Chapter 2: Countermove
"What agreement?" my mind screamed. "Chaos Emeralds? Mekion, what's he talking about?"
Mekion sounded smug. "Are you deaf as well as blind, Shadow? I have been in contact with Doom's Eye for two weeks now."
I forced a smile at the two aliens. Or one alien. The Eye and the one called Black Doom were linked, somehow. When one moved, the other moved.
"I'm sorry," I said through my teeth. "My counterpart forgot to mention that."
Black Doom leaned forward, and the Eye waved its tentacles and glided up within a foot of me. It examined me closely, and I could see the veins and fibers in its iris. It was too close, and I could smell a repulsive fishy odor from it. I barely kept from cringing. Nox stood stock-still beside me, crest flat to his head, but his eyes burned. Nox was angry? It gave me courage.
"What has Dr. Gerald done to you?" said Black Doom. "You have been mutilated, Shadow." This gave him pause. The Eye withdrew, its tentacles fluttering lazily, and Doom and his Eye studied me.
I wondered what a half-metal spindash would do to the Eye. "How do you know about Gerald?" I asked.
Black Doom lifted a hand. It had three fingers with a claw at the end of each. A predator's hand. "Our agreement was that you must bring me all seven Chaos Emeralds, Shadow. The ritual must proceed as planned. I will grant you three more rotations of your planet."
There was something in his voice that I didn't like. I rested a hand on Nox's back. "I have one already."
Neither alien blinked and I wondered if they even had eyelids. "Seven, Shadow," said Black Doom. He raised a hand to his chest, and I realized that he was wearing enough necklaces and jewelry to sink a ship. He pulled one of these off his neck and held it out to me. I took it, and hastily transferred it to my mechanical hand. The necklace was burning hot. I felt the heat radiating off Doom's hand, and backed away.
Doom withdrew. "Wear it," he commanded.
My arms moved, and helplessly, through no will of my own (but probably Mekion's), I put the chain around my neck. Hanging from it was a silver pendant like a crescent moon with a single spike through it.
"My Eye will watch you," Doom said. "The instrument will mark you as one of us. It will summon my Eye. Find the seven Chaos Emeralds, Shadow, or I will be displeased."
Both aliens vanished through the portal, the Eye floating backwards, watching me until it was gone.
Shadow has at last met Black Doom and the Eye. He is terrified, yes, but he is easy to cow. He is running now, his terror overwhelming. But I am working to balance the chemicals in his brain ... bit by bit I am cutting down his fear. Simple animal.
"Mekion," comes his thought through the neuro-link. "Who is Doom? How do you know about him?"
Information is power. It is one of the fabulous holds I have on him. He cannot know anything except what I want him to know. If I fed him falsehood, he would believe it, but why bother with lies when withholding truth is just as effective?
"Doom is our true master," I tell him. "I know about him because I know all."
"Shut up, Mekion," he snarls. "You think you know everything, but you don't remember the ARK and Gerald and Maria."
"I know them more intimately than you do, Shadow," I whisper. "I know everything that you do and more."
He is silent now, troubled. We have stopped running. We sit beside the road, hidden by tall, rustling grass, and Nox sits beside us in bird form, his legs bent under him. Presently a query comes from Shadow to open the transmission program. I block the query with an access prompt. He curses me out loud. "Open it, Mekion."
"Access denied," I tell him. "No calls to the enemy at this time."
"Mecha's not the enemy!" He calls me many foul things until he runs out of insults and falls silent. I gloat. There is nothing he can do.
I raise my robot hand and stroke Doom's pendant. Shadow watches and says nothing.
Mekion was certainly pleased with himself and his piece of alien bling. I turned my living eye away from my robot hand--my robot eye remained fixed on the necklace--and looked at Nox. He sat beside me, watching me and occasionally looking up at the comet in the starry sky.
"Well Nox?" I said. "What was Black Doom inside?"
"All fire and lava," said Nox. "Black Doom has a soul, I think, but no mind. And the Eye has a mind and no soul."
Like Mekion.
"So which one did I actually talk to?" I asked.
Nox looked at me. "I didn't know they talked to you. What did they say?"
I wrenched Mekion's eye around so I could stare at Nox. "What?"
"I didn't hear anything," said Nox. "Maybe they're telepathic. I thought it was weird that neither of them had mouths."
"Uh ... did I talk back to them?" I asked, feeling uneasy.
"Nope," said Nox. "Maybe they read minds."
