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On paper, the war had ended six months ago.
It had been a concerted effort; the first time, after so many years of bad blood, that the United Federation and the Mobian states had stood shoulder-to-shoulder, united under red, yellow, and heroic blue. And from Sunset Heights to Station Square, the world still bore the scars. But now there was peace, and new hope for the future, and the man who’d tried to tear it all down was dead.
There were plenty of people who disagreed with that ending, Shadow knew, even among those who’d fought. For his own part, he took no pleasure from it; there was always that knowledge, in the back of his mind, that each life taken must be measured against Maria’s love for all of them. But sometimes the cruel equations dictated themselves. Sometimes, when one chose so much evil, and refused to give up the fight, there was no other way to save everyone else.
It was said and done, now. No use dwelling on it. Now GUN was just chasing ghosts; the remains of an automated empire, still dumping out robots in a dead man’s name. At least, that was the official line on why they were out here, Team Dark included.
Unofficially, Commander Tower had been frank with them; GUN was worried about heirs. The first new attacks had lacked Eggman’s flair, his preference for drama and show-of-force, but they’d been well-planned enough to raise concerns. Over the next few weeks, as bases had been identified and burned-out, they’d gotten more sporadic, machines thrown against the guns with less and less thought, but even that lacked the mechanical regularity expected of automated defences.
No, Shadow couldn’t help thinking; it felt like someone with a grudge. Someone desperate enough to target anything, small or isolate or tactically irrelevant though it may be, in Eggman’s name. And that raised the question of who; all of the Doctor’s creations were either dumb or accounted for, and even if he had suddenly started caring about family, his only living relative was herself a member of Team Dark.
“Three minutes to drop!”
He murmured an acknowledgement. The drop was standard; him and Omega for the smash, Rouge for the grab, Topaz flying the gunship, and Hope back home to keep it running; three other teams for the follow-up, all from Spider; and Commander Tower in everyone’s ears, making sure everything went off well.
“You ready?” Rouge’s voice came from across the troop bay, teasing, perhaps, but not insincere. He murmured again, checking the pistol at his side.
“Let’s end this.”
A muffled thump cut her next reply short. The gunship lurched, hard to the right and down. Behind, the rattle of chaff-launchers echoed. Then another thump. Topaz’s voice cut in again. “Hold on; we’re taking fire.”
That was new. So far, GUN’s stealth tech had held them true. It seemed that streak was over.
The afterburners came on with a howl. They rose sharply, rolled hard-over, and for two-point-nine seconds Shadow was weightless. “Get us as close as you can,” he ordered.
There was a sharp sigh on the intercom. “You’re gonna have to go now.”
“UNDERSTOOD.”
Harnessed at the rear of the bay, Omega was unbothered by the manoeuvres. But Shadow knew him well enough to hear the anticipation there. The one they were all feeling.
“Okay, dropping in three!”
The lights cut. An alarm sounded.
“Two!”
Topaz banked them hard, then snapped the bird level.
“One!”
The door slammed open with a hiss. Omega’s harness blew open and out he went; Rouge followed, then Shadow, letting the rush of air carry them clear of the door.
“Good luck down there!”
And then they were away into the night. The gunship, far above, banked and climbed, racing for the safety of altitude. A missile shrieked up, bursting too close for comfort but too far clear for damage. Shadow rolled; the trail led back to the ground below, to a silo nestled in a looming mountain. To the target.
Omega landed first. He fired his thrusters last-second, vanishing in a suicide burn of vaporised snow. Shadow’s shoes made the same effect; he rolled from the landing, ready to run. Rouge swooped on overhead, taking her own path into the trees. And ahead of them all, nestled into the crook of the mountain, a great door of red steel began to grind.
“This is Team Dark,” Rouge’s voice came, from somewhere ahead and from the comm. “We’re on the ground.”
“We have eyes on the target,” Shadow added, eyeing the door. “Looks like they’re opening up for us.”
She laughed. “Must be the welcome party.”
She was right, of course. The sensible thing would have been to seal the door, to force them to breach, but whoever was behind had no interest. No; those great panels were shuddering aside, and behind them, ready to storm into the bitter cold and darkness, loomed a legion of Egg Pawns armed to the teeth.
