(Copyright Act Admissions/Lanham Act Disclaimers. This piece infringes copyrights owned by Sega and DiC. It is not a product of Sega, DiC, or Archie Comics. All available rights are reserved.)

Tolsalvey, Robotropolis, 2 Floreal 3225

Molly Lotor was hanging from a silver grab-rail on the train, eyes closed. Her mind was two miles behind in her apartment, sleeping. She swung against someone's furred backside, then someone against hers. Mobians packed into the traincar as though on meathooks.

The raccoon's black-rimmed ears rose at the minute, fuzzy beats of the Persona non Grata theme, and she blinked uneagerly, feeling for her cellphone in her hip pocket and wondering how she managed to wedge it in there in the first place. The train was rumbling past the deep foundations of the new Tolsalvey Swatbot plant. The workers looked haunted in hardhats that were toys compared to the flak helmets of the Army troops, lounging simultaneously nervous and bored in their street-level guardposts on the perimeter, scanning the streets for the first smoke of a communist or an Acorn-crazy or some other jobless sucker about to try to send a gas-oil cocktail over the ribbed brown safety wall. She dug her phone from her pocket and glanced at the message.

FROM: POSNIAK, T.B.

RE: GP

No body text. GP: the Ghettoplex, and her heart arteries clenched hard around their cholesterol deposits. Her undergrads were going sit in front of an empty whiteboard and wonder where TA Lotor was. She wasn't sure precisely why yet. But she could guess.

She got off at Militia and caught a northbound train from the other platform. The Ghettoplex was a patched up prewar grindhouse on the edge of Port Orange, a few blocks north of her apartment. Fourth-run films on two screens, announced with whatever letters were left for the marquee. ISO had given its nickname a double-ironic twist four months ago when it quarantined the worst of Port Orange with guards and razorwire: the theater was outside the wire, but its customers locked within.

Molly was astounded to find it open at ten on a Moonday morning, but she eventually figured out that the surly adolescent vole holding the bulletproof box office like a foxhole was the only guy minding the store. Next up was Sly Cooper, which at least had hunk Jack Foley in the lead. And Karen Sisco was supposed to be . . . well, surprisingly not bad as Carmelita Fox.

The Ghettoplex had pre-show trivia, but it used slides rather than digital projection. Clikclatch. BEFORE they were STARS: Before he was a star, BUBSY BOBCAT was . . . .

The raccoon raised her right hand and twined her index and middle fingers. ". . . . at the end of his rope, turning five tricks a day in a public bathroom?"

Clicklatch. A waiter!

Her tongue protruded at the screen, curling downwards.

"Someday you'll be right."

T. Baxter Posniak's voice was always disembodied, from some dark place behind her. It was surprisingly easy to forget the slight human from which the mild tenor emerged.

"Oh, I'm right today," Molly replied, levering her shoes off her ankles with her toes. "And it's happening today, isn't it? Somehow you and Kolensky know they're going to attack today."

The human kept silent long enough to let her know he was considering whether to answer at all. Then, "Yes." Baxter always told Molly the truth. This was probably some sort of professional trick: Establish Trust in capital letters, meet her alone, don't tell lies. He even said he wasn't working for the Mobian government directly—he was on loan from democratic Lachels, one of the postwar overlander splinter-states to the north (they very one she'd been sent to Ironlock for trying to escape to, in fact), under some treaty. She didn't care. If it was supposed to make her feel better, it did. She needed it, working for Captain Snively Kolensky. The shrimpy bald bastard was always yelling at her, at everyone. You don't need to know anything, Molly. Just do what you're told. Like she was some kind of robot.

The good cop/bad cop, Molly guessed, tossing oversalted popcorn into her jaws.

