(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.)
Near Range Comet Belt, 12 Nivose 3757
Once again, things were moving fast. Tails and his wingmen—their interceptors were not designed for atmospheric flight, and had struts for maneuvering thrusters rather than wings, but the name persisted—were on a wide defensive patrol, at a relative velocity to the fleet of five kilometers per second.
But to the naked eye, it didn't look like anything was moving at all. NRCBO 13741, a lopsided 160 kilometer ball of methane and water ice, was a smudge of the same gray as the hairs that were beginning to show on Tails's snout, a smudge that had moved about a centimeter in the shockglass of the Tornado's cockpit in fifteen minutes of continuous flight. At fifty astronomical units, the sun was just another jewel in the starfield, a little brighter than most, a little less intense than some. Without checking the maps or performing parallax observations the only thing that gave it away was an invisible but loud little planet, chattering and squealing away in a close, warm orbit around it.
Orient parabolic reflector-antennae to it and the EM spectrum was positively lousy with signal: ionosphere-distorted digital video files, mostly islander trans-oceanic broadcasts of the latest news from the continent; every variety of frightened, crazed audio from refugees stuck in terrestrial orbit, sent out in weak signals from oxygen-depleted craft, prophesying the end and demanding devotion to the gods, begging for a lift to the already-deserted asteroid shipyard. But most frequent were bursts of machine code.
Anticipating this, Tails had ensured that every communications system in the fleet was heavily isolated from intrafleet systems, every arriving message routed through several aggressive firewalls, frequently updated by computer scientists and logicians from Fortune and South Island, that ensured most of the incoming signals were never seen by sentient eyes or even a particularly smart computer. Particularly the machine code. Sometimes, when he was feeling particularly angry, or nervous, or frustrated, Tails would extract a portion of the binary signal and examine it with his naked eye.
There was no safe way to be sure, of course, but Tails was confident that whatever had grown out of Lupe was seeding the far reaches of the solar system with aggressive malcode, looking for them.
In the midst of this garbage the prearranged prefixes of Sally's transmissions would hit their antennas like bottles tumbling in on a beach. The eight hour light delay meant that even as Tails read them, he was already worrying that the information was outdated. That the world was already gone.
The Empire had disintegrated without a shot. For decades the war over Sally and Tails's asteroid shipyards had been fought with words, subterfuge, subliminal conditioning. Lupe had kept to the ground, focused on her neighbors and Amanda, holding her thoughts deep in caverns beneath the desert. It was only when the first of the generation-ships had broke orbit to trek to the guarded rendezvous point on the far fringes of the solar system, beyond the reach of the Empire's terrestrial monitoring, that it realized it had underestimated them. The old wolf Robian had strode into the throne room of the Egg and delivered an ultimatum, demanding that Amanda order a stop to the construction and burn the shipyards, Fortune and Winstone at the first sign of disobedience.
Amanda had broken the wolf's body, crushed its braincase. Deep beneath the desert, what Lupe had become shed both the flesh in which it had germinated and the pretense of obedience.
Sally notified the fleet of each subsequent disaster. It has control of the continent east of Robotropolis, all the way to Boulder Bay. It may have developed an optic nerve hack that can enslave unaugmented mobians at a glance. It has a machine that burns flesh to steel at the molecular level, making true robots of mobians and humans.
It's building a fleet of tiny vessels in the desert, and they probably carry nuclear city-busters.
Two days ago, when a damaged vessel in high orbit had finally managed to fire its engines and put on thrust to the asteroid shipyards, it had blown the craft from the sky with a surface-to-orbit railgun. But there was no news of launches directed outward along the elliptic, and Tails's patrols had yet to locate any drones or other unfriendly craft in their near vicinity.
When his patrol was ended, he and his team returned to the fleet, leaving their ships in the control of the inorganic portions of their minds as the massive delta-vee to match the fleet's relative velocity starved their brains of oxygen. Tails's organic mind regained consciousness just in time to guide the Tornado away from Rotor's massive fusion rockets, down beneath its hull. Each of the fleet's five vessels were modeled in part on the Egg, but slightly more tapered to be more aerodynamic, designed to take the pressure that the interstellar near-vacuum would begin to inflict on the hull at relativistic velocities. Inside each of the five ships were farms for plants that had not existed prior to the construction of the ships, algal oxygen plants, libraries genetic and otherwise, workshops, laboratories, and over fifty thousand mobians and humans. Only about a tenth of those were augmented by Charles Hedgehog's nanites, but another five percent were currently in augmentation or recovery from the process; finishing the entire population would take years.
