Small Step For Man

"Snively, I want a full damage report," Robotnik droned coldly as he sat back into his chair.

Snively did as his uncle asked, punching buttons on his control panel. A few holo-charts popped up, a sine wave graph, and some statistics, and eventually Snively reported, "Damages to production plant A-19 are extensive, but are only structural. All that's needed is to replace the coolant cells that were destroyed, and the factory should be running at optimal production rates within a day, Your Excellency."

"Get the metal vermin to work then," Robotnik commanded as he stood back up and began to exit the main control room. "I want you to increase the security around the factory in case the Freedom Fighters decide to show their ugly little faces again. You can handle that...right, Snively?"

"Yes, sir."

He had been so close to beating insomnia. The last couple days had been great for him, getting a sleep schedule going.

Trystan sighed into the still air. And then I just had to go and fuck it up.

He'd been lying awake for two and a half hours now, encroaching on eleven-thirty, constantly thinking about how badly he'd betrayed everyone's trust. No, it wasn't a big thing. No, it wasn't as bad as God-only-knows it could have been, but he felt so...dirty.

Then, he remembered what Sally had said earlier, how the only way for the factory to be sabotaged at the time was spontaneous explosion. The wheels started turning.

"No, no, no...that's a suicide mission," he said to himself.

So you wanna stew in your own shame, then? Fine by me. Trystan couldn't argue with that cutting little voice. He sighed and sat up, groping for his duffel bag in the dark, and pulled it off the table next to him. He retrieved his gun, knife, and car keys again before putting his clothes back on, gearing up, and peeking outside the shed. No activity in the immediate area.

Trystan slunk out and kept looking over his shoulder every five seconds, to make sure no one had seen him. It wasn't for the fact that people would think he looked suspicious outside alone; plenty of other civvies in Knothole seemed to stay up past nightfall (usually the nocturnal ones) but he knew some would just walk around. No, he was just worried someone might see him armed to the teeth and he'd have to pull a convincing story out of his ass or he'd have to pretend he was coming back from training and return to the garage. Thankfully, for him at least, he got through the normally busy areas without any trouble, using the high trees and the shadows they cast to his advantage.

He exited Knothole through a secret ladder hidden in the limestone cliff, the same one they used to go on the previous mission, and as soon as he was out, he ran out of the thick area of trees and brought his bike into existence. "Well," he droned, "it's either redeem myself or die trying."

He jumped on his bike and sped off in the direction of Robotropolis.

He was speeding past street corners with robians posted at some of them (which, seeing as how no one explained their situation to him before, he assumed they were like the old citizens of New Pacific City) on his bike, trying to figure out which path he had walked only a few hours before. He felt like a vigilante, and he was. He knew he could never talk about this, if nobody found out about it. At this point, he wasn't undertaking this "black ops" mission to gain redemption in the Freedom Fighters' eyes. He was doing this for himself, to finish his mission. And if his insomnia wasn't going to let him sleep, he was going to take full advantage of it.

Trystan stopped in an alleyway, deactivated his bike, and scurried up a ladder network to the top of some building coated in steel to get a better look at the surrounding area. It took him a couple minutes, but when he squinted, he could see the faint outline of another building in the distance that seemed to be catching fire in different places and smoking at the same time. "My best bet, I suppose." He was about to turn and retrace his steps, but he heard something heavy and metallic land behind him, causing him to yelp and whip around with his gun drawn.

To his relief, it was just a big, metal box that must've fallen from somewhere above him. Trystan looked up to try and see anything out of place. Nothin' unusual. Huh.

The crate itself looked highly futuristic and definitely had at least several anti-hacking measures in place, he was sure. There was a dividing line going vertically down the middle of it, too.

"What is it, though…?" He wondered aloud. To answer his query, the crate extended an antenna that spawned a plate from it that unfolded clockwise into some sort of radar dish and it beamed out a light yellow cross matrix onto Trystan, who jumped back and stood completely still.

"Data acquired," came a soft, robotic voice. "Hello, Trystan Cronus. These are for you."

"What the hell…? How does it know my name?" This question never got an answer, as the line down the middle of the box split open and revealed several things placed on a small platform inside: a strange wrist-mounted launcher of some kind, several syringes of sky-blue liquid, and a handwritten note. Arbitrarily, Trystan read the note first, which said:

Mr. Cronus,

You don't know us, but we've been watching you…

Trystan heard some rubble being scuffed by someone's boot and he whipped around. The rest of the roof was barren. He kept staring for a minute before going back to the note.

You don't know us, but we've been watching you. Who I am is not important right now, because, believe me, we will meet face-to-face soon enough. All you need to know is I pulled some resources out of our army to help you.

