“EDIT: LINE 724,” Dirk typed for what seemed like the thousandth time. He removed the code, this time a component of the crystal’s power regulators. The power rock sat on a console nearby, glowing brighter by the minute, casting angry and accusing spikes of light at him.

His hand-held radio blipped at him, adding to the array of disapproving warning lights and sirens in the background. Dirk knew who it would be before he switched the device on, and what they would say.

“How long, Griff?” he asked.

There was a slight pause. Griff’s voice came back to him riddled with self- doubt. “Little over six minutes now. Rotor picked up Robotnik’s armada a little early, but that’s only because it’s so damn large.” Dirk couldn’t remember the last time he had heard Griff curse, but it was one of the least surreal things confronting him right now. “Depending on which tunnel they take, of course.”

“How many are there?” Dirk asked, still frantically typing. Another warning light blinked urgently at him. He ignored it.

“Too damn many. The numbers are so big that I’m having Rotor double-check them just be sure that the first count was accurate.” Another pause, and Griff’s voice was even more shaky when it came back. “Dirk, we didn’t even know Robotnik had that many hover units.”

Dirk leaned over the control room’s console, sparing the time for a quick glance out the window. Against the overwhelming glare of the crystal the city below was difficult to make out. “The convoy’s not quite ready to leave yet. Give it two more minutes at the least.”

“That’s cutting it far too close. Even if they get out of the cavern in time, Robotnik will still be able to trace them. Their thruster exhaust will be an arrow pointing straight to the rendezvous point. That’s why we have to destroy the crystal, Dirk. Distract him long enough for our people to get away.” Griff sounded as if he were only trying to convince himself. Dirk didn’t comment on it.

The radio channel crackled in quiet static.

“How long until detonation?” Griff asked at last.

Dirk was about to answer that he didn’t know when the control room lights cut out, replaced by red-tinted emergency illumination. One siren blared above them all, one that he had never heard before. It must’ve been from one of the few monitoring programs left intact.

“IMMEDIATE HAZARD,” A synthetic voice buzzed over ancient speakers. It chilled Dirk to the bone. “CRITICAL OVERLOAD FAILURE, SEVEN MINUTES AND TWENTY-EIGHT SECONDS. EVACUATE TO A MINIMUM SAFE DISTANCE OF THREE HUNDRED METERS.”

“You heard the magic voice,” Dirk said, struggling to keep his fear concealed. “Seven-and-a-half minutes.”

“Just hope that’ll be good enough...”

Another voice came on over the comm, the walrus’s. He was atypically tense. “Dirk, do you see Bunnie anywhere up there?”

The half-metal rabbit? Dirk bit back an irate reply. “From up here I can’t see anybody. Why?”

“I can’t find her on any of the city’s cameras.”

Griff’s voice cut Rotor off. “Dirk, if you’re done up there... just leave the city now. Go with the rest of the evacuation convoy.”

“What about you, Griff? That only leaves one hover car left for you, Rotor, and the rabbit. And if she’s got a beacon in her leg...”

Whatever self-doubt had been in Griff’s voice evaporated. “Beacon or no, she’s coming with us. Don’t worry, we’ll get her as far away from the rendezvous point as possible.”

“And then what?” Dirk asked. “Robotnik will still be able to track the beacon to your car.”

“We’ll figure part that out then. The important thing is making sure that everyone survives.”

“You won’t if she’s with you,” he said bluntly.

“We’ll see. Just clear out of the control room now. Since I won’t... be there when the last convoy reaches the rendezvous point, I making you chairman pro tem for the duration of the emergency. If anything actually does happen to me, that’ll be a permanent change.”

“I can’t do your job, Griff,” Dirk implored, on the verge of giving up entirely. “Just please make sure that you survive whatever happens out there.”

“No promises. I’m not sure I even want to. Good luck, Dirk.” The other end of the channel clicked off before Dirk could even ask what he had meant.

“CRITICAL OVERLOAD FAILURE, SEVEN MINUTES AND ZERO SECONDS,” the computer intoned threateningly.

“Oh, hells...”

Dirk dashed towards the car still hovering outside, wishing for the first time in years that he wasn’t so committed to following orders.

“I don’t see any more evac vehicles in the air,” Gail said urgently. “I think they’ve all landed at market square.” It was true; the rumble of thrusters had faded to a dull roar. Bunnie was too absorbed in the task at hand to look behind her, but she could image the crowds of people beginning to pile into trucks and cargo tankers. The pilots and militia staff would check to make sure that there was no one left behind at the market. They wouldn’t be able to see her and Gail way back here.

These two people had to get to the convoy before it left. There wasn’t any other way out of the city from here.

“Don’t worry about it,” Bunnie said, more to herself than the lioness. “Let’s concentrate on getting’ ‘im out of here first, then we’ll worry about makin’ the convoy.”

