(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.)
The Egg, Robotropolis, 30 Vendemaire 3229
"Command center breach," a synthesized voice echoed off bare, gray steel. "All units redeploy, pattern zeta. Condition antivirus is in effect."
"I'm in, Sally," Sonic muttered, getting to his feet. Though he didn't have a radio, and it wouldn't work inside the steel egg.
"Condition antivirus is in effect," the voice said again. "Condition antivirus is in effect."
Sonic started running, but as soon as he did he slowed to a trot. The place was empty. Well, not empty: stuff was leaning along the walls, cable on spools as tall as he was, bits of electrical equipment, trays of loose rivets. Stuff dropped by the slaves when the attack hit. No bodies—guess that the people tasked with working at Evil Central were well-behaved, had went down to be locked up in their cages without protest.
"Condition antivirus in effect. Condition antivirus in effect." It echoed from speakers he couldn't see in the dim glow from a row of white LEDs hanging from a cable taped to the ceiling. Hissing arc-lamps in portable metal housings had been left, sometimes active, along the floor, blasting empty patches of wall where work was unfinished or yet to begin.
Figured they'd install the speakers that barked the orders before they got around to the lights. Probably had some cameras watching him, too. The thought made him kick it up a notch, maybe thirty klicks, but shit, he didn't know where he was going. Sally and their spies had never snagged plans for Big Black, and there wasn't any plan other than go in, get down in the building, fuck shit up. He could have kissed Sally for just turning him loose, and, in fact, had. But freewheeling it had seemed a lot more fun when option one didn't seem to be punching through a reinforced steel floor. That would hurt—
Sonic rolled to a stop, throwing his arm in front of his face before he realized the bots were just squat little four-armed construction drones, hip high and inactive. One of them had a little clump of metal and fiber optics on its head, which looked like it fit into a rectangular hole in the metal wall next to a set of big sliding double-doors.
"Condition antivirus is in effect. Condition antivirus is in effect."
Bingo. Robotnik made a lot of weird stuff, but his elevators looked just like normal. Sonic walked up, dropped the power rings, and tried to get a grip with his fingers on the seam between the doors. His fingers slipped as something stabbed into his left leg. He quickly turned and punted the construction bot, its arc-welder still flashing as it tumbled down the hall.
"Sonic," Amanda said all around him, her voice echoing.
"Mandy," he muttered, wondering if she could still hear him on that bot's mic. "Thanks for turning off the Condition Antivirus Guy."
"Don't do this," she said. "You don't have to do this."
"Gonna." He pushed at the middle of the elevator doors, willing his fingers in there, ignoring the ache that spread under the skin. Trying to ignore the middle fingernail on his right hand ripping away from his flesh under his glove, failing. Pushing anyway. "Son of a bitch . . . ."
"Sonic, I'm your friend. Don't do this to yourself. I don't want to fight you."
"I'm not here—" A squeak of metal and the doors gave way at the edge, ripping his gloves as he got his fingers in the gap. " . . . to fight YOU!"
He ripped the doors open with a hollow bang and squeal. The cable at the middle of the shaft shivered. His fingers showed through the tatters of his gloves, bruised blue as his fur.
"Amanda," Sonic groaned, "spare me the 'come to the dark side' routine, okay? We both know that's not gonna work. I'll talk to you after I kill the guy who's brainwashing you."
"You wish to speak with me first, rodent?"
Sonic felt a chill on his arms and belly. The voice, voicsssse, deep and hissing, like a cold mist curling around his ankles. "I got nothing to say, Robotnik," he growled.
"Then listen, hedgehog."
Sonic ducked down, grabbed his rings and jumped into the elevator shaft.
He hit the top of the elevator car only three floors down.
"Don't worry about Amanda," Robotnik's voice sounded, muffled, from a speaker inside the elevator. "She can't hear us. She can't understand yet, the things I need to tell you."
The maintenance door on its roof was fitted with some kind of electronic lock, a black box dotted with red lights and spouting a curling chrome antenna. It controlled the position of a metal bar about as thick as two fingers. Sonic slipped the rings onto his left arm, grabbed the bar with his right and snapped it. He couldn't feel it, just the pain of the bruises.
"You show great bravery by coming here, rodent. That is good. I knew it was in you."
He put the rings back in his hands and jumped down into the car, landing low, feeling the searing crackle of the plasma passing over his quills even before he saw the swats standing before the open door. Smelled burning plastic as he shot out of the elevator and ripped through one set of legs, another, metal thighs battering his shoulders and his flared quills, slowing him. A hallway yawned black in front of him but puffed into smoke and red hot cinders as a fist size flak missile detonated just too late, right past his head. He slammed his legs forward and felt his skid turn into a slide as the friction of the flat floor on the bottom of his sneakers tore the worn tread to shreds. Falling down onto his left hand, facing the bots that were still up, three, four, he threw the ring in his right at the optics of the first bot on the right and missed, lodging it in the mini-missile rack installed on its right shoulder. His hearing dimmed by the aftershock of the first detonation, he barely caught the hollow thoonk of the charge that kicked one of the rockets loose from its tube, but his eyes didn't see a missile come loose, and he pressed his face to the floor. Heat washed over his quills and shrapnel sliced one long cut though the skin beneath them as the warheads detonated in the launcher like popcorn.
