Starlight
"Wow..." Sonic breathed in awe. He was lying on a comfortable chair-like thing, looking through the gigantic telescope above him.
He saw stars.
Millions of them, millions over billions or even more, but the hedgehog lacked a term for numbers that felt big enough to count what he could see. The sky wasn't black with stars on it, it consisted of stars. They sparkled at Sonic's wide open eyes in all possible colors, the majority of them something between white and blue, but some were red, yellow, even green. Small, spiral forms surrounded with a purple aura faded into a long white and yellow band. "It's amazing..."
"What do you see, Sonic?", Knuckles asked from where he stood to the side.
"Stars..." The hedgehog was still merely whispering his words, his gaze lost in a world of twinkling shiny lights. "This is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."
"And nobody has ever seen exactly the same things you see right now, and nobody ever will," the professor said and Sonic could hear in his tone he was smiling.
"Huh? Why not?", Knuckles wondered.
"Because everything we see when we look into the sky is a brief glimpse of a moment... And it is always a look into the past."
"The past?", Sonic wondered, his eyes following a small pattern of bluish stars into a turquoise nebula.
"Yes, light, like everything else, needs time to travel through space. It moves at light speed, which is the fastest velocity possible, nothing besides light can move that fast."
"Well, that's worth a challenge," Sonic muttered.
"Oh Sonic, you'd lose that challenge, believe me," Tails laughed.
The professor chuckled. "You, like everything else that has a mass higher than zero, cannot reach light speed. Your mass is proportional to your velocity and grows exponential if you accelerate. The energy necessary to bring you, yes even the smallest atomic particles, to a speed only near that absolute limit is higher than exists in the entire universe."
"I don't get it." Knuckles sounded annoyed. Sonic thought it amusingly familiar.
"Me neither. But if I ever break that record, I'll let you know your theory is fuss." The hedgehog grinned, still studying the view through the telescope. "So, can we go back to the thing about the past? Why is everything I see the past?"
"Because of the huge distances in space," Tails explained. "Space is so big that even light needs millions of years to travel through it. The light of the sun needs a few minutes to reach our planet, the next star, our neighbour-star so to say, is a few light-years away."
"Tails is right. And most of the stars you see at the nights sky are thousands or even millions of lignt years away," the professor added. "So every picture you see now is a look into a long ago past, the light needed that long time to transport the pictures from the star that emitted the light to your eyes. Some of the stars you see there now might be gone already. That purplish galaxy you can see on the left is 250 billions of light-years away. There is no way telling for us what happened to it during that time."
"Wow. So if there were some aliens in space ships out there looking at us now, they would see something that happened long before, right?" Sonic pulled himself loose from the stunning sight and slid off the chair. He looked at the red echidna next to him. "They might as well see your ancestors flying Angel Island for the first time."
Knuckles sceptically raised his eyebrows, but the professor nodded. "It would be possible."
A thought struck the red echidna. "So, if we use that thing to look at this Emerald-manipulating whatever-it-is, we will see it years ago?"
Tails giggled. "No, it's not that far away, it'll be only a minute or so. Nothing that matters at all."
"Actually, we always look into the past. I see you now that way you were a few picoseconds ago." The white-coated racoon smirked. "But these short times don't matter; it's completely normal."
Sonic scratched his head. "I admit I don't really get this. How about if we see that we find that thing now?"
The professor nodded. "I'll need a moment to adjust the telescope; Knuckles can have a look at the stars too if he likes."
Sonic nodded at the echidna. "Really, it looks amazing!"
"Okay, I'll try." Knuckles sat on the chair below the oculars and looked through the telescope. He whistled through his teeth. "It's really beautiful. And this is all for real?"
Tails laughed. "Very real, Knuckles. No fake stars up there or anything."
For a moment Knuckles relaxed backwards into the chair, his eyes wandering though a maze of wonderful light. He liked this. He liked this lot. It was even a better view than on a clear evening from the island's highest volcano. It was impossible to recognize any constellations; the sky was a complete mess of stars, but it was by far the most beautiful mess Knuckles had ever seen.