Or maybe she really needed both of them, the nice human and the killer human. The side she was working for wasn't the only one with killers. "Why didn't you send in the extraction team, last week?" she asked. For a year she had fed Kolensky's information only to old Myron—but not old Myron, with his bitter drinking and unearned sense of superiority over everyone he saw. He was uncanny with his wakeful eyes, always dressed like some sodkicker in flannel shirts and meshback caps, calling himself 'Cat.' A month ago she first met the chainsmoking coyote with the aristocratic accent, trying to hide his identity between long-sleeved red button shirts, white gloves and a pair of wide sunglasses. She was beginning to wonder how big a risk to Robotnik any of these people could be. Then last week, munching chicken strips in the latest bugged restaurant, sitting on a manila folder of fake tech specs, Molly heard the electronic chime from the opening door, looked up and saw the serial killer. "I thought they knew. I thought the hedgehog was going to cut my heart out."

Baxter sighed, faintly echoing her tension. "There was a lot of screaming in the ops room. Kolensky said the risk for you was worse if the hog suddenly found himself being shot at. I wish I hadn't told you anything about him. We've only linked two bodies to him, anyway, and it didn't do you any good beyond scaring you to death."

" . . . You're still worried about him, aren't you? That's why I can't go to work. You're worried that he's going to get away from your ambush and come looking for me."

That pause again, calculating whether Molly should have the information. ". . . There's Kolensky, too." She smiled; the human sounded almost as miserable as her whenever he apologized for the Mobian government's treatment. "I want you to go somewhere for most of the day. Not here, not anywhere I'll know about. Just to sit tight until the situation stabilizes and you're safe."

"How long will that be? Should I get a hotel room?"

"No, that's no good. Snively's got a watch out on your cashcard. Even then, you'd still have to give your name. If you know some kind of below-board hotel that would work. I'll call you tonight, when I get off the plane."

"You're leaving?" Molly turned her snout over her chairback and Baxter squeezed his mouth in his hands, squishing his face open like a tomato. Stop it! Stop telling her things! The raccoon's eyes glowed soft gold in the dusty light of the projector. ". . . . You're going back to—back home?"

Baxter knew what he had to do now, because he'd seen Kolensky do it often enough. Molly, shut up. You know I have your best interests at heart. Now do what you're told and wait for my call.

"I'm going to Terscala," he heard himself tell the gold eyes. "There might be a trip north over the border, but I doubt it."

By this point Baxter felt a flushed, nauseous humiliation at very thought of Molly Lotor. He didn't care that he was trained as one of Lachels Foreign Affairs Department's analysts, rather than one of the spymongers in its Operations Division, or if his behavior was so classified it would never see the light of a windowless room: his failure as the manager of a double-agent was objectively humiliating. First thing after Baxter retrieved Renee and Molly from Ironlock, Kolensky had taken Molly to a downtown hospital for a debrief and a mononucleosis cover story, Lila Spitz and Renee had wired the raccoon's apartment for visual and sound, and Baxter had dived into the stacks at National University's humanities library, researching the psychology of spies and double agents. Regulate their access to information, dominate their perceptions, make yourself their only hope for security—security! Currently dueling with "power" for the right to be considered the most basic concept in the international relations theory Baxter had mined for seven solid years at Independence University! Simple! Just make the prisoner—

Well of course there wasn't a big spycraft wing of the stacks; the books were on prison administration, snitches and canaries, but it wasn't his fault, damn it, that the first he'd seen of her she was in Robotnik's national security prison getting shocked in the ass with a bag on her head! It wasn't his job to keep these hopeless fucking furballs from herding each other into cages like screaming fucking animals! His role in this operation was just to manipulate Lotor's interests so that she did what Mobius—and Lachels—wanted. That was his expertise, on the level of governments and corporations, and failing again and again with Lotor cut at everything he liked about himself. He wished he could get out of this dump with the sugar-soaked floor clinging to his soles like something alive, his nose filled with rancid scent of fake butter mixed with the fainter, too-thick smell of the female's fur.

Why didn't he leave? He should leave right now.

Clicklatch. Rearrange the letters. High-flying pilot fights evil for money: FAXROST.

Baxter had no idea; he didn't watch movies. Molly was slumped low in the seat before him, ears laid sadly back along her scalp, the white-on-black stripes on their rims plainly visible in the netherworld light of the projector.

