Greetings and welcome to the latest up. It's been a while since I've done an update on this project, but been busy putting the next chapters together. So expect more to follow.

This is possibly the shortest chapter of the book so far; could be for the rest of the arc. The title is again taken from a John LeCarre' book called "Smiley's People." Another great spy novel for those who don't mind falling asleep in their cherrios. But nevertheless, this chapter is not like that. Here is where the plot really begins. Aside from Aleutian finding himself, I wanted to add something more into this book without putting him as the total main character. This chapter also puts me in a unique postion to grab the origianl character arc to have a name stay in this. Course I view my first book to really balance the playing field out in that respect.

So...the disclamer: I own nothing of the Sega characters and the comics and respect the aurthor's rights who do. In which, I stand to recieve no profit from this excep for experiences.

Have to acknowledge Zycho32 for his clean up of the first paragragh. He's an awsome writer and I urge other readers to check out his story "Starting Points." He put me in my place and where I want to go.

And now...I bring you Snively...the real bad guy in this.

Snively's People

by: Mauser

He wasn't happy nor was he troubled. Lost in his thoughts, he pondered the three screens in front of him, showering his long nose and bald balloon shaped head with ambient lights of blue, white, and green. He studied a diagram on one, fidgeting in his leather chair as he took note of an old bot design and compared it to the newer version on the next screen to the left. Unknowingly, he flinched his face into a crooked half grin that quickly vanished when a harsh female scream shot through the speakers. He snapped his eyes over to the third screen in time to see an Eggbot throw an orange-red furred female fox across the ground. Her cloths ripped to rags, partially exposing parts of her anatomy that at any other time would arose a male mobian.

In a way, he felt indifferent of what his uncle was doing at times. And then there were times like this, the actions that the bots were ordered to do sent shivers down his spine. He watched closely as five other mobians were tossed beside her, fear on their faces along with despair. Afterwards came the order for them to stand on their feet, noting that they did with much hesitation. Snivley knew what was coming. He hadn't seen what had happened previously when he switched to this particular prison camp that made up several more others that were spread around Mobius. But the look on the fox showed what had transpired before. Behind them, a long pit that with a sunflower feel beyond that. In front of them, two Eggbots: one which was hovering overhead, its round bulk frame with wings that stuck out to the sides, armed with a forward mounted auto-blaster that was trained on the line of prisoners. With a beep from the silver Eggbot on the ground, the hovering bot tore loose with its plasma cannon with precision accuracy, lacing the bodies of the Mobians with hot orange plasma bolts. Snively's gaze never left the girl; her fur was burned at the chest when a lone bolt found its mark amongst her comrades.

To Snively's joy, she didn't scream.

When he lost visual of her as she and the rest fell into the pit behind them like collapsing buildings, their now lifeless bodies lying on top of the others from before, he glanced back at the other two screens. "So this is the new and improved Com-Bots," he announced to himself with envious eyes. "But what's missing to make them go operational?" He found the answer when he scrolled down through the technicals. "Cloaking devices not installed: insufficient biological components?"

Snively leaned further back in his chair, clasping his hands over his bald head, saved for a few strands of hair. "So that's why he was furious about losing that cargo-ship," Snively painfully concluded. He wasn't beaten for the revelation that Eggman found out just after the sinking of his Dreadbot and the Plunger -which Snively was very happy to finally see gone- but his uncle did yell at him for not telling him about it. Snively never dreamed that the phantom boat would have made a comeback. Especially after what he and the first Robotnick did over two years to make sure that it would never sail again; instead, just rust away. "But hired help isn't as good as either a bot or yourself"

However, besides scraping the Dreadbot from further construction and use, Eggman wanted to do the same with the new Com-Bots since he didn't have a certain component at his disposal. Snively thought otherwise.

After looking through the charts, diagrams, and inventory lists, he found that the facility they were housed and built in had punched out several of the new machines. As far as Snively was concerned, retooling and starting production on a new series of bots that wouldn't have the same potential was out of the question. He remembered all too well how the first Com-Bots almost won against Sonic and the rest of his Freedom Fighters...well, almost.