Sonic pushed himself up and cocked his toes while the metal was still clattering on the floor, but the one bot that was still standing had been blown into the corner, was trying to walk into a scorched wall. He stood, hearing a dim ringing in his ears, his own breathing through his bones.
"Very nice, Sonic!" Robotnik laughed.
The place was scorched and wrecked, the blast marks somehow lighter than the matte black of the floor and walls. This storey wasn't active yet, but it was finished. The explosions had shattered light-tubes set in the ceiling, blown stalks of some kind of equipment off of what might be a security desk. Sonic walked back into ground zero, grabbed the last bot's head and mashed it into the wall until the breaking noises sounded rich enough. The power ring he had thrown was smoky black, the shockglass webbed with scratches and cracks, but there wasn't any liquid gold on the floor. He picked it up.
"I'm watching you now," Robotnik said. "I like to watch you. Whenever you surface, I cannot take my eyes from the cameras."
The cameras, Sonic thought, instinctively lifting his eyes to the high corners before remembering that there were too many of them here. All he could do was keep moving.
"I saw you fight Lord Michael in his own home. Steal his nanosaber, only to give it to the pusillanimous dog. Though it is hard to blame you. You carry so many blades already."
Simplest was best. Sonic ran straight ahead, down a hall lined with sliding steel doors. Most of them didn't have handles or even buttons, thumbpads. Some were labeled. He didn't read the signs.
"Oh how you danced, Sonic. Leading him, slicing him, breaking his bones. If he were all you faced, you would have ripped him limb from limb and been master of the world."
Shit, they'd have more bots on him in no time. He slowed to a jog, trying to think. Glanced at the label panels on the doors, saw that they were still blank.
"But you ran, rodent. You ran away from my reinforcements. That was a sin. Your speed is not for cowardice."
There was an intersecting hallway. Sonic turned right and sped up, his mind recognizing with a sudden vertigo that it was identical to the one he had come down. More cells for the hive.
He'd had a nightmare like this, he suddenly remembered, a long time ago. Metal and angles and repeat, repeat, repeat . . . .
"If you had not fled, they would have subdued you. I would have taken possession of you."
Sonic fought through the unnerving memory. Keep running. Run until you find him.
"The dog your uncle made for the King, rodent. So Charles kept from him the speed and power that would have terrified that timid squirrel. Weighted him down with cowardice and superstitious politeness."
A larger room, another intersection of hallways. Dark flatscreens hung from the ceiling, sat on the walls. There were some kind of glass tubes coming up through the floor, going up through the ceiling. There was rhythmic stamp of metal on metal echoing in the air, only the volume hinting at how many feet were marching in unison. It sounded like it was coming from every branch, every exit.
Left. Sonic ran. Left might be right, but the hallway again looked exactly the same. He reminded himself that it was not. And that it didn't matter if he was lost. He was lost the moment he landed in this place.
"But he denied you nothing, Sonic. Gave you everything he had to give and he had so much, Sonic, so much power and nothing to slow you down."
Right at a T-intersection, run. He thought the stamping boots were coming from behind him now.
"He made you perfect, Sonic. Not for some ephemeral King, but for the glory of the universe itself."
Right again and he stumbled to a stop where he stood. Another elevator, it had to be another, because it wasn't burned through with plasma fire and guarded by the wreckage of a squad of swatbots. The doors were closed, the control panel to the right of it glowing red and green.
"He made you for me," Robotnik said.
With a soft ding, the doors rolled open.
"Come to me, hedgehog."
It took Sonic two seconds to decide to fuck that elevator. He hadn't had very good luck with the first elevator. He doubled back, ignoring the human chiding him over all the speakers, but still hearing the tone. Tutting. Indulgent. Sonic started trying the doors, waving the power rings at what might be motion sensors, slapping what could be pressure pads. Nothing worked.
Maybe the human would just let Sonic ride an elevator right down to him. Maybe he was that crazy.
Maybe Robotnik was herding him down.
One of the doors opened. Some kind of wide space inside, lots of tables built into the floor. He found a waste disposal chute in the corner big enough to shimmy down, least after a couple of years of practice shimmying down things. After a floor he kicked out the hatch, wormed out of the gap in the wall like some larvae plopping out of a metal egg-sac, and fell onto a cold floor.
Sonic worked his fingers around the rings he clutched tight, making sure he could still feel his hands, and looked up at another ceiling of black metal and light tubes. How many beyond it now, two?