"I will call you this afternoon, okay?" Baxter said slowly. "I will call you as soon as I am done meeting with the accounta—the people." Gods fucking above. "This evening."

"Thanks."

"It's no problem."

The raccoon remained motionless. "Before you go," Molly said, "is she for real?"

The sideways effort needed to reach the new topic jerked Baxter out of his funk with a dour little laugh. Because he was Molly's handler, Kolensky let Baxter see the basic outline of the fraud behind Operation Terminator, and the fake robot monster at the middle of it. It was a fitting subject for their surroundings. Amanda: half-skunk, half-machine, all terror. "You know more about the technical background for the con than I do. But the key thing to an economist is that Robotnik doesn't need a cyborg supersoldier. He's got plenty of normal soldiers; they come with a much lower R&D cost."

"Not the cyborg. The squirrel. I meant—" Baxter heard Molly swallow with effort. "What they say about her. In the Port. Is it true."

Baxter considered Molly's sentiments somewhat . . . childish. Indeed, like many young Lachels, he felt that representative democracy and market capitalism went down best with a generous splash of hatred for kings and queens. But Molly had gotten little from life, and she had nothing, almost nothing left. Her own parents had been loyalists, dead in the coup, fighting on the street for the royal family. When she calculated whether she could still give something to the squirrel . . . .

"No, Molly. No. Absolutely not." He rubbed his eyes. "There's lots of evidence to the contrary. The real heir to the throne would have surfaced immediately after the coup, when there was still a massive nationwide revolt ready to rally around her. And you know better than I do this isn't the first Sarah Acorn or Elizabeth Acorn to surface—hell, Molly, I'm pretty sure you guys had a Maximilian Acorn robbing banks a while ago. Fool me twice shame on me. And that tells you everything you need to know about her, Molly; she's not only not royalty, she's a con artist. She's one of these tinhorn forest-tyrants that they tried to clear out with Operation Brushfire, just lucky enough to have the right ethnic mix. Giving her control of the country would be the worst thing that could possibly happen to Mobius. See?"

Molly didn't move. Didn't speak.

Clicklatch. Join the Mechanized Army!

"Molly, it doesn't matter who the squirrel is. The Port and enough of the opposition has made up its mind. Either Robotnik takes her down now or there's a civil war. More suffering, more death, more everything, worse than the last ten years."

"Oh," Molly said quietly.

Baxter felt filthy. Fucking furball bitch.

"I'll wait for your call," she said.


A plastic bag landed on the desk before him. Inside it was a stapled, thick brown paper bag, tightly folded. Inside that was a heavy black plastic container with a translucent lid. Inside that was a thick-cut terrapod steak and potatoes au gratin. "Why Josh," Michelle asked, a bit more country than usual, Jawsh. "You graduating from chicken?"

"Chicken will always be my first love," the bear smiled.

The possum stepped out of the hall and leaned against the doorframe. "Oh, really? How was home?" she asked, and her mouth twisted into a smirk. "What's her name again?"

Things had started looking up for the Joshua Dursine ever since Ambassador Amberson had given a few words to internal HR at the Lachels Embassy. For one thing, Michelle was in his office—His! Office! In the bad old days whatever Mobian aristocrat had leased the embassy grounds had probably considered it a closet, but it was a testimony to their opulence that a brown bear still had enough room to worm around the end of a desk and plop behind a keyboard. And his lunch allowance had changed from Corner Bakery to Terscala Steakhouse over on Gallows Court. And his unpaid vacation time . . . .

But if it was just his personal welfare at stake, he would still have broken his term of service months ago, resume or no. Even over a long-distance phone call he could tell Kima was nervous, waiting alone for him back in Winstone, Lachels. Her advisor at Independence was considering a move to the growing theoretical physics department at Autechre College, and she felt like the evaluation committee had a pistol at her head. When he flew back over the border for a week, her arms were hungry for him. She needed warmth and weight. When the seven days were up she followed him to the airport, even with as little time as she had, stood at the gate lounge with her nose fogging the cool windowglass.

