(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.)
GreatForest, South of Narsurpan, 19 Thermidor 3228
"Well, Cat—"
His sullen eyes sparked to angry life. "What did you call me?"
"I—" Sally hesitated, realizing she'd just stepped in a big pile of repenshit. "I got the impression . . . that you had a nickname—"
"From the hedgehog, right? From that Sonic character?"
His public records said he was twenty-seven, about eleven years older than Sally, but he'd had a worn look about him as he stumbled out of the emergency staircase. His deep yellow fur was part washed-out and part speckled filthy with bits of forest; the dark gray traces seemed unusually wide on the edges of his fawn snout. The creases in the fur around his eyes showed exhaustion and bitter, ingrained hatred.
"I want to apologize for your trip here," Sally told him. ". . . . Myron."
"Do you now."
Man, she hoped that name was right. In the south suburbs Antoine had handed the lynx off to the wolf twins, Will and Mary. In four days, they had made the one-and-a-half day trip from the city to the royal hiding place, Knothole. Will had shown up in his fourthhand leather jacket, dragging the cat down five flights of hard steel stairs from the concealed entryway at the forest surface without even bothering to take the blindfold off.
"The location of my family's bunker is a closely guarded secret," Sally continued to explain. "And with what Robotnik has done to our country my people aren't always . . . competent, in . . . social niceties. Will and Mary were born and raised out here, in camps in the forest."
The lynx just kept staring. "Raised in a barn, huh. Was the hedgehog raised in a cave?"
They say you never got a second chance to make a first impression, but Sally always found herself trying. She had carefully planned the sight at which Myron was staring: a diminutive brown-furred squirrel, about five five and without the signature tall, bushy tail—shrew blood, most likely. Her underclothes were a tight-fitting brown top and shorts; above those her blue vest set off her deep red, neck-cropped hair. On her hands were the ornate, oversized white gloves of Mobius Minor, one of which clutched the perfectly polished chrome Orb of Clarendon. Around her neck and down her front to just above her knees hung a length of purple cloth with gold bordering, not quite purple, something very old: the Stole of Mobius Major. Above her pointed ears and high up on her forehead sat the united crown: a very thin gold circlet, three minute stones set together in the front: green, white, red.
In the moment when the lynx had first seen her he was gone, twenty years gone, his yellow eyes shining in the glow of some bright place of an early childhood for which Sally hadn't even been alive. The eyes rolled with equal astonishment to Antoine—he was a different man in the stiff red-and-blue Royal Guard jacket he wore in the forest, thick-furred golden military epaulettes on each shoulder.
The eyes went dark a moment later, but Sally knew the lynx's memories were still drowsily awake, somewhere behind them.
"So what do I call you? Your Majesty?" frowned Myron.
Sally hesitated before she took another step, black nose twitching at the faint odor of more repenshit. The Knothole conference rooms were built for her father and his ministers. For her they served a different purpose: their fine red carpeting, holoprojectors and table-set comp stations impressed forest dwellers or comforted city folk lost in the wilderness. But a cubicle worker like Myron was a new species, one that had been . . . well, kidnapped. He saw the like every day, at long unpleasant meetings with overbearing, entitled superiors . . . .
"Highness," Sally smiled, placing the Orb of Clarendon in an ashtray on the table in front of her. She sat, causally and imperceptibly nudging the crown to a more jaunty angle as she did so. "And don't bother with it; this get-up is for you. The head of state traditionally wears the Authorities in major diplomatic conferences, and your help is that important to me. Care to sit?"
"Why do you want me here?" he asked, motionless.
"I wish you were still at home," she replied honestly. "Taking you from Robotropolis tipped our hand."
"What do you want me to do?"
Antoine flopped a little manila folder open on the table and slid it in front of the cat. "In 3227 you were part of a Gescom Industries team that reworked security at Foulke-Zero Weapons Systems/Mobian Mechanized Army Joint Venture Robotropolis West Number Two."
"That's right."
"Danny Mackel says that you basically ran the programming team," Antoine continued.
Myron blinked, then gave the slightest smile. "Man, you know Danny," he chuckled. He sat down and spread the papers in front of him. "Yeah, that's right. We either called it Foulke-Zero Two or 'the mouthful.' So I guess you're going to try to—" He suddenly stopped and looked up at Sally. "Again?"
Sally nodded. "Again. It was us. To handle the computers, you'd have to know the security system, its strengths and its weaknesses."
"I'm familiar with it," he shrugged. "I don't know about weaknesses."
Sally had spent months by her parents' reading lamp, paring the plan down to the uncuttable core. "We need to get in and out of the building, entry and exit maybe ten minutes apart, without alerting anyone."