Gail didn’t need to be told twice. Bunnie hefted another girder, this one heavier than the last. She felt a knee joint pop under the stress, ignored it. She was grateful for Gail’s help; she was helping keep the girder balanced as Bunnie lifted. A quick swing to the left, in unison, and the girder landed next to the beam.

Nothing mattered besides this, not the convoy, not the city, not herself, nothing. After a few minutes, the thoughts no longer intruded on her mind. The only thing left was herself, the obstacle, and the victim.

She had to help.

The chunk of solid staircase disintegrated under a solid uppercut punch from her left arm, smashing itself into more manageable chunks without endangering the person pinned underneath. Gail scrambled to remove its remains, tossing piece after piece aside. Eventually, a face was visible in the trash.

The buck was in sorry shape. His entire head was coated in a solid white sheet of dust; whatever wasn’t was covered in blood. His sizable nose was obviously broken judging by the amount of blood covering his muzzle. There were more gashes and bruises on his forehead. Something had obviously struck him in the face when the structure had collapsed. The rest of his body was still pinned underneath the garbage, but the damage was likely as severe.

Bunnie waited, watching the buck’s body and urging to the lioness to be quiet for a moment. The scene was as still as a cemetery for a moment. Then the debris stirred, and a quiet hiss of air escaped his mouth. He was still breathing.

Then it was back to digging. Nothing mattered except the digging. She allowed her conscious to lose itself amongst the repetitive motions of lifting and throwing. Freeing. Saving. Only once did she glance up from the debris.

When the sun went out.

Illumination across the entire cavern flickered and dimmed for a moment, as if an instant twilight were settling across the city. Something was happening to the mammoth energy crystal. Violent flashes and surges of power played across the reflective surface. The entire display was visually fierce but eerily silent. For a terrible moment, the crystal went completely dark, engulfing the entire city in pitch blackness. Bunnie found herself digging without the use of her eyes. Spanning even the city’s length she could hear the cries of surprise and terror in market square.

Nothing like this had ever happened in the city’s decade-long history. The power crystal had come close to puttering out of energy a few times, but had never actually been completely shut off.

Then a warm glow began to build back up in the crystal, slowly but inexorably shedding light across the city. It was different, though: this time the light wasn’t a thrumming green-yellow hue but instead an incendiary orange. The color of fire. Something was wrong with the crystal but Bunnie couldn’t tell what.

And as long as it didn’t interfere with rescuing the buck, it didn’t matter either. Cursing herself for allowing it to distract her, Bunnie immediately turned back to the rubble, joined a second later by Gail. Neither of them commented on the crystal’s abrupt power cut-off.

Another girder joined the other two on the empty street, landing with a strong blow. The buck’s arm was free; there were another two beams covering his midsection and left leg. She and Gail grabbed the first beam and swung it out to join the others.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a trail of white-hot thruster exhaust streak away from the energy crystal’s control tower. Whoever had altered the crystal was leaving. Bunnie merely noted it and filed the thought away. For now her mind was completely consumed by the buck’s predicament.

Last girder. Lift, heave, done. The buck was free at last. Without speaking, Bunnie grabbed his left shoulder, Gail the right. Being mindful not to aggravate his already extensive injuries, they lifted his body out of the wreckage and set him back down on the street.

The buck coughed, a trickle of blood oozing from the corner of his lips. Thankfully, it was coming from a cut inside his mouth, and not from any internal damage. His left leg was twisted several times upon itself, obviously broken in more than one place. His eyes flickered open for a moment, painted red and glazed over by pain, then shut again.

“Can you hear me?” the lioness asked anxiously. “Can you speak?”

Thaddeus seemed to be hovering between pain-induced faint and semi-lucid consciousness. He coughed and his head trembled in what Bunnie could only assume was a nod. Sympathy overwhelmed her, but she resisted the urge to blame herself. The house would have collapsed regardless of the Laurentis transmitter. She had been there to help.

He wasn’t going to be easy to move, though. The buck was incapable of walking, and with the broken leg they would have a hard time carrying him. There wasn’t much choice, though. Bunnie slung his arm over her shoulder and motioned for Gail to do the same with the other.

“We’ve got to git movin’,” Bunnie said, when Gail appeared reluctant to touch him. “Ya can have a doctor dress ‘is wounds when we reach the convoy, but we have to git there first.”

Gail nodded slowly, steeling herself for the grisly job. Thaddeus grimaced in pain when they lifted him, but the pressure was soon off his leg when Bunnie and Gail were able to completely support his weight between the two of them. Together, they began hobbling away from the ruined house.

Time seemed to evaporate. Nothing mattered aside from the task at hand. Bunnie couldn’t tell how much time had passed when the ear-splitting sound of dozens of thrusters igniting at once began roaring throughout the chamber, but they had only moved two blocks away from the wrecked house.

“Hell’s bells!” Gail shouted to the empty air, stopping in her tracks. “Don’t do this.”