No, Josh had to be here so he could keep one of his best friends from college, Baxter Posniak, from selling the entire continent down the river to Robotnik and his totalitarian cronies. He was sitting on top of a ring of double agents that ran well into the Foreign Affairs Department itself.

The phone beeped. Baxter. Last time Josh had met Second Assistant Director of Intelligence for the Mobian March Frank Pulaski in the Acorn Park he'd asked Frank to see if he could find out why Baxter kept asking about international money transfers. Pulaski had shrugged and said he'd look into it; in the mean time, keep waiting for instructions and keep Baxter in his good graces. Provide state secrets, so long as they're only Classified and not capital-S Secret. String him along until Lachels counterintelligence was ready to break this whole ring, right to the top. Josh put his hand on the receiver and lifted a finger to the possum. "Michelle—"

"Go right ahead, boss," bahwss, she sighed jokingly, kind of. "But y'all c'mon visit us dawn awn the cube farm when ya get a minnit, awright?"

Josh nodded, grinding his teeth, forcing his face into a smile. Locked into place, the voice will follow. He lifted the handset between three thick fingers and pressed it to his ear. "Hello?"

"No, I don't want a flexticket; I want a one-way to—Josh, are you there?"

"Yeah." What is your desire, O Master?

"Lady, hold on a minute. Josh, I'm going to have to make this quick and blunt. You knew a lady back in college named Deanna Kozinksi. Economics, looking into work with the big accounting houses; she was the one always wandering around Scheck Hall last semester of '18 with the highball glass—"

"Hard to forget. Mind the GAAP, right?"

"Momma told me bears had good memory; I had to look that up. She's balancing books in Kogen Baird's Terscala office. I'm going out there tomorrow and I was hoping to have a word with her."

Gods above, this was ridiculous. "Think you might be embezzling from yourself?"

"Think she might remember you better than me."

Josh heard the plastic of the handset groan under his fingers. He knew Pulaski would probably tell him to shut the hell up and swallow his pride, but he just had to say it: "You want me to call on behalf of the embassy."

A tinny, infuriating sigh. "Josh, I would never ask you to endorse me on behalf of the government of Lachels, okay? I wouldn't want you to. Okay?"

"Gotcha."

"Good. Just call her before five—"

The bear pivoted the receiver away from his snorting snout. Just make sure you call him from the office.

Pulaski wasn't here, so he had to make the decision on this by himself: would helping Baxter and Dr. Julian Robotnik hurt or help Lachels in the long run? An accounting firm in Terscala probably meant some sort of shenanigans with gas and oil, maybe rare metals. Ellingson Mineral or HCT Technologies. Josh doubted that Premier Stuntaz would be thrilled to learn a Mobian double agent was running wild in the books of companies with that much market cap . . . .

But if you asked Josh, there wasn't a lot to be said for companies with a bigger record of sentient rights violations than most small nations. "Sure, Bax. I think I can smooth things over."

"Thanks. Never call me Bax ever again. Wait—hold on, Josh—what do you mean my booking doesn't match my ID, it's—oh, gods, it's my middle name. Just put TB. TB, like the disease—"

Josh hung up.


The grayish human immigrant squinted against the white noon sky, grimacing uncertainly at the manifest on the clipboard. "Where the hell is Jacques?" the woman asked, not looking up.

Sally's knuckles cracked tight around the unpadded steering wheel; she felt her toes itching nervously over the accelerator. Then she said: "Who?"

The guard shook her head, yawning at the badge clipped to Sally's vest pocket, the ones that matched the ones the guards had worn, the ones they'd finally gotten last week through Cat's raccoon contact. The woman leaned close enough that Sally could see she was named SPITZ, LILA. Did Lila miss Jacques enough that she was going to do some detailed checking on FALSTAFF, SARAH and LAZSLO, ANTOINE? Riding shotgun beside her Antoine stared blankly at the dash, cigarette shivering in his lips, ashen tip jerking like the mercury of a skittish thermometer . . . .

