(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.)

Robotropolis, 30 Vendemaire 3239

It looked like Amanda was dreaming. Stiffly upright upon her throne, tensed lower lip slightly opened to permit shallow, rapid breaths. Her ears flicked, her wide-open eyes twitched, sometimes at the screens and almost continuous warning calls of her collared warriors at the control banks, sometimes at images and sounds known only to her through the wideband ports in the base of her skull.

She felt the city rebelling against her. The southern third of it she couldn't even see, the workers and their rebel allies having taken apart the camera network with brutal efficiency. It hung on the city like a deadened, infected limb, glaring red on her mind's map. She was desperately trying to reroute stealthbot overflights from the forest and the fledgling spaceport to—

The spaceport was under attack! She called up the empire-wide net, marked the new insurrection on the map. Warned her six noblemen on the human front to prepare for sabotage and flanking maneuvers, told Lupe in the forest to move north and encircle, Alain in the desert—only four of her nobles in the capital! Only a third of the city's forces under the command of present rulers!

A heavy, grunting cough in her audio channels suddenly blotted out the battle. "Amanda," Robotnik said. "Where's Sonic Hedgehog?"

"I'm busy!" she spat aloud, carving the city into quarters in her mind and by raw edict transferring ownership of the robots and slaves within. Let the others complain later. Renee, southeast, Paolo, southwest—

"He will be coming to destroy you. Or me."

"Bigger problems!" And more, suddenly realizing that Sally was with them. Somewhere in that red, angry, spreading cancer—

"This gesture of defiance is futile and unimportant. You will crush the mobians. I want Hedgehog."

"Noted!" Amanda snarled, digging her fingers into the steel of her throne with exasperation. "Stay within the Egg, teacher. I'll keep you safe."

"Hedgehog," he said again insistently. "He is your first priority. Damage him as you will, but keep him alive. Bring him to me." Robotnik broke the connection, shrunk out of her consciousness.

She sat panting with exertion, tail plastered to her back-armor, and if the thought came through years and layers of mental reconstruction from the skunk Amanda Polgato, it was still hers: That was, without question, the stupidest command her teacher had ever given her.

With a stab of anger, she corrected that: the stupidest advice.

Amanda shuffled Sonic Hedgehog about thirty action items down in her priority queue, flashed text commands to unleash her nobles, and opened an audio channel to as many speakers in the city as still belonged to her. "This riot," she cried out, "will stop."

"I have nothing but love for my robots and my mobians," the Empress's voice droned out over the sound of thefuel cells going up like a string of very big firecrackers behind the swat-maintenance shed. Bunnie leapt out of the way as the glass blasted out of the steel box's windows, coming to a very nice three point landing, with one of those points right in the back of a swatbot's head.

"Pardon me, sugar," she shouted, giving its solid-state brain an extra punch with her foot's spring-bolts for good measure. She didn't know how the attack was doing; they couldn't afford to give away their positions with radio contact early in the attack, and the robots had the edge when it came to jamming communications. All that Bunnie knew was that her team was doing well. The predictions about the workers had been more than accurate; every factory they'd made contact with in the first (check chronometer) forty minutes of the attack had thrown in with them the moment they'd taken the doors to the dormitories. Their numbers of infantry were way up, armed with small arms that they'd either carried as factory guards or taken from the dead or surrendered factory guards.

But Robotnik gave the factory guards gas-propellant weapons for a reason: they weren't that good against bots and were worthless against heavy armor. So far they'd been dodging APCs and weapons platforms by keeping off the main streets, but that couldn't last, especially since the Robian tactical channels so far were filled with a lot fewer Hedgehog Alerts and Drop Everything and Get the Hedgehog Orders than they had hoped for. That meant that Sonic was getting deep into the middle of the city, but not yet taking heat off of them. Bunnie didn't like that, but she could deal with it, because she was a killer robot, just like him.

