It was a leader's role to stay calm in the face of disaster, make sure he stayed in control of the situation. Griff knew that whatever aura of self- control he managed to maintain was nothing more than an illusion, and that it was failing badly. Several times he had to stop himself from speaking because his voice was cracking. Only the weight of the responsibility on his shoulders kept him from breaking down completely.

So many people were counting on him. They shouldn't be, and if only they had known who Laurentis was, they wouldn't be. But that didn't change the fact that they were. Already he had cleared the emergency response center of its meager staff, ordering them to get to the transports with the rest of the city. Only he, Rotor, and Dirk remained.

Rotor had quickly volunteered to take the position of one of the deserting staff members. The mechanic's fingers played across the control panels of the monitoring systems, cameras and radars both, as if such unfamiliar things were second nature to him. Griff had known before that the walrus was a fair technician, but his competence with the unfamiliar tools surprised him to no end.

Things had more or less settled into a shaky routine: Rotor was monitoring the surface for any signs of the armada sure to be bearing down on them, and Dirk was busy relaying orders to both transport pilots and the scattered militia. Griff didn't envy either of their jobs, but knew that his was by far harder. He was the one who had to make the decisions, and he was considering the hardest one of all.

"Any sign of the task force?" Griff asked, after taking a deep breath, trying to steady his thoughts. His voice sounded disappointingly shaky.

Rotor didn't look up from the monitors. Griff caught a glimpse of the Great Forest on one of the surface cameras under Rotor's observation. There was nothing in the air, but the gray smog clouds over Robotropolis churned forebodingly in the distance. "Not yet," he said, switching camera views yet again. "But most of your surveillance systems are clustered around entrance and exit surface tunnels. Once we see them, we'll only have about five minutes of warning before they reach us."

Griff noticed that Rotor kept glancing at another set one monitors every few seconds, these ones set up to receive feed from cameras inside the city cavern. Looking for Bunnie, he realized.

Still, the decision weighed on his mind. Griff wanted to take his mind off of it, do anything but consider it, but it still had to be made.

"Dirk," he said, "how long until the second convoy is ready to leave?"

The boar set down the hand-held radio for a moment, pausing to work something out in his head. "Ten minutes, give or take two. Most of the hover vehicles are still busy dropping off their first passengers."

"Will everyone fit in the final convoy?"

"I'd say so. We were able to take about two-thirds of everyone at the market with the first trip." Griff found himself wondering how the boar could keep his voice so calm, stay so cool under duress. He envied Dirk's military discipline. "More people have arrived since then, but we should still be able to fit everyone."

"Out of the entire convoy, what vehicle has the least passenger capacity?"

Dirk seemed to understand that was shorthand for 'What vehicles can the city spare?' "That would be the Sewer Crawler car, passenger capacity is six at most. We have a total of five cars of the same model line in the convoy. Most of the civilians are catching rides onboard the bigger cargo haulers."

Griff's own hover sled was of the same make as the Sewer Crawler. It was the car he had taken to Knothole when he first met them. Yellow paint job; sleek, but small. "Pull two of them from the convoy, and have them sent here."

"Two?" Dirk asked. "One would be more than enough to take us all."

"I know, but send two anyway." Griff paused, wondering if this was the right thing to do. Over the years he had become convinced that Lower Mobius had weathered so many hardships that it had achieved its own sort of immortality. The prospect of destroying the city, even to save its population, was too much to bear. But his judgment told him that this was the best, the only, choice to make. "As soon as they get here, I want you to fly one up to the crystal generator's control room."

"Why?" Dirk was genuinely confused, and worried.

"I've run the analysis programs over and over again. The evacuation convoy's going to be too large, there'll be too much exhaust in the air to stay hidden. Hiding the path of one of two hover sleds usually isn't a problem, but an entire convoy. Robotnik's going to be able to track them, Dirk. He'll be able to track the convoy's exhaust trails unless we find a way to scramble them."

"And what does the energy crystal have to do with-"

Dirk felt his jaw tremble as the terrible realization hit home.

***

Making sure that she was prepared was often the hardest part of any battle for Sally. She knew she had be ready for anything, but she could only carry so much before it started to become cumbersome. What if she left the medical kit behind only to have someone get shot and need immediate aid? She couldn't see into the future to know what would happen. And this time was even worse. It would only be her, Sonic, and Dulcy out there. Sure, Dulcy was able to carry a lot, but with her claustrophobia it was unlikely that they could take her down to Lower Mobius.

Sally stared at the gear laid out in front of her, and made her decision.

