(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.)

Security District, 7 Floreal 3230

Tails had been a little frustrated when Sally told him. "But I can keep you safe, too!"

"I know," Sally had replied.

"And I'm getting really good aim. Sonic taught me how to use a—"

"Tails." Sally put her hand on his shoulder and looked at him with her serious face, which he hated, because Tails couldn't help feeling serious when she made it. "What you'll be doing is, in a lot of ways, the most important part of the mission. We know who we'll find, but we don't know precisely what we'll find to prove the existence of the roboticizer. We can't take heavy equipment out of there—"

He sighed, shuffling his sneakers. "Yeah, I know."

"—so we need to take what we can find that's light, and you're the best mobian for the job."

"Oh yeah?" He met her eyes. "Why's that?"

Her serious face did not falter: "You're fast—"

He harrumphed, but did not correct her. He was fast, kind of.

"—you understand technical stuff—"

Rotor's better, he thought, but of course Rotor wasn't very fast.

"—and," Sally finished, hesitating, "you . . . present a . . . minimal target profile."

Tails wore his own best serious face, refusing to look away from her: "I'm short?"

When Rotor whispered "okay go" and smacked Tails on his rump, resolving any doubts the fox had about leaping through the ragged hole in the hospital floor into a space where, seconds ago, four swatbots had been intermittently pumping intercrossed trajectories of autocannon antipersonnel rounds, Tails wished he were about a meter shorter. It seemed like a long drop, every moment waiting to pass between a stray round and its target, so the bullet would explode into the bulky black flak vest Sally had made him wear and sink shrapnel into him—that is, if he was lucky enough not to catch the bullet in one of his limbs. A fifty-caliber autocannon round would blast any of his limbs or tails clean off.

He wished he hadn't read so much about guns while he practiced with Sonic.

But he landed intact and low, his two tails aloft behind him to counterbalance the slight weight of his body and the more substantial weight of the jacket. He looked around the room. Sally was wrestling with Amanda Skunkbot; Sonic was fighting with two of the bots to his right. Lots of furniture (a little black table, a black armchair, a desk) had been shoved quickly to the wall, before they blew through the floor, it looked like. In front of him, an overturned couch; behind it a sink and the roboticizer tank and other things.

Nowhere a computer tower.

The benefit of going in late was that everyone else would already be distracted. Even the standard swatbot targeting programs were interlinked, concentrating fire and staying with their initial target. By this point they were probably trying to shoot at either Bunnie or Sonic, leaving Tails free to skirt around the periphery and pick up movable evidence of the roboticizer.

Why had they just assumed there would be any?

He scampered low, the little drawstring bag he'd been given dangling so lightly on his shoulder he kept worrying it wasn't there, putting his palms to the floor frequently enough he might be considered on all fours, and threw himself behind an overturned little table. He glanced at the swatbot in front of him and flinched when it half-blinded him with white flames of autocannon propellant, shooting across the room. Not at him, yet. He felt around, trying to look for something, a book, something. Black cup—was everything in here black? Some kind of black plastic tray. Nothing.

Tails closed his eyes. Go. Swatbot targeting programs are keyed to motion. Go. It has perfect peripheral vision and software that processes images from eight millimeter super-wide angle lenses.

Go move you're a freedom fighter GO

He almost got to his feet but wound up somehow running on his hands and knees. He opened his eyes and he was almost heading straight into the swat's knees, go right! He went right and Robotnik's nephew was right there, and Tails and somersaulted like Sonic. The bulky vest bunched up against his chin and he bit his tongue hard and he landed upside down against the far wall, between a cold steel washtub and a cold steel desk. There was blood in his mouth and there were tears running up out of his eyes. Kolensky didn't turn from where he hunkered behind the couch—how had he not seen him?—and above him, projecting over the lip of the desk, was a red hardcover book. Tails rolled silently to his feet, not quickly enough, and reached up a gloved hand to grab it. Leafing, rapidly, it was a handwritten book, lots of short numbers, all about the same size. It couldn't be a cipher; there wasn't enough information in the digits. It was nothing.

Beside him, under the desk, was a computer tower, a little power button on the front glowing green.