But Sally was handling the east bank of the Great River on her own. If she ran into a robian, she was dead. Bunnie had to push north faster and pull a flanking maneuver, getting ahead of her. Even advancing with leaps, hops and bounds, she was still deep southwest, pushing out of what used to be Ascogne-Dascogne and into what used to be Port Orange—

"Incoming!"

Bunnie hopped again into the red and black night, only gaining four meters of air, but three more than enough to let a pair of swatbot-shoulder rockets scream by beneath her. Her squad and the hangers-on they'd gained at the last munitions factory were scrambling for cover behind stacks of I-beams, shipping crates, and . . .

And a big bear too far away from cover just hit the dirt in the middle of the factory yard, his ass sticking up in the air not ten meters from where the fresh batch of swats and tech-slaves were fanning out in front of a reinforced warehouse on the back-end of the factory lot. She landed at the same moment that a rocket burst him like a bubble, a brown tint of fur boiling away on the edge of the blast wave. She didn't even have time to wince.

"The rebels have lied to you," the Empress said. "This misbehavior will only hurt you."

Four bots. Two mobians.

"Bunnie!" someone roared, but she was not going to give these uglies another second to paint the factory yard red. The rest of her troop got with it in a second, a chatter of small arms lighting up three of the bots and sending one of the aiming-mobians sprawling on the asphalt. She grabbed the bot to the right by its gun hand, slammed her anchors into the ground and swung the bot as hard as she could. The targeting slave behind it had ducked and she missed killing him by centimeters, letting her transfer the full momentum of the bot to the face of the one behind it. Then she popped her anchors and jumped, staying out of the way of any return fire.

"Surrender your weapons, return to your dormitories, and obey your minders," Amanda ordered.

While Bunnie was in the air one of the forest-troops got a clean shot with a plasma rifle through the fourth bot's head, ablative armor running white-hot from the burn hole like metallic pus. Bunnie landed beside the third, swung her right leg in a high kick. It went through the sheet metal sliding door like a rock through tissue paper.

As the troops advanced behind her, the tech-infantry slaves put up their hands. But Bunnie wasn't looking at them. She was looking inside the warehouse at the stacks of crated surface-to-air missiles that the factory had been assembling to shoot down human VTOLs in the far west.

"The Empire is kind," Amanda said. "You will not be hurt more than necessary."

"Boys," Bunnie grinned, "I think it's time to give a little love back to Mandy."

The door to the factory floor rocked, something outside trying to open it. There was a wave of boots scuffing on the floor as the workers drew back.

"Don't be afraid of them," said a collie in the front, a stunstick in his right hand, a minder's blood on his fingers and a wild smile on his lips. "The heavy troops are all to the north, or the Queen wouldn't have been able to free us."

"Roy," the pig beside him said nervously, tightening his grip on his screwdriver.

"They want us to be afraid," the collie said, ignoring him, giggling as the metal slats rattled again. "They can't even open the door—"

The door evaporated as frag grenades ripped through the slats. Screams rang out in the first few rows as shards found eyes and ears, and the collie charged forward into the breach, the contact points of his stunstick snapping and snapping. "I'm not afraid of you, you—"

Miles shot him in the face with a 7.62 mm round as he stepped through the door, keeping the rifle at his bare shoulder. He wore boots and shorts, frag grenades and spare mags dangling from his belt, a pistol hanging in his waistband. After the body hit the floor and the screams started, he shot the next mobian he saw, a pig, and then an ocelot, and then a kangaroo, keeping the rifle on semiautomatic and placing clean shots in heads and necks. Only then did he shout, "Workers on the ground!" While they were getting down, he shot a weasel in the back, a clump of fur and blood spraying over the screaming females behind him. "Hands on your heads. Do not move."

They complied, whimpering. Miles walked among them as the minders he was bringing with him fanned out, watching for movement in the corners.

Carefully, he took aim at the hands folded on the back of a brown-furred head and fired. The screams died quickly, and he could barely notice them after the echoes of the shot had died away.

The factory was pacified.