I have included several vials of nanomorphine. If you're in a bind, take one of them out and apply to the cubital fossa, the elbow bridge, of either arm. The nanites in the liquid will knit you back up in a jiffy, as long as it isn't damage to the central nervous system. Don't worry, it's non addictive, I promise. The other device you see is a wrist-mounted grenade launcher. It runs on nanites, so it never runs out of ammo and has several settings for grenade types available, and on top of all that, the grenades are small and disk-shaped, which allows for easy placement of traps. Just press the button with DET on it when you want to make some things explode.

If your friends ask you where you found these things, tell them you found this crate somewhere close by wherever you came from, and show them this message.

Pugnant, magis mori,

The Praetorius

Under the signature of this "Praetorius," there was a sigil. It was a red circle with a line running through the center, diagonally from the left, as well as some sort of crescent shape attached to the left of the circle as well. Trystan kept reading the note over, trying to decipher if this was some sort of trick, but every time he looked back up, the crate was still there.

He folded the note and approached the supply drop, picking up the nanomorphine, which was conveniently stored in a plexiglass case, and the grenade launcher, sliding it over his left arm.

"Alright, then," he said as a smirk crept across his face. "Let's party."

Trystan had driven all the way over to the building, although taking back alleys was necessary as he found the main streets crawling with SWATbots and robains. Something big was going down, he could tell, and it definitely involved the production plant. He managed to get himself into an alley that allowed him to get a good view of the building, and saw robians hefting machines and parts inside, presided over by SWATbots.

"Shit. Well, this makes my job a lot harder than it needs to be," he whispered. He looked at his grenade launcher, and took notice of the small screen on its upside. There was a switch just below it, which he clicked, and saw the screen buzz to life. On it was a picture of a small metal disk that read "Fragmentation" on the bottom. "Standard grenade," he murmured. He tapped the screen and the image switched to make the metallic luster look more slick. The caption read "Semtex."

"Bingo." Trystan grinned. It was time to light the place up. All he had to do was find a suitable catalyst to create a mushroom cloud that could be seen from the next country over. It only took him two seconds to think of the conflagration the coolant cells caused when he shot them. "Oh, hell yes."

He remained in the alley to try and scope things out. He deduced that the SWATbots rotated guard positions every two minutes or so, and upon the next rotation, he rushed toward the factory, and quickly ran up a wall to latch onto an open window, and he clambered his way inside without a second thought. The inside of the factory was mostly the same since he had been here a few hours ago, except more things were on fire.

Especially the two control rooms, which he could clearly see from this angle. There were more robians inside trying to subdue the flames, and therefore, more SWATbots crawling around the ground floor. Thankfully, he had been able to fall behind a stack of metal crates when he entered.

Trystan looked up at, what he assumed, was the secondary control module. From the ground floor, he guessed there were dozens of robians inside it, carting mechanical parts up there. He couldn't see what they were from this angle, and decided the best way to figure out what they were doing was to actually get up there.

He was about to move out of cover until he heard metallic footsteps approaching and two SWATbots passed him. Strangest thing was, they seemed to be talking to each other. "You understand what happened here, correct?" one of them said in a monotone voice.

"If I heard our supreme overlord correctly, he intercepted the Freedom Fighters' attack on this plant."

"Do you know how?"

They had gone further up ahead, enough that their robotic voices began fading out. Trystan decided to eavesdrop on the rest of the conversation as best he could, and he swiftly dove between his current cover and a stack of inert pylons. "I was given the information that the doctor managed to pinpoint their location via contacting their newest member."

"The doctor's kinsman?" The SWATbot seemed confident enough with that statement that Trystan didn't know why it even asked. He came out from behind the pylons and crept forward, staying in the harsh shadows casted by the furnaces of the factory.

"Affirmative. He was stupid enough to trust the good doctor." The two SWATbots then started to laugh in the dullest, least-inflected voice he had ever heard.

"We'll see who's stupid very soon, you faceless oversized toaster."

One of the SWATbots turned around and Trystan quickly stuck to the side of a stack of barrels and got low. "Did you hear something?"

...Shit.

Trystan waited with bated breath, and his right hand hovered over his gun holster, fingers twitching periodically. Soon, the other SWATbot continued walking ahead. "I'm certain it was nothing. We must continue to watch out for the Freedom Fighters' inevitable return."

The two units walked forward and Trystan, who now had his gun drawn and ready, crept forward as well and took a sharp left and got onto the catwalks over the rest of the factory. "Yeah, you two keep a sharp eye out." He took a few more steps across the walkway before muttering "Dumb fucking machines."

He made sure to cross a few different paths so as to take an indirect route to the secondary control room, as the main path was crowded by robains carrying up what he could now see as spare parts. He did, however, catch one of them hauling up what looked like an undamaged coolant cell. Oooh...there we go. I wonder if…

Upon reaching a pathway just above the secondary control room, he could see inside, and there were a few dozen of new coolant cells stockpiled and ready to be replaced. In fact, some already had.

