Shadows of the Future
Chapter Nine
"Ground Control to Major Tails..."
(Explanations, rating, and disclaimers can be found at the beginning of Chapter One.)
Tails ducked under a giant metal beam, pulling Amy along so fast behind him that she almost banged her head. True to his guess, the massive energies released at the launch base did indeed seem to be dampening their collars' signals--or at least, the kids hadn't seen any sight of the slavers since they entered the area. Their main problem now was staying away from the guards of the base itself. Signal or no, they were definitely still "unauthorised personnel" and would be treated accordingly if they were captured.
"Slow DOWN, Tails!" panted Amy, puffing for breath as they cautiously crossed a strangely rotating magnetic bridge. It was cylinder-shaped, and somehow turned people upside down and right-side up again as they crossed it--but held onto them the entire time. Unnerving, but harmless. Amy briefly wondered why anyone would design such an odd thing. "I can't keep running all day!"
Tails reminded himself that Amy had no food in her stomach and therefore a lot less energy to go on than he did, and slowed down obligingly. He dodged behind a tall cement pillar studded with spikes JUST before the nearest watchbot's sensors scanned the area they had been standing in. Amy followed him, squishing in as tightly as she could behind the scant cover. "We have to get inside the main building." Tails whispered, pointing to the huge complex that the immense spaceship was attached to.
The spaceship was SO tall, in fact, as it sat there on its end, that the top of it seemed to poke OUT of the sky--as if there was some kind of ceiling above them. Oh, don't be silly, Amy she chided herself. The sky doesn't have a CEILING! Still, they were on a very strange new world that they knew practically nothing about...
Aloud, she hissed, "Inside? Tails, are you CRAZY?! There are more than enough guards to catch us just out here; going in there among them would be suicide!"
"Yes, but where better to find tools?" whispered Tails back. "I mean, do you really want to be stuck wearing these things--" he fingered his iron collar "--forever?"
Amy gulped. "You have a point," she conceded. "But HOW do we get inside?"
They both looked across the way thoughtfully. They were about a hundred feet from the nearest entrance to the complex. But those hundred feet were SWARMING with echidnas walking back and forth on guard patrol, chatting and laughing with each other on coffee break, waving coloured glowing lightsticks in the air to guide smaller shuttle-type ships to a safe landing, talking into headphone-like objects to coordinate things with the control centers, scooting around on hovering platforms of some kind, zooming along on hand-held cable-trams to get from one area of the base to another, etc. Not to mention all the INanimate security measures--invisible laser tripwires, alarms, watchbots--there was absolutely no WAY that Amy and Tails could get into the building undetected.
And they both knew it.
"Amy," said Tails, turning to her after a moment, "we're gonna hafta create a diversion. Do you still have that great big hammer-thingie of yours?"
Amy shuddered but answered, "Yes." She'd discovered the miniature version of the Pico-Pico Hammer inside her glove and transferred it back to her dress pocket earlier.
"Good. Then I want you to run out there, yelling like a loony toon, and smash something with your hammer. Something that would make a big, splashy, attention-getting explosion. As much damage as possible. And I'll fly above you, yelling as well, and drop rocks on the guards' heads. If THAT doesn't get their attention--"
"--or get us killed," Amy cut in.
Tails scowled, annoyed at being interrupted in the middle of a plan. "YES, or that too--then NOTHING will!"
Amy shook her head doubtfully, but began scanning the milling mass of technology and people for a likely target. Crazy fox, she though to herself. Smash something, oh, yeah, THAT'LL work...
"AAAAAAAIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!"
Several echidna heads whipped about, long head-spines flying, as a strange, shrieking, small pink banshee came tearing straight at them from out of nowhere. Another banshee, this one orange and flying, tormented them by dropping rocks on their heads.
WHAM! Bits of metal and plastic went showering everywhere as one of the watchbots was crushed into oblivion. Its engine caught on fire, and because it was a windy day, sparks of fire started blowing around toward what looked like some kind of open fuel line! When the echidnas saw this, their reaction went from confusion to absolute panic, and they all rushed over to put out the fire. They saved the shuttle with the leaking fuel line from blowing up, all right.
But by the time the fire was out, the two creatures were nowhere to be seen...
