A/N – The art that inspired this segment can be found at w w w dot satamsonic dot com/fanart/cionex/MechaBunnie dot jpg Although obviously you'll have to bring each w into line and replace 'dot' with a full stop.
2. Seconds Too Late
They were sat in the lee of a storage silo and Sally was wearing her Not Happy face.
"I'm not happy about this," she said needlessly.
Bunnie and Sonic looked at her with pleading eyes – or at least Sonic did. Bunnie just beeped softly, twinkling diodes the only indication she was online.
"Sal, we had two options, and we've blown one of 'em. It's either this or heading back to Knothole with our cute little tails between our legs," said Sonic.
Sally's brow was knitted so tight there was practically a sweater on her forehead. "It's too dangerous." Both of them had known her long enough to know that she had eight different ways of saying that sentence. This time was Version Six: Explanation to a Slow Kit.
Sonic parried with, "Moi? I'm Danger's worst nightmare! I tweak the nose of Danger. I give Danger a wedgie. No, I give Danger the king of all wedgies!"
"Except that you aren't the one taking the major risk."
"Hel-lo? That's why Bun-Bun here insisted we tell you first."
"That made no sense."
"Sally," Bunnie broke in. "Forgive me for interruptin', but time ain't 'zactly on our side. Not to be disrespectful or nuthin', but are y'all gonna give the say-so or not?"
"I…" Sally bit her lip. She glanced down at Nicole, then up at the smoggy sky. Finally she let out a gusty breath and said, "In and out, quick as you can. No needless heroics. You understand me?"
"Hear you loud and clear, Sally-girl. Sonic? If y'all would be so kind."
Sonic leaped to his feet and scooped her into his arms. "Way ahead of you, Bun-Bun."
It was an interesting sensation, being carried at super-speed. Bunnie knew that any other creature would suffer from the adverse side effects of g-force, but she arrived at the power station in much the same condition as she'd started the journey. She didn't even need to pause and let her stomach resettle like Sally did, and Sally travelled the Sonic Express more than anyone.
"Okay." Sonic glanced around the corner so fast he was a blur. Bunnie catalogued and replayed at a fractionally slower pace, just to make sure she wasn't imagining things. "Three guards that I can see."
"Stands to reason. This ain't 'zactly the heart of Robotnik's operation."
"Well, yeah, but there's usually at least five. Maybe the other two are out of sight. If they're here at all."
"Speakin' from experience, I'd say don't take no chances. See if y'all can draw all five out into the open 'afore you go tryin' a dang thing."
"Get it, got it, rocked and rolled it."
"So where are the three you can see?"
"Two SWATbots on the main entrance and one on the mezzanine."
"Mezzanine? I didn't know you knew words like that, Sugar-hog."
He flashed her his best If-I-Weren't-Too-Cool-I'd-Be-Shit-Scared-Right-Now smile. "I like to keep a few things up my sleeve."
"Oh really?"
"Really really."
"Like?"
"Like this. Whooooooooooeeeeeee!" He revved and shot into view of the SWATbots, pausing long enough to blow a long, loud raspberry at them.
"Hedgehog: Priority One," droned the bots by the main entrance. They said it in perfect unison, their hive-like central processors locking onto the same command they always did when Sonic appeared. It made them tenacious as hell, but it was a loophole in their programming that lent itself to diversion, and the Freedom Fighters were thankful for it.
None more so than Bunnie. She heard the three bots clank off in pursuit, followed by an extra pair previously hidden around the back of a small ore silo. Sonic would lead them a merry dance, and – she hoped – it would give her enough time to finish and remove herself from the firing line. She was reasonably sure her new plating would stand up against conventional weapons, but she was in no hurry to test it outside controlled conditions just yet. Not if she could possibly help it.
With the guards gone, she had easy access to the control box on the outside of the building, and made short work of the security codes. She couldn't access much more from there, but it made a useful stepping-stone onto the higher systems if it could just get her inside…
Bingo.
The power station was full of Robian workers. Bunnie didn't seem at all out of place there, and since each were hard-wired for loyalty to Robotnik the SWATbot forces had been concentrated around the outside of the building. Doubtless, since there were no guards inside, there were more than just the usual five hanging around. No doubt Sonic was drawing all those off, too. He was good like that.