Miles and his team were lost. Robotropolis had changed since he'd last fought in it; whenever he'd come here he'd been flown about by pilots that knew the territory. Like the minders he was leading, he knew the city only as islands of territory belonging to his Lady. He thought the rebels were to the north; the antigrav factory was somewhere in the southeast. He was trapped well behind them, away from his Lady and her rear-guard warriors.

But he wouldn't despair. Because these were rebels, too. Until they were whimpering on the floor, every worker in the south of Robotropolis was now a rebel and enemy of the Empress and his Lady. Miles didn't have proper armament or his Lady's orders, but if he had anything to say about it, his Lady was going to pacify Robotropolis, one factory at a time.

Sonic couldn't actually drag the soldiers after him. This had never been a problem before.

Most days, he would cut through a bot, two, take off running. Shoot through the open door of an occupied factory dorm, take off running. When they gave chase, he would play mouse-and-cat, pick off the leaders, double back and hit squads from the flank, dance. More and more lines of troops following him until it felt like he was dragging along lines of force that ensnared the whole city, tying it into a thick, clingy web.

Today, for whatever reason, the robots weren't following, and the lines were slack. Sonic didn't like that at all. The lines were his connection to Sally and Bunnie, ways he could grab at the swats and assaultbots and troops and pull them away from them like lassoed terrapods.

When they didn't follow, Bunnie was all alone with her nanites and armor, and Sally was just all alone. Sonic was east of the river to be able to hit the Egg without needing to bust a bridge or get shot at swimming the river, and when he realized the bots were ignoring him, he'd cut four blocks over toward where she was advancing, before realizing that if the bots did start following him, he'd be dragging her into a world of hurt. So he'd turned back toward the Egg, his target drawing him, running through a city that felt deserted, even as he knew that his friends might be in trouble.

This time, he was the one being pulled on ropes . . . .

"I said get me to that rally beacon!" Lady Renee shouted at the pilot. She could barely hear herself over the air screaming through the rents in the transport pod's hull. The pod's speakers blared layered altitude, SAM and avionics warnings.

"What?" the mongoose bellowed, fighting the control stick. They were directly over a major street, steel walls sliding by on either side. "We're losing altitude! I can't keep this speed—"

She stabbed her finger at the winking green point on the HUD map overlay of the cockpit display. "That rally beacon!" The rebels were pushing north on both sides of the river, rolling up the city clockwise and counterclockwise, moving from six to twelve. This was where they would be stopped on the east bank: a pocket of robots and semi-loyal minders, bottled in the primary rail freight hub to the eastern desert.

Not Renee's minders, at least not until her Empress had given them to her thirty minutes ago, which was the only reason such an embarrassment as encircled imperial troops existed. But Renee would soon be there in person to teach them how to kill mobians, and how to die for their owner.

"I can't do it," the pilot bellowed. Then screamed in girlish fright as another stolen anti-air rocket streaked by over the hull.

Renee grabbed her sidearm and pressed it to the back of the mongoose's head. "That rally beacon. Five hundred meters."

"I can't," she wailed, throwing her arms away from the control stick as far as the chains buckling her wrists to its handles would allow. "We're going down. We're going to die—"

Renee popped the whimpering pilot's skull into a mist of blood vapor caramelizing on the cockpit display, then ran for the pod's rear hatch. She thought it open and clutched at the cargo netting as the eddy current tried to suck her out four meters over the pavement . . . three . . . two . . . .

She dropped her pistol and let go. And then let go again when the pavement grabbed her legs, allowing the forward momentum to burn away into angular momentum that ripped up her clothing, her fur, her muscle as she tumbled down the street.

The bones held. That was the important thing.

She drew her raw, bloodied arms away from her only slightly mauled face and stood, looking forward toward the smoking wreckage of the pod, the razorwire, and the electrified wall of the railyard.