"Parachute in, tunnel out," Myron suggested. "Don't look at me like that. I'm giving you the truth, which is more than I ever thought I'd do. We weren't losers and the contractors weren't either. The fences, gates, and utilities access panels are on a timed interlock with central police dispatch and Internal Security Office. You know a death switch? It's like that. MCom laid a dedicated pipe under the city. When there's any interference in communications, when their ping jumps hard, anything, plant security and dispatch get alerts."
"Sounds like overkill," Sally suggested, a little worriedly.
"It is," Myron agreed. "Gescom monitored the installation for a month after it started. There were two major false alarms a week. 'Good,' say the War Ministry people."
Antoine coughed nervously. "You didn't leave any, uh, birthday surprises . . . ?"
"Thirteen year olds talk about birthday surprises," Myron scoffed. "They're called backdoors, and I didn't leave any. I'd be in jail. I can give you a rundown from memory on the system, but I won't guarantee anything." He slapped the folder closed. "I wish I had my stuff."
"Do the best you can," Sally said unexcitedly. "Can you give me the basics in three days?"
"Depending upon what you mean by basic I can do it in one."
"Give me what you can in three."
"Sure," Myron said with a tiny bemused smile, very tiny and very brief. "Did I just take an order from you?"
"Yes," Sally confirmed.
The yellow eyes narrowed suspiciously, but there was a kind of warm twinkle at the back of them. "How did you do that?"
The squirrel smiled, lowering her face demurely to make the light catch the gems on her forehead. She told him to talk to Rotor before he did anything and he was off. As soon as he was out the door she dropped her smile like an empty beer cup at a tackleball game. "How did this happen," she asked.
Antoine gave a polite cringe, dropping his nose and ever so slightly flattening the slope of his ears. "My only guess, my Princess, is that Myron himself was the security leak."
More like you wandered in front of one of those new surveillance cameras RPD is putting up, she thought, but said nothing. "You assured me he was our best bet."
"He is." Again with the cringe.
"You think he's trustworthy?" Sally asked. She snatched the ancient chrome sphere as she stood up, began to toss it nervously hand-to-hand. "Is he telling us everything he knows?"
"Do you intend to torture him if he is not?" Antoine spread his empty hands.
"Fair enough," Sally sighed, resting her hips against the table. "But we're going to take whatever he gives us and do it. Our window's only going to last so long."
"Hmm," Antoine mused. The Committee for Public Welfare's terminal descent was the first major Mobian political development in five years. It left a gaping hole at the top of a power pyramid that had in its base basically all the antigovernment sympathizers east of the Great River and a lot of them to the west. It was talking to Antoine—he was a natural politician—that Sally first realized the way the vacuum would be filled would be dictated in the depths of Robotnik's stolen palace as much as in some skirmish in the woods. Robotnik owned State Broadcasting and had Kimex News watching his every move. The Committee's collapse was good TV, stuff to paralyze the locals and bring a twinkle to the eyes of foreign banks ready to move into Coolette. When the news went stale The Great Robotnik would himself pick a new adversary to pummel in front of the cameras. And unless something happened, it wasn't going to be Sally Acorn.
"The cat will give us something. We are going to find a way to make this work," Sally insisted.
"Hmm." Antoine said again, deeply frowning in intense thought. His eyes didn't meet hers, but they knew they were being watched.
Sally sighed. "How's Sonic?"
Antoine's snout scrunched up, whiskers out. He didn't like Sonic. "He is restless. He—"
"He's beating the snot out of people left and right, it sounds like."
"My Princess, I wasn't there. And if I was, certainly you must know that I would not be able to lay a hand upon—"
"You," Sally turned and pointed sharply into his startled face. "You are Sonic's leash. You and anyone else I send out with him. I know it's hard, but he has to be controlled, and you are the ones who have to do it. All of you."
"Only you can do it." As soon as Antoine's mouth closed he grimaced, eyes pinched against—
"Don't say that." She reared up her father's daughter, his flag-blue cape and his medallions, rallying his people to stem the tide of human battalions pouring forth from the mountains. Beyond this line they shall not . . . . Antoine's regret softened her brick will into tired resentment. "Just, don't. When you were in Robotropolis were there any signs that he, that some female, that—"
"No."
"A male?" she mused, raising one eyebrow.
Antoine shook his head. Sally nodded. "Your Highness—" Antoine began.
"Thanks for the information, Antoine. Beyond that it's not your concern," she said.
Antoine rose from his chair to bow slightly, a smooth, natural motion. "Your Highness. Anything else?"
"No. Dismissed, Antoine."
He bowed again and left.
Gods damn the hedgehog.
