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.

"What protection?" asks Marisa, still writing at her table.

"Don't see any point defenses, no pirate fighters deployed but there's probably a few in the command ship at least. These ships are well-armored but their armaments are mainly for carving hulls. The command ship probably has missile batteries or something similar."

"Command ship's mine, then, but break off and engage any fighters they happen to launch. I'm fine with missiles."

Marisa slides neatly out from behind her table of notes without disturbing any, and scurries to her bunk a few feet away.

Samus accelerates toward the ongoing battle, firing on the pirate cruiser which is actively carving pieces out of the Federation cruiser. She applies a good amount of roll to the gunship, corkscrewing inward; this acceleration leaves the contents of the ship undisturbed thanks to the physics of a much more advanced people than humanity. Not a paper slides out of place.

The witch exiting the ship on a broom, however, can take advantage of the roll for a boost towards the command cruiser, still sitting idly in its orbit.

The enemy probably noticed the jettisoned human. But it probably doesn't consider a jettisoned human threatening. (If it were Samus, fully armored, it would; she has a reputation.)

A minute of cast time would definitely put them on their guard, but she can likely afford to spend fifteen seconds visibly flaring with magic power for the sake of a powerful alpha strike.

The command cruiser has scrambled five fighters to engage Samus's gunship. The cruisers aren't really equipped to hit small targets.

It's worth quietly waiting for them to be closer to Samus's battle than to Marisa, then.

She can deal with these fighters! But she'll have to pay attention to them, fire on them, and fire on the command cruiser less or not at all.

Enemy fighters are approaching. These five are probably all the enemy can field. Which makes it a good time to expend dumbfire missiles on the cruiser currently under her guns.

The Federation cruiser isn't doing much. It's probably a combination of having had important systems damaged and not really being prepared for combat. If she wants to keep these fighters occupied, she has to threaten destruction of an enemy vessel. Realistically, she won't keep all five on her.

She allows herself to get hit by a few stray fighter shots before breaking to engage them. Certain pirate clans tend to avoid engaging enemies they can't hit as a matter of doctrine, just staying alive and pointing their weapons elsewhere; in this case, it would be at the Federation cruiser she's trying to protect, after realizing that Marisa is a threat and that they can't hit her. This isn't this clan's doctrine, as far as she knows, but it doesn't hurt.

And now it's time.

The ミニmini八卦炉eight trigram reactor is possibly the most valuable equipment on this battlefield. (The only competition is Samus Aran's armor, to the extent that it's equipment rather than biology.) It's not all that much to look at; you could imagine someone without all that much taste keeping it on a shelf as a decoration. A small octagonal wooden block engraved with the eight trigrams, metal crucible visible in the center.

Its maximum power output is probably not infinite; few things are truly infinite. It's high enough that the limiting factor is Marisa's mental capacity, and Marisa studies hard. In a way, it's a device that transmutes her attentional capacity and mental modeling facility into firepower.

Fifteen seconds to charge; this is not a power buildup in the reactor, but a mathematical system taking form in her mind. As she thinks it through, she can more efficiently transform the limitless power available to her from potentiality to actuality. She's glowing in a way impossible to ignore, but pirate clans aren't great at reacting to the unexpected; the enemy gunner will not be permitted the initiative to fire on her immediately. (Which wouldn't be dangerous to her, but would make it harder to concentrate.) And this cruiser definitely doesn't rate a Brain.

In a duel, she can precompute firing patterns onto a talisman, for aesthetics rather than destructiveness. This is not a duel, and the magic being fired is not merely the dueling-concept of a destructive spell. It's a spell that appears in one of the back sections of her grimoire, for true life-and-death combat.

反anti-主力艦capital ship光beam「ドレッドノートDreadnoughtスパークSpark」. A wide, focused beam tears through the pirate command ship, sustained for a good seven seconds, only decohering many miles past its target. (Not that far, as distances in space go; the planet would have been at no risk as a backstop, for example, had the battle been oriented that way.)

The vessel is no longer able to function as a command cruiser, on account of the sections where command was localized having been replaced with a hole!

It still has functional weapons systems, however. At this point the surviving gunners are already firing.

Three fighters move to intercept Marisa.

This is a good opportunity to destroy... two fighters! Two fighters fall to guided missiles.

The tactical priority here is keeping the salvage cruiser from carving more pieces off the Federation cruiser, which is largely accomplished by being in the space between them firing weapons. A second priority is keeping the fighters unable to usefully act against Marisa. Destroying the fighters would privilege the second over the first, so it's only worth doing when they are particularly open and it doesn't take much time.

If more than one fighter were currently pursuing Marisa, she'd pursue them. The zeroth priority is the survival of her actual ally. The Federation cruiser is worth saving but is at best not-openly-hostile.

So it's back to hammering the cruiser for now. She might actually destroy this one soon, it's not that tough and she's willing to spend more missiles.

