AN: So, this is late. Sorry! I've been hellishly busy.
Chapter 2: Heroes
Location: The Scrap Brain Zone, South Island, Emerald Archipelago, Eastern Continent
Date: 13th July, 2880 or Year 4 after Robotnik's Conquest (AC)
The tiny, overloaded red biplane, hugged the nap-of-the-earth as it's four-man crew searched the industrial wasteland for their target.
"I don't see anything, Sonic." The plane's pilot, a small orange fox who wore a brown leather flight jacket, flying goggles and a fleece lined leather cap, shouted back to a cobalt blue hedgehog who stood rather precariously on the plane's port wing.
"Don't sweat bro; just concentrate on getting us there safely." The hedgehog replied his nasally voice as the aircraft rose slightly to avoid one of the larger smoke stakes that littered the area.
The hedgehog had emerald green eyes and wore few clothes apart white gloves on his arms and bright red trainers with a white stripe down the side and a golden buckle as well as a pair of green combats. His muzzle was peach as was his chest while the rest of him was a deep cobalt blue; along his back was a protruding set of fearsome looking serrated spines.
"Amy" he said as he looked down at the green eyed, pink female hedgehog in the observer seat, "Anything on the scanners?"
"Not yet." The girl, who wore a pink Alice band, white t-shirt and a green tartan skirt answered.
"I told you this would be a waste of time," the red furred echidna who stood opposite the hedgehog on the starboard wing muttered contemptuously. The echidna was the most spartanly dressed of the group, for apart from a pair of green, yellow and red coloured sneakers he wore no articles of clothing at all. He had long flowing red dreadlocks down his back and a white line of fur across his chest but his most identifying feature were his white gloves. These gloves covered large fists each the size of a baby's skull, protruding from the knuckles on each hand were a set of three-inch-long spikes which had earned the echidna his nickname; Knuckles.
"Kid's plans are always too complicated. We should just head straight in and break stuff."
The fox turned to give Knuckles a cold glare but a shout from the female hedgehog distracted him, "I've got something boys, about a click ahead of us."
"We all know the plan?" The vulpine asked.
"yup," the echidna replied, "I make a lot of noise to keep the bots busy, Sonic rushes in and places the charges to blow the generators while you hack the mainframe as girlie keeps you covered."
Below a large squad of SWATbots began taking up defensive positions to secure Robotnik's data facility from the approaching attackers.
"Looks like ol' buttnik's more eager to defend this place and is already rolling out the welcome mat for us," Sonic said as he looked at the little vulpine, "You sure he's not here?"
The fox shrugged, "Not according to the transmissions I've picked up, he's got enough problems on the mainland."
Sonic yawned, "this'll be easy then."
"How about we make things interesting," he said as he winked at the echidna, "bet I can break more of those things then you can Knucklehead."
"Oh you're on spiny!" the echidna relied as he started to warm himself up.
The fox saw what was going on, "Not yet Knuckles we're still half a click from the…" but it was too late. Knuckles leaped from the plane and glided fists first into a SWATbot, shattering it into pieces. The kit shook his head and sighed contemptuously, "…Idiot!"
"What do you expect Tails? Knucklehead's as subtle as a brick," the azure speedster replied with a shrug.
Looking down, the three on the plane watched the Echidna who was busy scything his way through a number of the robots. "Got to admit he's effective though," the pink hedgehog muttered.
"Yeah, but some of us have reputations to uphold and he's currently making me look bad," the hedgehog said as he limbered himself up. "Keep Tails safe for me Ames." With that the hedgehog crouched into a ball and launched himself off the plane in a spin dash which smashed into a file of the SWATbots below like a cannon ball.
With his two standing passengers gone, the little fox increased the throttle and pulled back hard on the yoke forcing the small biplane to climb steeply until its engine began to strain. As the plane increased altitude, Tails fiddled with the settings on the plane's on-board computer.
"Auto-Pilots' set, ready Amy?"
The girl nodded as she pulled a long leather strap with a small crossbow and a large red hammer over her shoulder.
"Ok, now!" the fox shouted as he pressed a final button on the computer.
With the plane's engine on the verge of stalling, the kit swung the aircraft upside down into a roll. Gently, the fox and his passenger undid their harness straps and eased themselves out of their seats and dropped out of the plane. After a couple of seconds, the plane righted itself and banked away to safety under the control of the auto-pilot.
In free fall, the fox grabbed hold of the pink hedgehog's wrists and began to spin his twin tails which earned him his nickname producing enough lift for him to decrease their decent speed and allow the pair to glide gracefully to earth.