Sonic was good, but he wasn't invincible. Bunnie quickly found the main overseer consoles – unmanned unless Robotnik needed to close down the plant manually for some reason – and located a suitable socket.
as she unclipped the plate at the base of her skull and extracted the cable to plug herself in, she brushed against the power ring around her neck. It was there as a precaution, in case that first heavy dose of exposure to the Power Stone ever gave out and she had to be reminded who she was. She couldn't remember what it felt like to actually touch a ring, but Sonic always described it as akin to when you drink soda too fast and all the bubbles come rushing down your nose.
Primed, ready and running out of time, Bunnie jacked in.
The power station's systems had an impressive level of redundancy that lost all impressiveness through the fact that there were virtually no blocks between them and the higher networks. She cruised along a core byway, hiding amongst reams of secondary data so she could move on quickly without being noticed. She breezed past a mostly-repetitive diagram charting worker productivity, hop-skipped across plans to rebuild the SWATbots already destroyed this month, and found her opening amongst 3D impressions of the prison complex.
And then she was in.
Hm. Apparently Robotnik spent more time than usual on those half-dream plans for a citadel in his honour, yesterday. Oh well. Couldn't have a tyrant without the delusions of godhood, she supposed.
The citadel plans led her to Robotnik's personal logs, which were as high in priority as one might expect, given his ego and megalomania. Mostly they were filled with voice recordings of how much he hated 'that hedgehog' and, to a lesser extent, the rest of the Freedom Fighters. Bunnie bypassed them and rode a digital stream slightly lower.
Snively's logs were updated far more regularly than Robotnik's. They contained detailed fantasies of usurpment and tying 'Uncle Julian' up in the old castle dungeons for ritual torture. It figured the dungeons were the only part of Castle Acorn left unscathed after Robotnik's overhaul. However, the descriptions of what exactly Snively planned to do to Robotnik were rather too graphic and – above all – too trivial for Bunnie to pay much heed to.
Snively's fantasies did lead her to plans for the dungeon, however, and from there she slipped into the cartography mainframe and accessed information on the new motion detectors installed in the main blocks and towers.
There were dozens converging on one spot. She homed in on it, trusting to luck. Yes, there was the roboticisation chamber… now all she had to do was code in an order for its defences and… seventeen motion detectors, thirty lasers, a series of metal projectiles that could be fired from five different locations, and fake walls, behind which dozens of souped-up SWATbots resided. SWATbot parameters followed subdirection 0.000759bf, stationed in delta and beta positions for optimal observational range. Proximity to central cylinders no more than six feet, radius programme 444.676ygh. Contingency instructions were charted according to present data consortium re: Sonic the Hedgehog plus keyword: speed plus keyword: maximum plus keyword: manoeuvrability –
She was taking everything. She'd meant to take everything. That was the plan. Take as much as she could and alter the remaining data to make it incorrect before… before…
Danger!
Her sensors flashed the warning at her milliseconds after she was moving away from the location. Tendrils of green followed her, reached for her, and she switched from system to system, higher to lower to higher to even lower, until she thought she'd lost it.
Evidently, Robotnik's viruses were getting stronger. The actual schematics for the roboticisor were behind so many walls, encryptions and security measures that it was impossible for Bunnie to break through without considerably more time than she was ever afforded. Even if she could get to a suitable access point for long enough, one of the living viruses he'd installed would find her long before she got past the first layers of code, alerting Robotnik and – no doubt – a horde of SWATbots as to her location.
She had to pull out. Now.
Now.
She was splitting off; following a line she'd attached herself to while trying to escape the virus. It took her deep into the historical reference index, into archives nobody ever retrieved anymore. She was seeing scanned parchments, fragments of Olde Acorne directives, photographs of the king as a baby. She was still in download mode, still taking everything she came across, absorbing data like a sponge with water. Her memory banks integrated all she sent them: image files, stacks of text, meaningless scraps of digital flotsam that Sally might like to see if she could upload them into Nicole – and with that unintentional thought she was off again, soaking up entire digitised photograph albums and nursery rhymes and fifteen-year-old prices for the fish market and recipes for oatmeal cookies –
The flood of information widened. She was keeping anything and everything she ran across. The historical citations were dense and thick, like molasses. She knew she had to pull out, but the irrelevancies were stacking up and she had to devote part of herself to wading through them or else she'd be swamped and it was too much too much too much! Her conscious mind was busy and her subconscious, or whatever she had there now, wasn't equipped to give the order.
