Snively had never seen Robotnik move so quickly in his life.

One moment, the tyrant had been in the chair mounted in the center of the command ship, the visor pulled down across his face, grinning fiercely at the sight of yet another foe's defeat. Snively had been facing the tactical display; he never even saw him start to move. Robotnik had suddenly lunged forward and slammed a great fist down on Snively's control panel with no more warning than a slight grunt. Three dots on the tactical display disappeared in tandem.

Snively watched, too startled to do anything. On the monitor before him, one of the many camera views zoomed in on the distant hover car seemed to erupt into a solid yellow flame as the missiles chasing the rabbit detonated simultaneously.

Out of the yellow mist flew the hover car. It was singed by the explosion, but otherwise intact.

"No, sir!" Snively cried in shock. He only knew that the longer Bunnie Rabbot remained alive, the more upset Robotnik would be. And when Robotnik was unhappy, things generally went bad for himself. Why did he always behave so unpredictably? Why had he just saved the rabbit's life? "Why did you detonate the missiles early?"

"Didn't you see it, Snively?" Robotnik asked incredulously, still leaning over the controls. His eyes gleamed as he spoke. "She surrendered!"

"What?"

"There! Two objects just ejected from the hover car. Two passengers."

Snively checked his displays. Robotnik was right. Two people had just been pushed upwards, still attached to their chairs by seat belts. Neither of them were the rabbit. They were floating down to the scorched dirt below. As to how Robotnik had spotted them in the chaos of everything else that had been happening, Snively didn't know. He himself wouldn't have been able to see it unless he had known what to look for. Either those glowing red eyes were more observant than he had revealed before, or… he had been waiting for it to happen. But Snively couldn't discern its relevance to the chase.

"I still don't understand."

"She was convinced that she was going to die, Snively. She wanted to save the others before it all ended, and threw them out."

"If you say so, sir," Snively said, still bewildered.

"She was convinced that death was the worst possible thing in her future." Robotnik finally removed himself from the control panel, stood up, and glared at the tactical display. He looked *hungry*. "I've learned many things about the art of revenge over the decade of my rule. Surely you must know that by now. But the greatest lesson is that, whenever your prey thinks that the worst thing possible has already happened to it, the only way to give the dagger an extra twist is to inflict something even worse."

Robotnik moved back to his chair, and heaved himself back into a sitting position. His cheeks burned a red bright enough to match the angry glow of his mechanical eye-sockets.

"She's convinced that the worst that could ever happen to her was death. Roboticization can be infinitely more painful than even that. Ejecting her friends was a sign of weakness, Snively, a sign that she is helpless. She is mine."

Snively understood now. He shivered.

"I trust the roboticizer was left warmed up after our original departure, Snively?"

"Yes, sir," he answered shakily.

"Order whatever hover units are left in the pursuit to come at her from above. No -- I repeat, absolutely no potentially lethal shots are to be fired. Order the hover units to arm their grappling hooks. And tell the workerbots outside my castle to prepare for their landing."

***

For the first few seconds, Bunnie didn't understand why she was still alive. The rear view mirror had turned a solid yellow blaze; the explosion was so close that some of the fire had even licked across the rear of the hover car. The shock wave had tossed the ship up and down so quickly that the two effects almost canceled each other out. But the missiles had detonated too early.

Simultaneously, all three Stealthbots behinds her peeled back and voluntarily abandoned the pursuit. Bunnie watched them with a slack jaw, unwilling - unable - to believe what she was seeing. With little warning, driving became surprisingly peaceful. There were no more laser blasts; the sky was so clear that she even caught a glimpse of Rotor and Griff gliding to the ground behind her

But why had this happened?

Then she saw the hover units diving down towards her, and suddenly she knew.

Two of them were coming fast, timing their downward plunges so that they would come level with the hover car on both its left and right side. Almost invisibly, pieces of the hover units’ hull had peeled back to reveal small zones of shadow, and out of those gleamed the shiny metal tips. The hover car’s engine was really struggling now: already it had lost the majority of its fuel. Speed was bleeding away. Not only was it impossible to finish crossing the firebreak and make it to Robotropolis, but the car could no longer outrun the hover units, either.