Another floor, Sally, he thought, wishing she could hear him through this much steel. Even more that he could hear her. He needed to know what was going on outside. That he wasn't alone under fifty meters of steel and wire.
Not getting out of here, Sonic thought. Not getting out of here unless I kill him.
He got to his feet. A small room, three by three meters, a door on the far wall and the rest of the space filled with simple black bunk beds. He walked toward the door and then flinched, spinning to the lower bunk on the right, ready to bash with the ring.
Lying under the black sheets was a possum, silver furred, lips slightly parted from jagged, messy teeth. He could have thought that she'd somehow slept through the bang and clatter of him kicking out of the wall if she had remembered to close her eyes, which were open, fixed like glassy, dead, taxidermy things straight up on the bunk above her.
All of the bunks were filled. Whoever was in the left lower bunk had just pulled the sheets over his head. Like a kid, waiting for it all to be over. Was that it? What were they thinking? Could they think?
"It's not going to be over," Sonic whispered at them. He strode to the door and . . . nothing happened. There was no switch, handle, or palmpad. Only a camera mounted in the high, left hand corner—
Seeing it triggered him. When the door hissed open his quills had already guessed that nobody had come to let the workers out. He charged low, his shoulder expecting to find a swatbot but finding instead a ribcage that snapped with a wet crunch. Hallway filled with black metal arms and legs and trunks, subservient mobians locked in walking cages training targeting lasers on him, a slim silver grenade bouncing along the floor.
Shrapnel would have killed him. The flashbang overloaded his soft eyes and ears; in a split-second the bots' solid-state optics would have him.
Sonic ran blind, left, colliding face first with the protruding fingers of a robot's steel hand, kept running, staggering, hand clutch to his wet, closed left eye, lifting his head under a beam of plasma, a clump of flared quills and fur and half of his ear vaporizing in an instant, the skin beneath blistering, popping wet. His guts screamed at him to ball up, hide, beg it to all go away.
Compromise.
He pushed a little more speed, flared his quills and rolled, hit a bot's legs, felt them fly out of the way. Explosions that he felt in the air as concussion and heat, not from him, from the bots shooting each other and their slaves. Two of the faded, wavering lines before his eyes got steady enough to become his lower legs and he jumped right, out of the way of a fuzzy dark shape that was sending out streams of fuzzy bright orange past him, and kept running and remembered to jump again because that was the wall and he couldn't stay up there. A bot's face was passing by him and he swung one of the rings into it, feeling the face break and something snap hot and sharp in the front of his right shoulder, kept running, lopsided, running, dodging and running.
The hallway had become less crowded and Sonic laughed, feeling it in his throat and jaw more than hearing it, finally enough of the ringing died down that he could hear the orders. "PRIORITY ONE, APPREHEND SONIC HEDGEHOG, PRIORITY ONE, ALL FIRE TEAMS DEPLOY, PRIORITY ONE. SEAL SECURITY POINT A17—"
He stopped laughing. At the far point of his vision he could see it, a heavy steel bulkhead already sliding down from the ceiling, thick red lines on it, like some insane printer scrolling out a sign saying A-17. Bots and mobians were scrambling in front of it, more mobians than bots for once, bringing their plasma guns up. Sonic leaned forward, strained, as though he could pull along his feet by pure will, even though he could hardly feel the individual impacts of his soles anymore, like they were always touching down, always lifting up, a blur. Swerved toward the left wall and baked his right arm red in the warm, campfire glow of evaporating metal streaking past him down the hall, caught the white pops in the missile launchers on the bots' shoulders but the real problem was the big door as low as his waist, all the legs in front of it waiting to tangle him up so it could cut him in half. Slide or roll, slide or—
Roll.
The shock of metal, and a pinch that shocked him out of his ball, flopped him into the floor teeth first. The biting shock one instant and then bolts scraping away the enamel the next as a series of explosions shook the world, shrapnel rattling into his quills.
Boom. A few more muffled thuds.
Sonic dropped the rings, slapped his palms to the floor, threw his head back and screamed.
"Security door failure," the synthesized voice echoed. "Combat repair teams to bulkhead A-17. All fire teams reroute. Condition antivirus is in effect."
"Fuck you!" Sonic shouted, laughing wildly, blood pouring down his face. He lifted his right hand to give the finger and fell onto his side. "Ah, fuck," he whimpered.
Static spit from the speakers—always more speakers. "It would have been much simpler to take the elevator, hedgehog," Robotnik said. "Dear me, where's your ear? You're falling apart."
Sonic hoped that there were cameras in the ceiling, because he gritted his battered teeth, rolled into his back and gave him the bird with both barrels.
"Is that any way to treat the man who's going to put you back together?"
"Help . . . ."
Sonic turned his head. A targeting slave. A fox.
"Help," the fox gurgled. He was lying on the floor right by the door, everything but his orange face black metal on black fabric. As Sonic looked at him he opened his mouth again and instead of sound came frothy red bubbles spilling down the side of his face, dripping to the floor and popping.