Sonic was speeding his way deeper into the facility searching for the power generator; every so often jumping over an obstacle or breaking some two-bit robot which had been placed in his way. Although designed to be a maze, the route seemed almost second nature to the blue blur who'd spent the best part of four years breaking into these sorts of places; left, right, straight on for a little while, jump over this trap, etc. it all seemed so hackneyed. Man Buttnik needs to be a bit more creative when he designs these places, he thought as he made yet another sharp turn down yet another metallic corridor.
He flicked the switch on his transmitter to activate it.
"Ames, you and Tails in position yet?"
"Not yet," the girl's voice replied, "We've just landed and are making our way in there."
As soon as Miles recovers, she thought as she looked down at the fox currently sprawled on the ground panting.
"Ready?"
"Almost…" the fox wheezed, his tails may produce lift but he could only ever fly for a short period of time before he became exhausted. "Just give me… a few more seconds…to rest."
"Are you ok?"
"Fine… You just… weighed more…then I expected."
Amy stared daggers at the knackered vulpine, "WHAT DID YOU SAY?"
But the fox seemed quite oblivious to his poor phrasing, "I said… you were heavier… then I..."
"Miles, stop talking now or I'll crack your skull like an egg with this hammer," the hedgehog interrupted before he could finish.
The kit stared at her; social skills were not his forte and he was quite unsure what he'd done wrong. Seeing the look on his face, Amy rolled her eyes and sighed. "Remind me to give you tips on how to phrase things when talking to women when we get back," she said as she pulled him to his feet, "now which way to the CPU?"
The breathless fox pointed towards the door next to them. It was electronically locked up tight but next to it was a sealed access port.
"Can you hack it?"
"Course… if I can get access to the port."
"leave that to me," Amy unslung the large hammer from her back, swung it with all her might; with a loud Clang the metal broke apart revelling the access port's control box.
The fox hurriedly pulled a small computer from the utility belt of tools he wore over his shoulder as a bandolier and connected the wires to the access panel. After just a few seconds of frantic typing the door opened. The fox stepped back with a beaming smile on his face and looked at Amy.
"Show off," she muttered, "You're as bad as Sonic sometimes."
Twenty two! The echidna counted as his spiked fist smashed its way through yet another one of Robotnik's robots. He was enjoying himself immensely. He'd never admit it in public of course, but he always found breaking armoured robots apart strangely therapeutic. Sure, Sonic used the stored momentum to smash them; the kid had those blade-like namesakes of his along with that energy cannon thingamajig and the little shouty girl had her huge hammer. But, only he could actually break through solid steel with his fists and that was something of an ego boost!
A flash of red over his right shoulder snapped him out of his self-aggrandisement; he was still under attack. As quickly as he could, before the machine could fire again, he began to climb one of the facilities smoke-stacks using his claws. When he was high enough he suddenly leaped off and dove straight down onto another of the machines.
"Twenty-Three,"he said to himself as he picked himself out of the debris. However, a thud behind him alerted him to the approach of yet more of the machines and he was forced to sprint deeper into the facility to get away from them.
"I don't know how much longer I can keep giving these things the run around guys!" he shouted into the transmitter.
Sonic had just placed his second charge as he heard the echidna's message.
"Don't worry, just one more charge left to plant and then we're ready to go." He flicked the switch to change the channels again, "Amy, Tails, everything ok your side?"
"Affirmative," the fox's voice replied over the radio, "inside the mainframe now."
"Roger, let me know if you need any help."
Just as he said it an internal door in the facility opened revealing three SWATbots, each with their wrist blasters firmly pointed toward the hedgehog.
"HALT HEDGEHOG!" the trio of bots called out in unison.
The hedgehog raised an eyebrow, "it's about time you guys showed up, the security down here's just terrible."
There was no answer just a burst of blazing red light.
Sonic dodged the blaster shots. He leapt onto the side wall of the facility and ran along it until he was level with the robots. From there he leapt again, curled up into a ball and flung himself, with all his might, at the central of the three robots which collapsed under his momentum. The other two robots each turned to face the hedgehog, who now stood directly between them, the pair raised their blasters to fire again but the hedgehog was faster. He jumped into the air just as they let their shots off, dodging both of the laser beams, which instead instantly vaporised the two robots the hedgehog had been stood between.
As the hedgehog landed he surveyed the scene; shaking his head at the charred wreckage of three SWATbots, "Ol' Buttnik's artificial intelligence remains as dumb as ever I see!"
After that brief interlude it was relatively plain sailing and the third charge was planted easily. He flicked on the communicator, "Knux all charges are planted, what's it like out there?"