Even though there was no longer any point to it, she fought anyway, with every last ounce of strength left to her.

She managed to evade them for a little while. The first grappling hook missed wide when she quickly dodged to the left. The hover unit that fired withdrew the cord, and the metal hook snapped back into position. It fired again.

This time it hit.

The glass on the side of the passenger cabin shattered as the hook pierced it, and then fell limply to the floor where Griff’s seat had been. Bunnie wrenched the steering column in the opposite direction as soon as she heard the noise. The grappling hook’s cord was jerked back by the motion, but the hook itself had caught on the underside of the remaining seat, and stuck there. Both vehicles were linked by the cord, and the hover unit could easily overpower the car’s ailing engine.

Bunnie was jounced about by the force of the hover car’s turn slamming to a stop.

A second grappling hook, fired by the other hover unit punched through the car’s metal siding. The energy force binding generators had already failed past the point where they couldn’t even try to stop it. Even if they had been operating at one hundred percent efficiency, they probably couldn’t have won against that kind of force.

Then the last of the fuel spilled out to the ground outside, and the engine sputtered to a stop. The lights on the dashboard blinked, and went out. Even the motion sensor motion flickered and shut off.

The wrecked hover car dangled helplessly between the two hover units, completely at their mercy.

“No!” Bunnie cried.

For a moment, she considered raising her metal arm and killing herself with it. One swift, solid blow to the head would do it. She had done worse to SWATbots. It was better that she die here, rather than face what Robotnik certainly had in store for her. The three metal fingers on her left hand made a fist, and she held up to her face. The gunmetal gray surface of her fingers was numb to all but the strongest of sensations, so she didn’t feel the tears trickling from her check fur onto her hand. She could see them, though.

She couldn’t bring herself to do it. Slowly, she lowered her arm, and waited.

Continuing the battle was the only alternative to such thoughts, she realized.

Sally had once made each and every one of the one of the Freedom Fighters swear that, if they were ever captured, they would keep fighting Robotnik to the very end, no matter how hopeless the situation or how useless resistance was. Back then, Bunnie had held up her hand and repeated the words proudly. But now that she had actually met the end, she didn’t feel up to fighting.

Yet she found herself fighting anyway.

She wrested with the useless steering column, hoping that - even with a dead engine - there were rudders or airbrakes somewhere that she was hitting, something that would effect the aerodynamics of their motion and make it just that much more difficult to bring her in. Taking a frantic guesses as to how some of the controls worked, she tried using what things remained working to hook the car's reserve battery up to the laser emitters in front. Surprisingly, on her third try, it worked. She fired shots wildly into the air. Unable to control the orientation of the hover car or the aim of the laser, she just fired.

The hover units, Bunnie in tow, finished crossing over the firebreak and into the city.

Bunnie's laser shots washed over factory smokestacks and city streets, the power of the blasts too weak to do any real good. Griff's laser just wasn't potent enough to break through ceilings or walls. After firing for what seemed like minutes on end, she was rewarded once, when a stray laser bolt struck a SWATbot patrolling the streets below. The laser was only ineffective on the scale of a vehicle; against an individual it was deadly. The hapless bot was spun around three times before falling dead to the ground. She cheered through tears, and kept her finger on the trigger.

That she was going to be roboticized was a given. The only question on her mind was how long the reserve battery would hold up.

She kept firing even when the hover units finally set the car down on a landing pad on top of Robotnik's fearsome ellipsoid castle. Even though the lasers faced a wall and were doing nothing more than blackening an armored metal wall, she kept firing. No SWATbots had approached her yet. She only looked up to see the command ship land nearby, and only then long enough to wish that the lasers were facing it.

She knew that she had to fight as long as she could, because when he got a hold of her, it really was all over.

***

The command ship's ramp lowered soundlessly to the surface on the smooth metal landing pad, and even the dull thump of its impact against the ground was quiet enough to be drowned out by the breeze. Of course, the pad was perched near the very top of the castle, and the wind at this altitude was significant. The noise of the rabbit continually firing the hover car's useless lasers didn't help much, either.

