The engines continued to roar full strength behind the hover car, trailing tumultuous streams of white-hot exhaust. Bunnie leveled their descent. Gravity shoved her downward into the seat’s thick cushioning as she pulled the steering column upwards. Slowly, the horizon began to straighten. The craggy surface of the firebreak rushed past only meters below. She was worried that she hadn’t begun to pull up in time, and let out a sigh of relief as they reached a stable altitude.

Bunnie gave the firebreak a quick visual appraisal. There were no anti-aircraft guns installed anywhere so far from the city, so she didn’t have to worry about that yet. No visible signs of approaching hover units, which was odd. They should be out here by now.

She frowned, and checked the dashboard controls. Speed was holding at a steady eighty-two kilometers per hour, varying slightly because of their descent. The fuel tanks were full enough to take them another four hundred kilometers. There was still nothing besides static crackle on the motion sensor array. She stared at the display for a moment, and just then a foreboding thought struck her.

“Griff,” she asked, “How exactly does this motion sensor work?”

He scratched his head while digging the facts out of his head. “Uh, a high frequency radio, I think. Works a lot like radar or sonar: it sends out a pulse, reads the echo, sends out another, and finds out what’s been moving. There are a whole lot of things it needs to do between, compensating for the motion of the car-“

Bunnie didn’t hear anything past the second sentence. She wasn’t an expert in sensor technology, but any Freedom Fighter had to learn from their first mission how to remain undetected. And what Griff had just said was a big no-no.

“Y’all mean active sensors?” she asked, not bothering to clamp down on the alarm in her voice. “Something that Robotnik could’ve detected earlier?”

“Oh, no,” Rotor said under his breath. “If he knows that we’re using motion sensors, he’ll have prepared a trap.”

"Let the chase begin," Robotnik said, signaling his waiting forces into action.

The motion sensor burst into animation.

The four ambush Stealthbots fired their full complement of acceleration thrusters, and burst away from their shielding landing positions. Bright engine exhaust vaporized the parched dirt of the firebreak as it hurtled them into the air, matching the hover car’s speed in seconds and continuing to gain ground. They had been lying dormant on the ground, waiting silently - more importantly, motionlessly - as their prey passed unsuspectingly overhead. Only when they had achieved a strategically valuable position had they dared reveal themselves to the motion sensor. But by then, it was too late for the hover car to avoid them.

Four missiles immediately careened away from Stealthbot weapons receptacles, each hurling themselves towards the hover car.

Bunnie jerked the steering column over to the left the instant the motion sensor revealed the four Stealthbots coming to life behind them. The seatbelt strained against her as the gee-forces hit. Rotor tried to shout something, but it was lost to the thunder of the directional thrusters firing and the sharp crack of waylaid missiles detonating. The air behind them turned into a solid sheet of yellow as the missiles impacted the firebreak floor. That had only been the first salvo.

“Y’all sure ya wanted to tag along?” she shouted at Rotor, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to hear her. A lateral twist to the steering column, and the hover car tilted to the right. The ground slanted itself at a forty- five degree angle, but the maneuver never shook a single one of their pursuers. It would never be that easy.

Another four specks raced away from the trailing Stealthbots as they launched a second barrage. Fire blossomed in Bunnie’s rear-view mirror as they detonated, the ribbon of flame rippling threateningly close to the twin engines. Something shiny and fast whipped past the passenger compartment. They must have had a shrapnel payload, Bunnie thought. Air currents distorted by its passage buffeted her window. It would be just like Robotnik to go for something so intensely destructive.

As if the cacophony of explosions and roaring engines weren’t enough for her to cope with, the motion sensor was screaming alarms as it registered what lay just ahead. She could spare only a moment’s glance at the dashboard, and resisted the impulse to do a double take.

No, that couldn’t be right.

