Chapter 24 Sally and her First Mission
Sally left early the next morning while everyone else was asleep. She quietly slipped out of camp and started the relatively short walk to the waters edge, where she would swim out to the island which lay about fifty yards off the shore. The island was nothing more than a dock wrapped around a small atoll with the power substation situated in the center of the island behind a twenty-foot high wall. In order to get over the wall, Sally used a grappling hook that she had Rotor make and a length of rope to quietly slip over the wall.
On the other side of the wall was a SWATbot standing guard with its back turned to the wall. On her seeing this, Sally took the rope and grappling hook and managed to take off the SWATbot's head with the hook and rope. Once the robot was down and offline, Sally made her way to the energy station, glancing all around her to check for more SWATbots. On the side of the building was a small door locked from the inside by an electronic locking mechanism of some sort. Pulling out Nicole, Sally was able to defeat the lock and gain access to the building.
Once inside, Sally switched on the lights, only to find her entrance had not gone unnoticed by the security systems. Every monitor in the room she was in was rapidly flicking through each security camera except the one for the room she was in. Knowing she had already overstayed her welcome, Sally took out Nicole again and impatiently waited as Nicole dug through the computers files and finally activated the energy substations self-destruct mechanism. Seeing the self-destruct was on a mere twenty-five second timer hastened Sally's exit from the building. Once she got out of the access tunnel she had gained access through, she ran for the surrounding wall and the waters that lay beyond. As she neared the wall she had climbed over, there was a noise around the corner of the building she was standing in the shadows of.
Before she had left Knothole, Rotor had given her what he had for weapons; mainly the grappling hook and two simple grenades he had made from recycled robot parts and natural materials. Taking one of the grenades in hand, she prepared herself for what lay around the corner. What she found was the one thing she had not prepared herself for; a skunk with a loaded bow mounted to his right glove.
"Who… are you?" Sally asked, not sure how to act, being that the skunk was aiming his bow at Sally's head and she had her grenade in hand, ready to throw it if the event called for it.
"Would've thought that t'be obvious, luv… I'm the bloke with the knock-out gas bolt, ready t' put ya to sleep!" He stated as he stepped closer to Sally. "Now explain ya self or it's into the land of dreams for ya!" He demanded as he raised the bolt so it was eye level with Sally.
"Look… whoever you are… we don't have for this! We need to get out of here before the explosion…" Sally explained quickly, remembering how much time the self-destruct sequence was set for.
"Explosion? What explosion?" As the skunk asked, the timer expired and the building erupted into a ball of flame, throwing the skunk and Sally a dozen feet and showering them with rubble from the walls. For a few seconds, Sally and the skunk just lay on the ground catching their breaths and checking to see if the pains that they felt were just from being thrown through the air or if it was something broken.
"That explosion." Sally answered finally as she got up, dusting herself off and checking Nicole for any damage. The skunk groaned a bit as he picked himself up.
"Nicely done, luv! Saved me the trouble of blowing the place to Kingdom Come m'self!" The skunk said as he got up.
"Happy to oblige… any enemy of Robotnik's is a friend of mine! Call me Sally."
"Sally? As in Princess Sally?" The skunk asked before snapping to attention and saluting the Princess. "Geoffrey St. John, late of His Majesty's secret service, current leader of the rebel underground. Pleasure t'make your acquaintance." Sally had not received much of her royal training before Robotnik began the Betrayal, so she was unsure of how to respond to being saluted. After a few seconds, Geoffrey took his hand down and, glancing around, decided they should get off the island.
"Rebel underground? I wasn't aware of any…"
"We pride ourselves on maintaining a low profile, m'lady… on the Q-T, so to speak!" As they walked towards where St. John had come aground on the island, they both kept nervously looking behind them to make sure any robots or anyone else who happened to be on the island was not following them. Out of the corner of his eye, Geoffrey saw three SWATbots come marching out of the shadows with their lasers armed and glowing.
Aaron and Sam made it back to Texarkana without incident and ended up spending the night at Aaron's house. In the morning, Samantha was the first one up and had made breakfast for the both of them by the time Aaron woke up. As soon as Aaron got up and had finished breakfast, the phone rang.
"Hello?"
"Aaron… it's Professor Leif. I've finally finished with that sapling you brought me… once I get home tonight, I'm going to plant it and see if it'll grow around here. You might be interested to see the results of the tests I ran on a few of the leaves. I'll be in my lab until about 4PM if you wanna stop by." Jacob told Aaron. Aaron checked the clock across the room.