"It's locked!" yelled Amy underneath the confusion. The only door to the complex would NOT come open. Tails applied his strength to it as well but it was no use. "Look!" he pointed. "That hatch in the ground! Maybe that leads inside!"
After much tugging and pulling, the kids got the hatch open JUST before the echidnas would have calmed down and seen them. But they were in for a bit of a nasty surprise...the instant they tried to look into the hatch to see what was inside it, they were YANKED violently inside by a very strong hydraulic air-pressure force of some kind, crunched up into as small a position as their bodies could make, spun through a sickening loop, and then forcibly FLUNG out onto the floor.
Dizzy and a bit ill, they looked around. "Wow," said Tails as he realised where they were, "Amy! We're not in the building attached to the spaceship--we're IN the spaceship itself! Come on. If we could find that hatch so easily I'm sure the guards can, too. Let's get going before they find us."
* * *
"Okay, that's enough. We can stop now. I think we've lost them," said Tails after they had passed through their third flash-elevator.
"Tails, there is no 'them." Nobody's chasing us. In fact, there's nobody in here and I don't think there's BEEN anybody in here for quite some time!" snapped Amy. She was in a bit of a bad mood. Those elevators were making her downright sick to her stomach--again. They grabbed you in some kind of forcefield, then started whirling you around inside the field, slowly at first, then faster and faster and fasterandfasterandfaster--before zapping you seemingly at random through a complex network of tunnels, in ANY direction--up, down, sideways, or diagonal--at LIGHTNING speed, then stopped your spinning so abruptly you felt as if you'd left your innards behind, and kicked you out the door. Tails had insisted on using these elevators as a quick was of eluding their pursuers, but there seemed to be no way to CONTROL the things, so he had finally given up the idea. Between those things, the rotating cylinders, and the tube-thing that threw us in here, thought Amy, these echidnas must have REALLY strong constitutions!
"You may be right," said Tails, his voice echoing in the cavernous metal room. "I haven't seen anybody for a while, either. But I wonder why? I mean, if I started a project as big as this spaceship, you'd better BELIEVE I'd finish it! Otherwise all that work I did would have been for nothing!"
The spaceship certainly looked deserted. The two kids had spent the past hour wandering through empty room after empty room--the lights on standby mode casting everything in deep, eerily-coloured shadows, buttons blinking, things beeping, robot arms picking things up, and even janitor-bots to keep the place clean. The walls were shiny, the floors polished, the machinery was running, everything seemed to be in perfect working order. But despite all the life and commotion on the OUTSIDE of the space port, nobody was in the ship itself at all. It was more than a little bit spooky.
But it wasn't all bad. For one thing, they were safe, or at least for the moment. And for another, this ship was far from boring. It was HUGE, big enough that they could easily explore it for days and not see it all. It seemed to be some kind of generational ship, for colonizing a distant star, perhaps. It had crew quarters for several thousand people, and a FARM deck. An entire level of the ship was nothing but a great big garden, to feed the crew they supposed. It was truly an awesome sight--greenery EVERYwhere, all kinds of exotic, colourful plants they'd never seen before, extending over their heads in a curved horizon, like being inside a "Hollow World". Luckily for the children, some of the plants were edible--very much so--and so they sat down to a great feast beneath a spreading purple tree. The garden-bots, oblivious to their prescence, calmly came by, looked directly at them, sprayed them with its hose (obviously it must have been aiming for the TREE behind them) and continued on its way. And just as they were wondering how they were going to get dry again (actually, Amy rather LIKED getting squirted, 'cos she'd been wanting to clean up for quite a while now), an automatic dryer came on from somewhere in the ceiling, as they were walking down another corridor, and blew the two kids dry as a bone within only 5 seconds. Fluffy, but dry.
They had been walking around for a few hours after the incident in the garden, climbing up and down many staircaes, when they found the engine room. Tails, fascinated, had to look at EVERYTHING. "Wow," he said as he gazed around the room, tails quivering in ecstasy. After all, THIS had been the kind of thing he had hoped to see when he came to the Launch Base in the first place. "These guys are even MORE advanced than the ones who built the stuff on the Floating Island! I wonder if we've somehow teleported in time as well as space..." He shook his head as if to clear it. "Come on, Amy. There's gotta to be tools in here! Engineers are always droppin' stuff and then forgetting about it. I oughta know, I've hung out with Rotor enough..."