There was a couple of seconds wait before there was a response. "Hot!" the Echidna replied curtly, an explosion clearly audible in the background.
"Well can you draw them away so we can get out of here?"
"Roger."
Before he could switch the transmitter, the hedgehog received a new message. "Could use a hand down here Sonic!"female hedgehog's voice said, "We've got a lot of SWATbots pouring into the mainframe now."
"Be there in a hedgehog second Ames," he replied as he sprinted down the corridor.
The pink hedgehog was exhausted. She'd just swung her hammer into her seventh SWATbot in less than a minute; but, no matter how much damage she inflicted there seemed to be another one just waiting to attack, there was just so many of them. She looked over towards the centre of the room where the little two-tailed fox was trying to download as much of the system data from a central console whilst simultaneously returning fire at the SWATbots using his wrist blaster and slashing with his tails anything that got too close.
"Argh, there's too many of them," she moaned, "Are you nearly done over there?"
"Seventy percent," the kit shouted back as a blast of red light forced him to take cover behind the sever console.
"Can't you get it done any quicker?"
The fox's head re-appeared from behind the console; a look of irritation on his face. "Well, it would be quicker if I didn't have to keep doing this," he said as he fired his energy cannon hitting one of the bots in the midsection so that it dropped to the floor, it's circuits fried.
Before he could get another shot off however a fusillade of blaster shots ripped across the room forcing the fox back behind the console and sending Amy scurrying for some cover of her own. The hedgehog grasped at her communicator again, "Were are you Sonic?" she screamed, "we're pinned down in here!" but there was no reply.
Amy could hear the SWATbots advancing towards her, their fire kept her pinned but she could hear that they were moving around the barrier she was using to protect herself. From the fox's direction she heard a number of metallic clangs as Tails smashed another SWATbot with his namesakes. A few blaster shots were also heard as he returned fire as best he could. However, the SWATbots did not let up.
Suddenly she glanced up, one of the robots had rounded the barrier s and bore down towards her. The Hedgehog raised her hammer just as the SWATbot raised its blaster and she felt a sickening dread as she realised she'd never reach it in time before the robot fired it weapon.
"SONIC!" she cried out in panic as the robot began to charge up the blaster pointed straight at her.
She closed her eyes and waited for it to end. But it didn't. There was a whoosh of wind and a metallic clang and Amy opened her eyes to see the familiar cobalt blue hedgehog staring at her with a smug look on his face whilst he chucked the SWATbot's domed head up and down in his left hand like a football.
"Need a hand?" he asked lazily.
Amy didn't reply. She just let out a great sigh of relief at the hedgehog's timely arrival.
Another fusillade of blaster fire shook her back to reality. The blue hedgehog looked at Amy, "think you can rush them if I draw their fire?" The pink hedgehog nodded.
"Hey pixel brain!" Sonic shouted to the little fox taking cover behind the sever control at the other side room, "we're going to be doing that old 'rely on Buttnik's stupid obsession' play again. Ready?"
"Affirmative."
The blue hedgehog smiled at Amy. They were about to exploit a weakness in Robotnik's design, one that he and the fox had discovered years previously and used countless times since.
"Ok, now," Sonic shouted as he broke from behind the barrier that Amy had been using for cover.
"PRIORITY ONE TARGET SPOTTED, ENGAGING HEDGEHOG" the lead SWATbot called out
As soon as the hedgehog sped out into the open, the SWATbots, following their programming, stopped shooting at Amy and Tails and aimed instead for Robotnik's 'priority one' target, Sonic the hedgehog.
Sonic could easily dodge the shots and as he did so Tails and Amy both rose from their hiding places. The fox fired his wrist blaster taking out a few of the bots. Amy vaulted the barrier and raced forwards, her hammer raised, and swung with a loud clang into the robot in front of her, breaking it apart.
The SWATbots ignored the duo who were inflicting damage upon them and remained focused upon Sonic who ran along the wall, evading their blaster fire.
The cobalt speedster swung around and launched himself at the lead bot, smashing it to bits and ricocheting back into the air. The second bot was suddenly taken down by Tail's fire so Sonic launched a homing attack at the third and fourth bots which quickly fell in a broken heap. He now targeted the fifth bot, which stood next to a sixth. Sonic landed on the fifth bot's head and gracefully pirouetted, swinging his legs out to collide with the sixth, the hedgehog's momentum sending it flying. He then leaped off the fifth bot just as it was struck by another one of the fox's blaster shots and landed back on the ground, the SWATbots defeated.
He looked up to see the kit beaming at him and holding out his hand to pull him up, "that was so cool Sonic!" he gushed.
