The city’s power generator was behaving awfully erratically, and that worried Snively to no end. Something was going on, something he couldn’t see, and that always meant something bad in the end. He had gone from the overseeing the chase of the rabbit’s hover car to examining some of the sensor readings coming in from the hover unit squadrons.

The first display had just started scrolling data... and then it happened.

Over a third of every camera monitor mounted in the command ship shifted without warning to dead static. The entire deck suddenly flared white reflecting the glare of light suddenly coming from each and every monitor. The master tactical display blinked out of existence, unable to make sense of any of the data now pouring in.

More and more cameras blinked, shuddered, or simply winked to static. The sound of Robotnik’s pacing feet suddenly ended, a horrible silence coming from his direction.

Within a few seconds, the worst of the event was over. The light faded, the irregular shuddering of the remaining cameras stopped as the force of the explosion abated. Only half of the invasion force had survived. Fifteen cameras left active when there should’ve been over thirty.

“No!” Snively squealed, panic surging through his veins, a pain as sudden as whiplash.

Damage reports colored an urgent red appeared on a dormant monitor, each and every one on the list flagged as critical. Burnt-out engines, blown- out windshields, ruptured hulls, there wasn’t a single unscathed hover unit left in the city chamber.

“What just HAPPENED?”

“I don’t know, sir!” Self-preservation prompted Snively’s hands into motion, racing them across keyboards, typing frantic commands and requests for information.

The master tactical display flickered back on, rushing to compensate for the loss of so many hover units. There were visibly fewer dots left on the monitor, most of them clustered around the edges of the cavern. The center of the map was an vacuum so empty it burned to look at. Outside the cavern, three dots raced away through one of the side tunnels.

The camera images began to clear up. Everything up the cavern had changed, but the images were too small to make sense of it all.

“Punch up full resolution video,” Robotnik ordered.

Snively complied nervously. The dual-purpose window and flatscreen monitor had been displaying a view of the serene Great Forest outside. Now it blinked to a large, full-color rendition of the cavern below.

Snively gasped.

Almost nothing in the city had been left standing. Buildings, both rock and wood, had been completely flattened, debris always lying in a pattern that scattered away from the center of the city. The damage was less severe at the outer edges where some of the buildings miraculously stood intact, whereas the market square at the center of Lower Mobius was just... gone. There were gaping holes in the floor and cavern ceiling there, with the larger one at the ceiling. Molten rock oozed down from the crater, spilling into a larger pool down below. Rock crumbled down from almost everywhere; it wouldn’t be long before what was left of the city cavern collapsed and caved in on itself. Steam and smoke were a layer that covered everything.

Some hover unit components were still falling gracelessly from the sky, long streams of smoke and fire painting crude lines through the air behind them.

It was too obvious what had happened. Snively turned around. “The crystal exploded, sir.”

“I can see that, Snively,” Robotnik growled, voice dangerously low. “You let them outsmart you again.”

“Sir!” he squealed in automatic protest, “the warning signs only came an instant before-“

“SHUT UP! Trace the rabbit’s position! Find her! I want her dead!”

Snively glanced at the master tactical display, still putting the pieces of the trap together in his head. “She’s in one of the tunnels, sir. This one has an exit terminus fifty kilometers from Robotropolis and twenty kilometers from our current position.” He looked back at his uncle. “She must’ve known that she couldn’t outrun the hover units in the tunnels, and tried to use the crystal explosion to shake them off.”

“And you let it work, Snively! The survivors are too far back to catch up with her!” Robotnik shouted, face a bright red. Snively wished that all the angry blood rushing to his head would make it explode.

“No, sir, her plan didn’t work.” He leveled a finger at the tactical display, and the two dots trailing the hover car. “She tried to shake them but she didn’t. She lost this one, sir!” Snively exclaimed triumphantly. The Freedom Fighter had thrown everything she had against him, and it hadn’t worked. It was a wonderful feeling. “Two of the pursuing hover units survived the explosion, and are in the tunnel behind her.”

Robotnik’s fist slammed into the console with a sound that resounded throughout the entire ship, its noise blending in with the cacophony of alarms registering the cavern’s imminent collapse. “Finish her!”

The explosion had taken three of the pursuing hover units out. Bunnie hadn’t seen exactly what had happened to them. The flaring white-hot light had blocked her view: whether they had been incinerated, or pulled back, or knocked into the cavern wall, she didn’t know. She just knew that two of them had come through unscathed.

They were more than enough to finish them off.

It was as if she had become a completely different person. Bunnie felt her personality warping, changing around the situation. Adrenaline simplified the world. This was a fight for survival, pure and simple. Things kept disappearing, fear, anger, they were still there of course, but different somehow. They had stepped out of the way. The only thing that mattered was the preservation of life. It was as if the direness of the situation had forced various facets of her personality to shed and flake away. Parts of her personality that, until now, she could never have pictured herself without.

