Chapter 3

Escape from Mobius

Cinos knelt down and readied himself, he was doing something he'd had to do for the past two weeks since escaping the city, catch lunch. His hands parted wide as he observed his prey, a juicy looking cricket. It rubbed its back legs together and suspected nothing, Cinos went for it. He smacked his hands together but he cricket managed to jump from between his hands, he lashed out with his right hand to grab it but missed. Every time Cinos tried to grab it, it leapt from his grasp and hopped on, finally Cinos tripped, fell over and landed in the dirt and cursed himself as his cricket lunch hopped on.

Cinos suddenly, while laying in the dirt, reflected on how low he'd had to go to get food. He couldn't get food from a vender in the city because he guessed his chip in his hand had been deactivated –even though he dug it out of his palm himself- and even if it did work and had he used it Robotnik would've known within nanoseconds where Cinos was, and the point of what Cinos was doing was to remain under the Empires radar, at least until they forgot about him which he doubted would ever happen.

Once he'd escaped the city his life had just tipped him from one set of unfamiliar and uncomfortable circumstances to the next. He figured after a couple of days in the under city that he wouldn't last long without food and fresh water, unfortunately there was little of that in the under city. There were a million pipes down here, one must contain water but he dare not crack them open in case they contained gas or electricity cables or just sewage. He had a horrible experience when he thought he was drinking leaking water from a water pipe, only later to find out that he was drinking water that had been freshly flushed down a toilet. He'd thrown up for hours after that.

A day after this he decided his best chance was to leave the under city all together and try to find a life 'outside', but no one ever went outside, it was wild, it was nature, it was dangerous and he was always taught that nature was unkind, unforgiving and didn't care if you lived or died, but neither did the Empire so he took his chances with nature.

He figured he'd better learn how to hunt and catch his own food, no easy task however. Speed wasn't against him, he'd found out in the open he could get up to quiet an impressive speed, maybe twice that of a Mobian athlete so he could hunt down and keep up with his prey but he couldn't bring them down, he had no idea how to forge tools and there was very little to forge it with. Maybe in a week he could make a pointy stick with a rock but until then he had no way of bringing down big game, so he focused on little game.

He hunted rabbits and hairs, he could easily catch them but when it came to killing them he just didn't have the heart to do it, he was too squeamish and he couldn't stand the sight of blood so he reluctantly released them. His mind was really set on not eating smaller animals when he caught a hedgehog or lil'hedgehog as they're called, a small, balled up creature that walked on all fours and was no bigger than Cinos' own foot. He considered eating it because he'd become so hungry, but after wrestling with his conscious for hours he decided what he was about to do might amount to cannibalism and decided instead to let the poor little creature go, anyway he could sympathise with it. It was struggling to survive out here just as he was.

Cinos did however find a food source, one that given anything else he'd rather avoid, insects. That's right, bugs, beetles, spiders and there a few juicy big ones around but he seemed to have become partial to eating crickets for some odd reason.

Water was another problem but was quickly overcome. Cinos had found the pipe system for water that lead from the purification plant about 50 miles away. He opened an inspection hatch he'd found in the dirt, went inside, turned a valve and collected water to his hearts content.

At one point it had started to rain and Cinos considered collecting water that way as well as an alternative source of water in case his drink hole was discovered, this was impossible however because the rain wasn't ordinarily rain, it was acid rain, one drop would probably kill him and it stung his skin like hell. He took the lead from the land animals and took cover when he saw the approaching dark clouds in the filthy green sky, they were difficult to spot in the smog and smoke but Cinos soon caught the subtle differences between them.

Cinos signed and finally decided to pick himself up and sat cross legged in the dirt. Surviving was all well and good but it wasn't exactly helping him find the people he was looking for. Fellow freedom fighters, people who didn't agree with the Empire. Cinos had searched the Under City for two days and only found dead people, probably been flushed away to keep them quiet.

In the long silence he decided it was time to head back to his camp. He picked up a small collection of squashed bugs he'd collected and intended to eat later, they were a great source of protein and they were keeping him alive out here though he'd prefer something with more meat to it, like a burger or a hot dog or something.

His hideout was a small bunker, he didn't know what it was used for but by the state it was in he guessed it was abandoned. Inside he found a little food and water pipes, the water wasn't running to this station and he didn't know how to activate it so instead he just keeps making trips to the pumping relay station, it was 100 miles away but it took him only 10 minutes to run it and with each trip he was sure he was getting faster and faster.

He went inside, set his food down on a table and sat in a chair and got ready to dig in, to nights menu was either maggots, a big spider or a few dead crickets, 'Oh, the agony of choice' he thought sarcastically. He settled on the maggots only because they actually had a meaty flavour to them.