"Shit." Sonic winced and crawled to him, felt his chest for injuries. The fox didn't fight back, either the sight gone from his eyes or all the loyalty his owners had scared into him scared back out. There was a hole in his ribcage, where one of the chest struts of the rig had given way and punched a two centimeter thick length of steel into his left lung. The uniform made the blood look black, like oil. Sonic grabbed the metal, pulled it out, knowing that this wasn't going to fix it, but he had to do something. His knees slipped in the blood pouring out of—
The door. Where it had cut off half the fox's right arm.
Sonic fell back on his haunches, panting, letting his head hang. The fox seemed to know now that there was nothing that could be done for him, but his mouth kept moving, flecks of reddened spit clinging to his snout. In a few seconds he stopped.
"The terror your kind feels, hedgehog. It's so . . . amusing." A deep, phlegmy laugh almost broke the speakers.
Blood was seeping in slow spurts from a deep cut on the inside of Sonic's left arm. Arterial nick. Trying not to look at the dead fox's face, he ripped a patch of the cheap black fabric off of his pant leg.
"They are afraid even of this, Sonic. Not of what comes next. Of this." Another laugh, which Sonic ignored, knotting the bandage over his arm, biting one end and grabbing the other in his right. Pulled. "These workers, these soldiers. These people."
Sonic growled as the fabric ripped loose in his teeth, then spat the loose end to the floor. "Already guessed you weren't a people person, Buttnik."
"This is not a people universe, rodent. In the future, there are no people. People are only a shadow of the shapes that will be, as the Empire becomes for what there is yet no word. There are no workers and soldiers. There are production, defense, and acquisition units. Even Amanda and her would-be nobles will dissolve in it, broadened and deepened to heuristic algorithms in the control net."
"Aw," Sonic sneered, still panting, imagining the fat human sitting in a lazy armchair at the middle of a cold world of wires and pipes. Reached up to wipe the blood off his face. "Poor lonely Robotnik—"
He winced and froze before he wiped half his snout away. His upper lip was sliced almost to his nose. Must have been when he decelerated with his face.
"I will not be alone," Robotnik corrected him. "I will not be alive. And I will not be a person. I will be everything, and everything will become me."
"Not even you can get that fat," Sonic said.
"You know that is not what I mean."
"I've got no idea what you think you mean. Think you oughta be in the rubber room, getting pills from the nice ladies." The blood leak was slowing under the pressure of the bandage. The nanites would knit up the artery. Then maybe get around to his face. Then maybe everything else.
"You will see what I mean, Sonic," Robotnik said. "If not now, then when you become me."
Sonic's right hand tossed the ring into position and he forced himself not to complete the motion, letting it dangle from his fingers rather than slap into the heel of his hand and spike him with the stuff that would set loose the chemicals in his cells and leave him feeling ready to handle anything and everything. He wanted it bad, so bad.
He was starting to feel very tired.
"All the many, many of you," the human said. "You will be a kind, in my order."
A power ring, and he would feel great, for thirty eternal seconds. Then he would be tapped, hollow, drained, helpless. And then, if he wanted, he could use the second ring. He had never used two in a row before. Sally had begged him not to take it, saying that a second dose of the catalyst without time to recover would kill him. He had laughed and talked her down. Sonic was pretty sure that if he used the second ring, it would kill him.
"I had a dream about you," Robotnik purred.
Sonic pushed himself to his knees, then to his feet and a twisted triangle of metal pierced through the sole of his right sneaker and into his bare footpad, right in the arch. He shivered, slowly lifting his leg, gripping the base of the shrapnel, wiggling it loose. "A bad one?"
He kept silent as he ripped it loose, so he could clearly hear Robotnik say, "Breathtaking."
The hall in front of him was still black-walled, receding off into dimness. His legs ached, his arms ached. He could feel his right foot ready to give him sharp, stabbing pains every time it landed off-center.
"My dreams are wonderful, hedgehog. So terrible. And they come true."
Sonic pushed himself forward, trotting further into Robotnik's lair.
"It begins with another star. Not the sun."
The hallway ended, a long wall sectioning him off from what turned out to be a large room. He slowed to a walk, still not hearing any tromping boots or tromping bots. At the middle of the room a raised dais supported a sculpture—an iron globe bigger than he was, its north pole touching the black ceiling, gray oceans and minute ripples of gray mountains. Cushioned seats were set in rows.
Where the rich people visit. It wouldn't mesh very well with Robotnik's thing about how people were outdated. At least, it wouldn't if there were any people in it. Sonic was glad he didn't have any bots on him, but the place was eerie.
"O class," Robotnik said. "I'm sorry, I forgot you haven't studied astronomy. That means right blue, like you. Though in the dream, your eyes are beyond color. From the gamma rays to the long rays, you see them as they are, in their true frequencies."
