Impact

The comet - a constantly growing dot on the starry sky - was painting a long reddish line onto the dark firmament during entry.

Knuckles stood under a group of fir trees, his arms tightly folded on his chest and his gaze firmly locked on the small light. Looking at it intensified the small headache he felt for so long already he was about to become oblivious to it, just now as he stood in the cold, silent evening, he was intensely aware of it again.

The echidna's violet eyes remained on the sky even as he heard the sounds of footsteps crunching on the snowy ground.

Sonic stepped up to his side silently and cast a look around. The high mountains formed dark shadows against the night firmament and the small houses of the village behind them with their warm lights and decoration looked like taken directly from a kitschy Christmas movie. All in all a peaceful place and a peaceful night. Looking at the red echidna at his side whose tense stance wouldn't fit into the picture at all and following his gaze, Sonic lifted his eyes up at the sky. It was beautiful, and even with the knowledge that this orange light up there was a big threat, Sonic couldn't avoid finding it pretty in a way.

Knuckles certainly didn't. His brow was wrinkled in a frown and he looked up at the comet as if he wanted to destroy it by glaring it to death.

"What are you thinking about?", Sonic asked eventually, unsure where to start or if to start at all.

Almost a minute went by without words and Sonic thought Knuckles had decided to ignore him, but then he spoke quietly. "I can feel it, Sonic."

Sonic raised his eyebrows and shot him a sideways glance. "What do you feel?"

Another long moment of silence passed. "It's hard to explain. It is a bit like the feeling of the Master Emerald calling for the Seven. It's... something almost like a painful longing. It's crazy, but I think... I think it's lonely..." Knuckles paused, eyes still on the streak of gloom above their heads. "Can't you feel it?"

Sonic frowned. He hadn't considered it before. While it was true that Knuckles' sense for the chaos energy, especially for the Master Emerald was a lot sharper than his, he could sense the Chaos Emeralds, maybe even better than Knuckles could, and he could draw on their powers.

Even though he decided to ignore Knuckles implying this piece of stone could be having anything like feelings of loneliness, Sonic knew it was something like chaos energy after all. More out of simple curiosity than anything else Sonic closed his eyes, mentally focussing on that little sense deep inside he consciously used just rarely. A reaching out for that familiar warm energy that was part of everything around and concentrated itself in the Chaos Emeralds.

It was there. Sonic could sense a small pulse of power not too far away for him. There was a Chaos Emerald somewhere and for a second or two Sonic was tempted to really reach for its power and draw just a bit of it to himself, but he shook his head against it and concentrated on what else was there.

A tiny notion, like not rain but the knowledge it would be raining in several hours gained through the smell of the air… Or something like that. Sonic focussed on it, dragging himself closer to it, to get a glimpse of true feeling. And suddenly it was there, flashed uncomfortably by as if grazing his mind to put a halt to his intrusion and he felt, not heard, something akin to an odd giggle.

Jumping back in reflex, Sonic quickly pulled away from it, forced his eyes back open – and found himself sitting in the cold snow, noticing that he must have jumped also physically.

Knuckles was looking down on him with his eyebrows raised. "So, you can feel it."

Sonic nodded, his ridged quills moving less with his head's motion as they usually did. "Yeah..."

"I told you it's bad," Knuckles noticed and held his hand out at the hedgehog to pull him back to his feet.

"But just when I really concentrate on it," Sonic continued skipping on Knuckles' comment and shook himself once, his spines slowly starting to lower again. "I'm kinda glad about that though…" He paused as a thought struck him. "Do you…?"

Knuckles looked at him seriously. "Certainly not as intensely as you just did. I'd need to focus on it too, but I feel a little distant tingle of it, all the time. Even when I try to sleep." The echidna shrugged as if to get rid of the thought. "Like Tails said, it's a thing similar to the Master Emerald, so it's natural I feel it more than anybody else."

"Hmm…" Sonic nodded, forcing himself to look back up at the sky.

For several minutes they stood in silence once more, neither really finding anything further to say, so they just watched how the comet got closer and closer to the black shapes of mountains and then disappeared from sight behind one of them. A few seconds later, a brief bright light flickered from behind the mountain, surrounding its summit like a corona, and the two observers heard the crashing sound as the impact shook the very ground beneath their feet, then it was silent again and the only lights remaining were the stars above.