Marisa is actually aiming to touch down on the former command cruiser's hull, but she's free to take the time to dogfight a fighter.

She summons four laser slaves and chases it down, firing magic missiles. It's using nonmagical physics, and won't be anywhere near as maneuverable as a witch on a broom.

The fighter pilot is not especially good at dodging, and self-destructs!

Marisa slips out of the area of effect. That was pretty dangerous! She'll be wary of that in the future.

It's now time to support her ally. She lands on the wrecked command cruiser.

Samus is under heavy fire, and trying to be hit by a nonnegligible but ultimately harmless amount of fire is tricky.

But she has an opportunity to destroy another fighter when it makes an ill-advised turn, so she's down to two cruisers and one fighter now.

She flies away slightly, then starts a strafing run with missiles against the two cruisers, which are now fairly close together. Their weapons still can't track her effectively; she could let herself be hit once or twice, but that would be dangerous.

What's left of this cruiser isn't equipped to shoot at itself. They might send infantry, but that's unlikely and will take a while.

She can carefully charge a more complex piece of magic. Well, there's a few simplifying assumptions she can make here; but two lasers are inherently trickier than one. She has to keep a bit of attention focused on the fight itself, too, to be sure to hit her targets and not any friendlies. (Samus is fine, she can cut it close there, but they're protecting this deadweight cruiser.)

A small gunship can't herd cruisers, or she'd help. They've been in enough fights together to understand what the other is likely going to do.

Fortunately, the Federation cruiser has been trying to get away, though it had an engine carved off earlier and is not able to do so efficiently. She can be threatening in hopes they won't pursue too closely. The main problem is that their reason to not pursue would be getting better gun tracking on her, and she's been avoiding the cruiser guns. If they give up, it could be a problem.

Actually, they recognize the advanced technology of the gunship, and want it! They're less interested in the Federation cruiser now.

反anti-艦隊fleet光beam「ロックオンLock-OnスパークSpark」. Targets: two.

Firing two beams this wide means keeping track of the interference region where they both emerge from the reactor in her hand, and keeping it stable. The effect on the target cruisers needs no babysitting; they are pulverized, and both satisfyingly explode as their engine confinement is breached.

She smiles a bit inside her armor, annihilating the last enemy fighter without much effort.

Ugh, she is going to have to talk now. She hates this. Apparently the Federation cruiser has been attempting to communicate for a while now.

Fine, she'll take the call.

"This is Captain Isolde Miller of the Dyfed, registry number SV-637727. My crew and I are very grateful for your assistance."

She flies over to the pirate command cruiser to disable its remaining weapons. She should probably say something, but doesn't.

The captain looks at the expressionless helmet coming through on video. She can see focused eyes faintly through the visor. She's kind of intimidated by the legendary space warrior, actually!

"We lost our long-range communications in the attack, and would be additionally grateful if you could contact our fleet for assistance."

Yeah that's fine, she'll hack their systems to find out where their fleet is and impersonate the Dyfed to send a standard distress message, it takes about five seconds because she was already hacking every starship nearby as a matter of course when she landed on the battle, it's actually the main reason she armored up. Destroying more weapons systems in the meantime.

Oh, she almost forgot.

"How many alive on the surface?"

Is that a no on the communications? Best not to press the angry space warrior, especially not with a massively destructive ???witch??? (she's avoiding thinking about that) on the field too.

"We don't know. The surface station hasn't responded, and the pirates were in the system before us. We have to assume the worst."

Well, she already downloaded some data from the command cruiser, but it's all encrypted drivel; her suit can probably deal with the encryption, but it's not smart enough to sort the drivel. Easier to land. The Federation captain is right to assume the worst, honestly.

"Stay here," she says. "They're not likely to reinforce. This was probably an entire independent group."

They can't really go anywhere! Oh, she probably means stay in space while she blows up the planet or something.

"We'll be in orbit for the foreseeable future, ma'am." You ma'am Samus Aran, right? "Too damaged to do much else."

She can hang up now, right? Probably. She hangs up.

Sounds like a witch has just entered her gunship, judging by the noises behind her.

"Hey, you need me to handle the diplomacy?"

"I already talked to them."

"Uh, maybe I should call and introduce myself anyway. It's polite."

She can't quite do this with magic, so she sits at a copilot's terminal in the cockpit and sends a handshake.

Oh no, she's calling back.

"Put her through," the captain says, and the ships reopen communications.

Oh no, it's the witch. Actually, it looks more like a gigantic witch hat is calling them, but there's a bit of face visible at the bottom of the transmission.

"Hello! This is Kirisame Marisa, ordinary magician. Sorry about the pirate attack! I hope we were able to help you out a bit."

"We're very grateful, Ms. Kirisame."

Talking to this hat is a bit awkward. You can't just ask someone to angle their holocamera down a bit, though.

"We were fortunate that two such impressive warriors happened to show up."