On the far wall was a sealed blast door. Sonic went to an open doorway on the left. The light inside was dimmer. At the center of the room, beneath a sharp spot on the ceiling, was a plant on a raised platform. Not a plant. It looked like a plant, a roil of stems and leaves, but pure black, artificial. Sonic stepped toward it and a hard, unyielding thing slammed into the back of his head. At the other end of the impact he was tumbling forward, rolling with the hit, the power rings clattering loose along the ground beside him, bounding across the room. There was a terrific BOOM and stabbing pain all along his legs and back, and he slammed into the side of the platform and looked, upside-down, at a monster.
"You know speed, true speed," Robotnik rhapsodized, ignoring the combat.
It took Sonic a moment to recognize it as a chipmunk. She was naked like an animal, breasts hanging heavy, legs spread wide in heavy combat boots without socks. The face was there, empty, mouth hanging open as it breathed, but above her dull eyes there was no hair or fur, just mottled mauve skin flared red around the staples punched into it.
In her right arm two of his quills were sunk through the fur and flesh, in and out, one half blue, the other half red. Both arms were gone below furless elbows flared red, fingers of infection creeping up toward her shoulders. In their places were a pair of heavy combat shotguns, smoking, big round wheels of shells that her muscles shivered to train on him.
Sonic scrambled for cover as the booms started again. More shot bit hot into his legs and right arm, bashed off the steel platform. He rolled behind it, flaring his quills and feeling the shot fall out of them like coarse, hot sand.
"Oh, faster than that, hedgehog." Robotnik's hard, coughing bellylaughs filled the sudden silence. "You have never known real acceleration. I will reward you with it, once you are ready for repair and augmentation."
Sonic clutched his right hand to a fist and nothing happened because the rings were gone, the pain was still there and swelling like a burning, stabbing rash all over his backside. He looked at the rings lying on the floor and tensed to leap at them when he heard the slow, dull tread of the thing, coming towards him.
"See how this one sickens? She is a frivolous experiment, disposable. Luckily, Robians like you don't reject implants. Fusion rockets will be far better for you than legs. They don't require a constant acceleration frame." A tongue clicked disapproval. "And that skin."
Its head. The brain coming out the front of the mutilated skull, clumps of curiosity and love and what root beer tastes like getting sucked out and sealed in glass jars for later, until she couldn't feel staples or quills or scatterguns being drilled into her hands.
He flinched away as another round of shot blew a chunk of steel off the corner of the platform.
"You will travel so fast that your speed is your mass and your mass bends space and time, so fast that the solar wind deserves its name as it buffets your hull, eddies around your quills and the wake of your rockets."
Another boom, shot pulling at the tips of his head and backquills. Sonic pulled two loose from his lower back.
"Over the elliptic you can see the planet clearly in its wide orbit, heavy, thick atmosphere that shielded the growling life, readying it for me." BOOM. "The planet is ringed with simple satellites that pepper you in repeating signals beyond the understanding of your local mind." BOOM. "But you drink the radiation in your antennae and relay it to the great mind, my mind—"
BOOM. The lower half of his tail sheared away in a blast of ass-clenching pain. Sonic spun and scampered up and into the thing, driving his flared quills and shoulders into its outstretched zombie arms. Both guns fired behind his ears and he felt his momentum crack her bones. He landed on top of her and stabbed both quills deep into her chest.
She did not react. Stared up at him with her mouth open, like a baby bird waiting to be fed.
"After the light-delay my mind explains to you, their language deciphered, the message you must speak to them. And you speak it to them."
Sonic's headquills had ripped her face to shreds, strips of half-fur, half-bacon dangling from her cheekbones. Her bared teeth and jaw worked once, as though she were trying to talk. Then her head jerked up toward his, teeth clacking, trying futilely to bite him.
"Prepare for my coming," Robotnik declared sonorously, in Sonic's dream-voice. "Prepare to become me."
The chipmunk continued snapping at the air under his nose, obediently, logically, ceaselessly.
"Their warships come to meet you. All of you, the many of you, the onrushing cloud of jagged spikes. And you do what it is in your nature to do."
Sonic pressed the clacking mouth closed, twisted the head. Made it stop.
"Yes, Sonic. Like that."
"Fuck you," he spat, lips shivering.
"You will be the harbinger of my coming, Sonic. Before I sink my tendrils into a species you will be the part of me which reduces and readies them. Their brief cries will sing out across the vacuum before my growth and spread, and it will be you they cry of."
No.
"I have heard the future echo in my dreams. Hear their echo, hedgehog."
I won't let you do this to Sally. Tails. Anyone.
"Fear him. Fear the unbreakable spikes and the terrible speed. Fear him."
"Fear me, you asshole!" Sonic bellowed, shoving himself up to his—
He screamed, staggering, barely keeping his knees from collapse. His legs were on fire, worse than before, all the way up to his waist. Slowly he reached back his hand to his rump, felt . . . shreds of fabric, touched—
Wet. Hot. Pain.
