After half an hour of searching the Quadrant, Miracle Sonic had finally found the place of least resistance in the veil between one parallel timeline and the other, and it resulted in him almost falling straight down a mine shaft, then being surrounded by heavily armed drones. Their laser sights blinked on and off rhythmically in the pitch darkness as they circled him like sharks. He followed their movements with his eyes, challenging them to strike first, his whole body tensing to spring out of the way as soon as he sensed a shift in their pattern. This lasted for several minutes laced with all the tension of a protracted siege until a mechanical warbling voice cut through the dull, clanking echoes that resonated throughout the abandoned mines.
"Stand down, Security Team 5B!"
"But we have intercepted a dangerous trespasser!" replied the robot directly in front of Miracle Sonic.
"Supervisor Bot 25 has identified the trespasser as the Health and Safety Officer here for the inspection that the Union requested!"
The laser sight tilted in a rather sceptical gesture, "Anyone could claim to be an inspector. I don't see any identification on him! He's not even carrying a clipboard!"
"I... er..." Miracle Sonic's brain worked hard to think up a suitable response. He had never heard of Robotnik's robot army having more sophisticated thought processes than 'shoot all hedgehog-shaped objects on sight', never mind forming Unions and demanding inspections.
"I'm working undercover! I've heard complaints that the bosses around here will attempt to hide the health and safety hazards if they know someone's called an inspector! The things some people will do to cut costs these days, eh?" he tried to hide the nervousness in his voice but was painfully aware that it just made him sound even more like a maniac, "That's why I'm inspecting random areas of the mines, and I must say, the lighting conditions down here are terrible! Someone might trip and fall like I almost did! I think I dropped my clipboard down there as well."
"We're sorry, Inspector. Would you like my men to fetch it for you?" said the robot who seemed to be in charge.
"Oh, no need, I've got a good memory. I must say, I feel the need to complain to the Director about this, though!"
"But you'll blow your cover if you speak to the Director!"
"Yeah, you haven't seen the worst of it yet! Follow us, we know the fastest route around the entire mine, we'll show you the bit we're worried is about to collapse. We never get tea breaks any more either..."
As a mechanical claw grabbed him and hauled him up into the air, he mentally cursed himself for his stupid cover story. Now these idiots wouldn't let him see anybody at any meaningful level of authority, which presumably included the other Sonic, and he would be dragged around a mine that was apparently falling apart around him.
"Look, you can't continue working here, it's a death trap. You all need to evacuate right now!" It's the entire planet you need to evacuate, thought Sonic, and you're holding me up!
"You're going to close the place down?" the security robot swivelled around until his sights were quite distinctly pointed at their commanding officer, "You said that we were too vital to close down! Now we're all going to lose our jobs!"
"Now listen here, I wasn't the one who voted to..."
"Too slow!" yelled Miracle Sonic, darting past the robot whose back was now turned. The laser fire of the others missed him entirely and he was halfway down the far corridor that, mercifully, the lighting still just about worked in. Cries of 'get him!' and 'it's your fault!' echoed behind him but receded as he left them far behind. Despite the sprawling labyrinthine nature of the mine and the number of tunnels he remembered as exits that had since collapsed, it didn't take him long to find a way out. Gasping for breath – the place stank and he hated being in confined spaces – he ran in the direction he remembered as being the shortest route to Stardust Speedway.
It helped a lot that the stars in the sky were bright enough that he could now see them through the gloom. They were the wrong colour for this version of the world. Whatever was happening to his own world, it had already spread here. If this world's Sonic had anything left of the same personality as himself, he would be out there, at the heart of the trouble. Whether or not he was trying to fix it, he was almost certainly knee deep in it.
"I'm surprised you haven't tried to lay the blame on me yet," said Neo Metallix, idly brushing the rest of the dust off himself. Dirt was lodged underneath the retractable razor implants in his third spine down. If it got clogged up, he might lose some of the movement in his back. He had fallen hard and been hit a glancing blow by the collapsing platform. If he hadn't curled up into a ball on time, he might have broken something. He could get it repaired but it would cost power. Still, it would have gone a lot worse for him if he moved a second later, if the platform had landed on him, if his augmentations hadn't included significant armour plating that still left him as mobile as before, due to rockets in the soles of his feet.
"I won't lie and say the thought hadn't occurred to me," Miracle Sonic stared out at the stars that shone through the ruined ceiling, swinging his legs from the antennae on the roof of the security monitoring station, the highest they dared go for a quiet chat now that the platforms were unstable, "I need your help too much right now to enquire as to what you've been doing that makes you think I'll blame you for something like this."