The Stealthbots had stopped firing in tandem now, and were just launching their weapons one at a time. Missiles continuously detonated on the firebreak just behind them, shrapnel sending chunks of debris hurtling through the air at terminal velocity. To compensate for the ground’s dehabilitating influence on their guidance systems, the pilots were just firing missiles directly at the ground now, and were waiting for the inevitable lucky strike. To avoid one of their random assaults, Bunnie had to push the hover car slightly upwards. Calculations poured through her mind: she couldn’t rise high enough to let the Stealthbots establish a solid radar lock, just enough to avoid being pelted by one of the missiles.

When she pushed upwards, the hover car sped over the pinnacle of a small dirt uprising, giving its passengers a direct view of what lay ahead. It only confirmed what the motion tracker had registered moments earlier.

The air buzzed with hover units. Over fifty of them bore mercilessly down on the car. Stealthbots swarmed in waiting circles, like vultures. The ordinarily quiet whine of laser cannons being charged could be heard even from this distance, simply because there were so many of them. The city’s military forces had coalesced into a cloud of teeming mites, dark enough to rival even the permanent smog haze of the city. It was the second time in one day that she had encountered more hover units than she had ever seen in her life. Records like that shouldn’t be broken between a couple hours, she thought sadly. The firebreak still continued for another seven hundred meters before melting into the steel walls and waiting anti-aircraft guns of the city.

This time they really weren’t going to make it.

Rotor stared at the defense forces in slack-jawed disbelief. Griff was invisible to Bunnie, but completely silent.

“All this,” Bunnie whispered incredulously, “just for me?”

Neither passengers nor driver could know it, but the pursuit of the car wasn’t going exactly as planned. Too many hover units were racing away from their assigned positions with no order or provocation, and the local defense net was screaming erroneous reports. Depending on which sensor display Snively looked at, there was either nothing in the air over Robotropolis, or two hundred yellow luxury cars were descending en masse on the city. Only the master tactical display, with its direct uplink the command ship’s own sensor net, remained uncorrupted.

“It’s happening again, isn’t it, Snively?” Robotnik asked, a dangerous growl in his voice.

“I’m not sure!” Snively pounded at the bridge controls, to no avail. He had lost communications with over half the defense force. Many hover units had just frozen in place. Others were taking pot shots at each other, and at least four were busy playing some demented game of hide-and-go-seek through the city streets and alleyways. “I think the defense AI’s suffering some kind of glitch.”

“It’s never a glitch. Not where the Freedom Fighters are concerned.”

Only Snively’s greatest efforts allowed him to retain control over the remaining hover units. Thinking quickly, he wiped the defensive AI off computer memory entirely. It would take weeks to rebuild, but it was already hopelessly corrupted anyway. And wiping the AI let him place the remaining hover units under the direct control of the command ship’s tactical computers. In normal circumstances, the Robotropolis defense AI would’ve been infinitely more effective. Now, though, anything would perform better than that trashed software.

Snively typed in the final orders. The deletion was complete. In the end, he had retained control over half of the original squadron. It was still more than enough to maintain a healthy degree of overkill in chasing the rabbit.

He shook his head in disbelief when he saw that the majority of those he had lost control had suddenly switched course, and were attacking the ones left under his command. He had to assign a great deal of the reminder to fending them off.

In the end, though, whoever was behind this glitch could only delay the pursuit, never stop it entirely. They would get the hover car yet, Snively knew. The air around the rabbit’s car was constantly alight with explosions. And no one had dared try and take the command ship’s secret weapon off-line.

That reminded him...

“We’re in mortar cannon range now, sir,” Snively reported as soon as the timer on the console in front of him finished counting down to zero. “Establishing a target lock, and getting ready for a shooting solution. Just one more minute.”

It was like charging into a solid wall.

The only thing Bunnie heard after Rotor shouted, “Get us down!” was the solid, uninterrupted thunder of dozens upon dozens of laser cannons discharging at once. The hover car plunged through a sheet of vivid green energy and a curtain of debris. The shots seemed almost random in aim, but there were so many of them that the odds of not getting hit by several of them were so low as to be virtually nil. It was only by the sheerest of luck that the hover car only got lanced through once as it passed through the storm.