"Alright." The human woman waved them into the loading dock. "Go on."

Sally glanced into the shivering side-mirror and saw the woman mouthing into a bulky gray walky-talky and she thought go, drive hard across that parking lot and go through that cyclone fence and don't let off the accelerator until you've driven a path five klicks into the forest—

Breathe. Deep breath, filled with cigarette smoke—deep breath. She was closer to the roboticizer than ever. Surveillance of the north wing of Gaumont Laboratories' Tolsalvey facility revealed little activity compared to the rest of the plant. Cat's ex—Molly, that was her name, said the place was labeled Facilities Services on all of the maps, despite the fact that there was already a Maintenance Department elsewhere. Other documents she'd snagged from the wing in some rather dangerous recon matched designs that Bunnie remembered—the tank, in particular, the healing tank in which subjects were infiltrated with nanomachines, strengthened, brains rewired. Sally needed to go in unless she was certain things would go wrong.

The person in the box had not been alive. The guard did guard things before admitting them to the loading dock. That did not constitute assurance that things were going wrong.

And even if something were going wrong, Sonic was waiting with half the Knothole arsenal inside the little styrocoffin in the back of the delivery van. Sally grinned. My hero.

Antoine and Sally wheeled Sonic onto the cement loading dock, the interlocking mechanism of the gurney leaping up to waist level as they ducked out of the sun into a small receiving room. Steel file cabinets. A steel desk with a smoking ashtray—"Kill it," she reminded Antoine—a small computer running a Gescom OS, little closed-circuit cameras of the van parked outside. She asked "ready?" as she pressed at the latch of the white swinging door with its many warnings (Danger Confined Space, No Smoking – Halon Fire System, No Pacemakers, Classified Material Clearance), but she didn't wait for an answer.

Sally took point, so she steered. Narrow drywall corridors that pressed close enough to make a starved whippet feel fat, following barely explicable plastic signs that made it feel like some test maze designed by alien scientists—luckily, one that Sally had memorized in advance with the plans they'd lifted from the Public Works department. Closed-circuit flat-television cameras watched them conspicuously from high corners, daring them to look back, start behaving doubtfully—

Thumps behind her as Antoine knocked on the coffin with his knuckles. "Twan!" she barked, trying not to yell. A hollow thump in reply, from inside the coffin. Antoine coughed. "Sorry, mon Princesse. I worried that he might have been without enough air—"

"Don't." Sonic is fine in there, we've been over and over and over this plan and it's going to work because he is an invincible goddamn demon but let's please not let him out in front of the cameras unless we're about to die, okay? Blue quills weren't exactly common; he was about as inconspicuous on a mission as Robotnik himself at this point.

Left. Four meters. Right. So quiet. Almost there—there, two meters away. White doors, solid steel, spotless. "NO ACCESS, READ NATIONAL REGULATION 43.103." Sally laid her hand on the latch, nothing in the air but her breathing and the minutest click of metal against metal as her fingers began to turn it.

Antoine gave a hacking, deep cough. Instinctively, Sally sniffed the air: smoke.

"Twan!" Sally hissed. He was covering his snout with his rumpled sleeve, bent over the styrocoffin, his cigarette still burning in his right hand. Sally's eyes shot to the ceiling. "Kill it!" Smoking in places with as many state of the art electronics as Gaumont Labs didn't hair-trigger sprinklers. It hair-triggered vents that flooded rooms with oxygen-eating halon gas, stuff that would kill you or at the very least flood the facility with solicitous EMTs and, behind them, cops—

She froze.

A sprinklerhead.

Definitely a water-based sprinklerhead. Stainless steel pipe, the sprocket-looking distributer to give a good spray. Ready to ruin millions of dollars of sophisticated equipment.

If this was in fact an advanced cybernetics lab, as opposed to a carefully-constructed simulation of one.

