All right, I've been holding off long enough. It's time to answer some questions that I'm sure some of my readers are wondering about. The story is nearing its climax, and only the future can tell what will come of it.

Chapter 10 – One in a Million

Tails looked up from his console when the order to fire was given to see if everyone else on the bridge had heard. The looks on their faces left no doubt in his mind. Together, they looked out the right side of the viewscreen at the flagship to see what would happen. They never saw what the generator looked like; either it was so small they failed to notice it, or it was camouflaged in some way. Whatever the reason, they were unaware that it had activated until they began to experience its effects.

The first hint came from Cosmo. "Hey, something's wrong with the radar. A lot of debris off in the distance just disappeared."

Tails hurried over to look. "Are they jamming us?"

She shook her head. "I don't think so. It doesn't look like normal interference, and anyway it's coming from the other direction." She pulled up a three-dimensional onscreen model of the surrounding area. The flagship appeared on one side as a large point of light, and the Terroran fleet was shone as a crescent-shaped series of smaller points. "See this? There's debris everywhere except right in this spot." She pointed. Nothing was clear at first, but Tails soon saw what she meant. The surrounding space was peppered with uncounted pieces of metal, except for a large cone of emptiness that began directly behind the armada and extended all the way out to the edge of the map.

Amy had appeared behind Cosmo and was looking over her shoulder. "Now that's weird. It's almost like something's absorbing the radar waves."

Tails wasn't convinced. "But if something is creating a radar shadow, it ought to be right at the tip of that cone," he said, pointing, "but there's nothing the-" As he spoke, he turned to look out the left side of the viewscreen, and stopped in mid-sentence. While they had been talking, something had happened without their notice. Behind the fleet, focused as the pilots were on the flagship, something had formed in space. It was a sight that no known person had ever seen with their own eyes, a sight that terrified anyone who knew what they were seeing. No one knew exactly how they worked, but they had all heard of them: gigantic rifts in space that consumed everything they came into contact with, even light. The scientific community had a number of names for them, but to most people, they were called black holes.

As soon as Tails spotted it, he bolted up out of his seat and ran to the left side of the bridge to get a better view. He was soon joined by the rest of the crew. All of them stared, wide-eyed, at the spectacle before them. The black hole looked exactly as one might have pictured it: as if a gigantic, circular slice had been carved out of the starry background. Around it, the sky was weirdly distorted, as if they were looking at it through an oddly-shaped lens. All around them, pieces of rubble were being drawn toward the hole, and the Terroran fleet, still unaware of the situation, was being pulled in with it.

Sonic was the first to get his voice back. "Tails," he began with understandable nervousness, "you know about this stuff. What's the plan?"

"We have to get out of here, right now," he breathed. After a few more seconds of staring at the black hole, he came fully to his senses and dashed back to his console. As the rest followed suit, he seized the Typhoon's controls, turning the ship's nose out into space. The engines fired, propelling the starship away at full speed. As they accelerated, Tails handed off control to Chris and re-open the comm. link to the Sargasso.

"Admiral, we need to retreat right now!" the fox told Admiral Kairos before he had a chance to speak. "There's a black hole behind us!"

"What are you talking – whoa!" he shouted, looking to his right in surprise. He grabbed a microphone from somewhere below the screen and spoke into it. "All ships retreat and regroup! We are under attack, I repeat, we are under attack!" The engines of every ship in the armada ignited, sending the fleet surging forward after the Typhoon. At first, it seemed as though they would make it. Then they began to lose speed.

"What's going on? Why are we slowing down?" Tails wondered aloud, looking around at the many gauges and readings on his console.

"Something's up with the hole," Amy answered. "We're getting farther away, but the gravity readings just keep getting stronger."

"The radar shadow is increasing in size," Cosmo spoke up. "Tails, I think the black hole is getting bigger!"

