(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.)

Security District, Robotropolis, 2 Floreal 3225

"Stay right where you are, Sally. I'll be there before you know it!"

"Do you hear that?" Snively asked.

"Hear what?" Hawkins asked.

Instantly the steady pant of Amanda's breathing was submerged in a growing hiss of white noise. The view from the camera by her eye became wintry with snow. Snively frowned, muted his laptop, and turned the armchair around to face the Dalmatian. "The simple joy of a well-designed machine performing its function."

The dog's eyes vibrated with concentration beneath the black lid and the white, but he worked a smile into his lips. "I can't hear a thing."

"It must give you such a headache to misuse your transmitter that way." Snively stood, rolling his neck, and walked to the side of the repair-refitting table where the dog was securely clamped by mountings built into the armor of his ankles, shoulder, spine. There was no need to bag his hands to keep him from mischief; the small chemical reserves in his armpits had been emptied. But the machinery Snively had implanted in his brain could not be easily deactivated. "Do you ever wonder what it would be like if you cooperated, Hawkins? What a gift it would be, to speak to your brothers and sisters at any distance?"

Hawkins sniffed disdainfully, opening his black eye. "Didn't ask for it."

"Aren't the greatest gifts the ones we don't ask for? Being born. Parents, a family, a country." Snively walked to the little OR tray. There were no scalpels, only a bucket containing a bottle of champagne, a pick still buried in the crushed ice around it. I'm talking about people, things people experience, Snively realized. I've given up on him. He'll never be a machine. "This should have been such a joyous occasion. A new brother and sister for you, as soon as Amanda brings them to safety—"

"Oh, shut up. Sweet Trix'ana," the dog slurred, "can't you go one godsdamned second without give me some kind of crazy babytalk? I remember—"

And so and so forth. Snively hissed, taking the icepick and nervously chip, chipping away beneath the bottle. After sifting through all the friendless scum penned in the various forest camps after the army went in to clean up the squatters, it was Hawkins Familaro that had risen to the very top: unnervingly good aim, calm under fire. The only thing lacking was the will, the shaping desire, the command. And the treatments would provide that.

Wouldn't they? Or could they? The disadvantage of using drifters and captured rebels for the project was that there was no opportunity to obtain a psychological history. Had Snively created Amanda, or merely found a loyal, conscientious skunk? Was the little spark of rebellion that had ruined Bunnie a careless, early mistake on his part? Or had it been there all along?

Any hypothesis was evolving. But Snively wasn't stupid. He hadn't screwed up this badly with the dog. This wasn't his fault.

He felt his jaw tighten, slowly. This wasn't his fault.

Snively walked to the dog's bedside. Millions of sovereigns in him, those precious, precious sovereigns. "Do you know what's made you so unhappy, Hawkins?" He felt beneath the table.

The dog gave a weak little laugh, muscles tugging against the anchors in his armor. "You?"

His fingers found it: the little hole in the table. Lining up perfectly with the other little hole in the skull armor, thanks to the precise placement of the anchors.

Just like on a computer case. Every machine needs a manual reset button.

Snively watched the dog's eyes as he slammed the icepick through the skull and into the medulla. "Because," cranking his wrist, those eyes wide with the sudden pain, growing confusion, "you're the dregs, Hawkins. Because you're a disobedient, unmotivated, worthless son of a bitch. You don't deserve what I can give you."

With the alterations to the dog's excretory systems there was no sudden reek of release, just the slow clouding of his eyes. Unfortunately, Snively could not enjoy the full show. More important matters were afoot. Technically, Lieutenant Spitz had operational command, it was dear old Lila's job to capture the rebels, and her plan seemed as proper and solid as her actions usually were. But of course it was doomed to failure, wasn't it? It was inevitable that Amanda would be required to save the day. The project would be redeemed in the eyes of his uncle. He would have the money that he needed so very, very badly to continue. And Amanda would reacquire the half-finished squirrel-bot that had left such a painful hole in her psyche. As inevitable as the transition from winter to spring.

While Hawkins' heart continued to beat, Snively reopened his laptop.


"We keep moving forward. The longer we stay, the sooner we die."

Antoine panted, running behind the gurney. The worthless fake security pass felt strange and heavy, swinging back and forth below his neck on its lampcord line. His hands felt empty without a long-range rifle in them. His body was naked without a sniper's den. But he couldn't think about that, couldn't let it take him.

They were running through wide beige corridors now, rows of fluorescent lights swiping by like dashes on a highway. Carefully lettered signs directed them towards various locations, including EXIT. Thirty seconds from the outdoors, assuming they met no resistance.