Hull plating buckled and burned as the laser beam struck home. The molecular-binding generator struggled to compensate for the force of the blow, while the conductive armor did its best to dissipate the energy. Neither could do much against the overwhelming power of the hover unit laser. Within milliseconds of the strike, the binding-generator was forced to shut down, and declare that part of the car lost. Its controlling processor concentrated on trying to reinforce the surrounding areas.

The laser had clipped the side of the ship, just at the far right corner of the passenger compartment. Glass shattered at the beam’s exit point -- it had passed through one of the rear windows. Most of the fragments were projected outwards, where they fell harmlessly to the firebreak just meters below, but a significant fraction of the sharp glass was blown inside.

The force of the blast tilted the hover car sharply upwards, barely leaving Bunnie enough time to counteract it. She threw the steering column downward. The wind was rushing through the hole in the passenger compartment, creating a buffeting noise that almost - but not quite - managed to drown out the sounds of the laser fire. Then debris was sprinkling throughout the cabin, fragments moving fast enough to embed themselves into upholstery, fur, or skin. Several sharp things stung Bunnie’s ears, white-hot glass remnants projected inwards from the point of impact. Rotor’s head bucked forward involuntarily, and his hand came around to slap at where the glass shards had nipped that back of his head. Both of them were unhurt, but...

“Griff!”

Bunnie couldn’t hear her own words. She tried to glance backwards. The rear right window had been completely broken by the laser, and the rear seat had taken the worst share of the shrapnel.

The mountain goat was slumped forward into his seatbelt, his face invisible from Bunnie’s angle. Opaque red blood trailed down the nape of his neck from a gash she couldn’t see, the sharp color a severe contrast to his soft tan fur. He didn’t move, and, in the chaos of the chase, Bunnie couldn’t tell if he was breathing.

When she took horrified eyes away from the sight, she just had enough time to throw the steering column sharply to the right to avoid another Stealthbot missile volley.

Dulcy had “cracked the whip” so many times that it hurt to even move her tail. Sally was sure that the adolescent dragon had exerted herself beyond her ordinary breaking point, and it still wasn’t fast enough. They wouldn’t be at the firebreak in time to help, even though they could see it now. She was using Nicole to watch the fight, her computer’s optical scanners acting like a telescope and projecting a view of the chase in the air in front of her.

Sally gasped as she saw a part of the hover car’s rear passenger compartment smashed to pieces by an errant laser blast. Sir Charles had been doing his part by scrambling their aiming processors, but with that many weapons, a lucky shot had been bound to get through sooner or later.

She held her hand clasped over her mouth as the hover car began to spin out of control, and couldn’t hide her relief when she saw it right itself again. The car twisted sharply to the left to avoid a concussive volley of missiles. “If they stay low enough,” Sally told herself, not quite believing it, “they just might make it.”

“UNKNOWN VARIABLE ENTERING THE EQUATION, SALLY,” Nicole interrupted unapologetically.

“Show me,” Sally said.

The hologram flickered and changed shape. The shape of the object at the center of the new view was bulb-shaped, visually intimidating, and unmistakable.

“Robuttnik’s command ship,” Sonic said, watching the hologram as best he could from his angle.

Sally frowned, and risked taking one of her hands off of the speeding dragon’s back. She pointed at a peculiar formation of weapon barrels mounted on the underside of the ship. “That’s not right. We’ve never seen those before. Nicole, identify that.”

“THAT SYSTEM IS NOT A PART OF THE ORIGINAL COMMAND SHIP SCHEMATICS,” Nicole reported, pausing a moment to check her data library. “THEREFORE IT IS OF RECENT INSTALLATION.”