"But these have more potential," Snivley smiled inwards. "Biometricmuscles, quieter hydraulic servos; these bots could do amazing things in silence.

But you can't utilize a five-foot-five piece of machinery without someone noticing."

Snuffing at the air from his own comment, Snively went back to the screen where another group of Mobians were about to meet their harsh fate. He pivoted the camera around to gaze at the onlookers behind a heavily wired fence, seeing their faces painted with horror as they watched their friends about to be sent to the afterlife.

Snively pressed a button beside his keyboard and spoke through a small microphone that hovered above his mouth from the armrest of the chair:

"This is what happens if you don't work," he said with his nasal monotone voice, "This is what happens if you resist us. If you want freedom, then do as you are told. Or your freedom will be achieved in the afterlife."

He watched with a wide smirk on his face as the forced onlookers talked amongst themselves, no doubt telling each other to do as they're told from now on and not to start another uprising. Once more, he traced the fence line with his camera, seeing some of the prisoners cowering behind others as the last five mobians were cut down in rapid succession.

But then he stopped, centering his camera and his gaze onto what he couldn't believe. At the drop of a hat, a plan was conceived from what he his wide eyes projected to his deviant brain.

"Well-well-well. What do we have here?"

"Be strong, Kripta!"

"I can't take it anymore, Christian," she replied with a hard shiver in her voice induced by a crippling fear.

He looked down at her, gazing past her horn and green skin to her purple eyes. "But if we do as they say, we can get through this."

"Do you honestly believe that," the Chameleon almost shrilled as she looked up at her brown echidna husband. He held her in his arms as she was overcome by what they had witnessed which had sent her to her knees.

"No," he replied with a weary and cautious look as he glanced around him, nodding at a male leopard just off to his left, "not a bit. But, we need to keep them thinking that way. So we must remain strong."

Kripta nodded her head and mustered all the strength that she had left and rose up from the hard clay ground. What she had for pants when they first arrived at the camp were little more than a black pair of shorts; ragged, ripped, and dotted with holes as was her grey shirt. What was left of Christian's grey Echidna Security Team's uniform was almost in the same fashion.

"If we stay here, we're gonna draw attention to ourselves," came a quiet, but stern voice from behind Christian.

The brown echidna looked behind him and nodded in agreement to the blue Chameleon. "Your brother is right, Kripta. We need to move away from the fence," he said, affirming his brother-in-law's request to his sobbing wife.

Before they turned away from the fence, Anzio coldly noted that the bots weren't going to cover the bodies, but instead, to leave them to rot and smell in the hot sun that would hammer more of the message into the skulls of the rest of the living. He knew the two foxes that tried to instigate an uprise against their captors. They were former Freedom Fighters, taken prisoner when Robotnick Mark II went back on his word to Sonic and reconquered most of Mobius. They still held to their duties even in the camp, finding ways to escape or to attempt an uprising at the very least. What was needed was help. That they tried by forming a force to do the job. The plan would've succeeded if it hadn't been for the Eggbots shattering most of the camp's fighting spirt that was drained, along with their strength, in the endless flat fields of the Mobian Plains. With the mid-summer sun becoming more of an enemy than the bots, most of the forced laborers succumbed to the losing battle on both ends of the insufferable spectrum. With total exhaustion becoming the top predator over the machines, the foxes tried to launch their revolt with what energy and strength they had left to achieve freedom. In the end, it wasn't enough. For their failure, they were executed in front of the whole camp. But Eggman never saw their deaths as the end all solution. As a result, ten others were picked at random and subsequently slaughtered in front of trembling eyes –just to send a message.

"Will we ever see Angle Island again?" Kripta asked her husband as they struggled between two long huts.

"I don't know."

Snively hammered away at his keyboard, typing up an order as quickly as he could before he lost sight of the three. He switched to another camera as they rounded one of the twelve rectangular prisoner huts that were huddled together in rows, and looked about as ragged as the people they housed. Before he sent the message out, he reached deep into his hard-drive for a hidden program that he had constructed long before Eggman came calling to bring tyranny to the planet. He knew Sonic had cracked the encryption that Eggman was using –it became well defined after the little incident with theDreadbot and the rusted old submarine. But yet, Eggman still didn't believe him when Snivel suggested the notion to him, brushing off the warranted observation by saying something to the tune that Sonic and his fur-balled crowd didn't possess the mental capacity to crack the codes.