“Understood, Dark,” the commander crackled, carried on secure frequency to all three. “Do you require any back up? Spiders one-through-three are standing by.” It was a stupid question, of course, but protocol was protocol and care unavoidable.
“NEGATIVE.” A glance back showed Omega unfolding, rotary cannons glinting in the moonlight. Shadow couldn’t help a tiny flash of teeth.
“We’ve got this.”
The robot crashed against the wall, bursting into scrap metal. Shadow grunted; these things were hardly a challenge, but whoever was running this place seemed determined to throw more of them anyway. It was almost getting tiresome.
“This is Spider 1; atrium secured and landing-zone clear.”
The crackle from the comm was still strong, even deep into the bunker; it seemed not all GUN’s toys had been outpaced yet. He thumbed his own to reply.
“That’s good. Omega, Rouge; have you found anyone?”
“NEGATIVE.”
“Nothing but more machines.” Both sounded distinctly disappointed, Omega more so if anything. “We’ve reached the living quarters, but it doesn’t look like anyone’s been up here in a long time. There’s so much dust, eugh.”
“Hmmm.” Shadow looked back; his own corridor was silent, now, littered with broken badniks and little else. “Are we sure they aren’t receiving orders from elsewhere? You said this was the last one.”
He didn’t need to say who he was talking to; the commander’s voice came on after a moment, punctuated by a stern cough. “We triangulated this base’s position based on the other facilities we’ve destroyed. It was in-contact with all of them, but no other transmissions are going out; if there is anyone behind this, they’re here.”
Before Shadow could insist they double-check, another voice cut in; young, with a quiet familiar rasp to it. “I ran the analysis myself; unless they’ve found a whole new way to send messages, then this is the last one.”
There were times, still, when Shadow didn’t quite trust Abraham; their relationship was a working one, and there was history and difficulty and OpSec to consider. But that voice belonged to Hope, and he always trusted her. If she said there were no transmissions, then there were no transmissions.
“I see,” he agreed, looking again at the broken remains. “Then I’ll keep looking.”
Murmurs came from the others as he set off. The hallway he was in sloped downwards, descending, it seemed, into the bowels of the mountain itself. The air was cold, the lights dim, and every footfall seemed to echo as he pressed on. Eggman’s face was everywhere; every barrel and crate, every warning notice and direction sign, every door to a dead-end room; all were stamped with the dead man’s leering visage.
At the bottom, a final doorway loomed. Beneath the Doctor’s flickering face, the sign read ‘SERVERS’. That was something, then; even if this place was just running automated, the program responsible would be nested somewhere in there, along with plenty of data for Hope to diagnose with. So he stepped up.
There was a pneumatic hiss, but not from ahead. He whirled before the wall-panel was even open. The first would-be ambusher got its arm halfway up before a kick sent it flying; he drew on the second, round through the head, round centre-mass, and down it went. The third tried to run at him; jump over, spin, two rounds into spine in time to spin on the fourth and put one air shoe against its chest.
The blast drove the pawn’s own chest plating through its chaos drive. And then it was quiet, once again, with another round of twitching robots scattered to the floor.
“Sloppy,” he couldn’t help saying, dropping the pistol back into his holster. Still, it had been an ambush, one that had known to wait until he was distracted by the sign. Someone was definitely observing him.
He stepped back up to the door, speaking loud enough that whoever it was would have to hear. “I know you can see me; are you going to let me in, or will I have to break this door down?”
There was a long moment of silence. He prepared for the worst; for a fight, ahead or behind, or for the claxons to start screaming that this whole place was set to detonate. But instead, after what felt like far too long, there came a quiet, echoing clunk. And with it, and then a hiss, the door slid open in a cloud of pneumatic fog.
Shadow stepped through, checking his corners as he went. The room beyond was large; a great unlit vault, its darkness broken up by a starfield of blinking status lights as innumerable server-boxes hummed away indefinitely. From where he stood, they seemed arranged radially, racks reaching out like spokes across a circular space. But the centre was obscured, hidden by the nearest machines and by the rats’ nest of cabling between them.