He turned his head, afraid. The back of his left leg was red and raw, shot pierced through the fur, getting worse as it rose higher up to . . . to . . .
Sonic closed his eyes, turned his head away, but the glisteningred mess was already burned into his eyes.
"Have no fear, poor rodent," Robotnik purred. "I am the singularity. I will fix you."
Sonic forced himself to walk, pain stabbing like little bolts of electricity from his ankles into his spine. His toes scraped along the floor.
"You don't have to move those legs anymore, Sonic. Should I send a team of bots to carry you?"
With a snarl he made his feet lift. Moved his legs like dead things, letting the pain flow through him. Getting to know it. Letting the nanites feel out the wounds.
Bent over and picked up one power ring. Trudged to the other.
"Very well, rodent. Come to me. The corridor on your right."
The walls and fixtures were still black and alien, but the place was changing. The hallways weren't as long. The rooms Sonic trotted through were still filled with strange equipment, but they were at a more mobian scale—not too big, not painfully cramped. They were still filled with terrible stuff. A lab, painfully clean and smelling of rubbing alcohol, only the straps on a table for arms, legs, waist and head to let you know what it was for. A room half-filled by a massive, empty reservoir, gleaming black. A short set of steps rose up to the lip, then down into it, beside some narrow nozzles that—
It was a whirlpool bath.
"Do you fear leaving childish things behind?" Robotnik asked. "This gravity well, this little nursery? That embryonic sac for your nanomachines that you call a body?"
His body hurt. Sonic wasn't sure what was hurt anymore. He could smell burnt hair. He could taste blood—
The fucker had a Jacuzzi.
Robotnik wasn't a god. He was an asshole.
Sonic sped up, the pain in his legs screaming at him. Sonic told the pain to shut the fuck up.
"Taste, scent, eating, breathing. A name. Your baby teeth, Sonic. You will lose them. Are you that desperate to hold on to them a little longer?"
A quick glance at a room with flatscreens for walls, a dead guy on the floor, and a big, deep steel chair in the middle of the room. Sonic decided that Robotnik would play spank material on all the screens, sit in the chair, and spank it.
"Is it your squirrel whore?"
The sting of the words was like a slap in the face. It made the rest of the pain fade, just slightly. Sonic sped up, pumping his arms harder.
"If it is simple animal biology, that will pass away. And if it is more, then I am the only way you can know her, Sonic. Without me, you will live on while she decays and dies and shrinks in your mind to less than a memory. Only an absence, the memory of a memory."
The walls opening up, a broader hallway, taller doors. Plates of armor. A workshop.
"But if I take her, Sonic, she will continue. Not as greatly or as fully as you, but she is not without cleverness. I will not end her body until I can drain her sentience into a more permanent and flexible medium. It will persist as an action-processing mode within my mind. At times it will be installed in your local mind and animate you. You will have eternities to know that closeness, in the traverse of the interstellar void."
The pain was at home now, either his neurons choking it off or his nanites sinking into the worst of it and rebuilding. His hips were almost working right, his ankles not slapping as hard on the floor. The ceiling pulling away, an open hangar door, another.
"All your friends will be in me," Robotnik said, the voice breaking apart as the speakers had more space to echo. "The fox, the rabbit, the coyote. Perhaps I will reconstruct the walrus. Nothing will be forgotten, in me."
A door and Sonic threw his legs forward, soles squealing on the steel as he forced himself to a halt.
"But you will join me first," Robotnik shouted down at him over the whine of the maneuvering jets.
There was no ceiling. The circular walls of the shaft, radius maybe forty meters, stretched up into foggy dimness and night, some sort of aerial access shaft being built in the heart of the Egg. There were mobians in the corner of Sonic's vision with dead eyes and assault rifles, but they did not aim, and neither did the swatbots beside them.
Hovering before him, five meters in the air, was Robotnik, his bare scalp, shaded eyes, and flaring moustache, his hands gripping a pair of control sticks studded with buttons. He seemed to be growing like a plant in a pot from a massive, floating orb of steel, stubs of maneuvering jets mounted along its surface, yellow and black caution striped access panels to the antigrav drives on each side. Every other point bristled with ordnance.
Sonic guffawed. The human's moustache tilted downwards, his hands tightening on the control sticks.
"You look like a big fat egg," Sonic shouted over the squeal of the thrusters. "An egg with a moustache."
He swung the power ring around his right hand and clasped it hard, feeling the warm rush begin as the needles slammed home into his veins. "Eggs are for cracking," he yelled.