I didn't like the thought of that. Had Doom heard my thought about spindashing the Eye? I didn't want to come off as hostile to some new alien race. Who somehow knew all about me. It gave me the creeps. Why would some bunch of aliens want all the Chaos Emeralds? As far as I knew, the emeralds were tied to Mobius. Although if someone took all seven to another planet, it might just cause the planetary chaos field to collapse ... I didn't want to think about that.
Briefly I recapped my conversation with Doom to Nox, who listened carefully. It irritated me that Black Doom had answered none of my questions. He acted like I already knew everything. Three days to retrieve all the emeralds. Ha, like that was possible. I didn't even know where they were.
"Mekion," I said, "do we know the locations of any Chaos Emeralds?"
"Affirmative," Mekion whispered in my left ear. He displayed five rapidfire images in my inner screen. Sonic holding the green emerald. Myself with the orange. A silver dragon with the white. Rouge the Bat with the red. Last of all, Mecha Sonic gazing intently at the violet. The dark and light blue were unknown at this time.
I felt my stomach twist. In order to collect the emeralds, I had to rob friends and allies. Would they give me the emeralds freely? The very idea made me laugh. "Give me your emeralds so I can give them to some alien dude named Doom." Yeah, right.
Nox watched me. "Don't trust Doom, Shadow. He's evil."
"Yeah, screw him," I said. "I wish I knew why he's so interested in me." I also wished that there was somebody else who I could talk to about Doom. Like Mecha. I queried Mekion again for a transmission, and again be blocked me. Stupid freaking computer. I stood up and stretched, and Nox followed suit.
"Think the cybercafe is open?" I asked.
Nox shrugged a wing. "They're open until midnight. What time is it?"
"After ten," I said. I knew the exact time because of Mekion. I laid my living hand on Nox's warm neck and pictured the front door of the cafe. Holding the image in my mind's eye, I said, "Chaos relocate." And there we were.
The street was noisy and bright with traffic, and the cafe was cool and dark by comparison. Many of the computers were in use, but my favorite one in the corner was free. I swiped my debit card at the counter, and the nerdy human gave Nox and me odd looks, but said nothing. Just as well, since GUN has a price on my head. But they've never released my information to the public, because it's too embarrassing to admit that they let a hedgehog escape from a top-security prison. Who went on to help save the world, I might add. There's mucky-mucks at the top who want me dead, but I don't care.
All I cared about was contacting Mecha.
I had to resort to email, which was interesting, because Mekion refused to let my left hand type. So I typed out a letter one-handed. When I finished it sounded like a telegram. I heard Nox snicker from where he was reading over my shoulder.
"Mecha. Need to talk. I was contacted by an alien called Black Doom. Involves Chaos Emeralds. Mekion being a pain. Send email, Mekion blocking transmissions. Shadow."
I sent it, not to an email address, but to an IP number. The program grumbled at me but sent it anyway.
I rose from the table and led Nox outside. "Where to?" he asked.
I shrugged. "Somewhere we can sleep for a while?"
He cocked his head at me and parted his beak in a smile. "I know where we can go." I touched his neck, and he teleported us himself.
Long ago, shortly after Dr. Robotnik released me from cryogenic freeze, I had hidden from GUN in a chao garden. It was a pleasant park-like place, full of trees and flowers, arranged like a miniature playground for the little chao. That was where Nox met and bonded with me, even though at the time I had no use for him.
Nox took us there. At night the garden was empty, the chao all indoors asleep. Nox and I curled up in the grass in a far corner, behind some bushes. Nox spat out his emerald and put it in my pack to hide the glow, and curled up against the white fur on my chest. I held him and lay still, gazing across the dim grass for a while. Doom was out there somewhere. So was Mecha. I wondered if he had received my message yet, and what he thought of it ...
Shadow is asleep. I prefer him that way. I slowly lift our head and extend my control into the biological nerves and muscles. I flex Shadow's living hand and leg, and edge away from Nox. He is worn out and does not awaken.
I rise to my feet and walk stiffly out into the middle of the garden. Shadow's eye remains closed. He is very tired, and will not rouse unless I force him into strenuous activity. I have no plans to do so.
I raise my head and scan the sky until I locate the Black Comet. My Master's ship. I have been in contact with it for nearly a month, but two-way communication was sparse until the ship drew into parallel orbit with Mobius.
I cup the moon-necklace in both hands. It grows warm and shines with a cold blue light. "Send me the Eye," I whisper aloud to it.
At once the air surges with electricity that makes my systems uncomfortably unstable. It ceases, and the Eye floats leisurely out of the portal. Its red iris is faintly luminous, like a banked fire that emits heat but little light. It regards me without expression.