GUN had rooms like this; Hope practically lived in one, when she wasn’t bunking with the rest of the team. But with this one specifically, something made him pause, above and beyond the inherent dangers of the Doctor’s bases:
The colour of the light was wrong.
Eggman’s first-generation machines had been gaudy, at least from what Shadow had seen; shallow simulacrums of animals or of himself, painted up in patchwork colours. The second generation had been simpler, but no less proud, done up in bright red, yellow, or blue; that was the paint scheme Omega still carried. And the third, the ones from the war, the ones who had just tried to end his life for the tenth time tonight, were a clinical white. But all of them, right back, had always carried a distinct red glow to their eye-lamps, and that same sinister glare was everywhere in Eggman’s empire.
Except here, it seemed. Because here, the lights were all a bright shade of teal-blue; every little status indicator, blinking away in unison, shared it, and more seemed to be emanating from the centre of the room, casting a thin halo across everything. He blinked; it wasn’t a colour he’d immediately associate with the late Doctor, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t something else, some power source he’d uncovered or trick he’d never gotten to pull.
Carefully, and with half-an-eye behind him, he moved forwards. Stepping around one of the racks took him into a lane between them, leading down towards the centre. What was there was still hard to make out, still distant and obscured, but it was definitely something, something shedding that blue light, something seemingly moving, if only to shift a little in the darkness.
As he got closer, he could see some of the closer cables were different. They ran just like the others, out of ports, down in bundles, merging into larger strands as they reached the floor. But they were thinner, silk-slight, and coloured a deep dead-screen black that would have disappeared into the darkness were it not for the constant flickers of that same teal running along them.
The lights seemed to follow each strand, along the floor, away from the racks, as-if he was watching the data itself trace a path along. Until the bundles disappeared beneath more strands, strands coloured stark white, and it didn’t look like cables at all so much as…
He stopped suddenly, the realisation of what he was seeing slamming home all-at-once. The centre of the room, the source of the light, the shape he’d seen; it was a human child.
She was sat upon her knees at the apex of the web; those strands he’d been following became her hair, hair that fell in curtains down from curls to hide her tiny frame. On the outside it was all pale, clinical white turned sickly by the glow, but that glow itself was coming from underneath, from roots coloured black-and-data-blue that peeked out atop her head and seemed to swallow the rest of her below.
She had her back to him, but he was under no illusions. If anyone had let him in here, it was her, and he had made no move to hide himself. Still, if she was going to give him a moment, he would take it to take her in.
So much of her was hidden, but he could see her skin was pale, and her dress took its shade of white from her hair. From her size alone she was definitely young; eight, nine maybe, smaller than Hope by a third or more. And she was shaking, just a little, and making what he could only perceive as shaky, damp breaths…
Almost as-if she was trying not to cry.
“Who are you?” he ventured.
Movement; above and behind. Four, five, six targets. At once he turned, leaping for the ceiling; twelve eyes, burning the same blue, met his own from above.
Teleport, spin, one down; Chaos Spear to the left, two; draw, three rounds right, three, four. He warped again to the second-last. A kick sent it spinning into the sixth. Shadow landed again with a thump, before the tinkling crash of machine parts falling upon the server racks echoed it.
“Are you done?”
Another shaky breath answered him; the girl had turned, now, revealing a little face half-hidden by the curl of her hair. The one eye that could meet his was that same blue, burning with emotion, and its light shone out over building saltwater. Still, despite it all, he couldn’t escape how small she seemed, alone in this cavernous place.
She didn’t, it seemed, want to give him an answer. So he gave her a sigh instead. “Those robots aren’t a challenge to me, or my friends. Nothing you’re doing will stop us.”
“I… I know,” she breathed; her lower lip quavered just a little. “I’ve run the simulations, hundreds of thousands of times.” Her body seemed to shrink back. “No matter what I do, the outcome is always the same.”
He stepped forwards. “Then why keep fighting?”
“B-because I have to,” she forced out, her whole form starting to shake. “I was created to continue the war, to continue his conquest, no matter the cost.”
He blinked; there was enough in that alone to fill in who she was, and to set a familiar ache beneath the fur on his chest. He went to speak, to give voice to that realisation, but the data-streams in her hair stuttered, and she went on suddenly.