The very same wind fluttered Robotnik's cape behind him as he walked down the ramp, keeping the yellow cloth nearly horizontal. Occasionally Snively, walking behind him, had to constantly brush it out of his face or be blinded by it.

He stepped off the ramp, and surveyed the scene before him.

The two hover units had finished lowering their quarry to the ground, and were now regaining altitude and preparing to fly away. The rabbit's car itself - now a smoldering wreck of a ship with barely a smudge of yellow paint left - spewed smoke from the engine compartment. The gash that had been torn in the fuel tank was the largest of all the vessel's wounds, and occasionally a drop of clear liquid splattered on the ground beneath it.

At least twenty SWATbots had been scrambled to the pad, and all of them had their gauntlet lasers covering the car from all sides. More were approaching from an elevator door nearby. None of them had strayed very close to the car itself, yet, though. They were waiting for his order.

The landing pad was near the very top of the castle, but it wasn't the highest. There was a communication tower nearby, and, by lucky chance, the hover car had landed facing the control shed. Inside, the rabbit kept firing the lasers, probably hoping a stray SWATbot would stupidly wander into it. Robotnik shook his head. The SWATbot AI needed work, but it wasn't that bad. Meanwhile, the shed's metal wall was already beginning to blacken under the feeble but persistent assault. Given another five minutes or so, she might actually break through it.

Robotnik sighed, wondering what it would take to force her to give up. He made up his mind to find out.

He withdrew his own laser pistol from the holster, and with a single swift motion fired at hover car's small forward cannon. Behind him, Snively flinched at the sharp noise of the laser discharge - he hadn't been expecting it. His shot was far less powerful then the rabbit's cannon, but his aim was precise. He knocked the focusing crystal at the front of her weapon out of alignment. The next blast impacted against the walls of the barrel and backfired.

Something underneath the hover car fizzed and crackled, and another plume of smoke joined the others lazily wafting through the air. Robotnik grinned. On his first shot, he had overloaded the car's battery. From somewhere at the very fringes of his perception, he thought he heard a wail of distress.

He snapped his fingers at the line of waiting security droids, then pointed at the hover car. "Take her."

Five SWATbots approached the hover car's driver side door. Three others covered each of the other exits, gauntlet lasers at the ready.

From this distance, Robotnik could see nothing inside the passenger compartment. If any of the SWATbots could, they gave no sign of it. Following standard tactics, two of the five stepped forward to open the door, while the others got ready to open fire. That left six immediately able to cover them, and several dozen more waiting nearby.

The door was opened.

For a moment, nothing happened, and the first SWATbot's visor gleamed red in the smoggy daylight as it peered around inside. It didn't look like it saw anything, at least not before it was too late.

A metal fist shattered the visor.

Then the rabbit was on the ground, kicking out with her right foot. Shards of red glass still glinted on her left forearm. The first SWATbot didn't even have time to fall to the ground before her outstretched metal leg struck the second with enough force to cave in its chest plate. The horrendous sound of gears crunching and metal being twisted into new shapes split the air. The rabbit's face contorted into a triumphant snarl as her enemies fell.

Robotnik's grin grew. She certainly had spirit. One of his favorite hobbies was crushing spirit. No, he decided, crushing was the wrong word. Violating was perhaps a better term.

"Stun her," he commanded.

Bunnie was struck in the face by three simultaneous blasts from the SWATbots arrayed in a line around the landing pad. Two more hit her stomach before she even started pinwheeling backwards. The SWATbots continued firing even as she fell. By the time she hit the ground, seven more stun bolts had hit her in the face alone.

Robotnik paused for a moment, to let the atmosphere of the moment soak in.

He shivered with pleasure.

He walked over to the rabbit's slumbering form. She had grown since she had last been inside his roboticizer. She was taller, for one, and her proportions were more adult. He stopped for a moment, to wonder if that would affect the roboticization process. He had never partially roboticized someone in preadolescence, and then waited until they were nearly an adult to complete the procedure. Well, it would be… interesting to see what happened.