Next to the sprinklerhead one of those many, many CCTV cameras stared back at her, mute, unblinking.

Sally turned, about to push the coffin back down the hall, and stopped. They've been watching you since you came in. They know where you are and where you'll go to get back to the truck.

"Highness?" Antoine hissed.

She moved quickly, taking the datacard lock for the styrocoffin from her pocket and spearing it into the port. The light turned green, releasing Sonic—

No, it didn't. The tiny little red LED was still lit.

Sally pulled out the card and replaced it. Pulled it out, replaced it. Red.

She dug her fingers into the millimeter between lid and base and pulled, giving a little whine, but not at the pain.

What a great disguise, she thought. It really did look as though she and Antoine had, in fact, just delivered a fresh, strong robot-slave-to-be into Snively's waiting hands right on schedule.

"On me!" Sally barked. She dragged the gurney back into the hallway and made a different turn, away from the loading dock, deeper into the building. Somewhere a door clicked opened. She glanced behind her at the hollow, round sound of a pneumatic gas gun, saw the hissing canisters tumble into the hallway behind Antoine, unspooling their lullaby of white nerve agent into the fogging air. "Go! Go!" She grabbed the gurney with one hand and sprinted. They'd be all over. There wasn't even any actual science to get in their way. This entire wing of the facility was nothing but a baited deathtrap—

She froze. A moment of moral terror that quickly passed.

Right at the t-junction, right and left and they were almost in the main facility, the one that was an actual lab. Let's see if Robotnik's troops are prepared to handle a stampede of terrified scientists.

Left at the corner. Two doors saying EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY—ALARM WILL SOUND, DOORS OPEN IN TEN SECONDS. To guard them, two creatures with green ISO uniforms, furry arms and elephantine black gas masks trailing accordion hose to canisters on their belts lifted guns with muzzles the size of fists. "Frrz! Yrr undr arrrst!"

Sally dropped the gurney and leapt. One gun popped with a smoky FOOF and a sizzling canister bounced down the hallway as her right bootsole flattened the guard's mask, a high crack and a deeperwet crack. She leapt back to land squarely on her left foot and get knocked off it by a jab from the other guard's gas gun in the hard, stunned flesh between her breasts and neck. With a terrified yell Antoine drove the gurney into the guard's side, pinning him with a muffled squawk against the unyielding doors.

He stayed there, pinned, as Sally struggled to her feet. No, no—

The guard fired a gas canister directly into the ground. It hopped, flipped, then released, spinning hypnotically as its trail spiraled out around it.

Sally gave the guard a hard elbow to the neck. Then she dropped to her knees, into the growing white cloud, trying not to breathe. Her fingers found the spitting thing and sidearmed it down the hall. Then she stumbled to a run and slammed her shoulder into the locked door so hard she was for a moment convinced she'd broken it. To hell with it. She pushed down on the doorlatch, willing herself to stay awake, trying to focus on the earsplitting din that had started up. What was, seven, six—the gurney rocked, Sonic kicking, pounding in the coffin. Six. Seven. Eight—no, counting down—Sally realized she was breathing, coughed—

The doors gave and birthed them into crisper air. A wider, different hallway, up its length a rat and a lion in white coats stared briefly as they hurried to the exit, fire lights strobing white. "Come on," Sally gasped, getting to her feet. She grabbed her cell and hit the preset button that messaged "911" to Rotor. "Come on, we've got to—"

The alarms stopped dead with the click and hum of an audio feed being plugged in. "Sally?"

Her eyes shot wide at the voice. A camera watched the door to the ambush wing. It stared down, lens rotating as it pulled focus on the squirrel.

Amanda.

"There you are, Sally!" The voice was filled with relief, joy. "I've missed you. So much."

"Highness?" Antoine coughed. Sally was paralyzed. Rock hard, yet shivering, glistening eyes fixed on the camera lens. He'd never seen her so terrified.

"Just relax and stay still," Amanda said. "You'll finally be programmed, Sally. Very soon."


Kain Blackwood - 2008