He couldn't think about what could happen. Her Highness needed him. He was her only aid.

"Don't let her touch you," Her Highness panted, leaning forward to pull the weight of Sonic, his personal prison rocking on wheeled bed. She pulled them around a corner and Antoine could see the blue light of the midday sun through a distant set of glass doors. "If she touches you, you're lost—"

She leapt to the center of the hall less than two meters before them, low on her crooked legs and sharp, spread fingers. The smile of a spider, white in gleaming black. A horrible kindness in her eyes.

"PUSH!" Sally screamed, leaping for the wall. Antoine closed his eyes and rushed the gurney forward, hearing close by a crunch of glass, feeling the cold handles of the gurney jerk as its front wheels collided with the dodging robot's leg, spinning her to her rump. The skunk was too heavy for her size, as though she were a creature not of flesh but of iron—

"KEEP GOING!" Sally roared. She ripped the fire extinguisher from its cherry box (some disconnected part of her mind laughing—Case of Emergency!), and spun and froze. Amanda gracefully flipped to her toes, curling her fingers sharp but soft, eyes so eager—

They were her least mechanical part and Sally sprayed ice at them. Amanda would throw her forearm before her face, and she did, so she couldn't see Sally swing the freezing tank into the side of her head with a solid thunk. Dropping the tank, Sally sprinted past the skunk and—tripped, stumbled over a grasping hand, but she was still up and going, eyes on Antoine looking back at her godsdammit, run, pumping her arms—

Pain, sharp and hot, in her shoulder. As the hall spun Sally realized it was from the yank on her wrist, still held tight, and then she was looking into Amanda's eyes. No. She seized the skunk's thick head by her temples and the skunk touched a finger to her throat. "Hush." The gentlest little prick, soft as a breeze, and Sally felt her grip on Amanda go limp. "Forget his lies."

The robot disappeared as though erased by a mortar shell. If Antoine were thinking he would have stopped pushing the gurney when it struck her, because she was heavy, and she would of course steal his momentum and stop his forward motion. But he wasn't thinking, and the gurney's rear legs crumpled as the bot skidded along the tile beneath. The coyote kept pushing and the wreck upended on the creature, Sonic's prison landing squarely upright on the creatures thick skull before tumbling off. "You will unhand her!" Antoine barked. If he were thinking he would have desperately sought to drag Her Highness to safety, because of course there was no way that one such as himself could defeat the monster. But he wasn't thinking. The fire extinguisher was by his feet; he grabbed the cylinder and lifted it up over his head. With the instinct of the deeply practiced, Amanda whipped her pistol from her hipholster and snapshot Antoine through the center of his left kneecap.

At first there was no pain; there was just a sudden absence of enough to hold him upright. He collapsed with a shivering crackcrunch, slamming the CO2 tank's backswing into the ground. He gave a feral growl through his teeth as he clawed himself about on top of it, looked down at his leg and saw it bent in a lateral plane orthogonal to that in which a knee was supposed to move.

He thought about that a moment. Then he thought about it a moment more, staring, while the monster scraped herself out from under the gurney, breathing like a furnace. ". . . duh, dededuhdeduh dieux—"

Another. Another to steal her bots from her. Amanda lifted her pistol, studied and put a round through the coyote's right arm above the elbow, inflicting massive damage on the triceps. Then the skunk lowered her pistol toward the homogenous mess of the coyote's right knee and shot at the thickest strand of solid matter in it. She waited, ears folded against the sound of his agony, until the flow of the blood had become clear and she could pick see clearly what remained. Then she shot the next-thickest strand.

She turned her mind to better things. Her Sally was on her haunches and toes, the collar of the stolen guard's uniform tight against her neck as she tried to press herself upright against the wall. The brown eyelids reluctantly kissed her cheeks, then shot open, and her eyes snapped into place on Amanda, squatting before her. "Nnnnnnh," her voice pinched.

Amanda scratched gently at the short fur of the squirrels chin, teasing her whiskers. "Time for a full dose, sleepyhead." She slid her arm around the squirrel's head. "Don't listen to them," she said, seeing the tears in her bot's cheekfur. "You don't need to worry about a thing."

She cradled Sally tight against her belly as the impact and sound hit her. There was a bullet pancaked in the armor of her upper right arm. If it hadn't struck her it would have taken Sally's head.

Pressing her sleepyhead roughly down into the tiles, she turned. Another gunshot, and another. With each another hole appeared in the person transport pod.