"I take it things are as bad on your end as they are on mine, for once."
"What do you mean, 'for once'? Didn't I tell you that we both needed to watch out for space-time anomalies? Our worlds crossing over, both of our worlds existing in the same Universe at all, was always a sign that things were going to go wrong..."
"I thought you only just found out about this as well," he pointed out, "Through a mystical vision given to you by the Stones or some such nonsense. Since when did you turn into Knuckles?"
"Since when did you turn into Metallix?"
The other hedgehog frowned at the retort and stared at his hands, which now ended in mechanical claws. Then he shrugged, his face perfectly calm, "Anyway, I already asked the Information Terminal at Central Command about it. A massive space-time distortion is about to hit this planet. It's non-local, so it'll probably hit your world too. The place won't be inhabitable any more, even by us machines."
"I don't suppose you have a plan?"
"Of course I do. But I'm not sure it'll work for you. It wasn't intentional on my part but I have to think about myself and my people first," he said, "One thing we still have in our world that you don't, apart from those stupid holograms of me, is a network of transporters. They're designed to transport machines, so I have no idea what they would do if a biological organism tried to use them. I'm even taking a risk by using them myself, as I'm not yet a full cyborg. It is... mostly the reason why I've been fighting it a lot less these days," for a moment he was gazing at a point somewhere in the distance, then he shook his head vigorously, "No matter, it will allow the others to escape even if I can't."
"You care a lot about the robots here. I'm surprised."
"I never used to, but lately I feel kind of responsible for them. It isn't their fault they're stuck here and they've just been left running until they fall apart. I don't feel bad for having to destroy them when they were firing at me, or when my friends were trapped inside them, but now the situation has changed... I suppose I empathise with them a lot more, too, now that I'm almost a machine myself."
"They don't seem to think you're taking care of them, though."
"I'm not surprised they're wary of anyone in charge. Robotnik ran off and left this place to rot. I'm doing my best with the resources we have but I'm running out of fuel. The Zones need repairs. The robots all need repairs. Some of them still can't be reprogrammed to ever shut down and let me repair them. Robotnik didn't give them that option. Don't tell any of them but I'm always glad to see them show some backbone and take some initiative," he shook his head, "I hope they don't try and stop me evacuating them, though. I don't really want to abandon my home any more than they do. We worked so hard to try and get it up and running again. I'm going to find them a new home once I'm done here."
"Do you even know the transporters still work? That there's anything on the other end? It's been hundreds of years..."
"We have power to them, they're not in too bad condition and the test subjects I sent through came back in one piece. Don't look at me like that! They volunteered!"
"Sure they did," Miracle Sonic gave him a sceptical look.
"I'm going to have to be directly connected to the Central Command mainframe to operate all the transporters at once," he continued, "Every time I do that, there's a risk I'll completely transform. I had to do it recently to find out what was happening. It hasn't been long enough between transitions to be safe. I'm just warning you."
"Are you sure you have any idea what's actually happening?"
"Enough to know what I need to do," he shrugged again, "You can try and go through the transporters yourself or you can try and find your own way out."
"It sounds like an awful plan. You don't even know if you'll survive," said Miracle Sonic.
"And I suppose you have a better plan."
"We need to at least find out more about what's happening. Maybe we can stop it..."
"I tried find out more but the Information Centre was locked out of all its connections, its sensors jammed. The machine's sensors can reach almost everywhere on the planet. The only thing known to jam them is the Time Stones. Whatever is going on here, it's as if the planet itself really doesn't want me to find out. I'm not sure we can stop it if it's happening at that large a scale."
"The Time Stones kicked me out as well, and they actually want me to be there in the first place," said Miracle Sonic, "I don't get visions any more. Maybe if we combined our efforts..."
"If you plug into the computers, the same thing will happen to you that is happening to me. Not that it wouldn't be an improvement but I don't think you'd enjoy it. You might not be allowed back to your own world. It sounds like your world won't be there for much longer, so, as I said, it's your choice."
"You care about people a lot more than you let on," said Miracle Sonic, "Even in a place like this, you've found friends that you want to protect even at the expense of your own life. You co-operate with me even though we should really be enemies. I don't think we're all that different after all."
"Think what you like. I've got things to do," Neo Metallix jumped off the roof, stabilising himself and hovering slightly off the ground with his jets, then began yelling orders to his robots through a microphone headset that was built into his rightmost head-spine.