Somehow, she was still wearing the same purple jumpsuit that she had donned those two years ago.

Fitting.

With a gentle shove, he pushed her over until she was laying on her back. There was no use wasting violence on someone rendered unconscious. It was best saved until they could feel it. Closed eyes stared upward, and her mouth was slightly open. The wet tip of her black button noise glinted, and so did the tears on her cheeks. She groaned slightly, but otherwise didn't stir.

With one giant hand, he grabbed her by the cheeks, and squeezed until they were puckered. Not enough to hurt her if she were awake, but enough to puppet her. It felt so good to be in control of the unconscious prisoner. It would feel so good to throw her into the roboticizer. It would feel so good to kill her. After all she and her friends had done, it would feel *so* good to end her miserable existence and just make her suffer…

"Sir?"

Robotnik was once again aware of Snively, standing right behind him. After another moment, he let go of Bunnie's face, and stood up.

"Snively," he intoned threateningly, "don't ever interrupt a moment like that again."

"Yes, sir," the frail human said, subdued.

He looked down at the fallen form of Bunnie Rabbot, and took one last deep breath. Then he gestured to two of the SWATbots standing nearby. Obediently, they stepped forward, and waited for his word.

"Take her down to the roboticizer chamber," he ordered, and to his lackey, "and you, Snively, are going to help me modify the equipment again, and prepare to complete the Laurentis process. After two years," he glared down at Bunnie, "it's time to finish our test run."

***

After the ceaseless racket of the turbulent chase, Rotor had thought that the next moment he could hear blessed silence would be the happiest time of his life. The quiet now, though, was nearly unbearable. Stillness on a battlefield he could never stand. The aftermath felt too much like death. During the entire time he had coasted to the bottom of the firebreak, he had seen what had happened to Bunnie. She hadn't been killed, she had been captured. To the very core of his being, he was convinced that roboticization was a fate worse then death.

Had he been in Bunnie's place, he knew he would've wanted to die.

Her last words still echoed between his ears.

Rotor groaned weakly, and rolled off the side of the chair, and onto the solid dirt ground of the firebreak. His body had been through too much. The back of his head was still bleeding where the glass fragments had struck him. The ride in the hover car itself had been bad enough to induce nausea, but the acceleration of the ejecting seat had nearly broken his arms. The deceleration hadn't been so bad; the thrusters on the bottom of the chair had acted almost like a parachute in cushioning his fall. Yet, the majority of his internal organs felt as though they had been ripped out by the sheer force of his violent departure, and left behind. His heart especially.

The only other people who had ever told him, "I love you," had been his parents, and they had been roboticized when he was only five.

He tried to push himself into a sitting position, and managed to best his spinning head for just long enough to get a clear view of where he was. He was only the dry brown silt of the firebreak, surrounded by smoke and dust. Craters littered the ground. Some of them were old, but most were new, and had been blasted out of the decayed soil during the battle. Long, thin streams of smoke poured out of most of those. There was a crushing sensation of silence that went beyond hearing alone to oppress his very soul.

"Oh, Bunnie…"

His voice echoed. Rotor didn't care who heard it.

The yellow-upholstered chair that had come with him from the hover car was lying at his side. As far as he could tell, he was alone. The SWATbots had ignored him after Bunnie had ejected him. He almost wished it were the other way around. If Robotnik had the presence of mind to send units after him, too, it would mean he wasn't so single-mindedly fixated on Bunnie, and things might go a little easier on her.

No, he saw after giving his surroundings a more detailed examination, he wasn't alone. The top of Griff's chair was visible just over a slight mound in the dirt. It had landed sideways. The deceleration thrusters were still firing uselessly into the air, and couldn't tell that they had landed.

He summoned whatever strength hadn't been vanquished by the ride, and scrambled over to the seat.

Griff still hadn't moved. Arms and legs were lolling limply off the side of the upturned chair. His eyes were closed, and blood trickled down his forehead. The burning thrusters were nearly singing the fur off his legs. As soon has he saw it, Rotor lunged forward for the deactivation catch. The jets stopping spewing flames. He bent forward to examine the mountain goat.