"...Jackpot." Trystan brought his grenade launcher up, and took his time aiming directly at the base of the pile. He made sure his frags were selected before he clicked a button on the handle and a small disk shot out, almost invisible, and landed right in front of the pile. The robains crowded around the place didn't even seem to notice. "Alright. Time to get those furnaces," he muttered as he retraced his steps back down the catwalks. Amazingly, no one saw him, thank the powers that be, and he made it to the ground level.

Sticking to the shadows again, he inched along walls and got to a row of furnaces, which he quickly stuck with a semtex grenade, and he placed one on the boilers' steam gauges for good measure. With that out of the way, he was ready to leave, considering he had probably spent about two hours on a black ops mission and was running out of night that would keep him covered. He started sneaking out of the furnaces' section of the factory and almost rounded a corner before he heard more metallic footsteps...but this time, he knew how to handle it.

"Perimeter scan...clear," came another SWATbot voice.

Trystan immediately spun out from around the corner, took aim, and fired. The shot echoed over the sound of machinery getting restarted, and the SWATbot crumpled after its dome head got a hole bored into it. "You wish."

There was only a moment where the natural sound of the factory took over before the whooping of an alarm blared over it all, but Trystan was already making a break for a secondary exit. He ran up to the door, shot the handle for good measure, and kicked it open, not even pausing to take out his keys. He simply turned the car on while running, and the nanites formed into his bike alongside him. Amidst a sudden flurry of lasers, he jumped onto his vehicle and cranked the acceleration as high as it could go, and sped off down a nearby street. Behind him he could only hear the automated message of "Alert! Alert! Freedom Fighter has been spotted at Factory A-19. Lethal force is authorized for apprehension!"

"Bitch, if you want to say 'shoot-to-kill' then just fucking say it." A second later, Trystan felt a searing pain on the side of his lower abdomen as a laser cut across it, shredding his sweatshirt. "Me and my big mouth," he spluttered. It took him a second to remember he had healing items.

He fumbled around in the bag he took with him, and while he did so, he got a quick glance behind him. He basically had a firing squad of SWATbots trained on him, and they were still shooting. He swerved every so often to try and throw them off, although his bike got nailed a couple times. He was praying it wouldn't choke on him yet. Trystan eventually got ahold of a nanomorphine vial, although the fact that he was driving and cutting corners, coupled with being shot at, it was hard for him to administer it to his arm.

But he somehow pulled it off, and the relief was immediate. He put the vial back into his bag (because, hey, maybe there was some way to replicate it. And he was kind of a pack rat) and felt where he had been shot; there was only a scar, although agitating it did make it burn.

"Holy fuck me!" he exclaimed as another laser bolt flew past his temple. Turning around again, he now saw the firing squad had become a firing battalion. He only had one hope left. Even if this didn't throw them off, he could at least go out with a bang.

He looked for the button on his gauntlet that had "DET" embossed on it, and he pressed it with all his fury. He didn't get a good look behind him, but he could see, even from this distance, that the buildings around him were vibrating, and the deafening, hollow BOOM, that echoed through the air was something he felt in his groin.

On top of all that, he heard a lot of explosions and metal grinding on metal. Since this happened at the same time the laser fire died down, he was pretty sure that meant a lot, if not all, the robots behind him had been thrown off by the atomic blast and had crashed and burned. He quickly took a hard right, driving up a ramp and onto an old, decaying highway. This also gave him a good look at where he came from, and all he could see was a tall pillar of smoke highlighted by dull red light.

The shock took a minute to settle in, but when it did, his adrenaline forced him to laugh madly as he transformed his hoverbike into its speed mode and he raced away.

"Snively! What the hell is going on? What was that explosion!?"

"I'm checking, sir, I'm checking!" Snively punched the console as fast as he could. Graphs and power meters filled the viewscreen of the throne room, with some sections of A-19 dwindling rapidly.

"What is going on, Snively!?" Robotnik demanded, hopping up and down in his chair. Snively took a good look at all the data he had in front of him, and froze in fear. "Snively!"

"There was a, erm...a break-in at plant A-19…"

Robotnik stopped jumping around abruptly, and his right eye twitched. "What...happened...Snively…?"

Snively didn't want to talk at all, but either he stayed quiet, or Robotnik would throttle him until he got answers. "S-s-someone...snuck into the plant, sir…" Robotnik's eye began twitching again. "Th-th-th-they must have planted...explosives on the new c-c-coolant cells and the furnaces…"

"...And the factory, Snively?" Robotnik's voice was deep, but still calm. It only lasted until Snively pulled up a camera-drone's view of a now smoking crater filled with the charred remains of SWATbots and half-finished Auto-Duster parts.