Amy dutifully followed him inside, gazing at her surroundings with a now-jaded eye. Several hours-worth of high technology all around her at all times had rather desensitized her to the wonder of it, and besides, one machine looked about the same as another to her. So while Tails rummaged through the engine area, she turned her sights on a bookshelf lining one wall. Technical manuals, she thought to herself. They must be. Maybe one of them can help Tails figure out how to get our collars off. With the intention of being useful, she started sorting through the books. She couldn't read the titles but she hoped one of them would have a picture of someone unlocking something on the cover, or something.
"This is really weird," called out Tails' voice from behind a stack of supercomputers. Or something like that, Amy supposed. She didn't know and really didn't care. "As far as I can tell, EVERYTHING is working! The engines, the environmental controls, the artificial-gravity generators, the shields--if they got some crew on this sucker, they could lift off right now!"
"So?" said Amy, turning her head sideways to look at the spines of the books on the second row down. She was beginning to get a crick in her neck. "We already KNOW that. It is strange but it's hardly news, Tails."
"That's not the whole story," continued Tails, as he bent over to crawl under a ledge. "Everything is working perfectly, BUT there's a large, gaping hole, kinda diamond-shaped, big at the top, coming to a small point at the bottom, like it's where another part is supposed to go. An IMPORTANT part, I'm guessing from the apparent size. But WHAT does a perfectly-working spaceship need with another large part?" He squirmed out from underneath the ledge with a small device that looked like some kind of futuristic screwdriver in his teeth. "PFFFOUND IT!" he called out around the tool, then spat it out. "A tool that looks like it can get our collars off, I mean. Or at least, I THINK I did. I wish I knew if this thing was actually used for what it seems to be used for."
"Maybe one of these can help," said Amy, pulling a book at random off the shelf. "They're technical manuals."
Tails paged through the book until he found a picture that somewhat resembled the thing he had in his hand. "To be experiencing the great joy of the turning of the screws," he read aloud, "depress the button of clicking on the end of tool and apply the point of extending with polite force to the head of the screw in order to achieve the happy results." By the time he was done reading the sentence, he could barely speak for laughing. "I think they need to work a BIT more on the translation," he giggled.
"I have to depress the 'button of clicking', first," he began, holding up the tool until he located a round red button on one end. "You know, button," he told it, "the world is in a sorry state today. The environment is being destroyed, unemployment is up, and animals are starving in the streets. And did you know that the average life span of a button like you is only about three weeks?" Then he stopped trying to DEpress the button and just PRESSED it. A long, thin, stiletto-like blade snapped out. It was glowing slightly. "Okay," Tails went on, a bit startled by this. "Now I apply the point of extending to the head of the screw--" he located one on Amy's collar "--with 'polite force.' What the HECK is 'polite force', anyway?!"
"It's when you hit somebody and apologise at the same time," giggled Amy. "Like, 'I beg your pardon, sir.' WHACK. 'But I have to punch you now.' THUD."
Tails shook with laughter as he approached the collar with the glowing blade. But the forcefield surrounding the blade--or at least, that's what he GUESSED that glow was--wouldn't let him actually touch the collar. Frustrated, he played around with a dial on the side of the device, turning it this way and that, changing the colour of the field as he did so, until finally, there was a series of quiet, high-pitched beeps of different tones, a soft snick, and the collar split neatly in two and fell off.
"Huh," said Tails, staring at the device, then back at the broken collar, then back at the device again. "It seems to need the correct electromagnetic frequency as a signal before it'll open. Okay, now you do me." He handed the device to Amy, and she got it right on the first try since it was already on the correct setting. They were finally free.
"So..." said Amy, brushing herself off as she stood up, "now that we don't have to worry about being tracked by those slaver-guys, how do we get out of here?"
"I think," said Tails after a moment of consideration, "that our best bet would be to find a door leading out from a higher level, and escape by flying over everyone's heads."
"Ugh" groaned Amy. "That means even MORE climbing."
"Would you rather take the elevators?" Tails grinned wickedly.
"No, I would rather NOT," sniffed Amy. She sighed. "Find us some stairs and let's get going.