Only ten meters away, a mob of twenty uniformed, wild mobians stared at her as though she were the god of the dead, rising up from the underworld. She saw a pistol—gas-propellant, snagged from the minders, who didn't need to carry weapons that could hurt a robot. Some carried nothing more than bludgeons—wrenches, pipe ripped from walls. The last missile to miss her had come from the single-use SAM tube balanced on the shoulder of—

"Sally Acorn," Renee said.

The squirrel quickly switched her grip on the steel cylinder, holding the barrel like the handle of an axe, to beat her with. Renee laughed at the insolence, and the way she tried to cover the fear in a face that had fear written into its very bone structure. Miles knew how her jaw and skull had been fractured long before, and therefore Renee knew as well: a Robian, the hedgehog. The only thing that could save her was another Robian.

And there were none with her. Just frightened soon-to-be-slaves holding sticks.

"That fall really hurt, Your Highness," Renee leered as she walked toward the squirrel, ignoring the lesser ones. She lifted her right fist and tightened it, letting Sally see the reinforced bones of her knuckle pop through the bare, glistening muscle. "Let me show you how much."

Sally screamed and ran directly at her, holding the spent SAM to her side like a duelist's sword. Renee set her legs and lifted her fists to the ready, left to block the squirrel's swing and right to punch through her face.

That's when she noticed the rest of the mobians were charging, too. A cloud of gnats. Renee snarled and broadened her stance, preparing to swat.

The first wrench came at her head from the right. She didn't dodge, just grabbed and ripped it from the weakling tiger's grip and swung left deep into a flowering, wet skull that would have been Sally's if Sally hadn't skidded down and swung the SAM tube with her meager strength at—

the back of Renee's left knee, working with her bones rather than against them, sending her tottering forward and down just as two mobians bodily threw themselves on her. She slapped them aside, feeling their ribs break as they tumbled away and three more mobians piled on. The end of a length of pipe struck her hard in her forehead, precisely the part of her skeleton that would never give. She grabbed what felt like a neck and what felt like an ankle and crunched them to stalks with a rewarding squeal and rush of gore, and then someone shot her in the toe, of all places. Her knee took revenge, driving up and rupturing through one of the abdomens on top of her, intestines slippery, and the pipe hit her in the head again, rattling her jaw, and something clubbed her in the side of her head—

—(wait)—

—and she threw the worms off of her, rolling to her side as another bullet ricocheted off the pavement by her feet, and someone kicked her in the back like a child throwing a tantrum, and a wrench slammed into her skull—

—(they can't do this)—

—and she killed another one, another with nothing more than a punch to the face, so easy to kill them, easy to kill as many as she wanted, there were so many to kill so many hitting her with sticks like stone age beasts always more and she killed another and they hit her and hit her—

—and she reached out with her mind blindly like a drowning person, realizing that this was happening, that she was drowning in people, flailing, slamming her thoughts into radio servers where they sat inert and meaningless on the drives, fractured alphanumeric strings, ghostly, unreadable image files, less and less sense, thoughts lighter and stranger and she, she was dying—

—Renee had dreamt such a crazy dream, that she'd been a robot and Snively was there and the poor fox from the forest and—

—and with a sharp crack, the calcium-titanium of her skull finally gave way.

The factory hadn't been freed by soldiers from the forest; it had been freed by workers who had been freed by soldiers from the forest. They were from a nearby foundry, apparently the big hulking black building that you could see through the cyclone fences when you walked through the yard from the dormitory, the boiling smoke of its furnaces blotting out the sun.

Around every third worker in the plant and dorm was too far gone to care. The ones on rest period stayed in their beds, and the rest stood at their posts, some looking blankly at the wall, lost in fear or some kind of brain stall. The first instinct of everyone else had been to shout, fall on the floor, and praise the gods by name. It was as though one set of masters had been replaced with a kinder, less metallic variety.

Myron had the feeling of just having woken up from a dream, combined with an intense feeling of fatigue, settled in a fortified position above and behind his eyes. He knew the feeling from back when he had worked as a programmer; he always had it after coming up for air on a long project. A feeling like he had just lost a few weeks and a lot of energy to some mysterious force that had otherwise left him untouched. It was just that this time, it had been a few years.