She ground her teeth. "Hedgehog." And she was under orders to capture him alive. She couldn't kill him.

But she'd been thinking about how to fight him.


They had a backup extraction plan, true. The plan was to take a pair of stolen, rusted-out vans up to the north entrance, pick Sally and everyone up and barrel on out of there. Not very sophisticated, but if all their careful planning fell through there really wasn't a better way to do it.

But when their binoc posts on the house's roof spotted a good five vehicles, three of them marked RPD cruisers, pulling into the Tolsalvey Industrial parking lot and clustering around the entrances and exits, there were plans and there were plans. From the get go things went wrong, starting with Tails darting through the closing rear doors, yanking Sonic's backpack and his own brush clear just as one of Ari Koren's men swung it home. "Chief! Fox in the back!"

The badger in the driver's seat froze, thick fingers pressed around the key in the ignition lock, and turned to Rotor, sitting shotgun. "I'm not going anywhere if—"

"You want to try telling the kid to do something?" Rotor barked. "Haul ass!"

Koren's badger waited a moment before his nervousness overcame his stubbornness and got them moving. The Standard Army troops were each used to their own commanders: Rotor was in the lead vehicle with troops on loan from the gruff, black-furred ram Ari Koren, head of all the Standard Army splinter branches, reluctantly following the rest of the rebels along on Sally's crusade; in the rear vehicle were Cat Catalano, Gunther Maersk, and a bunch of lightly-furred rodents under the command of Kevin Logan, a skunk who'd been sold on Sally, and lightly in her debt, ever since she, Sonic and Antoine had saved him from a government assault about a year and a half ago. Koren's men got to go in the front car because he outranked Logan and because they looked mean as hell. They glowered in the back, sitting on the hot steel lockers that hid their weapons. Rotor wished he were back there instead of riding in the death seat, but he felt good knowing they were behind him.

It was not far to the North end of the industrial park, just two minutes. But in the two minutes the cops had parked a pair of prowlers crossways across the asphalt entryway. The cops had gotten out and barricaded themselves behind. At least eight, sidearms and Jenks submachineguns aimed obliquely at the ground. One came forth as the badger pulled up, slowing. Now, Rotor thought. Punch it now.

The badger's skull bobbed as he cranked down the window. A rabbit doffed his crimson policeman's hat and leaned on the door. "You can't come in right now, Sir. Situation."

"Oh," said the badger.

Rotor waited. His hand played nervously along his knee, but he didn't want to reach down for his shotgun, not with the cop staring at him. So he waited for the badger to swerve right over the concrete embankment and around the copmobiles. That was the best way in now, right?

The badger turned his eyes to Rotor. He shrugged.

"You need to get these things out of here, now," the rabbit cop added, stepping a worrisomely safe distance from the window. His right hand still held his pistol at the ground. Tighter grip than before.

"Whatever you say, boss," the badger yawned. He pressed the clutch, reached down and wiggled the van into reverse. What? Rotor thought.

"What are you doing!" cried a shrill, angry voice. "We can't just leave them!"

The badger's fingers tightened on the wheel. "Kid, shut up."

"You have a kid in there?" The rabbit came close, pressed himself sideways against the driver's door, lifting a flashlight next to his temple to peer at the shadows in the rear. "What the hell are you delivering—"

He didn't have time to finish because a bullet bashed into the plastic at the tip of the light, though the glass bulb and mylar lens. The little bubble of compressed air in and about the bullet's hollow tip burst the cold, heavy handle around it like a thermos full of freezing water, shearing metal through the rabbit's palm and fingers. He had begun to look surprised when a second shot ripped his ear in half, erasing an inch of flesh at its middle with an invisible paff, sending the top portion flopping through the air in an awful dance.

Grinding gears as the badger worked the stick back into first, then spun the wheel and lurched onto the curb, canting the horizon, throwing the blankets off Rotor's gun in the passenger footwell—Biggs Autoloader with a big twelve-shot extension drum-mag for the occasion—and almost tossing it into Rotor's lap. Rotor twisted his face, pressed his cheek against the seat; beneath the headrest he could just see a pair of mustelids piled in a tangle of limbs with two red fox tails, writhing. For a moment he thought they were attacking the boy, but then the fiberglass body of the van was perforated with a neat line of holes where the soldiers had been sitting moments before, each appearing instantaneously with a harsh snap.

The walrus flinched, did not get shot, turned his eyes forward to see the wide glass façade of Gaumont Labs lurch downward as the van rattled up a bank of cement steps. "What was that shit back there?" Rotor asked.