First was Nicole. That was the easiest choice. There had never been a mission she had gone on without her, and she clipped on to her boot and stayed out of the way until needed.

The power ring was the next obvious choice. Sally picked up the torus, turning it over lightly in her hands. She never understood the eldritch energy that glowed within it, but she couldn't argue with its worth. Sonic would carry this in his small backpack.

The next was an ancient piece of technology that had scavenged from Robotnik's junkyards. Sally had guessed that the antique laser rifle must've seen use as far back as the Great War; it was that beat up. It was one of the only weapons the Freedom Fighters had in their possession, and it only rarely saw use. Not only did Sally not believe in weapons, but a general rule of Freedom Fighting held that if you were in deep enough trouble to have to use a gun, you were probably done for anyway.

Sally didn't like having to use it, but she also didn't like confronting Robotnik's forces this directly. The rifle would provide some measure of security, at least. It was more than capable of destroying a SWATbot, and she was dexterous enough have a decent aim.

She slid a single clip into the underside of the weapon. A read-out on the top of the rifle flickered to life as she did so. There was enough energy in the clip's power cells for at least twenty-five shots. She doubted she'd need more than that. A final push on a stubborn lever snapped the clip securely into place.

There was a strap on the rifle. She slung it around her shoulder. If she was forced to run fast, the rifle would disrupt her balance and she'd have to ditch it. But it might come in handy before than.

Neither she nor Sonic had the room to carry the largish medical kit. Dulcy would have to tuck into her pouch. Sally uttered a silent hope that they wouldn't need it when the dragon wasn't around.

She left the hut, forcing herself to turn her back on the other gear, and not think about it. All they had to do was apply the tools they had, and they would win, she knew. Bunnie and Rotor would soon be back at Knothole, just like they always were.

Right?

Dark thoughts rushed to fill in the forced gap in her mind. Nicole's calmly worded description of the Laurentis nodule had shaken her more than she'd like to admit. And Bunnie had know about it all along. Sally kept asking herself why one of her best friends had kept something like this hidden, and couldn't come up with an answer. Bunnie had lied to her. There was no other explanation.

And Lower Mobius was going to suffer for Bunnie's lies.

Sally mulled on this as she walked closer to the power ring grotto, the weight of the rifle on her back a constant reminder of the deadly seriousness of the situation.

"Yo, Sal, you ready yet?"

Sonic and Dulcy were waiting for her. Sonic was already on Dulcy's back, wearing his practiced expression of impatience.

"I think I've got everything we're going to need," Sally said, slow to be stirred back into the real world. "Dulcy, I'm gonna need you to carry this." She handed the dragon the medical kit.

Dulcy sniffed it curiously for a moment. "What's one *more* smelly old thing matter?"

"You're just smelling the anesthetic, Dulcy. It's not that bad."

"Says you."

Sonic glanced down at Sally. "You look like you've got somethin' on your mind, Sal." The hedgehog could be surprisingly perceptive sometimes. When he wanted to be.

"Yeah. Bunnie."

"You're worried about the Laurentis-whazzit?"

Sally met Sonic's gaze dead-on. "Why didn't she tell us about it, Sonic?"

"Maybe she just didn't know," he offered.

"No. I checked Nicole's logs. Bunnie's known about the nodule, and its transmitter, for over two years. She just didn't want to tell us. I can't imagine what would make her want to lie to us about it."

Sonic shrugged helplessly. He wanted to say something reassuring, restore everybody's faith in Bunnie, but the words just couldn't come. "Well, we never asked," he joked weakly. The line fell flat.

"That's no excuse. For two years she knew that her very presence placed all of Knothole at risk. She just never said anything." Sally stopped short of using the word 'betrayal'. She couldn't bring herself to. For Bunnie to betray them like this was almost unthinkable, the concept itself was an oxymoron. "This hurts, Sonic," she admitted, "this hurts a lot. And I just don't know what we're going to do about it. She lied to us."

"Hey, stop right there," Sonic said. "I only know two things right now: Bunnie and Rotor are out there in mondo danger, and that we're in a position to do something about it."

Dulcy nodded. "It doesn't really matter, Sally. All we have to do is get out there and fight the good fight. Stuff like lies and pointing fingers can come later."

Sally bit her lower lip, looking down at the ground.

"Lies or no, we have friends to save, Sal," Sonic said.

Sally accepted Dulcy's extended hand, using it to pull herself up onto the dragon's back. She slid into a seated position, right behind Sonic.

"You're right. There are lives that need saving right now." **But that doesn't mean that the hurt is gone,** she added silently.