Sally examined the shape and size of the weapons barrels. They were too long to be standard close-range armaments. The focusing crystal at the peak of the barrel was slim, and tapered to a thin point. Sally was familiar with basic laser weapon mechanics, it had been one of the first things she had taught herself as soon as she began fighting Robotnik. The longer a barrel was, she recalled, and the more slender the focusing crystal, the longer the range of the weapon. But she had never seen an example quite as severe as that. Longer range...

It didn’t take her very long to figure it out.

Sally’s heart fluttered for a moment, and this time it wasn’t because of Dulcy’s erratic flying. “Oh, no!” she cried.

Robotnik’s fingers hovered over the mortar cannon controls, twitching occasionally. “Charge the forward cannon battery, five-one-two gigawatt payload,” he instructed. “Heat dissipation and thermal vent maximum readiness. Since the city defense can’t seem to handle the rabbit, we’ll kill her ourselves.”

“Targeting lock acquired, sir," Snively said as he carried out the tyrant’s commands. “We just need to obtain a shooting solution.”

"Snively, as a precaution, cut the command ship off from Robotropolis's data network. We can't let whatever is going wrong there affect us. This will work."

"We're already completely isolated. Mortar cannon controls are routed directly to your console." Snively checked his monitor. The SWATbots below had fetched the requisite battery. With the firm press of a button, and a final, deep tone, the charge was loaded. "Five-one-two gigawatt payload ready."

A visor unfolded from the ceiling of the command ship, and settled into position just above Robotnik’s eyes. Overseeing the process himself gave long-distance killing a much more personal feel. He liked it. From the command ship’s cameras at full magnification, he saw the hover car race across the firebreak towards his city. He set to work acquiring the shooting solution

“Marker lights on the objective.”

As Robotnik watched, red crosshairs appeared above the image of the beleaguered hover car, and began narrowing towards a shooting solution.

The swarm had thinned somewhat in the past few seconds of flying, although the air behind them was still echoed with the firecracker booms of detonating missiles and narrowly-evaded laser blasts. Bunnie kept her jaw locked solid, and tried not to think about what happened to Griff. She didn't know if he was still alive or not, only that he hadn't moved since the car had been struck. It was up to her to make sure that it didn't happen to the rest of them.

She kept a steady cruising altitude of barely over four meters, far closer than she ever thought she would dare. Occasionally she just missed smashing into an outcropping of dirt, and knew that whenever she clipped the top of a dune in the firebreak’s eroded soil, she left pieces of the hover car behind. Spouts of dust continually erupted all around her. The plumes of laser and missile impacts shot up far higher than the car. But it was thinning. They were able to avoid them.

There were only three Stealthbots behind them now; the fourth had veered off to the right for no readily apparent reason, and had lost its quarry. The remaining ones were able to keep up the pressure, although they were firing fewer and fewer missiles to conserve their payloads.

By chance alone, a single ray of sunlight had broken through the smog over Robotropolis. The bilious clouds had been agitated by the chase and a part of the shroud had miraculously been budged aside. Bunnie stared at it. She couldn’t recall the last time a ray of sunshine had touched any of the perpetually dark city.

Rotor had seen it, too, and was just allowing himself to become optimistic again. “Maybe we’ll make it after all,” he said. The crackle of explosions had died down enough to let her actually hear his voice, another sign that the pursuit was slackening.

“If nothin’ else happens... maybe...”

The ray of sunlight disappeared, cut off once again by the swirling smog.

Bunnie realized the battlefield had grown calm in the last few seconds. That wasn’t right at all. She was a great believer in the power of optimism, but at the same time she was a realist, too, and knew that odds of the pursuit just slackening enough to let her through were impossibly low. Something else was going to happen. Robotnik was doing it on purpose, to prepare for... what?

An incredible dread settled over her, and she knew that all the calm had been was the eye of the storm.