"Don't mind. I'm always happy to help out. We weren't expecting much of anything in this system! Pretty bad luck! Did they jump in on you?"

"We jumped in on them. This is a scheduled patrol vessel. To be honest, usually scheduled patrol vessels that happen on pirate operations just die; that's how the fleet knows there's a problem."

She doesn't want to be too pushy, but...

"We don't have long-range communications, and haven't contacted our fleet. If you have them working, we'd be very grateful if you sent them a message."

"Already sent one," she says to Marisa.

Samus probably didn't tell them she sent a message.

"Of course, of course. I'll make sure that's taken care of. You won't be stranded for too long if I have anything to say about it."

She smiles reassuringly, but only the tops of her eyes are actually visible on this transmission, so the effect may be lost.

"I, uh, I'm allowed to disclose the location of our fleet command in cases like this, but I'd really appreciate it if you didn't sell it or anything." They're a legendarily expensive and hard-bargain-driving warrior and a completely unknown... witch with anti-ship lasers, they seem like the types who don't have to sell the information but will anyway just out of Outlaw Principle or something.

"No no, it's fine. We'll figure something out, you don't have to test your regulations."

Another (completely wasted) reassuring smile.

"We're going to investigate the surface next, I think!" She pauses; no contradiction from Samus. "Is there anything you can tell us about it?"

"We weren't able to raise the research station. They're presumed dead, because there's definitely pirates down there. We don't know more; nothing special besides archaeotech is supposed to be on that planet." And Samus Aran would know more about the archaeotech, of course.

"Thanks! I'm sending you my frequency. I know it looks invalid, just call me on it anyway if you need something, I'll pick up!"

(It's the only way she can get communications magic to work with common starship technology.)

"Oh, you said your long-range was down. If you wide-beam something anywhere I can pick it up, don't worry about the direction, I'm picking up on the use of the frequency not the actual transmission. I sent a public key too, it's safe to use your usual protocols." (That math is easy.)

The captain hopes they don't have reason to call a witch anytime soon.

"That's very kind, thank you."

"Stay safe!" Out-of-frame grin, then hang up.

It's unclear whether the space weirdos are actually going to contact the fleet. The captain gives orders assuming they'll be stranded for at least a week.

In fact, Marisa is injecting More Diplomacy into the situation! She calls the fleet herself!

The flagship of Admiral Richard Peregrine, the Almagest, receives a transmission with priority label "♡ ～(￣ω￣)", baffling the communications officer on duty. He sends his bafflement up the chain of command, and answers it himself.

It's... a hat. Wait, looks like someone is wearing it, they're just mostly out of frame.

"This is Almagest."

"This is Kirisame Marisa, ordinary magician! I'm calling on behalf of one of your patrol cruisers! They lost their communications in a pirate attack, so we're helping out! I think they need relief, they're pretty beat up."

She sends the factsheet on the ship in question along the text channel.

"I can actually relay for you! I think it might be best if you spoke to your own ship yourself. Would that help? I can keep it up for a day or so."

"We'd appreciate that, ma'am." It'll need a rubber stamp from someone with a higher rank, because it does involve putting some third party in the middle of their communications, but it's not actually a problem, encryption exists.

(Their ciphers may be post-quantum, but they aren't post-sufficiently-advanced-Chozo. Samus is not paying attention, but her suit will decrypt whatever it sees per its standing configuration.)

"Great! I'm sending over the frequency. That's not a typo, it's really the frequency, I'm relaying with magic. If you use it in the next twenty or so hours it'll relay."

Uh. (He's not actually paying attention to any talk of magic, independent pilots are kinda weird and it's background noise to him, but the invalid frequency is making him worry some kind of classified project is involved.)

"Thank you, ma'am. And thank you for your report."

Reports slowly osmose up the chain of command!

With the call over, Marisa spends a bit of time casting a spell to do the promised relaying for her. If the fleet had happened to call their wayward ship right away, she would have handled it off her personal magical attention, but it'll be easier if she can set it on a summoned slave and forget about it. It'll last more like fifty hours but it's best to underpromise and overdeliver with strangers.

She has to hop out of the ship for a bit to leave the summoned slave in space. Looks like Samus isn't doing much anymore; she's probably sitting there reading stolen documents in preparation for the surface mission.

These stolen documents are boring. She's coupled to a symbiotic intelligence of sorts but it isn't really intelligent enough to work around the pirate clans' addiction to mind-numbing bureaucratic paperwork. Unlike some normal species like humans, they don't even have suggestive email chats to pinpoint, everything is as dry as everything else.

She's starting to get a picture of what's going on here, though. Looks like a standard raid for archaeotech of the kind she's seen and foiled countless times before. This was a relatively large number of ships for that, but it was about the right amount to deal with any patrol cruisers happening by (as, indeed, one did), so she's not suspicious that it indicates anything more important.

The researchers are almost certainly dead, unfortunately.