Sonic held his fist out to Sally. She laid her own fist on top, then held it steady as he brought his up and over to do the same thing again. The ritual concluded when they held their hands together in the universal good- luck symbol of a thumbs-up.

"Let's do it do it."

***

The boundary between the old Lower Mobius and the new was instantly distinguishable. The older buildings, rock structures that had been built long before the Great War shook Mobius, were composed only of crumbling stone and mortar. They had been co-opted by the first villagers, and restructured to different purposes. When the city had become too small to accommodate its growing population, the villagers had expanded. The newer structures were composed mostly of cleaner, well-chiseled rock and wood taken from the surface. Architects must have been in short supply among the city's population, because some of the wood structures looked haphazardly unstable. They all stood sturdily enough, but Bunnie couldn't imagine how.

There was no one left on the streets. By now the city was entirely deserted except for the distant market square. Even the evacuation sirens had been reduced in volume, making their distant wail decidedly haunting. Bunnie was wandering the streets of amongst the newer buildings searching for someone, anyone, she could help. For a long while, the only thing she found was unusually moist air registering on her senses.

Voices carrying across the street caught her attention. One was female, the other male, both were agitated. She found herself running towards the source, the danger the people were in the only thought on her mind. More vehicles were arriving by the minute. The second convoy was getting ready to leave, and everybody in left in the city had to be on it, or they would die.

Bunnie rounded the corner, metal feet involuntarily kicking up clouds of dust behind her. She saw two people clustered around an open doorway, a lioness and a buck. Bunnie recognized them both. They were part of the group of new citizens Dirk had been leading around the city before the beacon had been activated.

"We have to get the convoy!" the female was saying, speaking urgently. "If we run we can still make it."

"And if we don't we'll be trapped in the center of the city," the buck said uncertainly, "we have to find a side tunnel nearby. That's what our instructions are if we're near the cavern wall."

The two were obviously newcomers to the city, unfamiliar with its layout. Bunnie knew more than they did. There were no side exits anywhere by this side of the city cavern. The fastest way for them to get out would be through the convoy, but if they hesitated too long they would miss it.

Bunnie ran faster, waving and shouting at them. Somehow they overlooked her completely, too absorbed in the argument.

"We have to go now! To the convoy!"

"Gail, please," the buck insisted, backing into the wood-constructed house. "I-I think that boar gave us a map somewhere along the way. Let me find it."

She gave him a desperate look, wanting so much to start running but unwilling to leave him behind.

"Hey!"

The lioness finally noticed Bunnie's voice above the sirens. She whirled around frantically, eyes pleading for back up.

"Y'all have to get out of here, now! Get to the market!"

Gail turned towards the house. "Did you hear that? Now! I don't want to leave you behind!"

"Hold on," the voice came from inside the house. "I think I've almost found it."

Bunnie gave a quick mental curse at the stupid obstinacy of the male psyche. Judging by the pained expression on the lioness's face, she was doing the same, as if she hated him and loved him all at once.

"Get out here!" they both shouted in unison.

"Here it is," came the triumphant reply. "I found-"

*CRA-ACKKKK*

It was a horrible noise, the sound of wet wood giving away or bone splintering. Shock alone knocked the lioness's breath out of her as the house began collapse before her. The first floor seemed to almost disappear, the door the buck had gone through swallowed by a collapsing structure.

Pieces of the wall on the second story seemed to bend and buckle out, pulled down by gravity and racing towards the ground. Bunnie didn't have time to think, only act. She instinctively jumped away from the building, bionic arm grabbing Gail and shoving her away from the wall of debris. They both landed hard, next to each other, just as the wall and roof of the house slammed into the ground they had been standing on.

Bunnie used her own body to shield Gail's from whatever debris still managed to hit them. She felt heavy pieces of stone and wood hit her metallic legs. Had they been flesh, they surely would've been damaged by the onslaught.

An instant after the debris hit the ground, a cloud of dust spilled across the street, washing over both Bunnie and Gail and momentarily hiding the rest of the city from view.

Gail wasn't kept down for long. No sooner had the debris began to settle then she was up on her feet and running towards the debris, pure horror frozen on her face.

"Thaddeus!"

Looking at the remains of the house, it was obvious what had happened. Bunnie had thought that the air in this part of the cavern was uncomfortably moist, maybe due to an error in the city's environment regulators. The wooden support beams must have begun to rot in the humidity.

It turned out that the buildings that looked so incapable of supporting themselves actually weren't.