Tails was about to hail fleet traffic control and request permission to dock with Renee, when Sally's prefix reached the Tornado's antenna. He pulled up the text file in his mind's eye, instinctively pushing the controls back to his subconscious autopilot.
Eight hours ago and fifty astronomical units away, the city-busters were in the air.
Tails knew the nightmare, because it was dictated by strategy and physics. Sally and Amanda's kinetic-kill drones and gamma-ray lasers were—had been—screaming up from the crust and down from orbit, boiling the atmosphere. The machine was bursting its warheads in the air to soften the Empire's robots with EMPs, detonating them in the ocean trenches to trigger earthquakes beneath the human seabases, deluge their cities in tsunamis that couldn't be stopped by any possible technology. The energies were far too massive and terrible to pretend that warriors, bravery, fierceness were of any use.
Seconds later fleet control was hailing Tails, relaying the first message, but he was already receiving a second, very short.
Don't wait, Sally said—had said. Go now.
It would take weeks before they were travelling fast enough to kill the primary fusion rockets and engage the ramjet engines. If people survived, the fleet might still be able to return and rescue them before the long-abused planet's life-support gave out.
But it was with a terrible, final feeling that Tails ordered Bunnie to cut its lines to the water-mines on what was left of NRCBO 32471. He requested fleet control's permission, immediately given, to reroute and dock with the flagship.
Four light-years from their home system to Epsilon Vidavin, Tails thought, the insanity of a phrase like home system and the comprehensibility of the distance of four light-years telling him that for all the difference between them and the monstrosity burning their planet behind them, they themselves weren't truly human or mobian, not anymore. They were living in a totally artificial environment, and over fifty years there was no telling what they would do to it, and to themselves. And then, at Epsilon Vidavin, and then the next system, the next . . . .
Realizing he was growing dizzy, the fox carefully reset his horizon even with that of Antoine and the flagship, plotted his approach path to the docking bay.
There was one thing he could be reasonably sure of: nothing could exceed the speed of light. Whatever was on these ships, whatever followed them, as long as they kept moving, they could be free.
Free of anything but each other, Tails thought as the docking bay's mag-clamps seized the Tornado's struts and pulled him into position on the landing deck. And themselves.
The thrusters flared to life, building to one terrestrial gravity. At the head of the fleet, Sonic slowly began to put on speed.
Kain Blackwood 2012
Acknowledgements are in order.
This book would not have been written without a lot of help and a lot of inspiring fiction, fan and otherwise. Most important were Wingless Rain (ffnet) and Kain Blackwood (Fans United for Sonic SatAM), both of whom encouraged me early on, read drafts and provided invaluable advice. Duringserial publication, each was credited with review of individual chapters; I cannot stress enough the importance of their work to the plot and prose.
Also invaluable were influences from the Sonic the Hedgehog "darkfic" writers of the 00s on and other websites, including among their most significant writers Wingless Rain, Stoobing/Sean Catlett, Steven Zacharus and cornwallace. In particular Sean Catlett's Sonic: Sketchy was a major influence on the final portions of the novel, and Catlett and Stephen Zacharus's joint work Reflections was a key inspiration for Tails's treatment at the hands of Lady Renee. That's a nice way ofsaying I ripped them off. Both stories are very worthy of a read, if you can find them. I'm pretty sure Reflections is on ffnet.
I would also like to thank my regular reviewers. During serial publication, feedback from the community was greatly inspiring.
Finally, of course, a posthumous thank-you to Ben Hurst, who wrote the critical episodes of the Saturday morning Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon show and turned a great platformer into an interesting idea for stories. And, you know, ruined the platforming franchise in the process, but that's really more Sega's fault.
Led Zeppelin, "Immigrant Song"
We come from the land of the ice and snow from the midnight sun where the hot springs flow
Hammer of the gods
Will drive our ships to new lands
To fight the horde, singing and crying
Valhalla, I am coming
Over sea with threshing oar
Our only goal will be the Western shore
We come from the land of the ice and snow from the midnight sun where the hot springs flow
How soft your fields so green
Can whisper tales of gore
Of how we come in times of war
We are your overlords
Over sea with threshing oar
Our only goal will be the Western shore
So now you'd better stop
And rebuild all your ruins
For peace and trust can win the day
Despite of all your losing