Myron remembered his last name, "Catalano," because "Myron of Lynxes" sounded sibilant and stupid, and had remembered his time in the forest fighting with then-Princess Sally's royal army easily because it was the best thing he had ever done. His first instinct upon hearing the name Acorn on the lips of the foundry workers was to grab an assault rifle from the plant armory and rush out after her. But one of the things he knew from his days as an insurgent was that this lightning advance north through the city could become a disaster in a hot minute if the robots flanked them and came up the rear. This was not safe territory. It wasn't even free territory, unless they were willing to back up the rebels and put up a fight themselves.

"We're occupying the factory," he shouted, hanging onto a ladder on the side of one of the mixing tanks on the east wall to see above the heads of the crowded workers. "We have to hold it."

The lynx wasn't one of the foreworkers, but he was in charge of basic debugging and operation of most of the plant computers, which had by default made him one of a small class of authority figures. Of course, the Empress had a bit of cache herself and as soon as he started calling on the plant to do something—telling them that they were already doing it—half of the eyes glanced up at those speakers telling them to wait to be brought back under control. There were a lot more bit lips than hear hears.

"Hold it with what?" a voice shouted.

"What do we make here?" Myron shouted back. It was rhetorical: Lord Henri's factory processed precursor chemicals from the desert and agricultural waste into smokeless powder for gas-propellant weapons like the pistol Myron had stuffed into the belt of his jumpsuit.

The same voice: "Not finished ammo!"

Adelaide the forewoman broke in then to point out that explosives would be enough to improvise with, which was good, because the collie had a knack for persuasion and Myron was at that moment not able to do more than narrow his eyes in contempt. "We can do this," he added when she had finished. "I fought in the rebellion ten years ago. I've seen a twelve year old boy stand up to Robotnik," he said, omitting that the twelve year old fox had been twice as capable and fearless as himself. "Are you going to be beaten by a twelve year old boy?"

Reluctantly, and when aided by a lot more shouting, the workers whose names he'd never had occasion to learn in three years of continuous labor were not willing to admit that they couldn't stand up to a twelve year old boy. As Myron, Adelaide and a few others put preparations into motion, the mood slowly gained momentum, until the business of gathering bolts and scrap and piling bags of cement into barricades was carrying Myron himself along as he realized that he was out of his depth. He knew how to—well, he had some experience penetrating into a protected area, working mischief, and getting back out. Defending a fixed position . . . .

How hard could it be?

If enough robots attacked, it would be impossible. But other factories might be taking the pressure off them, which made him feel better, until he realized that meant that they were taking pressures off the other factories themselves. They had to prevail, no matter the cost.

He'd talked to Adelaide and was almost done quietly overriding the redundant protocols when he ran out of time. The words of the watchers manning the security feeds in the supervisor's office were lost in echoes off steel and concrete, but the terror in them was unmistakable. Myron finished typing in the command—just two more to go, dammit—spun from the mixing tank station and sprinted west across the factory floor, between the long waist-high chemical hoppers, avoiding the lanes still clogged by mindless workers staring dully down at the powdering sulfur compound in the troughs. He slid down to a stop behind the back of the ring of cement bags they had packed in half of a long oval around the exterior door to the shipyard, wriggling in shoulder-to-shoulder between a mouse and a chipmunk. The mouse carried a pistol; both stank of fear.

"Don't fire," Myron whispered to both of them, gathering up the first of the four twelve volt lead-acid batteries he'd left there, one wire already wrapped around one of the terminals, the other waiting, an inch of stripped bare copper at the tip. The second battery was in the lap of the mouse, his right hand holding free wire only a couple of centimeters from the free terminal. Myron shook his head, made a point of holding his own wire further away from the contact point. After a moment, the mouse followed suit. "Watch me," he whispered. "Only when I—"

The mouse's broad ears went flat as the robots tore apart the flimsy steel door with some kind of high explosive, maybe a frag grenade, strips of metal flying over their heads. No, Myron mouthed, his ears already ringing, and reached out a his right arm to grab the mouse's left. Not yet. He heard a couple of shots, semiautomatic. It was their own people firing, not the bots, which would cut loose simultaneously with rapid plasma and autocannon fire, once they had good sightlines. He listened through the tinnitus for the telltale clatter of anything like another grenade on the cement, the pop of an RPG—

Heavy steel feet, tromping toward them.