"Oh, god, not now!" Gail cried, kneeling down to desperately claw at the piles of heavy rubble. Of the buck that had been inside, there was no sign. "Any time but now! Thaddeus!"

There was time to think about what to do now, but Bunnie didn't need to. She was instantly upon the settling debris, trying to remember where the buck had been last. If there wasn't a vocal reply, then the buck was either unconscious, or dead.

The odds did not look good.

Bunnie took Gail by the arm, trying to gently move her away from the ruined house, but she refused. "Please, y'all have to get the convoy as soon as you can. Ah'll look for 'im, Ah promise."

"I'm not leaving my husband," she said, sounding just as stubborn as the buck. Just from her tone, Bunnie could tell that there was little she could do to change her mind. Bunnie couldn't bring herself to use her augmented strength to drag the lioness to market square. Gail sounded resolute enough that Bunnie was sure she would fight back, anyway.

The lioness was determined, that much was for sure, but that didn't mean she wasn't vulnerable. She looked back up at Bunnie. "Please... can you help?"

There wasn't much of a choice. Sparing a worried glance back at the convoy gathering at market square, Bunnie tried to determine where to begin digging.

***

A lone hover car, the second of the two diminutive Sewer Crawler models left ditched outside the Emergency Operations center, took off and split away from the larger group converging at the center of town. The twin jets of thruster exhaust looked desolately lonely in the otherwise empty expanse of the cavern. Just below, the evacuation was nearing its final stages, but the pilot of the hover car paid it no mind.

His mind was on his last meeting with Griff, and the last instructions he had received. Griff had Dirk's held shoulder as he gave his final orders, as if he were afraid it would be the last time that the two would ever see each other. Dirk didn't know what the mountain goat he planned, and he didn't want to know. The part of the operation he had been asked to carry out was menacing enough.

The glare of Lower Mobius's energy crystal only got brighter as he neared the control room above. Dirk squinted against the glare, yet never took his eyes off of the crystal. Alone, with only the rumble of the engines behind him, he finally had time to reflect on the situation he had been thrust in. He had trouble believing that this would be the last day he'd see the familiar energy crystal. The concept was as unthinkable as the sun not rising in the morning.

He coasted closer and closer, almost losing himself in the yellow- green glare. The hover car coasted between the four struts securing the crystal solidly to the cavern roof, rising to the gantry way just above. Dirk kept wondering how something like this could happen to something so tranquil.

The top of the convertible hover car clicked open, letting the light breeze of motion inside. The pilot's side door lowered into a ramp, leading into an empty air dozens of stories above the crowded street below. Carefully, he maneuvered the hover car until the ramp was just touching the scaffolding outside, and left the car to hover.

Without looking down, he stepped outside, onto the thin platform. Beads of sweat trickled underneath the fur on his brow. It wasn't because of the height; he had been here hundreds of times before, but only to monitor the crystal's power generation. The severity of his task heightened his senses, made him all the more nervous.

Dirk clung to the side of the gantry, hugging the outside of the control room walls until he was able to move towards the control room's open door. He slipped inside and into darkness, fumbling for the light switch. The room obediently bathed itself in illumination.

The control room was perched at the very top of the enormous energy crystal, with no easy way to access it from the ground. Very rarely were there more than two people up here. Most of the time there was no one at all. With events proceeding as they were, however, he found the desolation utterly unnerving. Having someone to talk to would make this so much easier.

The power rock, a gift from the Knothole Freedom Fighters, lay on a platform nearby, thrumming with energy. Power seemed to hum in the air all around it. It had been in the same place for over a year, and hadn't shown any sign of exhausting its seemingly limitless power supply yet. It was the source of all the crystal's energy, and was responsible for channeling power back and forth between the crystal and the city reserves. Everything had come from something so small. It was the gift that kept giving. Dirk hated to be the one to force it to stop.

He walked forward, eyes scanning over the consoles until he found the one he wanted. There were no chairs here, so he would have to stand. These computers were pre-Great War, not equipped with voice interfaces. Dirk flexed his wrists and began typing.

"OPEN," the words appeared on the monitor as his fingers pressed each key, "SUBROUTINE POWER_RELAY."

The monitor blinked, his own words replaced by column after column of computer code. These were the instructions that the computer followed when channeling power between the Knothole rock and the crystal itself. The vigilant automatic programs that ensured that life as Lower Mobius knew it could continue.

"EDIT: LINE 362."

The monitor blinked again, scrolling down until it found the requested block of code. When Dirk had first seen these computers, this program had seemed like a foreign language. Now he was able to quickly decipher the programming code, see what each phrase and word would do. Line 362 contained information essential to the process of channeling unspent energy from the crystal back to the power rock: one of the many pieces of the puzzle required to prevent a catastrophic overload.

