Shadows of the Future
Chapter Seven
"You Say You Want a Revolution..."
(Explanations, rating, and disclaimers can be found at the beginning of Chapter One.)
The room shook violently again, for the eighth time this hour alone. This time nobody was thrown around, as they had all gotten grudgingly used to it, but they all had rather grim looks on their faces the entire time they were holding on. When the room finally settled itself, Vector stretched up to look out a high window. "I can't tell, exactly," he reported back to the others over his shoulder, "but I THINK we're about 7 feet lower now. That cloud that WAS right next to the window now seems to be somewhat above it. But it could just be the wind blowing the clouds around."
"What wind?" snapped back Charmy, fanning himself with his uninjured wing. With the environmental controls in the Hidden Palace breaking down, the REAL climate of the Master Emerald Chamber, which was, after all, underground and part of the Lava Reef area--was starting to assert itself. And the tempers of the four conscious animals in the Chamber were heating up to match. Even the always impeccably polite Charmy was cursing and yelling along with the rest of them. The room was miserably sticky-hot now, in only a short while it would become hot enough to knock the creatures inside unconscious from heat-stroke, then it would bake them to a crisp. But more dangerous than that was the possibility that the air filters would soon break down. When THAT happened, the deadly poisonous gasses of Lava Reef would seep into the unventilated chamber...
...and they wouldn't be worrying about the heat--or anything else--ever again...
"It's the nicest day Mobius has ever seen, outside," Charmy continued, grumbling. "Trust me, that was a genuine drop of at LEAST 7 feet. I could feel it through my shoes."
"So could I," asserted Mighty. The armadillo was leaning weakly against a wall--the cool marble hadn't QUITE soaked up the heat of the surrounding volcano yet--and panting heavily. "If Knuckles and the others--whereEVER they are--don't do something SOON, this entire Island is either going to fall apart into its seperate dirt-clumps, or crash into the ocean, or BOTH."
Bunnie, who had finally made Espio comfortable but was unable to wake him up, put her hand on her chin thoughtfully. "This lil' ol' Ahsland heah is held in the ai-eh bah magic, raht?"
"Yeah," replied Vector, unable to see where she was going.
"But a lot of the thangs on it are run bah machinery, yes?"
"Machinery that is POWERED by the magic, yes..."
"But maht theyah be some way of makin' the machinery run on just purely mechanical me-ans?"
Vector put his hand on his own chin for a moment. "Of course! I HAVE thought on occasion that the Hydrocity purifying plants had far more parts than they actually needed! I'll bet it's that way all over the Island! It's as if the echidnas started off purely technological, then, when they discovered that the magic of the Master Emerald COULD power everything--"
"--they put it in charge and let the machinery sit there and rust!" Charmy interrupted, so excited that he just jumped right in without even thinking of what bad manners that was. If Espio, who had had his own manners correct by the persnickety little bee too many times to count, had been awake, he would have been rolling on the floor with laughter. "But if we could get it working again...well, we couldn't stop the Island from falling, but at least we wouldn't have to worry about being poisoned or cooked while we're waiting, anymore! But...who do we know that's good enough with mechanical stuff to get ancient machinery from a foreign culture working again in time?"
They all looked at each other.
"ROTOR!" they chorused.
"Okay," said Mighty, putting his hands on his hips, "but how do we get him UP here? I don't think we want to try those transporters again anytime soon...YOU know what I'm talking about, Bunnie."
She shuddered. "No, we definitely don't want to use the transpoahtahs. But we don't have to. Mahles pahked his lil' ol ai-eh-plane outsahd in--you know--that place with all them they-ah broken pillahs an' stuff?"
"Marble Gardens." supplied Vector.
"Yeah, they-ah. We can just flah down and get Rotor!"
Mighty shook his head. "There are too many problems with that plan. First of all, from what Charmy reports, Marble Gardens has become totally uninhabitable--"
Charmy's stripes turned pale as he nodded sickly. "The grass is black, the columns are all collapsing, sinkholes filled with some kind of poisonous dark liquid are everywhere, the vines attack you, and the air stinks." he supplied. "It's so sad...it was always a ruin as far as I remember, but it USED to be so beautiful..."
"--and even if we DO find the plane, it probably won't have enough fuel by now to make it safely to the ground, what with all the flying you said Tails had been doing today--"
"But--" began Bunnie.
Mighty ignored her and continued on. "And last but not least, who among us here can fly it? You and I--" he indicated Bunnie "--have NO piloting skills and would probably crash the thing into the ground at a moment's notice. Vector's too big to fit into the cockpit, regardless of his skills, and Charmy may be a certified five-star pilot but he's too SMALL to reach the controls!"