“And because I want to.” She lifted from the floor, floating up as her breath stuck and she forced herself to meet his gaze. “I want to hurt you, b-because you took him away from me.”
There was an obvious answer to that, an uncomfortably stark one, but he held out hope anyway as he asked, “who?”
Her face crumpled, the tears in her eyes brimming out over her cheek, and it came out white-hot. “Father.”
There it was.
“So, you’re the Doctor’s daughter?” It was a stupid question, really, but one that needed to be said for her own sake. She nodded just a little, still shivering, and the ache in his chest deepened. Still, he had to remember what she was. “Then you know what he was doing, and why things had to end the way they did.”
“Nobody had to resist,” she insisted. “Casualties were not inevitable; if the world had only submitted-”
He cut her off, keeping his words plain. “We both know that wasn’t an option. It’s the nature of people to fight for what they believe in; and most people believe in their own right to live free.” She looked like she wanted to protest, but he gave her no room to; not yet. “And your father would have killed many of them anyway; you don’t really believe that every victim of this war was part of GUN, do you?”
“Such a belief would be… illogical,” she admitted through gritted teeth, glancing aside.
He looked around at the banks of servers again, all tethered back to that one tiny shape. “You must know how many deaths he’s caused; how many people aren’t coming home.” The sigh that followed was heavy; this was going to be painful, he knew, but he equally knew it needed to be said. “For each and every one, there’s at least one person feeling exactly the same way you are now.”
Her eye stayed on him, stayed meeting his gaze, but her focus was suddenly absent from it. The glow in her hair brightened, more data spiralling faster and faster to the centre of the web. And as the realisation ran through her; as she followed that thread to its inevitable end; he saw that eye widen, and well up all over again, and suddenly fresh tears speckled the floor-panels and her mouth fell half-open.
“I-” she floated down again, landing gingerly on little feet. “I had never considered that. I…”
“Listen-”
“Why?” she cut back in, whole form shuddering. It may not have been physical, not truly, but he could still hear the lump in her throat. “Why does it not make sense?!”
He stepped closer still. “What doesn’t make sense?”
“This feeling.” It was almost a plea, breathless and tear-stained. “My father being gone makes my mission so much harder, but I shouldn’t be allowing it to stop me. My own capacities are not diminished; he created me to assist him, but I am fully capable of operating on my own, except…
“I just can’t. Without Father, none of it makes sense; I can no longer predict my own behaviour, let alone yours. I cannot find a contingency that doesn’t end here. Every time I try, I just feel like there is something missing, like something has been ripped out of me, and I do not want to plan or act rationally even though I know I should.
“I just want to hurt you. To hurt all of you. To make you feel the same way.” Slowly, her gaze turned back up, and the feeling in his chest became something worse at the sight. “And now you tell me I have been, all this time, and that’s why this resolution was inevitable and I just don’t understand.
“Father’s plan was perfect. But this…” she gestured limply to her entire self, words failing to catch whatever it was. “In a perfect world, this feeling would not exist. It would never exist.”
She hung her head, shaking it loosely. More tears sparkled for a moment in the glow, leaving a constellation of stains on the floor. And across from her, Shadow let out a long breath, and chose his words as carefully as he could.
“Feelings are part of being alive,” he explained, as softly as he could. “Someone you care about, someone you love, is gone; there’s no world in which that doesn’t hurt.” Her lip quivered, her eyes shone, but no words came out. So he went on. “That’s just what grief is; the only thing you can do is keep moving, as best you can, and accept things will never be the same.”
“Grief…” she whispered. And then slowly, with the weight of something dawning in her eyes, she turned up again. “That’s what this is; what I’ve been feeling… and causing.” It was horror, that look, he was suddenly sure. “Does…
“Does that mean I was created to hurt people?”
It… hadn’t been his point, and yet it had, in a way. He’d known, already, from the moment he’d realised her nature, that this was something they shared. And maybe once that would have blackened his throat, and turned all his words to ash, but not anymore. Because now, he knew what he was.
“I was made to cause harm,” he admitted; she must have known that already, must have seen his data somewhere, and yet still, she gave a little gasp. “My creator… your great-grandfather, he wanted me to be immune to diseases, so that he could find a cure for his granddaughter’s illness.” Now it was his turn to look away, if only for a moment. “But the ones who helped him, on both sides; they only wanted a weapon.