"Bunnie! Abort! Abort now, Bunnie!"
The alarms in her head were strangely like actual alarms. The floor was vibrating at exactly the same frequency, and it was only in realising this that Bunnie also realised she was executing an emergency abort procedure.
She fell back into her own body, and all at once she was not so much resettled as imprisoned in it, spasming and jolting under the onslaught of raw data. For some reason she was executing the integration in real-time, when usually she would have been happy with a small-to-large delay. Her memory banks were insisting it was like trying to give shelter to a billion new starving houseguests – simultaneously – with nothing more than a fiftieth-floor boondocks apartment and a pantry of fresh air.
In the end, the strain must have caused her to go offline for a while, because the next thing she knew she was staring up into a pair of worried blue eyes.
"New data incorporated," she said automatically, before she could even formulate the thought to say something else – something like, maybe, 'where the hell am I?'
The eyes lost their anxious slant and went out of view. "I told you it was too dangerous," Sally said.
Bunnie sat up.
She was back in Knothole, in her own hut, with Sally and Sonic standing over her like concerned parents.
"Hm." She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up. In her peripheral vision a screen flashed up, displaying the words 'system operation: optimal'.
At least she hadn't sustained any lasting damage, then.
"Hm?" Sally threw up her hands. "Sonic comes back with you having a seizure, then you shut down completely, stay offline for the better part of three hours, and the best you can come up with is 'hm'?"
"Would y'all prefer an extra 'm'? Hmm?"
"Don't you get smart with me, Bunnie Rabbot. You damn near gave me a heart attack. After that, I think I deserve more than indeterminate grunts."
Bunnie felt the back of her head. The cable was still hanging out. She made to wind it back in out of habit, then paused and let it go again. "Can I borrow Nicole, please?"
"What?" Sally looked nonplussed, mapping it over her irritation.
Sonic's grin looked uncertain, but he gamely said, "Just give her the computer, Sal." Sonic always trusted Bunnie to know what she was doing. It was a heart-warming and terrifying thing.
"Well… okay." Sally unclipped Nicole from her boot and handed her over. "But I still want a really good explanation about what went wrong."
"What makes y'all think anythin' went wrong?" Bunnie asked, plugging her own cable into Nicole's port. Another screen outlined on her retina - blue this time, and scrolling down painstakingly catalogued records. Bunnie performed a brief scan and started the upload.
"Well, the aforesaid seizure and shut-down were a small giveaway that not everything went according to plan. Sonic telling me he had to force you to terminate and yank you out of Robotnik's system was another hint."
"I wasn't in any danger. Just got sidetracked an' made a miscalculation about my processin' capabilities." Bunnie saw the taskbar show 100 and contorted her face into an approximation of a smirk.
"For what? What could possibly be important enough to merit frying your own circuits?"
"This. Nicole, give us a visual of image file 'Bubble Butt'."
"Acknowledged." Nicole bleeped and projected a picture into the air between the three of them.
Sonic's mouth fell open. Sally clapped her hands in front of her face, a blush darkening the skin beneath her fur. Bunnie just kept up her shiny smirk.
"That's you, Sal!" Sonic exclaimed once he'd stuffed his tongue back into his mouth. "That's… man, you can't be more than a few seasons old in that picture!"
"This was… this was what sidetracked you?" Sally whispered.
Bunnie nodded. "Not intentionally. But once I found these, they were too juicy to pass up. I got dozens more of your li'l tush in here, Sally-girl. Plus some more of your Mammy an' Pappy, stretchin' back to when they was kids, an' all. I also got the security schematics I originally went in for, an' I messed up Robotnik's data on Sonic so good, he'll be pickin' zeroes from his teeth for weeks.But these make for better viewin', don't you think?"
The image flipped to one of Sonic crawling away from a familiar moustachioed hedgehog, who brandished a diaper at the escaping baby.
"Aw, man! No fair, Bun-Bun!"
Bunnie's smirk didn't waver. "Oh, I think it's plenty fair, Sugar-hog."