The one good thing Cinos had found about this bunker was it had electricity, as long as he used little of it he guessed he could remain undetected as a drain on the local power supply, wherever that was. It also had its own screen system so Cinos could listen into the news channels, the screen was bust but he could just use it like a radio. He would listen in for either a report about him, the 'dangerous, terrible hedgehog terrorist Sonic, also known as Cinos' as they were calling him, or what was more important to him info on any possible Freedom Fighters in the area.

Cinos turned on the screen and put a handful of still live maggots down his throat and tried to force his mouth to swallow, it was getting easier to eat these things and that was worrying him. The report was practically of zero interest to him, it was all industrial and financial news, he needed some info on either him or political unrest on the planet. At least lack of news about him meant the Empire was not troubling the public to look for him anymore though there were constant reminders that there was a reward out for his capture which kept going up the longer he stayed unfound.

After lunch Cinos left his bunker and laid in the dirt looking up at the night sky, at the blackness, the blackness that was filled with millions of stars visible to the naked eye. This far out away from sources of light pollution like big cities Cinos could see so many more stars then he could see from within the city, it was strangely stirring and beautiful. Looking up at the night sky he wasn't just seeing black and white he could see dark blues, yellows, reds unbelievable colours. Cinos relaxed knowing how safe he was here away from Robotnik and technology, but he also felt worried. It seems political unrest on the capital planet was not going to come, it seems the only way he'd find people willing to fight the Empire would be out there in space.

Watching the sky again, seeing the universe slowly turn around his point of view Cinos knew this was the right decision. Somehow he had to get to these far colonies he'd heard of where there would be rebellions willing to take him in, to accept his help and to bring his dream of overthrowing Robotnik a reality.

Then came Mobius' second moon, the Death Egg, high in the sky looking down, watching him and at that moment Cinos made the decision. He would go into space, he would find a way somehow to reach these settlements in the far universe and when he does he'll make it his mission to set the people free. Now, under the night sky and these stars he began to plan his escape from Mobius.

Little did Cinos know that high in the sky from a satellite in orbit someone was watching him, Robotnik had found Cinos and had sent some recovery agents to capture him. But by the time they arrived at his cubbyhole the Hedgehog was long gone, leaving very little evidence of where he'd gone. By that morning the hedgehog had left his hiding place and raced across the land heading far east and eventually the satellite lost track of him when Cinos either through design of mistake ran directly under a large storm cloud and they lost him.

Later that week Cinos shuffled forward a little in the line he was in and waited his turn to be seen by the man behind the desk.

Cinos had realised the first thing he had to do was find a ship. The easiest thing to do was to enlist on a cargo ship that would take him far into the outskirts of the system and from there he could smuggle himself onboard a light speed skipper to take him out to the further colonies. He knew of a place that wanted people and workers with few questions asked. To do that he had to go to the other side of the planet, no problem for someone who could move as fast as him until he had to cross lakes and seas. But he'd finally made it.

He'd packed enough water and provisions to survive the trip and once he'd got to where he was going, a pretty rough and dirty looking domed city similar to Robotropolises except here they'd never heard of cleaners, he snuck into it by using the sewer systems in a reverse of his method of escape from Robotropolises. To his horror he'd found a lot of dead bodies in the sewers probably murdered by someone and dumped down here, on this side of the planet it wasn't unusual to find the law lacking.

Since these bodies would be reported missing, not dead their chips would be active. Cinos knew he needed to get hold of a chip and though it felt like a ghoulish task he took the hand of the least decomposed body, a white hedgehog nonetheless and removed the chip from the cadavers hand. His insides had curled in disgust as he did this, it was the same feeling as when he tried to kill a defenceless animal for food, only in this case the thing he was working on was dead which made it even more disgusting in his books but it had to be done.

After that he set up a temporary base and scouted out the area from under sewer grates. The place was as tight on security as it was in Robotropolises but for whatever reason it seemed to allow drunken behaviour and lawlessness. Cinos guessed this far from the capital it had fewer eyes on it.

Cinos soon found that whether it was a sewer in Robotropolises or a sewer in this 'Metaltropolises' which was its name, he soon learnt that sewers still reeked a thousand times worse than a half eaten sandwich that had fallen into the back of the fridge and been forgotten about for months.