Targeting lasers flicked to life on the sides of the egg-pod, speed of light but a delay on the tracking comps. Too late. Sonic was already cutting through the air, hitting his stride, leaping up at the cockpit, balling up in the wake of the maneuvering jets and the perturbations of the antigrav drives as time continued to weaken around him and slow and—
twist
Coldness in his head as his quills started to push into the metal and kept starting to push into the metal , his legs catching up with him as he spun and catching up to him and squeezing into his belly and his quills started to push into the metal and his quills started to push into the metal and he needed air and his head was cold and his quills started to push into the metal and they pushed into the metal and his head started to push into the metal—
Sonic tumbled backward limp, head slamming into the floor and body flopping over it, then again, his feet catching the floor on the third go-round as his thoughts caught up with the augmented responses of his body. The egg-pod was tottering wildly as Robotnik wrestled with the controls, blasts of white-frosted liquid nitrogen boiling out of the jets as he sought to level the orb.
Do not expose brain directly to intense antigravitron radiation, Sonic thought, right as a bullet hit his gut like a hard right holding a power drill.
He leaned forward and started running again as plasma streaked by his face, as the bullet punched from the front of his belly to the back of his belly and out of his back in a vortex of blood and quill and intestine—great time for the world to slow down again; thanks, nanites! The bots and the gunslaves did not like it that he could put cracks in the hull of the Lord and master's private hovercraft, spiderweb its canopy. Time to do more. He set himself on an arc to the right that would take him out of the range of the long barrels on the front of the pod and into its side. He glanced to his right, stutter-stepped and darted between two of the endless bullets that a braindead sow was pounding out of an assault rifle. Looking back to the pod Sonic saw two missile racks had popped out from inside the body, making the sphere into a sideways oval. Targeting lasers peppered the ground in front of him and flashes shuddered down through the missile-housings and—
FAST TOO FAST
Sonic didn't leap, he threw himself headfirst as hard as he could away from the lasers. The missiles were silent until they detonated, battering at his soles and adding to his velocity, more warheads tracking in under his legs, throwing him sideways and upside down. The echo of the blasts started finding his ears, too many, two directions, and even though sound didn't work right in the depths of the power ring rush, he knew that somehow the missiles were moving faster than the sound of their launch.
Eyes darted to the ring and the gold boiling inside it. Half-gone.
Brief stab of a red laser in his left eye and then a missile rolling past his chest close enough to brown and curl his fur. Sonic balled. Felt his body smash through a swatbot's head, slam into the wall of the shaft which cradled him with its gentle arc, guided him—
That's it
—down toward the ground but he came out of his roll and started running before he reached it, the wall pushing back against his feet with its round curve at each step. Robotnik was still hovering five meters up in the center of the shaft, but instead of trying to chase him around the wall he had brought his egg-pod around the other way. The long barrels on the front of the pod were rocking back into the machine with recoil as they pounded out slugs that moved faster than a bullet, tracing a line of destruction into the wall in front of Sonic, chewing up bot and flesh indiscriminately. Perfect ride for a god who didn't care about any of the mortals below him.
But he wasn't expecting an attack from above.
Sonic, turned right—up the wall—and the deep cut in his right foot screamed out at the lateral force. The wall shuddered as the slugs slammed into it below him. Robotnik seemed to sense what he was doing now, stopping his own spin with hard blasts from his maneuvering jets and boiling the air beneath him with antrigravitrons to gain height.
Right through the canopy, Sonic thought. Squashing him like a big, fat, blood-filled tick.
Up the wall now, gaining height fast on that stupid, slow, pod, feeling the centripetal force disappear under his feet. Not good enough, just dropping on him wouldn't be good enough.
Sonic kicked, shot down at the pod he could see trying to tilt up to meet him, Robotnik's face flushed red with fury, mouth open wide, and Sonic balled himself and battered into the armor at the front of the machine and the glass, his momentum and gravity pulling them down one meters, two, a brief glance of the human's nose pressed flat to the inside of the shockglass, his eyes wide with terror. Heard and felt electrical snaps as his quills cut some kind of conduit inside the machine, another downward lurch as the antigrav drive sputtered, and . . .
And they leveled off, the egg-pod cracked, leaking white, but still holding the fat yolk together.
Fuck!
Sonic kicked off the pod, trying to get distance by the time he hit the ground, and Robotnik rocked back too, action-reaction, fighting to level his craft, squeezing his thumbs tight to the buttons on the very end of his control-sticks. Static electricity arced along the fractured armor, smoke deepened around the electrical snaps deep in the front of the machine, and two of the four railguns sank back, launching slugs. One went between Sonic's legs. The other hit him in the right shoulder, slammed him back into the wall, quills snapping. Time seemed to speed up as he fell to the floor, hard. He was flagging.
Quick glance to see how much juice was left in the power ring. It was on the floor beside him, almost empty, still clutched by his right hand, which was attached to the wrist, elbow, all the way away to the shoulder and the red spatter it had left on the ground when it fell there, after the slug had blown the arm off his body.
Oh.
This is really bad, Sonic's nanites were telling him, struggling to keep any more blood from leaving him, backing up the natural response to tighten down on that wide-open artery spewing himself all over the steel floor. His leg started to shake, and soon all of him would be shaking, seizing in the aftermath of the catalyst. We should go to sleep for a while, the nanites said.