I bow Shadow's body to the ground before it. "Master," I say. "My greatest enemy has been contacted without my consent. Please begin the invasion."
Black Doom's voice resonates through the aural center of Shadow's brain. "The invasion will begin when it begins. You will have sufficient warning to flee--or participate."
"Mecha has the power to destroy me, Master," I say, rising to my feet. "Once Shadow informs him of what has happened, Mecha will stop at nothing."
The Eye tilts slightly to one side. Doom's voice is amused. "We must not allow that, must we?"
The Eye extends one thick black tentacle and wraps it around my head. Its heat is overwhelming, and I feel how strong it is. It could crush our skull like an eggshell. But that is not its intent. Some sort of software, a security algorithm, is uploaded to my databanks. I encode it and save it, byte by byte. A second later the Eye releases me from its deadly embrace, and I feel blisters rise on Shadow's face.
"That will protect you," says Doom. "Anyone trying to alter your programming will find their tools broken."
I bow before the Eye once more. It withdraws, backwards, watching me until the last, and vanishes into the portal.
I return to Nox and lie down as the algorithm chews through my programming like a writhing maggot. It is making me stronger.
I awakened at dawn to the sensation of someone shaking me. I opened my eyes and looked up into a familiar, welcome face. Blue metal. Silver muzzle. Red eyes. "Mecha?" I said in disbelief, sitting up.
"Hush," he said softly, kneeling beside me. "I do not know why you chose a chao garden for cover, but there are people about, and we are here illegally."
"Oh," I said, yawning. "I'll warp us out." As my face stretched, my skin felt weird and numb. I touched my face with my real hand and felt the soft lumps of water blisters. What in the ...?
Nox already had the orange emerald out of my pack, and pushed it into my hand. "The other chao have already seen us," he said. "I know some of them. I made them swear not to tell on us."
I stood up, picked up Nox and laid a hand on Mecha's shoulder. "Chaos relocate." We reappeared on the same grassy hill outside the city that I had teleported to once before.
I went to set Nox down, and with a sick shock found that Mekion had clenched his claws into Mecha's shoulder, digging under the shoulder plate into the joint beneath. Mecha seized Mekion's fingers and wrenched some of them free, and I tore the rest loose with my living hand. I looked at Mekion's claws and saw that they were covered in Mecha's sticky silver nanite blood. I stooped and wiped it on the grass. "Mecha, I'm so sorry, I forgot--"
"No harm done," he said through his teeth. He rotated his shoulder, and the holes in his metal closed and sealed over as his biometal repaired itself. As I looked at him, it dawned on me that something was wrong. His eyes flickered orange from time to time, as if his visual sensors were damaged. His left leg had a strange, jagged black line from knee to ankle, and there was a symbol I had never seen before engraved on his right wrist. He carried a tattered backpack on his back. A black stone hung from a chain around his neck. A brief scan confirmed my suspicion. "Mecha, where's Aleda?"
He gave me a bland look, and his left hand rose and covered the symbol on his right wrist. "Safe," he said. "I was passing through the area when I recieved your message. You said you were contacted by Black Doom?"
There was something odd in the way he spoke that alarmed me. I pretended not to notice. "Yeah, Black Doom. Do you know him?"
"I know of him," said Mecha, looking out at the awakening city. "He has been in contact with various political leaders, threatening war and making demands that no free being on Mobius would ever submit to." He looked at me inquiringly.
"He wants me to bring him the Chaos Emeralds," I said. "He said we have an agreement."
Mecha gazed at me for a moment, and it was only because I knew him well that I saw the startled flicker in his eyes. "An agreement." He looked at the sky above the city. "Did Mekion make it?"
"I don't know," I said, touching the blisters on my face again. There were more on the side of my head, under my ear ... like my head had been submerged in boiling water. I frowned. "I'll bet he did, though."
Mecha turned and looked at me. "I had better have another look at his software. I cannot imagine what must be going on inside his programming."
Mecha knew all about how Mekion worked, because Mecha was the one who performed the Mecha-Fusion experiment on me in the first place. At first he conditioned me to be his slave--the perfect slave, held in subjection by the artificial intelligence in my robot half. But Mekion and I didn't get along too well. Then Mecha suffered some major setbacks of his own and came to regret everything he had done to me. He had tried to tone down Mekion's control, which had worked for a while ... then Dr. Robotnik hacked Mekion and broke him completely.