Cinos had spent the latter years of his life so far changing filters on the pumps and machines that used this mass of waste as a power source for one thing or another. The waste was good fertiliser and the methane a form of bio fuel. For some reason in the back of Cinos mind he sensed a strange irony that Dr. Robotnik one who used to use and wasted fossil fuels was now using a form of renewable energy. The brown hedgehog didn't know if it was ironic, he couldn't remember his old life but that corner of his mind Sonic was tucked into seemed to think it was odd. That was until you remembered that Robotnik had already plundered Mobius of its mineral wealth, all forms of fuel from Natural Gas to Oil and coal had been mined out of the planet and now they had to survive on imports and on renewable forms of energy. Some scientists had suggested harnessing the power of wind, water, air and the thermal energy from the planets core, but one by one the Emperor, or his puppet master Dr. Robotnik had turned them down referring to it as a waste of time because nature could not be tamed. So instead a fleet of ships had been built to suck mineral wealth out of the rest of the galaxy, first it started with asteroids and mining ships travelling to the other 8 words in Mobius' planet system, but they didn't stop there, they went further afield to far and distant planets that had mineral wealth and amazingly an atmosphere that Mobians could breath. So the Empire had expanded growing larger and larger with each planet they colonised. Not once however did these colonies encounter intelligent life. They found plant life, but no animals, no fish, no birds, it seemed the only constant in the universe was plant life and so far Mobius had been the first to harbour any form of intelligent life.

Cinos realised he was thinking too much as he waited in line for his turn, he should be ready to answer any questions put to him without hesitation.

Cinos had no money to hire a shuttle and the moment he'd set foot on the surface in his current state he'd be caught. All cameras everywhere had iris recognition technology, they could tell who you were depending on your retina scan and eye colour.

There was no chance of using coloured contact lenses as they were illegal and had all been destroyed to stop people avoiding the scanners, even shades were prohibited and even glasses when outdoors so the cameras could always spot you, indoors however when you're working was a different matter.

After wandering ankle deep in some muck one day Cinos peered through a vent shaft and that's when he saw the answer to his problems. There was an advert on a wall saying "See Space, join the Mobius Waste Management Team!" or MWMT for short.

Basically, after burning the sludge Cinos was wading through there was always rubbish at the end, useless black sludge that was of no use, so it was loaded into canisters, fired into space where they were collected by a garbage ship and hauled to the sun and dumped on its surface. But then the ships went to the far edge of the system and collected fuel waste from several other colony planets to return to Mobius to be burnt as more fuel.

It was the start of a plan, if he could get to the edge of the system at least maybe he could find a way out of the system altogether. That's why Cinos was standing in line, he was about to join the MWMT.

He sat down at a desk opposite a black jump suited individual, a heavily built dog with a long mussel, sharp eyes and a mean grin. Cinos kind of felt out of place being a scrawny little hedgehog, this guy could eat him for lunch. The glasses Cinos was wearing which magnified his eyes to twice their size didn't help either. Cinos had found them in the sewage dump and washed them down to use. He'd also dyed his fur a dull white using some kind of chemical so he wasn't recognisable, though it worked he did subconsciously wondered how many forms of cancer he was going to get off it, and he had his quills tired up into a pony tail like thingy at the back of his head. This was so he resembled more of the hedgehog who's chip he was using belonged to, the dead one.

"You're a little short for this work aren't you?" the man behind the desk said, a name tag on his uniform breast pocket read, Arnold Reed.

"I didn't realise there was a height requirement." Cinos said, and Reed grunted. Cinos had disguised his voice by wearing a breather, a device for heavy asthmatics that fed oxygen directly into his lungs so he could breath, Cinos didn't need it but it added to the disguise he was going for. Of course he'd found it in the waste pit so it still stank a little and made him sound like a villain from a sci-fi film whenever the device breathed for him, but it had advantages in that it hid his lower face and with filters it also filtered out the drugs in the atmosphere so he could think clearly. This look didn't look out of place in this area of Mobius anyway, this close to the garbage pits many people wore these things with filters to stop the stench getting through from the sewers to their noses but Cinos acted up the part of a dorky, asthmatic.

The dog took out a form from his desk and began writing on it filling in details. "Sur-Name" he suddenly asked.

Cinos quickly fished for a name, he couldn't use his real name –nor his alternative identities name- in case Robotnik somehow spotted it and decided to check it out. Nor could he use the identity of his chips original owner because he didn't know it, damn he should've planned ahead. Cinos said the first name that came to mind "Bla...ke" he'd meant to say Blade because it sounded cool, but changed tack when he realised it could give him away because it wasn't a usual ame. He almost said Blakes, with an S as in the Emperor but realised that might be too conspicuous as well so stopped short of the single S and so he became Blake.

"First name?"

Cinos was ready for this "Richard"

"Date of birth?"