Kindness didn’t matter when there were military airships trying to gun you down. Empathy only got in the way in a game for survival. They were gone, all of it gone. Even a lifelong inhibition against cursing was lifted. She shouted something she’d never thought she’d hear spoken in her voice.

The hover units were armed with two separate lasers: an omnidirectional cannon mounted on the roof of the airship, just above the center of the segmented windshield, and a second, more powerful one in a fixed position on the front underside. All four lasers discharged at once, sending powerful bursts spearing through the tunnel.

Walls cracked and exploded around her as missed shots impacted against them, sending dangerously large pieces of debris flying through the air. But the hover car was moving fast; the second the rubble had flown far enough to be any credible danger it was already far behind even the pursuing hover units.

The crystal had gone completely dead. There was no source of light in the metal cave. Shadows engulfed everything, parting only for the occasional lightning flicker of lasers. It was difficult to see the walls directly around her, let alone ahead. Bunnie only could catch occasional glimpses of what was coming next. The tunnel ended less than thirty meters ahead, curving away in a direction she couldn’t make out.

If she turned the wrong direction they would just careen into the wall. Which way did it turn? Right? Left? Up, down? In the sparse light she couldn’t make out the vaguest hint of direction, let alone the inclination of the curve.

This was it, she thought, they were going to die.

“Turn left!” Rotor shouted.

The handlebars moved to the left almost without thinking. The tunnel walls seemed to slope and curve around her, and then straightened back as the turn ended. It was all Bunnie could do to keep from overcompensating her way into a crash.

The hover units were cloaked in the shades of darkness too, but their SWATbot pilots made the turn easier. They had infravision visors, and didn’t need light. Another near-hit laser blast shook the car.

“Ah need to see! Where are the headlights?” Bunnie fumbled around on the dashboard, looking for a likely button. Her hand stumbled a series of four buttons arranged in a square-shaped pattern.

“Don’t!” Griff said immediately, “That’s the ejection toggle. You’ll send us all into the ceiling!”

“Then where are the headlights, Griff?” she asked through closed teeth. There was another turn coming up soon, but that was all Bunnie could see.

He reached over her shoulder and hit one of the many switches lining the center of the dashboard. The car’s headlights came on with a quiet click, calmly and peacefully doing its job in the midst of the chase. Bright shafts of light materialized in the air. There was a turn coming up, and it was up and to the right.

The turn forced the car to slow down, letting the hover units behind them catch up. They obviously had no trouble making any kind of corners. Laser blasts squirted from both omnidirectional laser cannons.

Bunnie grunted. The odds against them weren’t as high as they would be against five hover units, but they still weren’t very favorable. In fact, they were enough to rekindle the feelings of hopelessness that had been burning inside Bunnie ever since her visit with Drizit.

The car accelerated again as she gunned the accelerator. The tunnel was straight for at least another hundred meters, which meant she could use the superior thrusters to her advantage for the time being. Robotnik’s hover units began to slip further and further behind, firing lasers in protest as she sped ahead.

Only to catch up with her when she had to decelerate to round the next corner. Two sharp explosions below the passenger compartment marked barely- missed laser shots. If they had just fired an eighth of a second sooner, the shots would have snapped Griff’s car in two. It was clear they couldn’t survive for much longer than a couple more turns. But if they could just make it to the open surface...

The car’s thrusters roared again when the passage straightened, nearly drowning out Bunnie’s voice. “How long before this route hits the surface?”

Griff didn’t sound optimistic. “Another... five, maybe ten kilometers.”

“Oh, great,” Bunnie choked, “then we really aren’t gonna make it.”

The car swerved roughly around another corner, perhaps more severely than it should have. The sudden deceleration felt like a slap. It bled more sped then the thrusters could make up for. When the hover units caught up again, they actually had to brake to remain behind her. There was a moment’s pause before they decelerated; as if the pilot’s were having trouble decided what to do for a moment.

“We’re going to make it, we always do,” Rotor said. “Just drive for now, Bunnie.” He turned to face the rear seats, face gaunt with resolve. “Griff, I want you to tell me everything you know about the layout of this tunnel. What are we approaching?”

Just drive. Wonderful. The hopelessness resurged. Just like always, Bunnie wasn’t going to give up without a fight. But before that fight had been enough to get them out of anything. There wasn’t any fight she could muster that would destroy the Laurentis nodule.

Faced with a situation like this, she thought, what would her role model do? If that role model was in her situation, being chased by two heavily armed airships that had her outmatched every step of the way, a screaming beacon welded to her leg, responsible not only the destruction of one of the few safe havens left on Mobius, but the also the danger her closest friends were being subjected to, what would she do?