Sonic pulled himself loose after a few minutes. He threw a glance at this friend. "Tomorrow, Knuckles. Tomorrow."

The echidna didn't look at him. "Hmm."

Sonic waited another moment. "Why don't ya come back inside? We already ordered some dinner. I just came to get you. If we don't hurry Tails will have finished everything before we get there." The hedgehog's triangular ears lowered a little at his friend's apparent lack of interest, but he kept talking anyway. "It doesn't help standing here, you know? You'll only snatch a cold."

Knuckles finally looked at him. "I thought you would…"

Sonic smiled, glad there still was some sort of humour left. "Now that I almost got rid of mine, we don't need you to get one now, do we?"

Knuckles finally nodded and turned to walk back to the hotel they stayed at for the night. "Guess you're right."

"This is our lucky day," Rouge whispered to Omega from where she was lying on her stomach on one of the hills around the base, observing the entrance.

The door had just opened and a bundle of robots, followed by their egg-shaped creator in his flying mobile got outside. Just a few meters behind followed another group of clumsy-looking machines that shoved a plane-like thing between them. When they had brought it outside, the robots returned inside and the door shut behind them, while Eggman's vehicle and the little plane took off in opposite directions to vanish in the darkness of night.

Rouge turned to Omega again. "The boss is not at home tonight. This will make it a lot easier for us." She stood up and started walking down the small hill towards the well-hidden portal. Its color fit perfectly into the rocks around and especially in the dark of night nobody would have guessed that behind it a huge complex of underground labs, factories and computer rooms was all-time busy.

"The probability that subject Shadow was located in the aircraft is calculated to be approximately 70 percent," Omega informed her about the result of a just finished calculation.

The bat looked back to where the plane had disappeared. "I wonder where Shadow's going. And what he's up to."

"Your observations of Shadow's characteristics imply that Eggman is controlling his actions. Result: the hedgehog unit is incapacitated to achieve a sense of awareness of his direction of movement and the form of activities he performs at that place," Omega noticed neutrally.

Rouge sighed. "Of course you're right. It's just hard to believe that…"

"Your optical percipience proved it. Mistrusting your own observations is not logical."

The white bat sighed again. "Forget it."

"This unit contains a highly developed memory core. I do not forget," Omega snarled.

Rouge shook her head and was very glad that they reached the door at that moment and this useless discussion was interrupted. She typed the code to open the hidden portal they had taken from the patrol robo's databanks into a panel camouflaged under a small stone and the door slid opened. The duo cast a sharp glance around.

"No other units in reach of sensors," Omega declared.

Rouge nodded and the two entered the base.

They had just rounded a corner and Rouge almost shrieked when Omega's invisible robot claw suddenly grabbed her and pushed her back. "A patrol is approaching," the normally red robot explained quietly.

Rouge quickly beat her wings and fluttered up to the corridor's ceiling. She crouched down on a large tube and froze, watching the six Eggrobos slowly walk closer.

Their hands holding a stick that looked like a lance, they stomped in a formation of two lines of three machines along the corridor, their feet creating a deep clang-clang-clang sound on the polished ground.

Rouge narrowed her eyes. Somewhere down there Omega was standing, not visible to her eyes and as the fleeting contacts with Eggman's machines in the last days had proven, neither to the robots' sensors. But the group filled almost the complete space the corridor offered and Omega was not exactly small… If one of them ran into him…

Just as the thought swam through Rouge's head a metallic crash came from below and the right robot in the first line seemingly ran into a wall of air, causing its counterpart that followed behind to crash, too. The other four robots walked a few more steps before noticing that something was not the way it ought to be here and stopping.

The two Eggrobos that had run into Omega stiffly stood back up and then all six machines stood, turning around, their eyes blinking wildly. Rouge held her breath.

Luckily, and as if to prove the bat's opinion on most of Eggman's inventions being not exactly smart, it took about a minute of walking back and forth and scanning their surroundings before the robots returned to their default formation and continued their walk, the sounds of their metal feet slowly receding.

Rouge gasped. "Phew, that was close." She leaped down from her tube and looked around. "Come on, let's go."