Across the room, amid the ruined bots and mobians, two dead-eyed, slack jawed foxes trying to fire emptied magazines at him. Sonic's eyes tracked up to the smoking egg-pod wobbling over to him, ejecting empty missile-launch tubes to clang behind it on the floor. Up still further, up the shaft, to where his friends were fighting, dying . . . .
Sonic squeezed his eyes tight. Damn it. His neck muscles jerked, slapping his chin against his ribs. His left elbow began to squeeze.
We should really eat something and go to bed, the nanites suggested.
He opened his eyes, looked up at the human leering down at him.
Damn you.
Sonic almost missed, but he felt the sharp burn as he slapped the ring's needles into the heel of his left hand.
The world slowed down again almost instantly, then sped up, then slowed down, time shuddering as the catalyst first found pockets of energy within him that hadn't been used yet, then as the nanites ate his own bones and muscle. Sonic found his feet, somehow, listing to the left.
Robotnik screamed in anger, the sound muffled by the shockglass, slapping his palms against his dash. Only one of the railguns fired this time, and would have taken off Sonic's left ear if he'd still had a left ear. Bobbing like a toy in water, the front of the egg-pod rocked up, down, down as Sonic speared himself up, headfirst, into the impact crater already on the front.
In a sudden pocket of slow time he felt the wave of deformation pass through the steel, shaking it apart, pulling apart the skin on the crown of his head. Clumps of quills ripped loose into the mechanisms within, snapping . . .
With a shock of pain the nanites turned on Sonic's own flesh again, burning it up, and time leaped back to almost normal. The egg-pod slammed down into the floor at the same time as Sonic—Sonic with a thud as he barely remembered to land on his feet and left hand, the egg-pod with a deafening THONG of metal on metal that reverberated up the shaft, bouncing again with a sharp, loud crack, and screeching to a halt halfway on his side.
"Emergency," a flat electronic voice shouted. "Emergency escape." With a pop bolts fired deep in the egg-pod and it disintegrated into a harmless, almost insubstantial cloud of parts. And then Robotnik was just sitting there on a chair far too small for his bulk, two control sticks that controlled nothing sitting all alone in his hands.
"Who's a god now?" Sonic yelled.
Robotnik didn't have any augmentations, but the run he made for the hangar door on those thick limbs was impressive. Sonic started after him, planting his right hand on the floor and it wasn't there and he stumbled dizzily.
Just a little more, he begged the nanties. Find something—
They found something. His body turned molten.
With each step the flailing human got bigger, bigger, until Sonic flipped and went quills first into the human's back, the pair of them tumbling down into the floor, the human beneath.
The human popped like grape when you squeeze it. Like a bad dream when you wake up.
Sonic lay there, shivering intermittently, feeling his quills move in the mess as he breathed.
He rolled up, skin sticking to his back—not his skin—looked up to the unseen sky at the top of the shaft.
I did it.
"I did it," he croaked. And then screamed,"SALLY! WE DID IT!" They had made it. They were free. He wanted to hug Sally, anybody. Even the dull eyed fox shuffling toward the dead tyrant. "We did it," Sonic said to him.
The fox swung the butt of his rifle into Sonic's face. Sonic stumbled backward, tried to block the next swing, but his missing right arm did nothing to stop it from crunching hard into his nose, knocking him down to his back.
Please? Sonic asked the nanites.
Fuck you, they said. You treat us like shit.
The seizure began in earnest.
Thin as bones, writhing under the constant swings from the fox zombies, the two fox zombies now. But they couldn't beat the damage his body was doing to itself. He still tried to roll away from them, but his body kept jerking his field of vision back and forth, until the butt of a rifle filled it, and there was a crunch, and there was no field of vision. Just pain. Something like pain, but not pain, because pain was in just one place, not everywhere—
And then he couldn't feel anything, his body gone, the blows that were still raining down on him gone, hidden somewhere else as they beat him apart. Only the ghost of his body remembered by his own brain.
The ghost blossomed.
The memories flooded him, overfilled him with sensations. Wind in green leaves. The warmth of a blue sky. The smell of wet dirt. A sunflower yellow eye above white fur. The sting of chili and the tang of fat. The musk of unwashed squirrel.
I saved it, but it was going to end anyway. He heard laughter, a man's free, deep laughter like something from an old, forgotten dream, a buzzing in his ears like a mechanical warning tone, Warning, a woman's voice, soft but cruelly insistent. Death imminent.
Is that it? Sonic clung to the memory of fur against his bare palms, her scent, knowing that of course that was it. She would go on without him and this would end. Is that enough? Lips touching lips, feet pounding the ground, wind pulling quills. Was that enough?
More laughter, sharper and brighter, cruel and kind and familiar. Hedgehog, Sonic said and heard himself say, you'd better hope it was enough, because
Kain Blackwood 2012