Myron squeezed the mouse's wrist. No.

Two steps. Three. The ringing in his ears slowly gave way to the whine of capacitors in a plasma gun.

Now.

Myron touched the exposed wire to the terminal and flinched in anticipation. The blasting caps popped deep in the pack of powder behind the piles of bolts and scrap on either side of the door. The pressure wave ripped over him as the steel clanged off and ripped into the bots and tore apart any mobians stupid or unlucky enough to have come in with them. There were shots all along their defensive line now, dammit, even the chipmunk next to him peeking up over the cement bags to fire out into the yard. "Gods damn it!" Myron shouted, throwing away the first battery and picking up the third. If they drew plasma fire it could set off the secondary packs.

"Blow it now!" someone shouted, the words coming to his ears, like everything, down a long, narrow tunnel.

"No!" Myron screamed at the mouse, but the mouse wasn't talking. He was holding the fourth battery, following his lead and holding the wire up beside his snout, away from the terminal, though it would be better if his eyes weren't squeezed tight.

"Fucking blow it!" the chipmunk on the other side of him shouted.

The lynx turned and craned his head over the cement bags, looking directly into the knee actuator of a swatbot. And the next thing he knew he was on his back, unable to breathe, which panicked him only until he realized that he had set off the second pack of gunpowder stuffed in behind the forward barricade, and that he was still alive. He forced the sack off of his belly, the air filled with cement dust , felt around for a gun, he needed a gun, until he realized that if there were any robots still standing, he would already be dead.

He got to his knees, slowly turned and took in the shattered, smoky ruin that was the plant entryway. There was no sign of blood, everything soaked in dust. The concrete was cratered, the door simply gone. The only thing remotely intact was the tumbled, twisted bodies of the swatbots, unmoving, gray.

Holy shit, Myron thought.

Then he felt the floor shiver again under his feet. South gate.

The floor shivered again before he even found his feet. That was wrong, too fast. The bots had delayed the second entry, learned from their mistakes. In a couple of moments he was running, and his ears had recovered enough to hear the screaming.

Myron didn't even look over the chemical hoppers to the south gate as he ran for the mixing tanks, knowing before he looked that he would see the black shadows of Swatbots trudging over the tumbled barricade, red bolts of death stabbing out to where workers were scrabbling backwards, firing rounds wildly in the robots legs and the ceiling. Plasma bolts few by him into the far north wall, not aimed at him, and then he was in the shadow of the mixing tanks, at their command console.

The tanks were designed to contain highly volatile compound in large amounts. The tanks had dust suppression systems at every entry and exit. Compressed nitrogen tanks blew oxygen out of the interior, and multiple grounds and failsafes forestalled spark risks even if any managed to get inside. The tanks had to be cleaned from time to time, and when they were multiple spillgates on the side opened up to allow cleaning crews to work inside. But they were designed to only be opened only after the internal sensors registered that the tanks had been emptied, and the remaineder of the plant was partially evacuated and secure.

Quickly, Myron's fingers set about overriding the last of the two code-objects that prevented opening of the spillgates.

This wasn't the only battle. There were others. Their job was to neutralize robots in combat, and the fight justified any casualties to the rest of them, even the ones cowering in the corners, standing blankly at their posts. But what Myron was thinking as he prepared to flood the tanks with oxygen and the floor around him with explosive was that sensation of coming up for air after a long, deadening assignment, thinking about what he would feel like when he was seventy, forty years lost in the blink of an eye.

That was not going to happen.