The world-

The red crosshairs centered on the hover car, and began blinking frantically. Text underneath the image confirmed that a shooting solution had been established. The mortar cannons had a target at last.

Robotnik grinned savagely.

“Fire!” he shouted, and slammed his fist down on the strike controls.

-exploded, flinging shards of dirt and mud and debris upwards all around them in a hailstorm of fire and destruction a hundredfold more intense than any that had ever preceded it. Bright red beams as thick as the Lower Mobius tunnel system slammed down into the ground to all sides of the hover car, and although they were concentrated on an area far too wide to actually strike the car by chance, they were more than capable of causing enough problems on their own.

The molecular-binding generators whined and crackled as they overloaded. The hull was punctured several times instantaneously. The noise of the wind, which had been howling and thundering through the hole already punched through the hover car, grew louder still as the passenger compartment was ruptured by pieces of plasma and charred rock that, moment earlier, had been part of the firebreak. Beam after beam slammed down into the ground all around them, throwing up more and more deadly debris. Whatever the weapon was, Bunnie knew that the only way to avoid taking damage now was to gain altitude. She yanked the steering column towards her chest, and the car jerked upwards. The centripetal acceleration slammed her backwards.

Rotor shouted something, but Bunnie couldn't hear him. She was too busy trying to gain altitude as more and more of the red beams smashed apart the firebreak. The car rose from the veil of debris. The red beams stopped emerging from the sky as soon as they could no longer hurt the hover car, but the three Stealthbots were still in pursuit. They hadn't been affected by the intense laser concussions. And, now that the hover car had been forced to raise its altitude, their missiles would be deadly accurate.

Amidst the furious swirling specks that was the motion sensor, Bunnie saw three more dots appear as the Stealthbots launched another salvo of missiles. She was caught between two extremes: gain too much altitude, and face the missiles. Get too low, and face whatever those… beams had been. There was no middle ground.

The missiles careened towards them. Bunnie drove the hover car as towards the ground, and flattened their trajectory just in time to avoid crashing into it. The missiles patterned into the firebreak behind them. Rotor shouted soundlessly again.

"Five-one-two gigawatt battery loaded," Snively reported, eager to please. Robotnik saw the hover car dive down again towards the ground. "Second salvo is ready to fire. Shooting solution already established."

"What'd you say?" Bunnie tried to shout over the wind.

She could barely make out Rotor's voice. "I said the fuel tank's been ruptured!"

Sure enough, a clear liquid was trailing from the rear of damaged hover car, splashing uselessly against the scorched dirt of the firebreak. Bunnie checked the fuel gauge. They were losing it so quickly that the tank would be completely empty in less than half a minute. The fossil fuel engines that Griff had said earlier was so responsible for their speed advantage really was going to kill them now. They'd never make it to even the outskirts of the Robotropolis now, let alone Robotnik's castle in the middle of the city.

It was the worst blow of them all.

Before they'd at least had a chance. No matter how stupid or unlikely, there was always the possibility that they'd be able to somehow sneak inside of Robotnik's city and put everything to rights. That chance was gone now. They wouldn't make it past the firebreak. A minute of fuel wouldn't get them far. Bunnie hurled a wordless cry of frustration at the universe, and, if it hadn't been for Griff and Rotor, would've smashed the hover car into the ground then and there.

She hated Laurentis for inventing the nodule, she hated Robotnik for wanting her dead, and she hated herself for being too cowardly to confront this when she had a chance.

Some instinct she couldn't name made her keep fighting. The thought that had struck her before the chase came back suddenly and fiercely. She was going to die here, but maybe the others wouldn't. More immediately, she was aware that the long-range beams would be able to strike again now that she was close to the ground. Amid the overwhelming sensorium of blinding tears and deafening noise, she became acutely conscious of the steering column, and gave it a last desperate pull upwards to avoid the next strike of the beams. Only to see that she was too late-

"Fire charge two!" Robotnik howled at the wounded hover car in his visor's screen. The mortar cannons discharged again, careening his fury towards the battle in the most violent way possible.