"Affirmative," Omega replied and Rouge jumped to the sound of his voice directly behind her. She really needed to find a way to reverse this invisibility or she would go nuts sooner or later.

The wind tore strongly at Sonic's quills and the hedgehog reached to pull the knot in his scarf a little tighter to prevent it from getting ripped away. Looking back up, Sonic scanned the area in front of him. The sky above was a pale grey and the winds were blowing snowflakes around like leaves in autumn. They were walking up a gentle slope with a few deeply snowed in trees from time to time. Aside of the now invisible path, a deep gap had been torn into the mountain's flank, about fifty meters deep and as broad. It offered a great view on the valley beneath them and the shapes of higher summits in the distance that looked blurry through the curtain of falling snow.

Behind Sonic, Knuckles and Tails stomped through the ankle-deep snow. The small fox was wearing a dark green sweatshirt against the cold winds and together with Sonic's blue and Knuckles' bright scarlet fur colors the group formed the only dots of color in the whiteness around.

They had been hiking for hours already and were making good progress so far. The only problem – if it was worth being called one – was the constant snow fall, but considering the weather catastrophes that had taken place in other Zones on the planet during the past days, constant snowfall seemed pretty natural at this place. Sonic secretly wondered when it would get worse again, since the comet had crashed yesterday in the late evening, everything was calm. Too calm for his taste.

The hedgehog was pulled out of his thoughts by the sound of engines somewhere above and behind him. He stopped and craned his neck upwards, squinting into the snow-filled sky. The noise quickly grew louder and Sonic finally spotted a small plane. Its speed stirred up the snowflakes around its wings.

"What's that?", Knuckles shouted over the noise and the storm.

Sonic turned around to him for a second. "A plane, Knuckles. You know, a nice flying thing?"

"Urgh," Knuckles grunted in annoyance and looked back to the plane. "And whose is it?"

Sonic also turned to the plane again. Just in that moment it softly came down on the plain ground of the snowfield in front of them and the sound of its engines died out. "I guess we just go and take a look!", Sonic shouted and started to run for the landing place.

"Sonic, wait!" Tails raced after the hedgehog and Knuckles had not much choice but to follow them.

Sonic reached the plane just in time to see a small door at its side open up and a lone figure hop into the snow, standing still where it had landed. The blue hedgehog skid to a stop. "Hello! What are you doing around here?"

He didn't get an answer, but the newcomer moved slowly towards him, his outlines getting clearer as they were peeled out of the curtains of snowflakes and Sonic recognized the sharp forms of hedgehog quills. He took a small step backwards. "Ehhm… Shadow?"

Still no reply, but by now the black hedgehog was close enough that Sonic could see him. He was staring straight at Sonic, his red eyes fixed expressionless on the blue hedgehog, his movements rhythmic and almost stiff, as if he needed to think about every step before he took it. A weird sort of helmet was locked firmly around his head, small electric lights on it blinking frequently.

"Eh… Fancy hat you got there, Shadow," Sonic started nervously. He really didn't like Shadow's look. "Umm… You see, I'm not still mad that you threw me in the water… you really couldn't know… Oh, yes, Rouge searches for you… Shadow?"

The black and red hedgehog had stopped about a meter away from Sonic's position and now stared at him, but remained silent. He had not moved a single muscle of his face and his eyes looked completely empty. Hard and stoic they stayed fixed on Sonic without truly looking at him.

Tails and Knuckles had finally caught up with the blue hedgehog and now stopped at his sides. Tails looked at Shadow in open surprise and Knuckles fisted both hands. "You know, you almost killed Sonic back there?! What did you think you were doing?!"

Shadow just stared, but a few lights on the helmet blinked faster. His left hand lifted a small gun.

"Hey, what's that about?", Knuckles shouted and instinctively braced himself.

"Enemies detected," Shadow said tonelessly, "Order: destroy." He pointed the weapon at Tails. The fox stared at him with wide open eyes, shock and surprise stunning him in place.

Shadow fired with a bang that echoed from the mountains around.

Speedy's note: Yeah, not as some people thought the impact of a stone with a diameter that small isn't gonna make the planet stop spinning or end in apocalypse... it makes a bang and a crater mostly... I guess Sonic and Co. need to worry more about other things at the moment, don't they? ;-)