"Yeah, I can be there by like one or two o'clock… gotta take the car through a carwash. The roads were a bit dusty last night." Aaron said, before saying goodbye to the professor and hanging up. Once Aaron was done with the call, he and Sam took the car to the nearest carwash and ran the car through it a couple times. Once he was satisfied that the car was clean, he and Sam drove over to the lab.
"Hey Aaron and Sam! Glad you could make it… I was just about to call again and see if you guys were coming or not. All the stuff about that sapling is over here. After I show it to you, if it's okay with you two, I'd like to submit it to a scientific journal I write for now and then… get some feedback and suggestions on what to do with the data I have and the sapling." Jacob launched into as soon as Aaron and Sam walked through the door.
"What'd you find? Something you recognized as plant?" Aaron asked as they followed the professor back to the lab table, which was now covered with slides and notes and a large microscope. Sam picked up one of the notebooks and casually glanced through the various notes and diagrams covering its pages. Most of the notebook was gibberish to Sam, though she did recognize some of the diagrams as drawings of plant cells.
"It looks like a normal oak sapling at first glance, but there's cellular structures that I've never seen before. And there's more… there are crystalline structures that appear to grow with the rest of the plant and there even seems to be a couple microorganisms that live inside the leaves without destroying the plant. Also, I found a blue quill underneath one of the leaves. Based on what the quill looked like under a microscope and all the books I have available, the quill looks vaguely like a hedgehog's quill, but I've never seen a hedgehog with blue quills, have you?" Jacob asked. Aaron looked at Sam and she nodded to Aaron.
"Doc, you might wanna sit down for this one." Doctor Leif sat down on one of the few chairs that sat around his cluttered lab. "There's a highway that floats in space; a highway that will take you anyplace you want to go, even to other planets. One of the planets is called Mobius and is inhabited by sentient, intelligent animals and your average space-age humans inhabit it. The humans ended up there back in 1971 when Flight 181 flew into the Bermuda Triangle and got flung to Mobius where they crashed into a mountain.
"About a year after they ended up there, they sent a space mission towards the edge of their solar system in an attempt to contact Earth. On Mobius, there's a blue hedgehog… the blue quill… called Sonic. He walks on two legs, talks just like you and me and Sam, just he's a hedgehog. My car is the only thing that can travel between here and there… it's powered by two giant emeralds that enable it to travel between here and there in under two hours at about fifteen hundred miles per hour." Aaron explained. Jacob was not sure what to make of what Aaron had just explained. In the back of his mind, Jacob kept wondering if the sapling and what Aaron had told him was some sort of joke.
"You're kidding me, right? I mean, a car that can travel to other planets, a blue hedgehog that walks on two legs and talks, and a plane that crashed near the Triangle ending up on some planet no one's ever heard of sounds a lot like of malarkey to me. And still, none of that explains the microorganisms in the plant or the crystalline structures in the leaves. And to top it all off, where in the world do you get a car that can travel in space, not to mention to other planets?" Jacob asked, running the whole story that Aaron had told him through his head. As he thought about it more and more, the story started to make more and more sense. Samantha pulled out a packet of pictures and the memory card from the digital camera and handed them to Aaron. The digital camera had been used to take a few seconds of video from their first trip.
"I kid you not… here, we've got a couple rolls of pictures and a few seconds of video from our first trip there. I even have the negatives if you don't believe me." Aaron said as he handed the pictures and memory card to Jacob. Jacob took the pictures and looked through them, then viewed the few seconds of video on the memory card. After viewing the video file several times, Jacob turned to Aaron and Samantha.
"You're serious… this is too good to be special effects or something. I didn't believe you, but you've got all this… stuff and…" Jacob said, going back through the pictures.
"It's all real, dude. We were there and we're planning on going back there to do a little sightseeing again. I'll bring back more pictures and some more video. One of these times, we might even initiate contact with the animals." Aaron explained, knowing that Jacob would object to initiating First Contact purely on a scientific basis.
"Coming into contact with them might not be the smartest idea you've ever had, Aaron. Your just being there may be changing the way they live; influencing their lives in ways you couldn't even imagine."