The hover car shot out of the new cloud of massive red laser beams and flying dust and plasma like it had been shot out of a cannon, and in worse shape than ever before. Exhaust spewed not only out of the two rear thrusters, but from numerous holes punctured in their sides. Yellow hull began to blacken and char as the intense heat of the combustion reaction began to misfire and spew its energies in directions the designers had never intended it to, all the while continuing to drain a dwindling fuel supply that would barely last another three minutes.

Bunnie sealed her eyes shut as the mysterious laser rain seared through the air around her. Whenever she did manage to catch a glimpse of their source, it seemed to be coming from the horizon itself. Whatever was firing them was impossibly distant. Year-old memories tugged at her frayed mind. Sonic had talked about something like this before, some kind of laser hooked up to a radar that tracked his movements. It had behaved similar to this beam. Was it the same technology? Oh, it hardly mattered now…

Rotor was visibly shaking in the seat next to her, fully expecting to die in the next few seconds. She still couldn't tell if Griff was breathing or not. They were bystanders, she thought, they shouldn't be here. They were here because of her cowardice in refusing to face the existence of the transmitter. They had no right to die with her. There had to have been some way of dropping them off earlier!

Some way-

At that instant, Bunnie knew what she had to do.

The hover car rose away from the mortar cannon impact points, beyond the harmful debris clouds of their blasts, and the red beams cut off instantly. But they had risen back into the altitude where the Stealthbots had their best missile guidance. The car had risen too steeply, too; there wasn't enough time to reverse its direction and get low enough to avoid them again.

With dreadful certainty, Bunnie knew that the next missile volley would kill her.

She thought only of one thing.

Rotor and Griff had to be out of the hover car by then.

"Rotor, whatever ya do, keep your arms and legs away from the walls!" she shouted, hoping beyond hope that he could make out her words above the continuing thunder of the air hammering through the hole in the passenger compartment. If he couldn't, he might lose a limb just from the sheer alone. She only wished that she could give the same warning to Griff, but he was completely out of commission for the time being.

"What are you going to do?" he shouted above the wind.

She didn't answer. On the befuddled motion sensor, three bright dots streaked away from the symbols that represented the Stealthbots. Just as Bunnie had feared, she was left with too little time to reverse the car's course. Even if she pulled the steering column as far as it would go, they would still be too high up to nullify the missiles' radar guidance. The blast would be assuredly fatal. Two seconds.

Bunnie wished for just another moment of life, a last chance to take in the sights and sounds of the real, physical world before it was ripped away from her. Even the scar of scorched dirt that was the firebreak could be a suitable last sight. She didn't have time for that, though. She only concentrated on two things: finding the right buttons on the dashboard, and pouring her heart into her last message for Rotor, and shouting it with enough volume so that he could not possibly miss hearing it.

"AH LOVE YOU!"

The eject toggles were patterned in a series of four buttons, arranged in a square-shaped panel. Bunnie slammed two fingers into the buttons that matched Rotor and Griff's seats, and pressed them down with all the effort she could muster.

The last thing she saw of Rotor was his eyes wide open in shock. Whether it was from her words, or the surprise at the ejecting seat pushing him upwards, she couldn't tell. The glass roof covering the passenger compartment snapped backwards.

A louder rush of wind, and they were gone. There was almost a palpable sense of vacuum, an emptiness, where Rotor's seat had been.

The missiles careened towards her in a half-second of deceptive silence.

She no longer wanted the few extra seconds to look around at the world. Had she any time left to her, she knew she would spend it sobbing. She let go of the steering column. It was all over now. She had failed to disarm the Laurentis nodule. Robotnik's weapons, though, had left her tear ducts no time to squeeze out even a single drop of salty water.

In the rear view mirror, the missiles had grown large impossibly fast.

With fearsome suddenness, the universe was torn asunder.