What would Sally do?

The question was like a logic matrix in her mind, facts and characteristic tabulating, simple and easy. The same solution every time she thought about it. Sally would do her best to drive, dodge the enemy fire, and she would trust Rotor.

Bunnie’s grip on the steering handles tightened.

Griff, wracked by loss and fear, was less than enthusiastic about answering Rotor’s question, but he spoke anyway. “It’s uniform like this almost all the way throughout. This branch runs throughout almost the entirety of one of Mobotropolis’s old suburban districts. The only additions we made were adding the militia posts and the usual rat-bot safeguards.”

“Nothing we can use against them?” Rotor asked, jerking his thumb backwards. The lightning effect of laser blasts played nightmarishly across his features.

“I don’t see how.”

Just as the hover units had been falling reassuringly behind, another corner was coming up. Bunnie just barely managed to follow it, using the brakes again too carelessly. The delay was more than enough to let the trailing hover units catch up again. The harsh crack of continual laser impacts grated at Bunnie’s eardrums.

There was no way they could survive another five kilometers of this.

“We’ve got to find some-“ Rotor cut himself off in the middle of a sentence, attention suddenly riveted on one of the hover units.

One of the two pursuers had been slow to decelerate. The hover unit’s course had carried it dangerously close to the hover car, almost bringing them into a collision. It response, it had overcompensated it firing its braking thrusters, and had been pushed back awkwardly far. Too which it had again overcompensated when trying to accelerate again. The overall effect was almost comical, the pilot was stuck in a loop, accelerating and then braking too fast. It seemed to be going to too great of pains to avoid crashing into the tunnel walls. After a few seconds of this, though, it straightened back out and resumed firing.

“What was that?” Griff asked.

“Technique,” Rotor blurted, “that’s their disadvantage.” He had slipped back into full puzzle-solving mode, figuring aloud. “The pilots are SWATbots, computer-controlled. Their AI is normally accustomed to flying on the surface, where they have more space. Robotnik must’ve had to splice together new piloting routines on the fly. Hastily.” His fist smacked gently against the side of his seat, mild triumph.

“Yeah, well how’s that going to help us now?” Bunnie asked dubiously. She was having trouble following Rotor and flying the car at the same time, but understood what he was getting at. “Just so long as their aim is deathly accurate Ah don’t see how this’ll help us.” Just meters away from the passenger compartment another tunnel wall shattered into fire and debris, as if to emphasize her point.

“Neither do I,” Rotor admitted, “but it’s a starting point. Something to try.”

The tunnel continually warped into flames and molten metal around them as Rotor paused. He frowned, leaned back, and pulled what looked like a harmless laser pen out of a pocket in the backseat. Griff stared at it, confusion evident on his face.

“Bunnie, how well do you think you can react to unexpected changes in the tunnel?”

“Not very well,” she said sullenly.

“What about the SWATbots? Not counting their advantage of multi- directional engines, how would you rate their actual reaction time to things like the curves in the tunnel?”

Bunnie wondered for a moment what Rotor had in mind. Whatever it was had to happen soon. Keeping the hover car away from the constant laser blasts was straining her skills to the breaking point. He had a point, though. The physical bonus of their thrusters was what actually enabled the hover units to move faster around the curves then she did. When it came to actual reaction speed, they both seemed to hesitate for a moment. Price of a hastily made AI routine.

“Worse than me,” she said.

He handed the pen-sized object to Griff, slapping it in the mountain goat’s palm and ignoring his expression of incomprehension. “Here’s what you’re going to do.”

“A few dozen more meters, Bunnie, hang on!” Rotor shouted.

It was becoming harder and harder to maneuver away from the hover unit’s laser blasts. Whatever rushed modifications might have been made to the AI, it still had a very solid and adaptable base. They were adapting to Bunnie’s moves, learning. She would try and dodge away from one blast while the other hover unit would try and predict where she would fly to and shoot there. It was proving remarkably difficult to best.

Bunnie was forced to try new combinations of tactics, things she wasn’t too sure about. One of the hover unit’s laser cannons began to glow brightly, preparing for a discharge. She immediately jerked the steering handles to port and starboard in quick succession, trying to dupe the other hover unit to believing that she would dodge to the left.

She had done that move too many times before, the SWATbot pilot saw right through it. An instant before a laser would’ve have stabbed right into the passenger compartment, she moved to the left again. The windows to the right of the passenger compartment flared bright yellow from the near-hit explosion.

Sweat beaded on her brow. Their very survival hinged on nanoseconds of action. Her action. She didn’t have time to talk, didn’t have time to think, only act. Another curve in the tunnel was swiftly approaching, the places where it became almost impossible to dodge blasts fast enough. Where the hover units’ lasers would be closest.