Dozens of vehicles sped away from market square, dispersing towards tunnel exits on the cavern wall. Horror numbed Bunnie’s heart as they flew directly overhead, neither seeing nor caring about the three people left behind.

“No!” Gail howled.

The convoy was gone. Gail watched them go, shoulders slumping when the last one finally disappeared. The lioness sucked in a shaky breath of air, a unbearably hollow sound in the suddenly empty city.

After a long moment, she asked, “What can we do now?”

Bunnie kept hearing Sally’s voice in her ear, repeating the second cardinal rule of the Freedom Fighters: Act first, fret later. Options ticked off in her mind. There were distressingly few of them.

“We’re not the only ones left in the city,” she said. “Ah have some friends still back at the emergency control center. Ah’m sure they have a car somewhere with them.” As soon as the words came out of her mouth, Bunnie knew that wasn’t an option. “But...”

“But what?”

“Ah’ll be traveling with them. Ah can’t let you come.”

Confusion mingled with a dozen other unreadable emotions in the lioness’s eye. “Why not?”

“Because if you’re with me, then Robotnik will- Ah mean he’ll track- what Ah mean to say is it’s too dangerous. Ah can’t let you die with me. Too many people already will.”

There were dozens of ways that Gail could have reacted to that. Anger. Disbelief. Fury. All of which would be legitimate. Fortunately, the lioness must’ve felt that Bunnie had done too much to help to turn around and betray them now. “How else can we escape, then?”

Bunnie tried to think of hover vehicles that wouldn’t be commandeered by the evacuation convoy. Besides the car she, Griff, and Rotor would need, there wasn’t much left in the city. The convoy would have taken everything registered in the city, from recreation vehicles to cargo transports. Only foreign vehicles would have been left behind.

“The cargo sled!” she burst out.

“Huh?”

“Ah almost forget about it. Ah parked the cargo sled just a few blocks from here,” Bunnie pointed towards a side street between them and market square. “If it hasn’t been taken in the panic, we can still make it.”

“Let’s go, then,” Gail said.

With Thaddeus still slung over their shoulders, they began hobbling down the street again.

“Squadrons one, three, and four, change your heading by three degrees left parallel.” The control panels on the flight deck of Robotnik’s command ship hummed with electricity, but that wasn’t the only palpable sense of power in the room. Snively had the power to change the world with a spoken command. Out the window before him, he saw the battalion of hover units change position as soon as he was done speaking. “Squadron two, assume vanguard flank position.”

Robotnik sat and stared at his nephew. Snively didn’t mind at all; the fat man was surprisingly quiet. The only time he never said anything was when he approved of Snively’s work, or was utterly overcome by determination. Or both.

“All units standby to break formation. Charge laser cannons and prepare for attack,” Snively ordered.

The armada of hover units had left Robotropolis only twenty minutes ago, and already the city was just a smudge of smog on the horizon. Over fifty vehicles dotted the sky over the Great Forest, with the command ship nestled snugly in the center of the formation.

Snively turned to his uncle. “All hover units ready as you ordered, sir. We’ll have over a dozen left with us on the surface while the rest of them go underground.”

“Very good, Snively. Are they prepared for subterranean combat?”

“Yes, sir, modified pilot AI ready and waiting.” During the flight, Snively had worked frantically to upload maps of the caverns below to the SWATbot pilots, and retooling their combat AIs to be able to work in limited space. There were still a few rough edges in the program, but the sheer numbers of hover units would be more than capable of overwhelming any possible opposition.

The units assigned to attack would break position as soon as they were positioned directly above the target cavern. The ground below was unusually rocky, and riddled with large caverns. Many of them had been drilled artificially before the Great War, and were more than wide enough to accommodate the hover units. The hover units would take those tunnels to the cavern below. And to Bunnie Rabbot.

“What about the mortar cannons?”

“Charged, sir.” The name was a bit of a misnomer, Snively knew. To say mortar implied projectiles. The newly installed weaponry perched on the bottom of the command ship was merely an array of specialized high- range, high-impact laser cannons. But the overall effect was close enough to the actual name. The cannons had only been field tested twice before, but each time they had proved the most powerful ever deployed on a battlefield in recent history. The explosions from each laser impact could bludgeon anything apart, and it had an effective range of over five kilometers.

If they used it against the rabbit, she would never know what had hit her.

“Very good. Very good indeed, Snively. Transfer tactical command over to me.”

“You, sir?” Snively asked, voice begging clarification.

“I want to give the attack orders myself.”

“Yes, sir. Tactical command is yours.”

Robotnik’s teeth glinted in the glow of the consoles. Below him, the massive task force waited to be thrown against the rabbit.

“Squadrons one, three, and four... advance!”

Dozens of hover units broke formation and charged to the ground below, swallowed up by the inky black of the rocky caverns in minutes. Snively punched up a tactical display, one that showed a map of the tunnels and the target cavern, with the hover units positions overlaid on top.

“ETA three minutes,” he reported.