Before she had time to react, Geoffrey jumped and pushed Sally down out of the line of fire. Cowering behind a large piece of pipe, they prepared to defend themselves. Sally got out her slingshot and Geoffrey loaded his wrist-mounted crossbow.
"Walkin' tin cans don't look none too friendly, luv!" Geoffrey said to Sally, while doing his best to protect him and the Princess.
"So I noticed, Mister St. John." Sally said back, trying to damage or destroy as many of the SWATbots as possible. Geoffrey's bolts and Sally's paintballs were slowing down the SWATbots, though not enough to buy them much time. "Not too shabby! Think you can pick up the pace a little?" She asked, noticing Geoffrey had not been firing for a bit.
"I could… if I wasn't plum out of bolts!"
"Out of bolts? Some boy scout you turned out to be! What kind of Freedom Fighter are you, anyway?"
"One who flies by the seat of his pants, luv." Reaching into her vest, Sally pulled out what looked like another paintball.
"You remind me of someone else I know. Fortunately… I came prepared!" Sally threw the ball and it landed at the feet of the SWATbots and exploded, taking the robots with it. "There! That homemade grenade should give those SWATbots something to think about!" Sally happily exclaimed as she and Geoffrey made their way to where Geoffrey had come ashore.
"I'll say this for ya, luv… you've got style." Geoffrey complimented her.
"Save the compliments for later, Mister St. John… at least until we're linked up with the rest of my unit." She said, as they started back across the body of water to where Sally's recruits waited.
"The Princess sure is taking her own sweet time. Maybe she ran into something she couldn't handle!" The pig sitting on an old fallen log next to their campfire said.
"There's nothing she can't handle, Hamlin… she's a trained professional. I just with we could have gone with her." Said the green armadillo standing across from the pig.
"You said it yourself, Arlo… she's a trained professional and we're only trainees." Said the purple duck sitting to the armadillos left, "But how are we supposed to learn anything by watching and waiting?"
"Patience is a virtue, Penelope… and following orders is the most important lesson any would-be Freedom Fighter can learn. If she says wait, we wait until…" The reddish-brown porcupine sitting across from the duck was saying when he was interrupted. Something broke a branch someplace behind the pig. Everyone turned and looked to where they thought the sound had come from. Without warning, Geoffrey leaped out from behind a tree and lunged at the pig. Geoffrey and the pig proceeded to throw punches and kicks at each other the best they could. They carried on for a couple minutes until Geoffrey managed to get his wrist-bow loaded.
"Ya got three second t' explain y'self, mate… or you'll be one sorry slab of bacon." Geoffrey threatened as he aimed his wrist-bow at the pig's throat. At the same time, Sally came running out of the woods behind the two opponents.
"That's enough!" She shouted at Geoffrey and the pig. She brought her voice back down to conversation level before continuing, "Get off him, Geoffrey! They're with me. We're all on the same side, after all!"
"Sorry, mate. Just got a bit carried away." Geoffrey apologized, offering his hand to the pig to help him up.
"Oh, you'll be carried away all right… once I'm finished with you!" The pig growled.
"You an' what navy, you slobberin' sack of…" Geoffrey drew his fist back, ready to strike while the pig got ready to tackle Geoffrey.
"You won't raise such a stink after…" Sally jumped between the two of them.
"Cool it! Both of you! Save some for Doctor Robotnik. There's plenty of him to go around." She said, relaxing her stance but making sure to stay between the two of them. "For your information, this is Geoffrey St. John, the leader of the local branch of the Rebel Underground. He'll be joining us on our mission." Sally introduced.
"Pleasure t' meet you." He said, relaxing his posture.
"And these fresh young faces are the next generation of the Freedom Fighters… Arlo," she said pointing to the armadillo, "Penelope," she said pointing to the duck, "and Dylan." She said pointing towards the reddish-brown porcupine. "Hamlin, I believe you've already met." She said, motioning towards the pig. "Now, let's all get some shut-eye. We have a full day ahead of us tomorrow… and I want to fill Geoffrey in on our plan." She finished, heading towards her tent. Penelope and Arlo headed into their respective tents, leaving Geoffrey and Hamlin standing outside.
"The princess may buy your hero act, pretty boy… but I don't!" Hamlin said to Geoffrey, before he too went to his tent.
"Well, aint that too bleedin' bad." Geoffrey shot back before heading to his tent. Once they were all settled in their tents, quietness fell on the camp as sleep came.
(End of Chapter 24)