten or so minutes to actually finish computing, which can run in parallel with the small gunship-sized drive spinning up for each jump.

So it's about an hour, spent mostly in friendly silence, later that they arrive in the orbital neighborhood of a nice temperate planet.

As is typical, a space battle is raging in orbit nearby.

A lone Federation cruiser, of the sort that might hypothetically have shaken her down were it alone, is having pieces carved off it by an overpowered salvage cutter characteristic of the Resources Exist To Be Consumed^[1] clan's vessels. A second cruiser is harrying it with electromagnetic weapons, and a larger cruiser—likely a command ship—is a ways away not doing much of anything. The federation cruiser has launched fighter drones and is returning fire with its railgun battery as best it can, which is poorly (this sort of railgun is meant for use at range). No fighters have been launched by the pirate cruisers, but the command ship at least probably has a few.

"Marisa!" she calls. "Two pirate cruisers and one command cruiser, looks like."

[1] An idiomatic translation. Called, by those who bother to distinguish between pirate clans, the "Salvagers" somewhat formally, and various names along the lines of "fucking magpies" informally.