It took them until they were twenty flights up from the engine room to find a door leading outwards. And then it led to a rather open, exposed balcony that everyone could easily see from the ground. They hurriedly ducked back inside.
"We'll remember that's there in case we DO need to use it," said Tails as they caught their breaths for a moment. "Maybe there will be less people around at night. But for now, let's keep going. Maybe there's like a...service exit, or a fire escape kinda thing, somewhere around here."
Something had been nagging at Amy all this time, and she finally realised what it was. "Tails," she puffed as they trudged up the 21st flight of stairs, "you remember those silly instructions in that manual, right?"
"Of COURSE I remember them," he answered her. They reached the landing. He briefly opened the door, scanned the room, saw that there were no other doors leading out of it, closed the door, and started climbing again. The 22nd flight. "That was only an hour or so ago! What about them!"
"They were silly and didn't make much sense, true," said Amy, watching as he opened the door to a room at the top of the 22nd flight, saw nothing useful again, and continued again, "but WHY were they even IN Mobian to begin with?"
Tails froze, turned around, and stared at her. Why hadn't HE thought of that?! "I mean," Amy went on, "from what Knuckles told us, his people deliberately cut themselves off from everybody and everything on Mobius hundreds of years ago! Why would they suddenly want to learn to speak our language NOW?"
Tails blinked, completely clueless. "I have no idea."
"Neither do I," she answered as they passed yet another landing.
"And that's what worries me."
They stopped abruptly, because the stairs had. They were evidently in the top of the ship. A circular room surrounded the stairwell, with a domed ceiling. Chairs with small, flat computer panels of some kind mounted in front of them on swinging arms were arranged neatly on the floor, all facing a large metal panel on the far wall.
"Cool!" exclaimed Tails as he saw the computers, his eyes lighting up. "I'm gonna see if I can make this thing show me a map of the place." He sat down on one of the chairs and started randomly tapping at the buttons.
"Just don't blow us up," cautioned Amy.
"Oh, I'm sure the self-destruct command would require some kind of secret passcode only the highest officers know," Tails breezily brushed that dire possibility aside as he continued experimenting.
Bored, Amy decided to explore the room. There wasn't much here to look at if you weren't into technology. But what was UP with that weird huge metal panel covering that wall, she wondered. She walked towards it slowly, holding out and hand to touch it.
And as she did so, she must have triggered some kind of sensor in the floor, because a computer voice started talking as the panel slowly rose into the ceiling! "Warning" said a feminine voice that sounded almost normal except that it was far too calm and flat. "Warning. Blast doors retracting. Shielding no longer in place. Warning." and Amy gasped in terror as the panel slid out of the way to reveal a starry void! Oh, my gods, she thought hysterically, these people are REALLY mean! They throw tresspassers out into space!
But after a moment, she calmed down as she realised that there was actually glass in between her and the void; it was just a viewscreen of some kind. She still couldn't shake the creepy falling sensation, though; it was just so BIG and so EMPTY! Eventually, she worked up the nerve to come right up against the glass and look out.
The view was absolutely stunning. She gasped as she looked down--it was hard but she made herself do it--and found that she could see the ENTIRE city spreading beneath her, under a gently-shimmering dome of some kind. Around the city was nothing but barren, cratered rock. To the sides was a moon hanging against the blackness. And directly in front of her...
"Tails," she called in a tone he had never heard before, a tone that quite frankly gave him the creeping willies. "Come here and look at this."
Curious but somewhat alarmed, he joined her at the viewscreen. Directly in front of them, filling up almost the entire lower half of the window, was a planet. Rotating slowly, it was a bright patchwork of blues, greens, and browns ringed with fluffy white clouds against the dark. And the continent closest to their viewpoint looked strangely familiar. It has a gigantic gleaming metallic city of some kind, so big it was easily visible from space, then near it was a HUGE forest that spread for miles and miles in every direction. Then surrounding this continent was an even bigger ocean, dotted with many small islands. Except for one island--it was very large, and it wasn't IN the ocean, but ABOVE it, floating among the clouds!
They both turned away slowly to stare at each other, jaws gaping, as understanding dawned. "We're NOT as far away as we assumed we were," Tails breathed. "We're on Mobius's MOON!"