He could hear footsteps approaching and he crouched down, head just above the keys, as he took out the last failsafe, turning the code that controlled the spillgates into a simple on-off switch. He called it up, tabbing through the controls to find the switch, and glanced quickly to his left into the barrel of a rifle.

For a moment, Myron was just surprised he wasn't already dead. His fingers were trembling against the keys, he'd forgotten where he was in the sequence, had to look back at the screen, but couldn't. The soldier at the other end of the rifle was staring at him with shocked, surprised eyes, something about his face, something—

The features fell into place. "Tails?" Myron asked.

A high-velocity round ripped the lynx out of the sights of Miles's rifle, splattered his brains against the screen and the steel of the tank. The bullet itself slapped into the side of the tank, but didn't puncture more than the first of its layers. The fox stood in place, frozen, looking down his barrel at the concrete floor behind where the lynx had been kneeling.

"Approaching," said one of the imperial soldiers behind him.

He'd forgotten about Cat. No one had ever trained Miles to hate him.

"We're clear," the soldier said, right at his ear. A minder Miles had commandeered from one of Lady Lupe's factories. "Are you alright, Sir?"

"Nggg." Miles coughed.

"Sir?"

"Nice shot," he croaked.

"Sir, we've lost quite a few bots. Everyone at the west gate—"

"There were more than workers here," Miles said, finding that he was able to move again.

"Sir?"

"See if there are any minders we can add to our numbers," he said, turning away from the body. The anger he felt was now tinged with just the slightest bit of worry. Subduing these factories was turning into a more dangerous task. "We need to move faster."

"But Sir—"

Miles snapped his teeth right in front of the wolf's face, snarling. "I am in command, minder! We will show these animals how to fight."

"Yes, Sir!" the minder barked, splaying his ears.

The fox grinned as the wolf turned away to relay his orders. A real fight meant real honor. A chance to prove himself.

Miles would make his Lady proud.

Sonic kicked open the door, holding both his pistols out to shoot the soldiers.

There weren't any. The roof was empty, as was the rest of the abandoned building, slated for demolition as the Egg's higher stories stretched out across the street below. There was nothing but the massive struts of the cranes beyond, the red lights blinking along their height in the smoky gloom to keep the transport pods away. A foul breeze wafted over the empty roof, carrying distant echoes of Amanda, ordering the city to lie down and wait for punishment.

He wasn't being shot at. He wasn't doing his job.

Angrily he tossed his guns to the ground, took off his backpack as he walked to the edge of the roof. He could barely see the newest floors of the egg from here, a black steel sheet at least fifteen meters below and ten meters away that somehow looked fake, like a grid in a computer game. The two power rings felt cold in his grip as he shook them out of the bag, letting the pack flutter down into the night below.

It wasn't the longest jump he had ever made, but it was the longest he'd ever planned on making. And once he went in, he wasn't coming back out until it was all over, one way or another.

He wasn't going to do it.

For all the times he'd screwed up a plan in the past, he was still surprised at how strongly the realization came to him. He wasn't going into the Egg. He was going to go back and find Sally and find Bunnie and find Tails and knock him out and drag him back into the forest. And they were all going to live happily and stupidly ever after.

"Damn it," he hissed turning from the edge. "Fuck you, Amanda."

And as if she could hear him, Amanda changed her tone. She sounded—

Sally.

Sally had commandeered some of the city's speakers. He couldn't hear the words, just her voice, overlapping with Amanda's surging up, trying to be heard.

Almost before he could hear them a squadron of stealthbots screamed by overhead, toward the eastern half of the city. Below them, a klick in the distance, a factory the size of a city block flowered into flame.

Sonic ran back to the door, so fast that his sneakers slammed into the roof access shed before he could skid to a stop. Then he ran, leapt, tucked in his legs, the flashing red lights on the crane streaking in the black night. With a shock of shearing metal he was gone, down into deeper darkness.

Kain Blackwood 2012

NEXT WEEK, in a special update, Persona non Grata concludes