Bunnie's ears drooped almost to the ground in dismay. Then she brightened up. "Wait!" she said, snapping her fingers. "There IS a way! Dulcy can carry him!"
"Are you sure that's wise?" Vector asked uneasily. He and Dulcy had never been comfortable around each other, and so far, no-one had quite worked up the nerve to ask them WHY. "I mean, you know, the way she...lands....and I do use that term LOOSELY..."
Charmy snorted. "The way the Island is now, who'd NOTICE a bit more damage?"
Mighty was already activating the Island-to-Mobius com system. "Hurry," he said, stepping aside so that Bunnie could state her case to Princess Sally, Freedom-Fighter-to-Freedom-Fighter. "The com system is still working, but it won't be for long."
"Hah y'all down they-ah!" chirped Bunnie as Sally's face came on the screen. "Ah got a fav-ah ta ask of you..."
* * *
Sonic careened madly down the colourful half-pipe for a while before he realised something--it wasn't moving. The roller-coaster slide was just sitting there dead still. Sheepishly, he pulled himself to a stop and rushed back to the hooded figure, who was no longer invisible--its cloak had turned a rather dull grey. He couldn't see the person's face, but he got the distinct impression he was being glared at. He dropped into step alongside the figure and looked about more closely at his surroundings.
Sure enough, that glimmering round portal had indeed been what he thought it was--a giant gold ring, and this was the Special Zone all right, or one aspect of it anyway, but there was something...wrong...about it. It wasn't moving; the floor was just sitting there. Instead of being made of energy, the walls, and, in fact, everything else, seemed to be made out of hard coloured plastic. He flicked a finger against it experimentally. Even FELT like plastic. And weirdest of all, there were no rings, and no bombs. Just a quiet, bumpy, plastic tube.
Noticing his gaze, the figure shrugged and said casually, "The Otherworld went...inert...after the last of the Chaos Emeralds was drained. We don't know why it's even still here at all, but we're not exactly gonna complain. It makes one heck of a hideout. We're the only ones who know how to MAKE portals to it and from it disappear and reappear whenever we want, so we've never been caught."
"The Chaos Emeralds were drained?" asked Sonic, bewildered. "Hideout from who? Caught by who? Who is 'we'?"
The figure stared directly ahead and pulled itself ramrod straight. "I am not the one to answer that. I am only Number Six. Wait for the coming of Number One. Number One will answer all. IF--" and here the figure turned sharply towards Sonic "--you are judged worthy..."
Finally the slide ended, bottoming out into an even stranger realm--but also, again, familiar. The horizon curved down away from them, as the floor they were standing on was actually a gigantic sphere. The floor was covered with a red-and-white checkerboard pattern, each square easily as large as Sonic if he were to lie down on it. And the sky? The sky was jet black, nothing but an empty void. Sonic wondered briefly how the sphere they were on was generating enough gravity to keep them from falling off--for, indeed, the gravity felt just like Mobian standard--then thought it best not to ask. He peered into the blackness more carefully. Stars! There were stars! He was in outer space! But how were they breathing...?
No, he amended as he looked closer, they weren't stars, they were too perfectly round for that. They were...
...they were other spheres like the one he was standing on!
All the Special Zones connected? Well, he supposed it made sense...
The floor was also decorated with the typical patterns of red, blue, white-star bumper, and orange spring spheres, each about Sonic's size, but the large sphere was NOT turning, and no matter how long they stayed in there, it never moved any faster. Sonic shuddered. There was just something...WRONG about this. He'd thought the ORDINARY Special Zone was weird enough, but THIS place was giving him the creeps!
They finally crested a rise to find several other hooded figures surrounding them. "I have brought an Outworlder," intoned the figure who was leading Sonic. "How shall we judge him?"
"ANOTHER one?" groaned one of the figures, this one with an obviously male voice, not trying to disguise it with a synthesizer. "We've already got one here, and boy, is she..."
"...ANNOYING." supplied another, this one with a female voice. She casually leaned against a red sphere. Sonic winced, then realised that this Zone really WAS inert when nothing happened. "She's over there," she pointed off behind a field of blue spheres. "Twelve! Bring out the other prisoner!"
Could it be Electra? wondered Sonic. The way she had disappeared like that worried him more than a bit.
But, no. His spirits fell slightly when he saw that the figure the two hooded and robed echidnas were dragging out was Jolt the Squirrel. Well, he reminded himself, ANY step at getting the group put back together is good...
"SONIC!!" shrilled the young squirrel, loud enough to shatter glass. Sonic clamped his hands over his ears. "I am like SO totally glad to see you here, isn't this place just like so totally LAME?! I mean, just LOOK at these COLOURS, like BARF me OUT, they just TOTALLY clash with my fur! And checkers make my butt look fat!"