Tails wormed around the desk legs, swallowing a big mouthful of warm spit tangy with copper, and nudged the tower panel away from the wall. The black plastic grunted on the floor and he froze, pressing himself to the wall and Kolensky heard him and yelled at him—but no, he wasn't looking. Tails felt on the back—where were the thumbscrews? He pressed his snout up against the warm box, squinting as a heat fan blew dust in his face. No thumbscrews. No snaps. No steel bolts? Everything was black. Where did they get this black stuff? He grabbed at the rim of the case to just pry it off, but he couldn't get any purchase with his gloves on—why had he left them on?

Bodies tumbled toward him and he yelped and crawled back toward the overturned table and remembered the book and went back and grabbed it and put it in the bag and remembered it was useless and turned to crawl back and looked right into Snively's eyes as his lips moved.

"KILL THE FOX."

For no good reason Tails found himself scampering back along the path he had taken, avoiding the middle of the room, putting himself right between two of the bots that would shortly be shooting him. He glanced down, remembering at least not to trip over the cup, or the tray.

Which had a slowly blinking green light on the side of it.

Because it was a lapcomp.

Rotor watched with horror as Bunnie and Sonic squared off with Amanda.

It was like a movie or a comic book. Super heroes. When a bullet came at Sonic, he dodged—almost. When one of Bunnie's heel-kicks missed, the floor was dented. And Amanda just took everything they threw at her, Bunnie never quite catching up, still dazed by whatever Snively had said to her, Sonic losing more and more flesh and fluid, face betraying more and more exhaustion. And Rotor couldn't draw a bead on any one of them without blasting shot into the other two.

At the far end of the hall Reynard started shooting. Cops moving in on their position. They need to scratch the mission. They needed to get out of there.

"Get me out of here!" Tails screamed. He was running, awkwardly circumventing the mayhem in the middle of the room, his left arm locked around his bag and some kind of black plastic thing. The swatbots tried to track him, one with no line of sight through Amanda, the other—

Rotor rolled and almost fell into the gaping pit as he wrenched his shotgun around under the ceiling and went full auto on the bot's head. It flinched, tried to reaim, tried to reaim as Tails looked up, tensing his legs and raising his tails—

(big breath)

—and leapt almost straight up, toes pointed, tails pressed down against his legs, the fingers of his right hand straining so hard they were almost ready to pop out of his hand and carry the glove into orbit. It was an incredible jump that carried him almost within almost two decimeters of the tall basement ceiling. Lupe shot her arm down and the two grabbed each other at the wrist, Tails screaming as his shoulder was wrenched and he heard both swatbots open fire—

—on Rotor, fuck! The walrus flopped away from the pit, eyes closed, opened them to see the wolf deposit the fox safely on the ground, holding on to that little plastic tray as though all their lives depended on it.

"Bunnie!" Rotor bellowed. "Get out of there!"

Getting the last people out had always been the most questionable part of the plan.

Sonic tried it first. He had a gun full of ammo left to him and when he got about a meter away from Amanda in the dance, just far enough so that her move had to be to block shots or turtle rather than reach out and grab his gun arm, he unloaded. Amanda turtled; Bunnie leapt at the couch and pulled Sally off of Snively. Sonic kept Amanda pinned low until—

Oh, fuck, he realized with an ache in his chest and his side and his left hand and his legs and his face: he'd forgotten about those last two swats, hadn't he?

Raw backflipping away from the shell impacts in the floor, feeling the shock and agony in every inch of his left side from fingers to toe, one and two flips and he was out of space and roared, firing at the face of the one on the left, trying to get the lenses, and Bunnie was back in the middle of the room, her little right arm around Sally's middle. "Sugarhog!"

Sonic ran forward, put his right hand in her left, and screamed in pain as she literally threw him out of the basement. He landed above, outside the ragged hole, as Amanda dove for her lost pistol. Just Sally and Bunnie were left and she was going to shoot them; she lined her sights as tight as she could on the rabbit's head.

Priority override, Bunnie thought to the skunk. Commander's hurt.

Before Amanda could fight through the message, the floor shook as the rabbit fired her jump-bolts. Amanda fired after them, one miss into the distant first floor ceiling, another miss into the floor—

And they were all gone.