Sally's thoughts were running in tight, dizzying circles as she stomped out into the buzzing blue fluorescent light of the hall and smacked into a small fox kit whose thoughts always ran that way. He stumbled backwards and shook, the undulation passing quickly from the cowlick of yellow head-hair down his spine to his tail and his birth defect—no one had ever decided which of his perfectly formed, bilaterally symmetrical but too plentiful fox tails were which. Tails (he had once told Sally that his real name was Miles) was another stray that predated Myron. He didn't talk about his parents and neither did Sonic, who had "found" the boy in some nonspecific way on the west side and brought him to Knothole about five years back. In summer he favored a pair of fur-blending bright yellow athletic shorts, a gift from his 'Uncle' Sonic, shoplifted from places unknown. "Hey Aunt Sally," the kit yelled as he started to tear off down the hall again.
"Whoa, whoa!" she grabbed a pinch of the fur on his bare back. "Where are you going, young man?"
"Mary says it's sunny out!" Tails smiled, pointing at the door stenciled SURFACE ACCESS—EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY. "I've had breakfast already. Rotor's stew was left from last night!"
He looked so happy Sally hated to even think of bringing him down, but . . . "Today is Warday." Sally reminded him. Warday was math day; and this month she'd given him the last of the geometry proofs she'd learned from her poor old tutor Rosie. "Have you done your problems?"
"Uh-huh," the child replied, nodding vigorously.
It was ten in the morning, but it wasn't improbable that the kit had just gotten up, solved Rosie's problems and wolfed down some food. Tails had trouble focusing, but when he wanted to (often) he sank his teeth deeply into hard sciences and didn't let go. Sally had dithered about showing him algebra two years ago until he finally invented it himself, using an empty box for a variable, to do some of her harder word problems. "Because that's what the equals means," was all the explanation he could give when Sally asked him, almost worried, how he'd written the symbols he had. She'd have to turn him over to Rotor before the year was out. Maybe he could have done this at half his age if it weren't for the coup. Maybe he was a genuine prodigy.
Or maybe he was lying and going out to fish in the creek. Because skipping out on schoolwork is cool.
Gods damn the hedgehog.
But Sally's stomach lining had worn too thin to push for the truth. "Good," she said, walking away. "I'm glad you're such a hard worker."
"Are you okay, Aunt Sally?" Tails asked.
"I'm fine. Just a little tired."
"When's Uncle Sonic coming back?" the kit asked.
". . . Not yet," Sally answered, stooping down to speak to him face to face—Tails said he was twelve years old, but that was doubtful. "He's still got things to do in Robotropolis, Tails. He'll be okay. Are you bored?"
"Lonely," he answered. And suddenly she saw as though for the first time how alone Tails was, how the walls and the megagrams of rock behind them dwarfed a boy of his size. "Do you miss Uncle Sonic?" he asked her. He was going to cry.
"Of course I do, Tails," she nodded earnestly, lifting her gloved hands from her knees. "We all do. Come here, honey."
There was no need to take the fox child; he ran up to her and wrapped his arms around her, clinging to her neck. A wet nose sniffled by her ear. "I miss Uncle Sonic, too," Tails croaked as she folded him in her arms. "I wish he would come back tonight, and then we'd have leftover stew for dinner."
So needy, so desperate, so pathetic.
Two days later Myron gave his report. The easiest way to disable the alarm system at West Number Two without setting off alarm bells at Mechanized Army Base Jarmit, every police station in town, and Internal Security Office's floors at the Naugus Building would be to first destroy MAB Jarmit, every police station in town, and the Naugus Building. After that a number of techniques would do the trick, ranging from cutting the power to obtaining intrusion software routinely distributed for free to eleven year olds. Once they were in, Myron could recommend devices to bash through internal locks.
In the evening Sally summoned her troops to audience in the mess. Almost twenty, if you included absent the absent Sonic and Featherlight. She would have more, many more. The way to win people to her was simple.
"Troops," she said. "Tonight I'll tell you how we're going to destroy a swatbot factory." The Postalitas children started at 'destroy,' hooraying and yaying, while their mother watched silently. Antoine clapped precisely. Deacon, who had picked it up from Featherlight, made the gesture of pulling an old fashioned air-horn. Maersk beat his crutches against the floor with resounding thuds. The new one whose name she couldn't remember, the cat who thought he was so smart, had a face that asked: are you stupid? She smiled and gestured for them to calm down. "It will take at least two more weeks of planning on top of what we've already done, and a little more time and luck to get started. But once—"
"Why isn't Sonic here?" Tails demanded in the quiet, sitting on the floor by Rotor's feet.
Because he's turning the sweetest, brightest little fox kit into an empty-headed good-for-nothing, because no one has the time or sense to keep him away from you.
"I'm getting to that," she said.
Edited VT2 - 2007