The female hooded figure groaned. "You see what I mean? She's been talking like that the entire time she's been here!"
"Can't I sedate her, boss, please?" whined one of the two guards.
"No, Twelve, you may not, I keep telling you we need the tranquilisers for medical supplies!"
Boss? Sonic's ears pricked up. "Are you Number One?"
The figure laughed. "Me? Oh, heavens no. You won't meet Number One until you are deemed worthy. Not until we are sure we can trust you--you and your little friend here. You see, this isn't any party-time here. We're hiding out in a defunct Special Zone and wearing disguises because we're at WAR, kid. So tell us who you are and where you came from. And make it snappy."
So Sonic told her everything--after all, the first figure had said they were on the side of freedom, and that right there sounded like something he could agree with. "My name is Sonic the Hedgehog. I'm from a planet called Mobius. This girl here--" he indicated Jolt "--is a friend of my sister's and her name is Jolt. I don't hang out with her a lot personally, but I do know she's harmless. Anyway, we were teleported here by accident--myself, Jolt, Electra my sister, Amy Rose, Knuckles and my best friend, Tails the Fox. Knuckles is an echidna like you guys--and in fact, until just yesterday or so, I thought he was the ONLY one that existed!"
This caused some stir among the hooded and robed crowd. They started whispering feverishly. Sonic couldn't follow all of it, but he caught random phrases like "The Guardian!" "Only a legend..." "...help us..." "don't be hasty..."
They turned back to him. "What do you do for a living, Sonic the Hedgehog?" called the female figure.
"Well, I belong to this group called the Freedom Fighters," began Sonic a bit uncertainly. The figures were beginning to advance towards him in a rather ominous way. "Large parts of my home planet have been taken over by this evil dude named Robotnik who wants to turn everybody into robotic slaves with no free will. He got my Uncle Chuck and he partially got Bunnie--uh, she's not here, but she's another Freedom Fighter and a good friend--so I have PERSONAL reasons to hate this guy, ya know? Anyway, the Freedom Fighters are trying to get rid of him and put the parts of Mobius he's ruined back the way they're supposed to be..." he broke off as he realised that the figures were now surrounding him in a tight circle. One of them pulled out a glowing red rod that Sonic was sure was blazing hot and started moving it straight towards his head. Others grabbed his hands and held them behind his back. He flinched as he felt cold metal snap around one of his wrists. Handcuffs? he thought vaguely. The red-hot poker came closer and closer. This is it, he thought. This is where I die. I must have said soemthing wrong...oh, gods, I hope burning doesn't hurt TOO much... He squinched his eyes shut.
He felt a moment of searing heat around his neck, then...nothing. A loud CLANK as something fell to the floor.
And the heat was gone. Am I dead? he wondered briefly. He opened his eyes cautiously, and found that he was still standing in the defunct Special Zone. All the robed figures were still around him in a circle, but with two key differences now:
Their hoods were down, showing their faces for the first time.
And secondly, those faces were smiling.
"Welcome, fellow Freedom Fighter," came the metallic, synthesized voice of the one who had first grabbed him out of the alley. Sonic turned to look and jumped as he realised that the voice didn't sound that way because of an attempt to disguise it--the person was a robot! A tall, elegant, gleaming silver echidna with long-head spines down to the backs of his knees, perfectly formed, slender yet muscular, with exotic high-boned features and realistically-sculped everything. Though his voice was gender-neutral, the body was very definitely crafted to resemble a male. His facial features moved like a living face did; he could smile, frown, raise or lower his eyebrows, blink, close his eyes, and more. His eyes did not have that creepy glow to them that Mecha Sonic and Robo Knuckles had, and in fact Sonic could tell at a glance that he was WAY more advanced than either of those two. He looked NOTHING like Robo Knuckles; he was shaped completely like a real person, muscle, bone, and skin moving with an eerily fluid grace, just like a living movement--but all in metallic silver. He even had individually-crafted delicate hairs of fur covering him--all in metal! In fact, if there was anything wrong about his appearance, it would be that he moved a little bit TOO smoothly, a little too precisely, a little too gracefully.
Sonic tried not to stare but the robot caught him doing it anyway. "Don't worry," he smiled, "I'm used to it. Not very many EF-5000's were made, you know. I'm kinda rare. Plus my particular designer was also an artist and went against the typical robot mold for my appearance--so I am the ONLY robot who looks anything at all like me."
"Are you..." began Sonic uncertainly, "I mean...did you...?"
"No, I was not--what's that word you used--'roboticised'? I was always this way. Made in a workshop, not hatched. I am one of the most advanced robots ever made."