SCA001 screamed. She screamed at herself, hooking her fingers inside the armor of her cheeks and pulling, pain filling her head as the anchors in the armor transferred the force to her skull. Her taccomp said WARNING WARNING WARNING. She kept pulling. Criminals had destroyed her home. They had damaged her bots, her own bots! Two of her own bots so damaged they could not think without repairs so expensive that Commander might insist that they be scrapped! So many components ruined, so much hurt and failure! All because she did not want to hurt Sally. Because she could not keep her secure two years ago. Because she did not listen to Commander—

Commander was injured. She leapt over the couch and knelt next to him. He was on his right side, slowly curling into the fetal position. He had severe contusions on the left side of his head and on both wrists, which were likely broken. His hand was still wrapped about his nine millimeter automatic, lying on the tile before him, his thumb awkwardly under the triggerguard, the barrel pointed the wrong way.

At his face.

Commander's arm shook and the gun scraped short, parallel white lines in the tile glazing. His thumb tried to pull on the trigger, but with the bone damage in his wrist he could not generate enough friction with the smooth floor to fire the weapon.

"Commander," SCA001 said. Her mouth worked, trying to find words. "Orders please," she requested.

The human whined. Because he was small it was very high-pitched. A memory from deep in her organic brain said it sounded like a repenomamus pup

(The repen pups are very cute. They have no fur. They squirm in the basket and make sounds, high and soft. The sounds are sweet like chocolate milk. The push against the big repen mother's belly. She lies on her side, curled around the outside of the basket. Mandy likes them, but Mom says that they cannot keep them.)

Commander's cry sharpened to a point and showed his teeth. Bones clicked and he slowly edged the pistol closer to his face. "Commander," SCA001 repeated. She was frozen, as though Commander had said her special words, but he hadn't. He nudged the barrel with his nose, sliding it toward his eye. His thumb tightened again and his hand tried to press the gun into the ground.

A pair of bones clicked. They crunched. Commander screamed.

Amanda grabbed the gun, slipping her pinky behind the hammer to prevent it from drawing back. "No!" she barked. "This is psyops." Psyops was when the enemy tried to get soldiers to take undesirable actions by hurting morale, or poisoning command lines with false information or orders. Commander was more vulnerable than her. He did not have a taccomp. She plucked his fingers from around the metal like creeper roots from cracks in a boulder. The overturned coffee table shattered at a kick, and the wood immobilized Commander's wrists and hands when tied with strips of leather from the couch.

Listening to the air, the gun battle had moved away. Listening to the security band, police and hospital guards were converging on Accident & Emergency. Amanda knelt and put her soft mouth to Commander's ear. "Tell me a safe place. I will take us."

There was no sound behind his lips, but she could read them, in case her auditory receptors were damaged. You can't. You're seen. I'm done.

"I will. I will not be seen. It will be a black op."

Amanda crossed Commander's arms in his lap, picked him up and carried him to the elevator.

Cat dropped to his knees and pressed his sallow fur to the wall to his right about a meter before the hallway opened up into A&E's receiving room, checking the action on his Poiccard. The rain was still coming down against the glass, but had slackened off, no longer hammering, offering a touch of ashen sun.

To Sally, the automatic doors directly across the wide-open room looked like something from ten years ago, a world away, even as Lupe Almatrican backed out through them after Reynard, joining the rest of Sally's troops at the getaway point. The princess grabbed Tails by the scruff of his bulletproof vest and pressed him to the wall, too. His arms were wrapped tight around his black bag of treasure; otherwise, he was a crying, useless wreck. She pushed herself against him, giving cover, and leveled her pistol back down the long wide hall to General Admittance, tracking the distant moving bodies that crossed the lane of fire, waiting for the one that sprouted a gun. At the opening of the secondary hallway she had just left, Rotor had installed himself against the corner, shotgun parallel to the floor; behind him, Sonic slumped, breathing hard, both his arms useless and his guns gone, one lost, one given to Sally. But he was still able to run.