"Snively…!"

Robotnik stood up in a flash and gripped his nephew's uniform by the collar. "I specifically recall telling you to get more troops to guard the factory grounds!"

"...I...I did, sir!" Snively choked and tried to keep talking as his uncle slowly asphyxiated him. "I brought in as many SWATbots in the district as I could…!"

"Then allow me to repeat myself when I say, 'They're more useless than using an ice pack in the frozen tundra!'" The rest of his ranting could easily be heard for miles around the main citadel of Robotropolis.

Trystan, meanwhile, had driven like mad through the countryside leading back into the Great Forest, and when it got too dense, he jumped off and ran until he got to one of the many stumps that hid slides into Knothole. He collapsed on top of it and chugged down air like it was holy water, and eventually picked himself up and nearly threw himself down the slide.

The slide spat him out into a waiting hay pile to cushion his landing, and he remained there for several minutes, half of him wanting to make sure no one saw him, half of him still high on adrenaline. He forced himself to his feet after what felt like years and limped his way back to Tails' workshop. Either he was lucky, or no one had decided to question why he looked so torn up as he flung the door of the darkened workshop open and keeled over on his cot.

The last thing he said before he passed out was, "I really shouldn't've done that. I'm gonna piss so many people off."

Two people sat to the left and right of the broad man in his grand hall, gone dark after years of abandonment, until the Filii Rubrum had moved in, of course. His helmet held a plume of deep violet hair, mounted transversely across his head, and the helmet itself covered his face entirely. His armor was composed of black and gold kevlar. The two attendants, however, wore no helms, instead only robes that had been left behind from the previous occupants of the city and restored to at least a semblance of their former glory. One was male, dark-skinned, and a noticeable amount of facial hair was growing in on his chin. The other was female, of petite, slender build, and rather sunken eyes. They had been debating over pictures, taken years before, of a city with sleek gold and alabaster buildings.

"All I know is, this is throwing our plans off-course, Praetorius," said the woman.

"I understand your concerns, Cincius Blesse, but you must understand that we need to make connections with them."

"Tossing our planned siege of the city out in favor of silently supporting a guerilla operation that isn't even that well-equipped to begin with isn't exactly the best course of action, sir."

The Praetorius faced the other Cincius, and though his expression was unreadable under his mask, he spoke with conviction oozing out of his words. "Cincius Emex, they're on our side. That's all that matters. On my orders, the Filii Rubrum will do everything they can to support this cell of 'Freedom Fighters.'"

"By doing what, Praetorius? Sending them more supplies? We only have enough for our soldiers! You realize that sending that care package, you've not only made our army that much weaker, but we've been hearing about outbreaks of insubordination among the ranks of the Martialii!"

"Emex, the reason the soldiers are acting up is just because of the supply drop itself, not who it went to," Blesse countered.

"We will support them with manpower, Cincius. When the time comes, of course. However, I wish to send over some of our earpieces," the Praetorius answered coolly.

Emex folded his arms. "Earpieces are fine, they're a dime a dozen. But soldiers? That'll be very short-lived once one of the Martialii decide to pop a cap into one of the little furballs"

"You know they won't do that. Almost everyone here has the New Pacific strain of genes; they'll tolerate the mobians at worst."

"And I can give two examples of Overlanders from New Pacific who always hated mobians. I'm one of them…" Blesse had been looking at Emex with terror in her eyes, and had gestured across her throat in an attempt to get him to be quiet. She was too late.

The Praetorius stood up in a flash and stomped over to where Cincius Emex was sitting. He slammed his fists down on his side of the semicircular table and leaned over slowly.

"Dont. Say. His. Name."

Emex put his arms up, but his neutral expression remained unchanged. "I'm just trying to illustrate a point, sir."

The Praetorius scowled at him under his visor for only a couple minutes more before standing erect again, returning to his chair at the head of the table, and picking up a gavel from a special compartment in his seat. "Even so, if one Overlander can gain the trust of the Freedom Fighters, so can the Filii Rubrum. We'll wait longer to make sure the kid's relationship with them doesn't go south," he then glanced back at Cincius Emex, "though I doubt it'll happen. Meeting adjourned!"

The Praetorius bashed his gavel on the table twice and the two Cincii of the unofficial council left for the outside. Before Cincius Blesse left, she turned to her superior. "While I can see the advantages of this plan, I still advise you to be careful, sir."

"Of course." Blesse nodded in affirmation and then exited, leaving the Praetorius alone with his thoughts. He reclined in his chair and swiveled it around to face the back of the hall. There was a flag hanging over a broken, old, cracked throne. It had been turned around and held the emblem of the Filii Rubrum on it now, but the other side held the crest of the sun being raised over the horizon, in the center of a golden circle. "Stay safe, kid," he sighed. "And above all, stay alive."