"Shut up," the badger growled. A skunk in a red RPD uniform flew to one side in front of the vehicle as a gunbutt struck and spidered the windshield. The badger did something quick with his foot and the world spun, tilted, the steps pulling sideways against the rear tires as they spun out of control, the van about to roll—


Sonic drove his fists into the lid again, felt it sag, heard the sound of tiny cracks running between the bulletholes like in thin ice. The plastic bit deeper into the skin of his knuckles and the pain kept him awake despite the foggy sleep-gas he could see through the little shafts of light. Again, again, the rhythm building, the regular pull in his arms, bite in his fists, the deep huffs of his breath filling the little world. Crackkkk—push, push, the egg breaking—

Enough room for his knees and he squeezed them to his chest and kicked. The lid tore away and before it landed Sonic flipped forward, his head pressed low to show the world a ball of spikes, leaving behind a big plastic tray thick full of black guns. He landed on his toes, arms crossed across his chest; he whipped his pistols wide, then leveled them forward.

No one to grab him; his eyes darted. Black and white tile floor, signs, the main lab. No one, no, Antoine down, hurt. Sally, dazed, arms limp—

His quills pulled taut in his flesh and his head cleared. The only thing holding Sally up was a shiny black arm around her belly, a hand with its fingers tracing her chinwhiskers. Just enough of her brown eyes were showing to let her see him. Her lips pressed. "Sss. Suh. Suh. Soh—"

"Shh." The botbitch peeked her head out around the squirrel's, nosed lightly at her cheek. "Sally is mine," she said, turning her eyes to Sonic. She stepped aside to the wall, dragging Sally's boots along the tile as she went, giving him a clear path to the daylight-shining glass at the end of the hall. "But you may go."

He fired. The bullet glanced obliquely off the bot's smooth skullarmor. Sonic kept his guns ready, but the head did not peek around Sally again. There was only her chuckle, low under the echo of the shot. "You may even have the coyote," she said. Sally's lips were moving, soundlessly. Like a puppet talking, a puppet show. "But hurry, please. The police are already here. And my Sally is so eager to rest—"

Good boy, Amanda thought. She watched from the security camera on the wall behind the hedgehog as he dropped his pistols and dashed for her, hearing in her own ears the squeak of his sneakers growing louder as his quills retreated from the lens. She dropped her poor sleepyhead to the side as the hedgehog drew within one meter. An old memory

(Ropes. Lights. Scent of femalesweat, skunk and badger. Sergeant Amanda Polgato. Thick red gloves about her hands. Private Lendri is fast but she has no reach. Her jab looms; I dodge—)

not hers, from deep in her organic brain spread her feet, lowering her center of gravity, pulled her arms close in front of her body, fists below her eyes, elbows tight above her abdominal armor.

And now another memory returned to the present, a newer memory, her own, from a horrible dawn alleyway in a faraway city, the scent of blood and dust and oil: the hedgehog is so very fast, faster than her. He should not have been faster than her, but somehow he was. Many angles to his fists, his blows rained heavy and hard against her shell, the stress shivering into down her armor mounts into her endoskeleton. She was already against the wall and did not retreat, only compressed, shrinking under his blows, smaller and smaller.

Amanda felt the opening she sought and locked her fingers, stabbing her left knuckles hard into the bluefurred chest. Shock mixed with the pain in the green eyes and she locked her right fist and stood, the power in her legs driving the uppercut into his chin. He was already trying to backflip away from her and the punch ripped his toes from the floor, just a tantalizing moment in which she felt something hard begin to give beneath his soft flesh.

The hedgehog landed a little more than a meter away. Not close to beaten. But there was an unnatural set to his jaw, the start of a long bruise deepening in the thinning fur of his lower chest.

She smiled at him. He should not have been as strong as her. And he was not, not nearly.

Sonic came again, fists and knees. He worked hard at her middle, eyes darting, looking for counterpunches and hooks, leaving her forearms wet with his meat, trying to force her fists away from her soft, weak snout.

Amanda chose a precise counterpunch. Her right knuckles met Sonic's left and the unarmored ones cracked, the fingers popping loose and shearing to peek white and shining through the furless flesh and the holes in the torn glove. She dodged his other hand, sinking low onto her right foot and delivering a sliding kick with her left. She caught the hedgehog just below the knee and only her fear of following through into her Sally kept her from ripping the knee apart. He leapt backwards off his left foot and landed with a high, anguished cry, stumbling to the right before finding his balance and raising his guard. His shoulders rose and fell as his lungs fought for air.