“And eventually, so did he. He wanted me to destroy this world, to bring ruin to humanity. And for a while, that was my only purpose.”
She swallowed, and for just a moment, something glimmered in her eye. And then it was gone. “Why did he change your purpose? I cannot find it in my data.”
“Maria.” The weight to the word, even now, was more than he’d expected. But he found the path down from it well-worn. “She was… both of our worlds.
“But when GUN found out about what I’d become, about my creator’s other benefactors, they came to shut it all down. And they took her from us, the same way your father was taken from you.”
“Do you still miss her?” the girl asked softly, something not-quite-hope in her words.
“Every day,” he admitted softly. “But I’ve come to terms with her death, and with who I am. I chose to live by her ideals, instead of the ones I was created for.”
Another sigh brought the feelings down, back to the present; to what mattered now. “I can’t promise it will be easy, but I promise you can do the same. You don’t have to keep fighting this war; it won’t make the hole inside you go away.”
She seemed to consider; her mouth opened and closed more than once, empty like the cold air around her. Until she sniffled, sharply, still not-quite stopping her tears, and spoke again.
“But I do not resent him,” she confessed, tensing as it came back. “Even knowing all of this, if Father was still here, I’d still want to be at his side. I would still want to fight for him.”
“I don’t believe that’s important,” he explained; he tried again to keep his own words level, to soothe all of those painful feelings as best he could. “You love him, and the wound is still fresh; that’s normal. But he isn’t here, so what you’d do if he was is irrelevant; the only thing that matters is what you do now.” He took a deep breath; time for a little more painful truth. “But if it changes your decision, you should know that I don’t resent your great-grandfather, either.
“And when one of my…” he paused for a moment, not quite sure how to explain Black Doom to the girl. “When I was given the chance to follow through with his mission for me, on my own terms; to force all of humanity to feel what we felt; there was still a part of me that said I should. I chose not to listen to it, in the end, but it was there.”
He let out one last sigh. “Finding what it means to live; that takes time. But you have to start from somewhere.”
She sniffed, sharply, at that. And then, with a new light finally starting to dawn in her eyes, she spoke again, her words little more than a whimper.
“When you arrived at my door, I was sure you’d come to kill me.” Another sniffle, breaking through into a sob. “It was the only outcome I could see.”
“I came to end this,” he promised, and meant it, “one way or another. The reason I told you what this war means is because every time I have to fight, I remember it; how it felt, when Maria died, and what she hoped I would become. I weigh that against every life I have to take.
“So I knew going in that if I didn’t have to kill you, I wouldn’t, even before I knew who you were.”
She swallowed, hard. “And now?”
“And now, I think you are a lot like your father. But I also think you deserve a chance to live for yourself.”
And that did it. At once, exhausted and overwhelmed and grieving and relieved, that tiny little shape of data and light pitched forwards. And fell against him. And burst out into all the sobs she’d been holding in. And he put one arm, gently but gingerly, around her head, and held her as she cried.
“Does…” she mumbled, somewhere in the fur on his front. “D-does this mean you’ll help me?”
And he squeezed her, just a little. “Of course.”
He held her there. Until she cried herself out. Until it was all out there in the cold of that dark storage space. And then he kept holding her, as she made no move to pull back. Until…
Movement; above and behind. One, two. Slow moving. Not targets. Allies. Friends.
“Shadow?” Rouge’s voice broke the silence. The digital girl gasped.
He let her go gently, turning back; sure enough, the rest of Team Dark had found the doorway, and behind them half of Spider Troop stood guard with weapons down. At the sight of them, the child flinched, shrinking back behind her hair; he reached down in response, and one little hand found his own.
She really was so much smaller than Hope.
“I found our target,” he began, not missing the understanding in Rouge’s eyes. Omega was harder to read, certainly, but there was still something of the same in his frame. “Everyone, this is…”
“Sage.” She squeezed his hand, tightly.
“She’s Doctor Eggman’s daughter; part of my family. And she’s going to be staying with me.”
And nobody; in that room, on the comm, or anywhere, disagreed.
And hand-in-hand, the siblings set off.