Tails' logical side rebelled. "But that's not possible! A black hole can only gain mass by drawing in other objects. There's nothing nearby that could cause that much of an increase in so short a time." Even as he said it, he realized what he had wrong. Black holes also shouldn't be able to pop up as quickly as this one had. The only solution was that this was not a black hole at all, but rather something else that acted like one. And that meant…

"The Metarex are controlling it," he finished out loud. The rest of them looked at him, uncomprehending. "This must be the graviton generator," he explained. He realized the implications of what he had just said, and smacked himself in the forehead. "Of course! The graviton generator! It works by producing gravitons – particles of gravitational force! This is the weapon they were talking about!"

"Wait, slow down," Sonic interrupted. "You're saying the Metarex made that!?"

"That would explain why the force isn't decreasing as we get farther away," Amy pointed out. "If it's generating the force artificially instead of using a mass to do it, it might not follow the normal laws of gravity."

At that moment, the generator redoubled its efforts to tow them in. The Typhoon stalled out, its engine power equal to the attractive force. "We can't keep this up for long," Chris informed them. "We're already running at almost full impulse power, and with one of our engines damaged, we could burn out at any time."

"Just as long as it holds out longer than that generator's power supply," Tails replied. They waited, hanging motionless in space with the rest of the armada, hoping they could hold out long enough to survive this. It was then that the Metarex captain spoke again.

"What's wrong? Why aren't they being pulled in?" "The generator is running at full capacity. Our enemies are just barely able to equal its pull at this distance. We, however, have a much greater mass, and are facing the wrong way to counteract the pull." "Wait, you mean we're being drawn in?" "As I informed you, the target you chose was too close to allow for safe…" "Enough! As long as the enemy is unable to give chase, our mission can be carried out. Deploy the transport." "Acknowledged, transmitting your orders to launch bay 7…"

From far away, the crew of the Typhoon saw something emerge from behind the Metarex flagship. Tails realized what it was with a jolt. "No, no, no, no!" he shouted, more to himself than anyone else. "Two hours of fighting and that Planet Egg's about to fly away right in front of our faces!" He started hitting keys, bringing up a sight for the frontal laser cannons. Sonic put his hand on the young fox's arm.

"Tails, you can't hit that thing from here!" he told him forcefully. "It's way out of range, there's no way…" He didn't have to say more; his words had hit home. Tails took his hand off the trigger and lowered it to his side, defeated.

"We can't just give up!" said a voice from their left. They turned to see that it was Cream, speaking for the first time in over an hour. She was looking defiantly across at them, her Chao companion, Cheese, hovering by her shoulder and mimicking her expression. "They need that Planet Egg to bring their world back to life. We have to at least try to hit it."

"Cream," Amy began carefully, "Sonic's right. That ship's more than twice the distance you can expect to hit it from. It would be a one-in-a-million shot."

"It's better than nothing," she replied. Turning back to her console, she brought up the same laser cannon controls Tails had just seconds ago. She didn't normally operate the Typhoon's weaponry – she didn't like to bring harm to anyone, even the Metarex – but she knew how it was done. There was no one on that transport, just a Planet Egg in need of saving. She would feel no regrets about shooting it down. She looked intently at the screen, carefully lining up the targeting crosshair. Even at maximum zoom, the transport was barely more than a gold speck against the background, and the laser cannons, powerful as they were, were notoriously imprecise.

When at last the cannons were lined up, Cream pressed the trigger two times in quick succession. Two blasts were launched at the transport, one slightly behind the other. The first passed just to the left of the target, causing it to veer sharply to the right. This reaction was its undoing; it ended up swerving straight into the path of the second blast. The tiny craft disappeared into the yellow beam. At first, no one was sure what had happened. The light of the laser faded, and for a moment everything was dark.

Then a white glow flared where the transport had been. A cheer came through the fleet comm. channel as the pilots realized what had happened: the Planet Egg had been freed. Still shining with a brilliant, blue-tinged radiance, the crystal streaked off into the distance, heading back to its old planet. Admiral Kairos's face appeared on the main viewer.