"I am generous," Amanda said. "You may still go. You may still have your coyote." Her Sally was trying to crawl away from her, so she took a step forward, pinning the squirrelbot between her legs. As she did so, the hedgehog took a step back.

She smiled. "Do you want to be mine too?" she asked. "Or do you want to go?"

There was a hollow crunch from down the hall and no time to find a good security camera to watch from: she turned her eyes from the hog. The front doors had been shattered by the rear of a gray cargo van. The thing was abused, sagging to one corner where one of the smoking tires had suffered a blowout. Identify yourself, she ordered. The van did not answer; it was not ISO or RPD. The rear doors were kicked open; she drew her pistol from her hip and fired a series of long-range shots into darkness.

Sally tasted blood as she tried to press herself to her hands and knees. Her vision disappeared, eyes too tired, and she let it go, focusing on the unyielding plates biting into her sides like the teeth of a wild repentrap. Come, Sonic. Sonic was always so angry that no one would play the trick on Antoine . . . .

Sonic threw himself quills first at the Skunkbot's head. She dodged away—but rather stumbled over Sally as Sonic hit her. Her head struck the wall hard just above her neck, and she rebounded to land belly-down on the floor. Sonic rolled at impact, instinctively cradling his left hand and reaching his right for his pistol until he remembered that he wasn't wearing his holsters and he'd dropped his guns somewhere.

Amanda forced herself onto elbows and knees, biting down on something unyeliding that scraped enamel from aching teeth: a pair of blue quills, each stabbed through the flesh on the right of her snout. The rebel troops had crowded around the van at the entrance and were using it for cover in a firefight with RPD outside: weasels firing Poiccard 337s, a walrus stupidly trying to use a Biggs combat shotgun beyond its effective range. She quickly gave their position a GPS tag and sang her bots awake. Kill them.

A chorus of recognition codes. Yes Commander.

But there was one element of the door fight that had to be dealt with immediately: a small fox running toward Amanda with long, light strides, the recoil from his pistol spraying bullet after bullet randomly about the room. One impacted in the tile just short of her Sally's skull, spraying razorshards into her forehead, making her moan in pain. Amanda leveled her gun for a clear shot at the idiot and the coyote grabbed her arm, pulling himself onto it with a demon's fury. Why wasn't he sleeping? They were all over her, like bugs

Enough. The butt of her gun snapped hard against the mad coyote's snout, a canine tooth popping into the air with looping a trail of red. The fox stopped short of her, gun empty, now a very fearful idiot. She threw herself forward and drove her pistolbarrel hard into his neck, knocking his light body to the ground. She landed on top of him, lifted her arm for the backswing, and bullets chattered into her side like a steady pelt of hail.

Sonic was no longer in a mood for precision gunmanship; he had quickly chosen from among the guns spilling from the coffin a ridiculous Jenks Marauder of Antoine's and pulled the longbarrelled steel monster it into his lap. It was at a little less than a meter in length the sort of gun Ant felt would keep him safe in close quarters: two alternating barrels, extended banana clips that loaded in the top to fight the kick. Something in Sonic's left hand was wrong, so he'd taken the gun in a big hug, propping the barrel on his forearm, worked the action-pull once with his teeth to load the chamber, and was now in his third second of pounding the botbitch off of Tails with a series of sixty .357 FMJ rounds. She rolled to the wall and turtled, pulling her limbs and head into a ball. Take it, bitch. He cut a steady haze of light black dust from her back, chipping closer, closer to her flesh.

Clickclickclickclick. Sonic ripped one of the hot empties from the gun and slammed a spare home in the mount, and as he lowered his head to bite the action lever he saw the botbitch contorted and glowering from a dark cave of her own armor, a pistol leveled at his face. He stopped, tasting the gritty machine oil on his tongue. He was dead. The botbitch had the drop on him, and she did not miss. She would blow his head apart before he could chamber a round.

Her black beetlefinger shivered on her trigger. "Commander is wrong," she said, voice dry. "You should die."

She disappeared into herself again, hiding from a lighter but steady rain of bullets. The kick had Tails almost on his back. He fired carefully between his legs at the bot, lips mouthing a steady count as he tried to make the clip last: four, five—

Sonic dragged a bullet into the chamber. "Tails, move Ant!" he shouted. "Sally!"