The picture suddenly shifted, then blurred, spinning around in a way that made Knuckles dizzy and he was glad as it turned black for a second. He blinked a few times and as he looked again, the image was showing a few small stars in the background, but the echidna didn't have any eyes for them.
The middle of his sight was filled with an orange object, erratically shaped, spinning not quite steadily around itself so that it seemed to tumble through the black nothingness of space. It was moving slowly towards the left edge of his vision and Knuckles had the vague impression that it was growing as it did.
A shudder ran down Knuckles' spine. He could name no real reason for his discomfort, it just looked like an orange, dimly glooming stone, but it gave him the weird feeling of deja-vú without being able to place it. He felt, no he knew it was a bad thing. Just seeing it let something prickle in the back of his mind, some sense lower than instinct, the feeling the opposite of what he felt close to the Master Emerald. He quickly pulled away from the oculars and shook himself.
"You okay, Knux?", Sonic asked, looking confused.
Knuckles nodded quickly. "Hm. I just don't like it. Is giving me the creeps."
Sonic quirked an eyebrow, but didn't comment.
The echidna waited impatiently until all the others had had a look at the thing as well. "Now, what do we do?"
"We need to analyze its structure, its course, if it will hit the planet, if it does in which angle..." Tails shrugged. "We need information about it before we can think of destroying it."
Knuckles tapped his foot, something he'd never thought he would find himself doing. "So, how long will that take?"
"Professor?" Tails turned to the raccoon.
The white-coated took off his glasses and turned them around in his hands. "At least the entire night, maybe tomorrow too. It's hard to say."
Knuckles sighed.
Hours later, Knuckles was still sitting at one of the tables, watching Tails and the professor walking from one screen full of numbers and diagrams to another. He listened to their conversation, a conversation consisting of a seemingly nonsensical chain of words without a meaning. Knuckles had never heard any of them, to him it was as if they were talking in a completely unknown language. Maybe that way the case anyway.
The echidna yawned and stood up. It seemed as if he could be of no help anyway, the two seemed to have completely forgotten he was even here. Sonic had left what appeared a long time ago and Knuckles decided to follow his example.
He slowly walked down the stairs and stopped as he entered the living room. Sonic was curled up fast asleep on the seating of an armchair, his head on the left armrest, his feet in the freaky socks on the other.
The thought that perhaps the hedgehog was smarter than he was occurred to the red echidna. Flopping full length on one of the couches, Knuckles decided he could as well try the same, but in spite of his tiredness, sleep was a long time coming. In front of his closed eyes, the orange gloom was still tumbling through the darkness of space.
"Doctor?"
Robotnik jerked awake in his seat to the sounds of Shadow's voice. "What do you want?" A look at his screens showed him that it was shortly after midnight and he frowned, turning around to face the hedgehog-black-arm clone that didn't know it was exactly that. "It's late. Why aren't you resting?"
"I was," Shadow replied slowly. "I couldn't sleep. I had a dream... I guess. I was running… through a long corridor, calling a name without getting an answer…" The black hedgehog paused, once shaking his head before returning his gaze to the doctor's face. "Do you know anyone called Maria?"
"No," Robotnik lied, eying him. He definitely had to get his plans to the next level.
"I've been thinking," Shadow continued, "about many things. About that idiot blue hedgehog for example. And why he knows me. Maybe talking to him could help me get my memory back." He looked up at Robotnik.
"I don't think so," the scientist started," and meeting him is always dangerous; he's our worst enemy. Maybe I can help you."
"Really?" Shadow's red eyes went wide. "You said you need all the Chaos Emeralds for that."
"I will try with the one a robot patrol found outside the base a few hours ago. The Chaos Emeralds changed a lot during the last time while the asteroid comes closer to our planet. I built a machine using this new power." The human stood up.
Shadow nodded almost enthusiastically and was outside the room already. Robotnik looked after him. It looked as if he'd finished the material for the next step just in time. Shadow was getting out of his control.
It was time for Plan B.