Dirk made sure that the entire line was selected, and then hit the 'Delete' key.

***

"Not now," the lioness Gail repeated to herself, on her hands and knees stubbornly picking apart the piles of debris piece of piece. "Why did this have to happen now?"

Bunnie circled the remains of the house, trying to find any sign of a survivor within. The devastation was total. To be so completely destroyed from losing a single beam, the entire building must have been on the verge of complete structural collapse long before Bunnie came here.

Bunnie wondered why bad luck seemed to follow her around like the plague. As if the Laurentis transmitter weren't bad enough, her subconscious couldn't help but escape the impression that the building had collapsed just because of her mere presence. There was no sign of the buck at all, and the distant rumble of the convoy's collective engines was growing disturbingly louder.

"Does this happen often?" she asked. Maybe talking would calm the lioness down.

Gail shook her head. She was so distraught that the motion looked like a frantic trembling then a real gesture. "No, you hear stories, but -- no. Even with the dehumidifiers on this side of the cavern on the fritz, I never thought that I could take those stories seriously."

For moment, her face lit up with hope. "Thaddeus?" She tossed aside a crushed remnant of a sheet rock wall. When that revealed nothing, her face crumpled.

"Where is he?"

"You should just go," Bunnie insisted. "Ah'll keep lookin' for 'im, while you get to the convoy."

"I'd never be able to be able to forgive myself if I just left him to die," Gail said sadly.

Although they were in it through different reasons, love and guilt, they were both bound to this spot by a duty to save a life. Bunnie circled around to the left, searching for some place, any place, to start digging. There wasn't enough time to search through everything. She had to know exactly where the buck was.

It was a problem solved almost immediately, though not by a method Bunnie at all liked. As she sorted through the rubble, her left toe landed a puddle of warm, sticky liquid. She looked down it just as the rich coppery scent hit her nose. Blood. It was beginning to pool on the ground and seeping out from underneath the wreckage. She froze.

Gail saw Bunnie stop, and glanced over in her direction. She saw what Bunnie had stepped in. "Oh god."

Instinct kicked in. Act first, fret later. "He's over here." Bunnie immediately began to shove aside the first few piles of smaller objects.

Gail rushed over, and immediately dug her hands in to help. They hadn't seen any sign of the buck other than the blood, and it wasn't going to be an easy dig. There were larger beams cluttered all around here, even a section of the stairwell that had miraculously remained whole lay nearby. All of it barred their path.

Bunnie cleared away the pieces of smaller debris first. Pieces of shattered sheet rock, plaster, split wood. Gail helped clear the area near the center, and when Bunnie reached to the remove the twentieth pile of smaller wreckage, she felt the buck's hand underneath hers. Reassuringly warm, but limp.

Gail's cry of relief broke off in a choked sob. The buck, Thaddeus, was almost directly underneath the larger intact beams and pieces of thick stone wall several times larger than an average person. Desperately, she tried pulling away the largest beam between them and the buck. Her sizable muscles strained to no avail: the beam remained solidly in place.

"Stand back, sugar," Bunnie warned her, grabbing the beam's midpoint with her left arm.

"What?" Gail trailed off, eyes wide and staring at Bunnie's arm, as if noticing her biomechanical limbs for the first time. "What are you..."

Her organic hand gripped tightly around the endpoint of the beam for support, Bunnie began to *lift*. The servos and motors in her elbow joint strained to keep up with the sudden demand placed on them. The false muscles labored against the weight of the rubble. She felt the whir of the Laurentis nodule in her leg as it struggled to assign the necessary power reserves in time.

Slowly, the beam began to move upward.

Bunnie moved her right leg forward, knees bending to take some of the beam's impossible weight. She hear motors whine with stress, but with a total of three artificial limbs doing the work, she could more than handle it. It was about time her augmentations got put to good use, she thought to herself.

Gritting her teeth for one last thrust, Bunnie heaved the weight sideways and out into the street. She loosened her grip on it just as her left arm swung outwards, letting it go.

The beam landed forcefully in the street a second and two meters later. The corner that struck the dirt road actually managed to significantly dent the ground underneath. The clanging noise of the impact echoed up and down the empty streets. Bunnie let the air out of her lungs, heaving a sharp sigh of exhaustion, but already prepared for more heavy lifting.

Gail stared at her. "How did you do that?"

"Tell ya later," Bunnie said, "just keep diggin' 'im out of there."