"TOO advanced," added the female figure Sonic had been talking to earlier. She turned out to be a short, middle-aged, slightly chubby echidna with dark brown fur. "The EF-5000 series was made to be very independent, so that they could direct other robots for their owners, understand complex problems, and solve crises that came up on their watches without having to ask for outside organic help, thereby saving resources and manpower. It didn't quite work that way. The programmers made them SO intelligent and independent that they basically developed free will, and they often walked out of their jobs, deliberately directed the less-advanced robots to do the wrong things, or even murdered their echidna overseers! So as you can imagine they were recalled and dismantled rather quickly. All the ones they could FIND, anyway..."
"At any rate, welcome, Sonic. I am Number Two, and we are the New Radicals, Arellus's version of the Freedom Fighters. We're not out to destroy robots but we ARE out to depose or at least confound an evil ruler, Queen Riku-Dari."
This was the first Sonic had heard of any of this. "What is the Queen doing that's so bad?"
Number Two frowned. "Lots of things. For example, see those collars?" She pointed to the two broken chunks of metal on the floor. Sonic just then realised that those hot poker-things must have been to melt the collars off or break the locks or something. Jolt was rubbing at her newly-exposed neck, too. "Slavery was STRICTLY outlawed according to our ancient code, going up back to the days when the Floating Island was still part of a continent on Mobius! And then, Queen Riku-Dari, BLESS her heart," she said sarcastically "runs the City of the Stars completely out of money with her wasteful, extravagant ways, and how does she decide to raise more? She institutes government-sancioned slavery! A good percentage of every slave sale goes to the throne, and you can be SURE she's not using it to fix anything! Which brings us to our current project. But I'll let Number One explain that to you."
A tall, slender yet muscular, attractive young orange-brown female echidna strode into the room. Even though she was only an ordinary person, she somehow projected an air of confidence and determination that made her seem even more powerful than the gleaming robot. She was dressed all in a simple black suit and had her shoulder-length head-spines pulled back in a ponytail, away from her face. "Okay, everybody, look sharp. Showtime in less than 24 hours, we gotta get to it." She turned to Sonic. "Who are you?"
Sonic told her. When he got to the part about his friends, her entire demeanor changed. "Knuckles? You know Knuckles?" Her composure was completely gone, her eyes were wide, and her voice even shook slightly. WHOAH, thought Sonic, what HAS our dear red friend been doing since he got here? Whatever it was, he's obviously made some kind of impression on HER! Where IS he, anyway? "You say he's the Guardian? Then...then that would explain...this." She pulled out a gleaming orange jewel.
And most of hell broke loose.
The ball they were standing on started moving under their feet and all the rebels, not expecting it, were tossed around. Number Two quickly leapt back from the red sphere she had been leaning against earlier.
"It's a Chaos Emerald!" gasped Number Six, the robot. "It must be! It's reactivated the Zone! Put it away, put it away!"
"So this IS what I thought it was," said Number One, regaining her composure as she tucked the orange emerald inside her pocket. This seemed to be enough to convince the Zone it was no longer there, and it went back to its eerie dead state.
"I have met your friend the Guardian," she replied. "I--I spent the day with him, and left him at the door to my house tonight--and he disappeared immediately afterwards. We think the Queen's Own took him." She sounded depressed. "NO-one ever gets away from THEM."
"So why don't you go rescue him?"
She shook her head vehemently. "We don't have enough people for that. We're a small group--we have to be, it makes detection harder. We've got a more pressing matter right now. You see, this entire city has been running on some unidentified magical means for some time now. And we have all known for years that it will run out soon, but no-one has dared to say anything for fear of the Queen's wrath. So we have been building a mechanical generator that we THINK will be enough to power the city by itself, in secret, here in the Zone. It's almost but not quite done now.
"The problem is, I've recently hacked into the Royal Palace's computer system, and discovered something that makes us need to work much faster. We have almost a week's worth of work left to go on the device. But we have to have it operational by tomorrow.
"You see, whatever it is that's been powering the City of the Stars, it has enough power of its own, but it's recently started draining power from somewhere else."
Suddenly, everything clicked into place for Sonic and Jolt. "The Floating Island!" they chorused, looking at each other.
Number One nodded grimly. "Without the machine, we won't be able to safely destroy the Queen's power source without causing all the air in the City to leak into the void and kill everybody. And if we don't get it working SOON, the Floating Island will crash into Mobius and everybody on the planet will die from the shockwaves and earthquakes."
"Well, we'll try to help you," said Sonic as Number One led them across the floor of the sphere to a GIGANTIC collection of incredible gadgets hooked together in some way. It was so complex he got dizzy just looking at it. "But neither of us know very much about machinery..."
"I can tell you something I DO know," whispered Jolt in his ear. "This Number One girl is in LOVE with Knuckles.
"Big time."