Sally grunted just as he began to unload on the bot. Short, uncontrolled bursts, pressing the bitch to the wall, giving Sally a handful of seconds to inch closer to him. "ROTOR!" Tails yelled; out of the corner of his eye Sonic saw Rote take the coyote from the struggling fox's side and lift him onto his fat shoulder; Cat waved him at the van. Sally had barely moved, still a meter from him, fingernails scratching on the cold floor. Fuck it; Sonic held the trigger until he heard a click. Then he tossed it and rolled and somehow he had Sally cradled in his arms, running to the van. Their guys weren't sure which way to shoot; some were trying to snipe over the hood at targets outside, others spraying suppressing fire around him and over him and hnggg—

In a moment he was still running but something was missing from his left shoulder and he was bent lower, Sally's weight almost pulling him down into a faceplant. He saw her eyes blink, brown and wet—

The bumper hit Sonic above the knees and he threw himself onto his side, flattening his quills. He slid until his skull slammed into something hard, squeezing Sally's soft between his chin and belly. The rest of the troops were climbing into the van; it was moving under him, the hallway was turning behind them as they pulled away. He had done it.

The air suddenly filled with the with the deep, rapid explosions of swatbot autocannon fire. He felt the van rock under him as the axles took hits. The badger at the wheel boiled in a pair of shots that pierced the door; Gunther roared in the passenger seat, reaching out one of his big bear paws to clap on the steering. Sonic saw the rocket trails of a pair of their mini- roombuster RPGs streak past the still-open doors of the van as it turned, felt the flash of heat and concussion as the second rescue van exploded, the hollow thoonks all along the wall as shreds of it bounced off them.

We're dead, Sonic thought, and then, why aren't we dead? Bots tended to think alike; all their rockets would have been fired at once.

Then he saw the bitch in the air. She was dented and pocked and hurtling at them like a meteor, legs drawn high, arms spread wide.

She must really love Sally, he thought, and he was filled with terror.

The bitch landed just in the door and the van sagged, screamed of friction as the rear chassis kicked sparks from the concrete below. "Gettout!" Sonic snarled, and slammed the heel of his right foot square onto the armor above her left knee. Behind him Tails screamed, high-pitched and furious. The bot threw her arms across her face as the fox managed to put a pistol round against her chest armor, the impacts and the balance tilting her with horrifying slowness out of the van and into space. As soon as her feet were gone Rotor and Cat reached out and slammed the doors closed.

Gunther had muscled on top of the badger and was pressing his dead foot against the accelerator, aiming them at the street. Sonic felt Sally breathing against his chest, warm and wet. She was alive. "Say something."

She shifted against his arms. He felt her fingerclaws press into his wrist. ". . . sssonic—"

Something landed on the roof, heavy, the thin fiberglass dented around it.

Rotor snarled, his tusks long enough to spike kebabs: "Oh son of a bitch!" he roared, lifting his shotgun to his shoulder and holding down the trigger. Shells tore the roof apart like paper. Her outline appeared, at first a shadow, then real and black against the wheeling sky, heavy and substantial and ready to fall on them—

She was gone. Rotor fired two more shots until the drum emptied, but there was nothing on the car. Gunther in the front seat finished muscling the badger into the passenger seat and sat down to work evading police pursuit on a pair of damaged axles.

And in the back, the Royal Army of Mobius finally let itself fall apart.


"We are in recovery," Snively said blankly.

Sobs. "Yes, Commander."

"Join your bots in the recovery vehicle and return to base for repairs." People had seen Amanda. From a distance. There were cover stories he could and would deploy. Next-gen armor. Convincing, from a distance.

"Yes, Commander."

Snively muted his microphone and sat back.

How could he make it to the end of the week?—

Right on cue, his phone. Rudi Sarkstein. Again. Before he could try to think whether it was better to let this one go with the other nineteen, he opened the connection. "I can't talk now, Rudi."

"Snively. Our friends are very worried. I have been trying and trying to call you."

"There's a very serious national security issue, Rudi." Snively's voice had the unsettling calm of someone burying unimaginable stress. "I'm afraid I can't talk right now."

"They are very impatient, Snively. They speak of taking action against you."

"I will call you back."

"Personal action. Against you. And against me." Rudi was crying the pathetic, helpless, wheezing tears of the elderly. "They think we worked together, to betray them—"

Snively broke the connection. He sighed distantly, as though this were happening to someone else. Poor Rudi, he thought.

Then he got up. He had to hurry to get the repair/refit table ready for Amanda, and that augmented dog corpse was going to be heavy as hell.


Kain Blackwood - 2008