The first hover unit was getting ready to fire it’s multidirectional laser at the same time that it was busy recharging its other cannon. This time, Bunnie feinted to the right, then pulled straight up. Time to remind the SWATbots that this was a three-dimensional game, not to mention pull them into the position she wanted them in. The shot went wide this time, and both hover units pulled upwards, closer to the ceiling.

Corner. The hover car rounded it as smoothly as possible, but the deceleration still felt like an unnecessary jerk. The empty and abandoned platforms of a militia station reared in the distance ahead.

Bunnie squinted, trying desperately to see in the cones of illumination coming from the headlights. This had to work. This was their last chance. The exit to the surface was still several kilometers distant, and there was nothing else they could try between here and there.

There it was. While it was open, it was only a small rectangle clinging to the top of the ceiling. Their last chance.

Bunnie clamped her jaw shut so tightly that her muzzle started to ache, and gunned the accelerator for all it was worth. Streaks of burning thruster exhaust marked a trail behind them.

The hover units rounded the corner, laser cannons firing in unison, taking advantage of their temporary gain. Walls to Bunnie’s immediate right and left imploded against each other, struck by a deluge of laser blasts meant for her. She carefully kept her position of height, using it to force the hover units to the same elevation.

Rotor stopped ticking off meters, whirling around to face the rear seat. “Now, Griff!” he shouted, voice barely audible over the roaring engines and explosions.

Griff’s arm brought the pen-sized cylinder over to face the rectangle on the ceiling, his face frozen in anger.

Bunnie jerked the steering handles downward, away from the ceiling and towards the middle of the tunnel. Her only wild hope was that Griff could compensate for her piloting.

He was ready. A beam of blue-tinted light shot from the object, straight between the driver and passenger seats. The light was just that, a harmless light, not a weapon, and passed harmlessly through the windshield. It hit the rectangle dead-on, shining on the light-sensitive receptor block.

The doors began to slide shut.

They had once been used to keep the rat-bots from tunneling into Lower Mobius, but once that threat had been dealt with, the security doors had been made a part of the militia posts. The rectangle was only part of the door’s upper half, which was gradually lowering itself from the ceiling. The doors other half was rising swiftly from the bottom of the tunnel.

The laser fire ceased suddenly, as the SWATbot pilots registered this change in the environment ahead.

The hover car shot neatly through the center of the open doors. Bunnie had compensated correctly, holding the car at the middle of the tunnel’s vertical axis. The doors weren’t yet closed far enough for her to crash into.

The hover units reacted too late, trying desperately to decelerate and dive down through the center of the closing doors. They were still open wide enough to accommodate even their bulky egg-shaped visage, but compared to Bunnie they were at a major disadvantage. One of the hover units smashed to pieces against the top half of the closing door with a welcome flash of bright orange fire. It cremated all at once.

The other hover unit had come down far enough to make it through. It scraped its underside against the bottom half of the door, and had one of its segmented windshield pieces broken and scraped away by debris from the other, but otherwise came through intact.

“Fire braking thrusters!” Rotor ordered.

Bunnie had already hit them an eight of a second ago. The SWATbot pilot was still dazed by what had just happened, flying nothing but a straight course after making it through the doors. It wasn't able to compensate for Bunnie's deceleration.

She brought the car around underneath the other airship as it roared overhead. When she brought it back up again, the car was directly behind the surviving hover unit. The roles had reversed.

Bunnie reached for the button underneath the right handlebar, waiting until the hover unit was aligned directly in front of her car’s own laser cannons. She wasn’t going to give the pilot a chance to dodge. She squeezed the trigger.

Griff had been right when he said that the car’s own laser cannons weren’t very powerful. They didn’t do much damage to Robotnik’s hover unit at all, didn’t even pierce the outer hull. The hover unit’s armor absorbed the energy of the blast. The only thing Bunnie’s laser could do to the hover unit was knock it around a little.

Knock it right into the wall.

The impact had been at such a high velocity that the airship didn’t even have a chance to crumple and shatter before evaporated. Fire from the hover unit’s crash blossomed up and around the passenger compartment as they flew directly past it. Then it was behind them, flaming wreckage growing more and more comfortingly distant.

They had done it. Rotor’s cry of triumph was resoundingly loud in the sealed passenger compartment.

Despite the fact that this had done nothing to get rid of the Laurentis nodule, or even helped her overall situation, Bunnie couldn’t keep the rebel yell from escaping her mouth.

The hover car coasted, peacefully and unmolested, through the remaining kilometers of the tunnel, until it reached the terminus and spilled out into open daylight.