"Captain Prower, you've just saved the life of everyone on our planet. The people of Terrora owe you their lives."

"Don't thank me," Tails replied modestly. "I was all set to give up because it was so far out of our range. It was my weapons officer who took the shot."

"Well, in that case, I commend him for his determination and his extraordinary sharpshooting skills."

Tails grinned inwardly at the admiral's words. He exchanged a glance with Cream, and realized what she planned to do. He remained silent as the young rabbit stood, garnering the admiral's full attention. "Thank you for your compliments," she replied with the utmost politeness. Amy and Cosmo both stifled chuckles; Sonic's was less skillfully concealed, making him sound as if he had just come close to choking on something.

Admiral Kairos raised an eyebrow at this. "Ah… it seems I was a little quick to judge. My apologies, young lady," he said respectfully.

"Warning. Foreign hack signal detected," said a mechanical voice on the bridge of the Metarex flagship. "Analyzing… signal is programmed to transmit our communications to an outside source. Initiating countermeasures…"

"How could this happen!?" the captain shouted furiously, banging his fist on his console. "How could they have possibly hit it from that range!? They're over three miles away!"

"It was a turn of good luck for them, something they could not normally have accomplished." The second speaker was his science officer, an ordinary Metarex infantry member with red-orange armor and a triangular, insectoid head.

"Inform Commander Red Pine that the mission has failed, and shut off the graviton generator."

There was a pause while the first lieutenant, another, blue-gray infantry member, worked its console with mechanical efficiency. After a moment, it looked up. "Error. System malfunction. I am unable to deactivate the generator."

"You what?" the captain asked, his voice dangerously slow.

"I am unable to…" it began.

"I heard what you said!" he roared, cutting it off. "What's the problem?"

"Unknown."

"Well, can we escape from the gravitational field?"

"Unlikely. In the time it would take to achieve the proper angle for escape, the ship would be drawn in past its capacity for power."

The captain banged his console again. "I can't believe this! They destroyed our fleet, they broke through our supposedly invulnerable defenses, and now they've maneuvered us into destroying ourselves!" there was a second pause. "Accelerate to full impulse speed."

"Acknowledged, full impulse," the drone replied. "If I may ask, what are your intentions?"

The captain laughed loudly, revealing a hint of madness. "If we can't escape, we might as well take as many as we can with us."

Neither Tails nor anyone else noticed that the feed from the Metarex fleet had been cut, and as a result they heard nothing of the conversation that had just occurred. No sound traveled in space, so they did not hear the gargantuan flagship's engines fire, nor have reason to look around it accelerated toward the Terroran armada. It was only when the dreadnought was almost upon them that anyone noticed it. The alarmed pilot called out to the rest of the fleet, but by then it was too late. There was no time to get out of the way, only to engage their shields in an attempt to protect their ships.

The flagship crashed into the center of the armada, scattering the crimson ships in every direction. The Typhoon was among those that were struck head-on. The dreadnought pushed the smaller starship along for several seconds, sending multiple waves of concussive force through the semitransparent blue shield. The power drain was enormous. When the Typhoon finally slid off of the 'face' of its attacker, the larger ship cruised right on past, sending the smaller one ricocheting off of an armor plate and into space. The impact threw everyone to the floor.

"What was that!?" said a voice from Tails' console. It was Knuckles down in the generator room, apparently shouting into the comm. panel. "Did we hit something?"

"Something hit us," Tails replied, struggling back into his seat. "The Metarex flagship just rammed the entire fleet."

"Why would it do that?" Knuckles wondered. "It's heading right into a black hole, isn't it?"

"Yes, but more importantly, so are we," Tails answered, taking control of the Typhoon. He used the turning jets to slow the ship's rapid rotation, and as soon as he could, fired the main engines. In his haste, he forgot the damage to one of them. This, combined with the strain of the sudden acceleration, was too much for the single undamaged engine. With a cough and a small explosion, it blew out, and the Typhoon began to lose momentum, moving inexorably closer to the pitch-black mass behind it.