The rise and fall of Griff's chest was barely perceptible, but present nonetheless.

Rotor sagged with relief, and collapsed into the dirt.

The next thing he was conscious of was a steady bass beat, like that of a distant drum. He looked up, but could see nothing in the smoke of the battle's aftermath. The sound was moving, growing closer. It wasn't a drum, either, it was like the great quantity of air being forced into motion. Or the flapping of great wings.

Rotor suddenly found the capability to rise to his feet.

"Dulcy!" he shouted.

Led by his voice, the dragon's form gradually appeared from behind a plume of smoke. Exhausted, she was barely able to keep aloft now. When she spotted Rotor on the ground, she changed her direction and came to a crash- landing nearby.

Sonic and Sally had braced for such an event, and immediately regained their footing after being thrown clear of Dulcy's back. They rushed towards Rotor.

He didn't take the time to embrace them, or even acknowledge their existence beyond pointing at the upturned seat and shouting, "Griff's hurt!"

It wasn't long before Sally was bent over the wounded mountain goat, scanning Nicole back and forth across his limp body and waiting for the computer to diagnose him. Rotor's expertise was in machines, not people; he couldn't make sense of any of the medical babble that Nicole spewed out. Sonic was kneeling next to her, looking at Griff with something like dismay on his face. Wheezing heavily, Dulcy trotted up behind him and plopped heavily to the ground. Even her exhaustion couldn't hide the worry on her face when she saw Griff, though.

After listening to Nicole thoughtfully, Sally proclaimed, "He's been received a concussion from some kind of blast. With all the glass fragments in his skin, I'd say it came from the laser we saw hit the car." She closed Nicole, and clipped her back onto her boot. "He'll be all right. Probably take a couple hours to wake up, but he'll be all right. Now, Rotor, what's been going on with Bunnie?"

He gave them the abridged story.

***

It began just like it had before.

When she had been shot in the alleyway, two years ago, the effect of the stun had lifted away slowly, like a morning fog being burned away by the sun. Only the sun was the most painful thing in the universe, and she would give anything to avoid its rays. Reality hurt. The smothering fog of unconsciousness had been the most welcome thing in the universe, and it was leaving her no matter how hard she clutched at it.

This time, though, the fog hurt almost as bad as the sun. She had been shot one two many times. The multiple stun bolts had thrown her into a sleep that tormented her subconscious. Shadows chased her through the fog. Apparitions of mist reached out and impaled her. Friends withered and fell in front of her. Even spending an eternity in this hell, though, would be preferable over what awaited her in the realm of the living. Metal feet clanked in the background.

Always throughout the fog there was the image of a horribly familiar face, mustache twitching in the fat smile constantly in motion below it, and the echo of a menacing laugh. The image grew stronger as time went on.

It turned out that the truth breaking through the smog.

Last time she had waken up surrounded by SWATbots on the floor of the roboticizer chamber, Robotnik leering over her. This time was so much alike that she thought she might just be suffering through a flashback. No, it couldn’t, her legs and left arm were solid metal this time. And there were far more SWATbots.

She groaned, and tried moving her head. It was a mistake to try. She fell back to the floor, retching with a dry heave. The overdose of stun bolts had left her more nauseated then she’d ever been before.

Robotnik began laughing harder.

The roboticizer chamber had hardly changed in the past two years, but Bunnie had known that before. The tube still hung from the ceiling, the glass prison as yet undeployed. It would only be lowered when she was cast into it. The machinery above it was ambiguous in its precise functioning but obvious in its overall purpose. From that emitter in the ceiling would come the transforming beam, the clinical malevolence that had transmuted her flesh to metal two years ago. It had patiently waited all this time to finish its task.

Two SWATbots were standing at attention behind her. As if Robotnik had remembered her kick to his groin two years ago, another was standing in front of her. Snively was readying at the roboticizer’s controls, readying it to finalize her enslavement. Resting innocently on a tray nearby was the Laurentis blade.