Sonic smiled as he took Tails' outstretched hand, "It's nothing kid, besides I couldn't have done it without you. That was some great shooting."
The little fox gave a weak smile, "They were tougher than I anticipated. Another minute and we'd have been toast."
The hedgehog patted the small fox on the shouldered. "When have I ever let you down?" he gestured towards the console, "that download done yet?"
"Just a few more seconds," the fox replied as he walked back to the panel.
"Sonic!" Amy's voice called out from behind him. The hedgehog turned and was immediately embraced in one of the girl's bone crushingly tight hugs, "You took your time!"
"Hey… settle down Ames," the hedgehog said as he struggled to free himself from her embrace, "when have I ever been late for anything?"
The girl smiled and let him go, "just come quicker next time."
"When am I slow?" the hedgehog replied with a smirk. "Besides it's not hard to beat Buttnik's stupid bots."
"The robots aren't stupid," Tails replied from behind the terminal with the hint of an exasperated sigh of someone who'd explain something hundreds of times before. "It's their coding, they're not AIs, they can't fully think for themselves. Robotnik has an obsession with capturing you so he programmed it into his bots to attack you as a priority. But before that they all doubled back to attack me and Amy in here."
Sonic didn't care much; one robot was very much like another, dumb and easy to break, "So?"
"So, it's weird that they reacted like that, they tried to trap us rather than go after you or Knuckles. What if Robotnik's hyper-sensitive about what is being kept in here so he programmed the SWATbots to defend this place? We know he's building something, he has been for years, so what if the data's stored here holds the designs."
"They didn't react that much differently today though, did they?" Amy asked
"They did, they only sent a token force out to deal with Knuckle's decoy and Sonic's demolition. The rest came in to trap us."
"You're just jumping at shadows bro," Sonic replied with a shrug. "So what there were a few more of them? I bet there's nothing different from the usual update reports and junk files."
Tails pulled the wires out of his computer, "well we'll soon find out, the download's finished."
"Great, let's juice Ames," Sonic said as he manhandled the pink hedgehog over his shoulder before she could even react and sprinted off, "Race ya Tails!" he shouted as he sped out of the facility. Amy's shirk of surprise following him out.
Tails smiled to himself, carefully put the computer away and sped off after him using his twin tails as a propeller.
What's taking them so long? Knuckles thought to himself as he sat waiting at the rondeaux site, a piece of wastelands a few miles from the facility. The Tornado biplane was already there, grounded with its engine turning.
Eventually a blue streak sped on to the wasteland with the yellow fox not far behind both of them screeching to a stop as they saw Knuckles.
"What kept you?" The echidna asked.
"Buttnik's bots. No sign of their tubby master though, kid was right he must be across the ocean again," the hedgehog replied as he placed Amy gently down on the ground. "You ok Ames?"
The girl seemed to have turned a rather interesting shade of green, "I've told you before," she muttered as she slowly walked away and sat herself on the floor, "give me a few seconds warning before you do that."
Sonic shook his head and turned back the red echidna with the cocky smile back on his face, "so how'd you do?"
Knuckles stood examining his spiked namesakes nonchalantly, "Thirty-five SWATbots."
"Well done, I only managed eighteen," the hedgehog replied as he pulled the detonator out of his pocket.
The echidna smirked in triumph, but the hedgehog cockily raised an eyebrow stopping the celebration before it began.
"Of course I also did this…" Sonic said as he pressed the button on the detonator causing the entirety of Robotnik's Scrap Brain zone to burst into flames.
Knuckles gawped at the explosion as the hedgehog gave a smug look of triumph, "Which, I think counts, as a few more."
After a few seconds of silence, the hedgehog finally noticed the kit hadn't said anything. He was stood separated slightly from the rest of the group furiously typing on the little portable computer. "What's up Tails, the download work?"
"It's encrypted," Tails answered quickly without even taking his eyes off the screen, "heavily encrypted, I need to get it back to the lab immediately to crack it."
Additional AN: Hope you like this, it was great fun to write.
I'd like to thank those of you who reviewed the two prologue chapters. I put them out much earlier then I wanted for a number of reasons. The biggest of which was due to the fact that I noticed my story had worrying similarites to a piece of work on here called "Sonic Affinity" by a writer called S4pphi. I wanted to publish mine sooner rather then later so I could flag it up with the original writer and offer to pull the story if he so requested. Anyway, he was happy and although the story has a similar themes in the early chapters we're going in very different directions.
As a thank you to S4pphi I'd like to ask all of you to go and give "Sonic Affinity" a read; its a great story.
Don't forget to R and R.
Cheers.