After he sequenced his new program into his message, he sent it across the bandwidths of two satellites. He pulled his hands together at the finger tips as he smiled intently, waiting for his orders to be executed by the Eggbots.

When they passed through the second row of , they noticed other mobians scattering away from them. Anzio soon realized why. A cold sinking feeling came over him faster than that of what his ears could make out; the low humming noise of a hovering Eggbot was much like a rhythmic drumbeat to the gallows. He didn't need to glance up, he knew its weapon was trained on them just like it had been once before on his brethren that now lay dead in a mass grave.

"Halt!" shouted a different bot to their right, standing with its large broad sword pointed at them. Soon, three more showed up and encircle the trio.

"We are doing as you asked," Christian pleaded with the mindless droids, saved by their A.I. that only seemed to care about not making their master irritable.

"The Chameleons come with us," ordered the bot from overhead, its voice box chattering in a commanding voice.

Kripta held Christian's left arm ever tighter. "What do you want with us?" she cried out.

"Not for you to know!" spat out the same bot.

As the four bots began to close their distance, Anzio triggered the cells in his skin on instinct rather than training. He vanished in a mere few seconds as he blended into the scenery.

"Switch to heartbeat mode and find him..."

Before the lead bot in front of them could get his order fully across to the rest, he witnessed his arm being twisted and torn off. With the heavy blade that was still attached to its arm, the Eggbot watched as it was rammed through its metal hulk as if the Goddess was smiting him with its own weapon. After Anzio took the sword out from the jolting bot, he turned quickly around to go for a second bot when his body erupted in enormous pain. Christian flinched in terror as the hovering Eggbot switched its laser to stun and gave the invisible chamaeleon an excruciating jolt from it.

Anzio dropped to the ground, slowly reappearing to the others, unconscious.

"Anzy!" Kripta screamed out with what little energy she had left. She tried to bolt forward from Christian's arms, but he held her back, cuddling her face over his chest. They watched as two other bots went over and picked his body off the ground, dragging him away by the arms as if he were some prize to the machines.

Then Christian's heart seem to freeze when he felt a sharp blade come across his neck.

"Release the Chamaeleon, now!" came the computer generated voice.

Christian held Kripta tightly in his arms, using his love as his defiance against the bots.

"We said release the chamaeleon!" With a hard tug, one of the Eggbots pulled Kripta out of Chritian's arms as the bot with the sword at his neck pulled him away in the opposite direction. Kripta tried to hold on, but her fingernails sunk deep into her beloved husband's brown furred skin and trenching three lines from the center of his forearm to his wrist. But he didn't care. He tried to pull away from the Eggbot, but his strength came up short from the amount that he needed to succeed. The bot then dug the point of his blade deeper into Christian's dread lock covered neck and the echidna stopped his resistance at that painful instant.

He wanted to bolt; the thought beckoned him to do so, but the blade killed that idea in its infancy. In its stead, Christian weepingly watched as the bot carried Kripta under its arms. She was crying out his name as she held her arms out, her hands looking as if she was trying to grasp him as the bot widened the void between them. He said nothing as he watched her vanish behind a hut and away from his life.

Snivley had already turned the viewer off when the Eggbots had separated the two lovers. He shunned away his pity by concentrating more on his "new" project. Still being his Uncle's lackey wasn't sitting with him...but at least he wasn't getting hit anymore.

"I'll show him what I am capable of, and when I succeed, he'll be my lackey instead.

But if he doesn't..."

Snively smiled widely as he drew his plan from his cruel skull, musing intently over the sweet outcome that he hoped would follow.

Hoped you enjoyed this chapter. Please review my progress and where I should improve.

Next chapter will be of Aleutian. I'll be bringing out shades of a love story I hope to create out of all this.