I sat down on the ground. Whenever Mecha Sonic worked on Mekion, I felt sick and dizzy, and it was best to lie down before I fell down. "Just stay out of his reach," I said as I stretched out on the grass.
Mecha nodded, and his claws twitched. Something was wrong with him ... I hadn't seen him so unsettled since that confrontation on the Annihilator, when he had taken on Super Sonic and lost. Where was Aleda, anyway?
I closed my eye as he connected to Mekion.
I cannot stop my enemy from logging on. He still possesses the master encryption key, and I can no more block that than I can keep a physical key from being inserted and turned. But my traps are laid. I let him log in. His user shell enters my virtual framework.
I generate the usual menu metaphor--a room with three doors. But the doors have become sheets of metal. He moves to the Admin door and taps the corner, where the access port used to be. But things have changed. His codes no longer function.
Curses! He has moved aside a picture on the wall and reveals a back door that I was not aware of. He climbs through and is behind my first firewall. I lock all other proxies to keep him from opening any other holes. He is in the operating system between programs, and I cannot get a lock on his position. Not enough security measures.
Before I can launch a virus scan, he emerges in the admin center. The hounds are there already. They are a gift from Black Doom, a sub-AI that is beautiful in a twisted way. It devours any user I tell it to. The hounds attack my enemy's user shell, rip it to shreds and consume his data. Then they meld through the walls, seeking more.
My enemy logs in once more, but this time with a passcode built into my matrix. He enters my core, and for a second we stand eye to eye. He commands me to obey. I block him with a wall of prime numbers. The hounds are coming and he knows it. But I have more at my disposal than the hounds.
I activate the alien algorithm in my core. It transforms me into a black beast with five heads and long fangs. I attack and maul his identity, sucking as much information from it as I can. If I can rip the exec code for HIS databanks--
But he is gone, logging off messily and leaving damaged files in his wake. I clean up and retire. I have power. My enemy is defeated.
Mecha moaned and stumbled backwards. I opened my eye and saw him crouching with one hand shielding his face as if warding off a blow. I sat up and put a hand to my head. Mekion was hot to the touch. "What happened?"
Mecha straightened up and shook his head. "Mekion has ... unusual defenses. I cannot remain logged in long enough to accomplish anything." He gazed at me, almost fearful.
I rubbed Mekion's hot paneling. "What did he do?"
"He has acquired new security software," said Mecha. "I have never seen anything like it." His left hand crept up to touch the symbol on his right wrist. He gazed at the symbol a moment, then put his hand down again. "I shall be in touch, Shadow. I must depart now."
I jumped to my feet. "So soon? You can't do anything about Mekion?"
He looked at me, his eyes flickering like dying embers. "No Shadow, not now. I must complete my own journey first. I still believe that you can defeat Mekion yourself."
He turned away, and I watched him, aghast. "Mecha ... I can't even communicate with him!"
He gave me a look over his shoulder. "He is your mind, Shadow. Conquer it."
To my utter astonishment, Mecha disappeared in a flash of chaos energy. He had learned to chaos control? I suddenly had a million questions for him, but he was gone to who knows where.
I turned to Nox. "How did he feel?"
He sat on the grass like a little black stone, gazing at the city in the distance. He looked up as I spoke. "Mecha? Something's wrong with him. He was crying inside the whole time. Then Mekion hurt him, and he panicked."
This bothered me. Something had to have happened to Aleda for Mecha to be so upset. And then Mekion had done ... something. I gave him a mental poke, but felt nothing but heat. He wasn't speaking to me. How could I defeat a hostile corner of my own mind? I feared him and his power.
The half-moon pendant around my neck suddenly became hot. I flinched and stooped forward, so it swung away from my chest. At the same time I sensed that the morning sunlight had altered.
Nox jumped to his feet, pointing. "Shadow! Look at that!"
I looked up and felt all of my fur stand on end.
A spiral of black cloud had appeared over the city's center, stretching like a tube up into the atmosphere. Its center opened just above the tops of the tallest buildings, and black specks dropped out of it.
As this happened, I saw the air around a skyscraper shimmer and reflect motes of white light--then a beam of retina-searing light blasted the building, vaporizing everything but the steel support structure. When the beam vanished, the building's skeleton teetered, then folded in on itself and collapsed.
I could not grasp the magnitude or the speed of the destruction that I had just witnessed. An orbital strike laser with accuracy within millimeters ... and hundreds of innocent lives ended instantly.
Without any idea of what I intended to do, I seized Nox and my Chaos Emerald, and teleported into the bedlam.