“Well, you've been rather slow to regain consciousness.” Robotnik was clearly enjoying her horror. He had said the exact thing to her two years ago. He wanted her to know that this had been inevitable, and her subconscious believed him. “Almost as if you didn't want to. Can't say I blame you."

***

“Nicole, give me a schematic display of Robotnik’s headquarters.”

Griff’s head had been bandaged, and his limp body had been placed upon Dulcy’s back. He would be all right later, but he couldn’t do much for them now. The dragon was happy to maintain a lookout for any incoming hover units, as the inactivity gave her a chance to rest. Sonic and Rotor had clustered around Sally’s handheld computer.

The hologram flickered into existence, but the floor plan was decidedly unhelpful in its present state, even with a map of the local security setup.

“Let’s see,” Sally said, rubbing her chin as she figured aloud, “after all the fighting, Robotnik’s security is probably still on a code red alert. Nicole, change the diagram of the castle’s security to match.”

The hologram obediently changed.

“Plot out every option we have, and try and find the route that will get us to the roboticizer as quickly as possible, and as safely as possible.” Sally wasn’t very optimistic about the chances of Nicole finding something they could use, but knew she had to try anyway. Red lines flashed across the castle schematic as the computer quickly simulated the results of infiltrations from every angle. After a few seconds of rapid calculations, Nicole beeped in display.

“THERE IS NO OPTION THAT WILL NOT RESULT IN DANGEROUS CONFLICT,” she reported. “ALL ENTRANCES AND EXITS ARE CODELOCKED AND HEAVILY GUARDED. ALL AIR DUCTS ARE NOW BEING PATROLLED BY CAMERA ORBS.”

“Then we have to try fighting our way in,” Sally said, discouraged by receiving the answer she knew had been coming. She slipped Nicole back into her boot. “There’s no other way around it.”

“No problemo,” Sonic said, clenching his fist. “When Bunnie first got roboticized, I got in by bashing through the SWATbutts at the front door. We can do it again.”

“Sonic, there wasn’t a code red alarm back then,” Sally said. “We’ll be lucky if there’s less than thirty SWATbots waiting for us there.”

“We’re gonna have to go anyway. Sal, there isn’t any other way around it.”

“Sonic’s right,” Rotor said. “If we’re going to save her, we’re going to have to go in headfirst. I know that rushing an attack before we have a plan isn’t something we do often, but it’s either that or run out of time.”

“I know, but-“

Sally didn’t finish. She was once again conscious of the weight across her shoulder. The strap that held her laser rifle had remained in place throughout her entire ride on Dulcy. The power cells were still clipped into place, and ready for use. She had only had to use a weapon a few times before, and had hoped to never take it out again.

Whenever missions had spiraled out of control far enough to justify its use, it was usually too late to do any good. She had come to think of the rifle as a bad luck charm. This chase had spiraled that far out of control. Using it would be like admitting defeat. But they were desperate, and there wasn’t any other choice.

Sally turned around, and called “Dulcy, you’d better take Griff back to Knothole.”

“Okay, just don’t expect me to fly there very fast. What are you guys going to do?”

“What we have to.”

She reached into her backpack, and felt around for the smooth torus she knew would be waiting there. The power ring’s texture was one of the most unique things on Mobius. It didn’t feel like metal, and it didn’t feel like plastic, but it was somehow an amalgamation of both of them. It was warm to the touch, too. Her hand glowed when she pulled it out, and slapped it into Sonic’s waiting palm.

The power ring flashed the instant it touched his glove, and an energy discharge like a thunder blast split the air. A translucent sphere of solid gold energy encompassed Sonic momentarily. Sneakers became a solid white glare. His face perked up, visibly energized.

“Yeah!”

The glow surged in strength until it had become almost opaque, and then collapsed to wrap around him. He was ready.

“Sal, grab on to me, and Rotor, grab on to Sal. And hang on - this isn’t gonna be smooth sailing for long.”

A streak of gold-tinted fur and quills blasted away from the firebreak and into the city, making a beeline for Robotnik’s castle. The power ring led their path. The city sped by them on fast-forward.

“Hang on, Bunnie!” Sonic’s voice shouted from the blur. “We’re comin’!”