Behind the counter halfway across A&E receiving Bunnie was hunkered down; she glanced in the direction of A&E's treatment stations, to Sally's right, and jerked her head back from a bullet in the drywall of the counter, flattening her ears so hard it looked as though someone had yanked them with wires. Cat turned back to Sally. Pulled down the flesh underneath one eye—he had seen—a two-finger V—two hostiles—and pointed to the right, away from the exit and windows, toward the treatment stations. Sally nodded, raising Sonic's pistol beside her head.

Cat fired his first burst of three shots before he had properly aimed his rifle around the wall, to scare the cops. In a moment he bellowed "CROSS!" and Sally dragged Tails into the lobby. After about five feet Tails caught up with her idea and started running alongside her, freezing and stumbling when he glanced to the right and saw a pair of pistol-armed guards crouching behind a pair of structural pillars. Before she reached cover Sally was already handing him off to Bunnie, who came out of cover with her eyes fixed on the fox's tear-streaked face. She picked him up, shouted something to him about a sugar-fox and sprinted him to the van so quickly the raindrops' paths seemed to curl in their wake.

Sally had tried to teach herself to count bullets, and she had reached around eighteen, but thought she had missed a few, when she rolled behind the curve of the abandoned reception counter, braced her feet, stood up and screamed "CROSS!" She emptied her pistol at the guards, a pair of brown-furred mutts. They could tell the difference between automatic and semi-automatic fire and began cautiously aiming, so Sally added "RUN!"

Cat did not need to be told; he wasn't a natural fighter like Sonic, but he was learning to make up for it with absolute devotion to procedure and plan. When his cover-team called cross, he ran at his highest practical speed toward the next cover station, because statistically that was what was likely to keep the most people alive. If this meant he sometimes dived at a gunshot, which he did, leaping towards a sudden impact crater in the ground before him, then he was just going to hope that this war stopped before the law of large numbers took effect.

Two to go, Sally thought, as Cat commando-wormed beside her. She slid to the floor, dropped Sonic's empty gun, and plastered herself flat atop the lynx as outside, in the rain, the rest of her team's automatics simultaneously burst to life. Sally knew what that meant: the first major wave of police opposition responding to the alarms. According to her mission plan, they were already in the vans and pulling onto their escape route now.

That was the part of the plan that accounted for why they didn't all get shot to death.

"Give it!" Sally barked at Cat, ripping his rifle out of his hands. On instinct he tried to take his gun back and she planted her elbow in his chest, knocking him at the door. "Get out!" she screamed, ejecting the live shell from the chamber and spinning on her hip, leveling the gun at the hallway to general admission.

Rotor had flattened his blubber against the wall, the drum of his combat shotgun level with his head. He was about to lean around the corner and start firing on the positions he'd seen Sally and Cat firing on when they did their cross.

Which positions the guards had advanced from as soon as Sally's already meager covering fire had ended—right on schedule, eight shots. They were creeping up the wall toward Rotor, a little less than two meters away, pressed to the wall and ready to pound semiauto fire into anything that crossed the plane of their vision. Rotor was almost guaranteed to get shot in the face.

Beside him on the right, Sonic grimaced as he summoned all his strength, darting around the walrus's hip, almost horizontal, a kinetic-kill torpedo. The guards wouldn't track him at his speed, but there were starbursts from far down the hall behind him—not quite far enough to be potshots. There was maybe a ten percent chance that he would catch a bullet and go down before reaching the parking lot.

That was what Sally would work out from her brief glance at the scene over the next three days, and then the five years after that.

At the time, Sally didn't think. She screamed "SONIC," slammed the stock of Cat's rifle to her shoulder and kept her shots down the hallway and high, to keep clear of Sonic's quills. When she felt the blastwave of his passage ruffle her fur she swung the rifle to the left. Rotor fell back to the floor, landing like a sack of jello. Sally noticed the red hole in his shirt as the butt of his combat shotgun hit the floor and sprayed shot wildly at the A&E stations.

Sally opened fire right as the guard in front shot Rotor in the head.

Three-round controlled bursts. One struck the dog in the neck, but he stayed up. She fired again, emptying the clip. One of the two bullets shattered his skull, while the second guard returned fire at her, missing wide. Sonic grabbed her under her arms and pulled, yelling "come on!" But she couldn't hear, with all the gunfire and her boots scraping on the ground and—

She realized that she was screaming.

Kain Blackwood 2009