"Feburary 2nd" Cinos said without hesitation, it was Lola's birthday. Wait, would that come back to haunt him he wondered? But it was too late to change his mind now.

"Year?"

"I'm 27 if that helps?" stupid answer, but Reed the Dog didn't appear to care and just scribbled a year on the form which from Cinos angle looked like it made him 50. This form filling must be a complete joke, the guy had even written his first name as Dick, making him Dick Blake which sounded like a private detective in a bad cop show. Hey wait a minute, Dick? Was this mutt insulting him?

Reed asked some other questions like why he wanted to join the company and so on. Then Cinos was weighed, and Cinos was alarmed to find out he had lost 2 stone and 3 pounds from being on the run for a number of weeks, he was already a scrawny thing he couldn't afford to lose much more weight. They also did an eye exam which Cinos pretend to be bad at once he'd gotten to the third line, giving credibility to his need for glasses. He memorised the letters with his glasses off in case the guy asked him to repeat it with his glasses on, but Reed didn't.

Reed then gave Cinos a six page document to read quietly in the corner which stated the terms and conditions, he was then to sign both the form Reed had filled out and the six page document to seal the deal.

Not to make himself seem too keen Cinos sat down and read the document. It was long, drawn out rubbish and legal stuff he didn't understand, within two paragraphs though he was reading it though none of it was going in and eventually he gave up altogether.

Suddenly there was a light flooding into the recruitment centre. Cinos peered out to see a drone peering in, scanning every ones' eyes. Cinos' blood froze, if it recognised him he was done for. The seconds ticked by like they were minutes and he was aware his heart was thudding madly in his chest as the robot collected data on all of them. He was sure it would recognise him and an alarm would be set off, security forces would surround him and Cinos would be dragged off to have his mind wiped again.

But no alarm came, the drone shut off its search light and continued on its way. Was a silent alarm tripped or didn't the drone recognise him?

Cinos returned to reading the document which was still boring and dull but he was still on edge waiting for trouble. He'd been sitting there for two more minutes when he realised he wasn't wearing his glasses and quickly put them on. He hated these things because they hurt his eyes but they were necessary to remain undetected.

After signing the documents Cinos was officially part of the garbage hauling business MWMT or the 'Gung brigade' as they were more commonly known. As Cinos walked back to his little hidey hole in the sewers he looked around waiting for security guards or Swatbots to swarm down and wrestle him to the ground. But none came.

Cinos scratched his head, this was odd, usually these drones were 100% accurate so why hadn't they found him? He got his answer after he passed a shop with tinted windows that made them a two way mirror, they could see out but you couldn't see in. Cinos did a double take and peered at his own reflection. He looked stupid with his dull white fur, quills tied behind the back of his head and glasses that made him look like a nerd but what interested him were his eyes. He blinked thinking what he was seeing was a trick of the light, but the difference remained the same.

Through the glasses that magnified his eyes to three times their original size Cinos noticed his eyes had changed colour! They'd gone from his usual jet black to a very dark hazel. Cinos had noticed when he saw Sonics image projected at him weeks ago that Sonic had emerald green eyes. Where his eyes changing back to how they were before the memory wipe? He removed the glasses from his face and pocketed them thinking maybe he wouldn't need them but still decided to hang on to them just in case. The glasses were annoying anyway, while wearing them he would sometimes bump into people because his vision through the glasses was so terrible, but people just thought he was drunk.

Was Sonic coming back? He wondered when he found a quiet, shady spot to sit down. Would Cinos wake up one day and remember everything, remember being that free spirit Sonic the Hedgehog? But then Cinos thought, what would happen to him, Cinos the person, would he just cease to exist? The person who was now suffering because Sonic had slipped up? Erased to make room for some cocky little teenager personality that sounded to him like he was an irritating, little, antisocial brat?

Cinos waited before opening a small access shoot and leaping back down into the sewers and landed with a splash in the wet sewage.

Cinos was certain he could get along fine if Sonic stayed out of the picture all together, the cocky little rat had had his chance at life and he'd blew it. But at the same time Cinos also wanted to feel free, Sonic just seemed to embody freedom in Cinos' mind as well. He could go anywhere he pleased, he didn't care what others thought of him and through fragmented memories in his mind it felt like he knew how to enjoy himself. Cinos couldn't possibly feel that now and he desperately wanted to feel that sense of freedom for himself, even just to taste it.

But maybe Cinos wouldn't cease to exist, if Sonic did come back he'd retain the memories of Cinos and a persons' personality was made up of memories that influenced how they behaved. Would he became a Cinos/Sonic hydride personality? Would his older, more experienced self make Sonic step back and plan things through carefully before racing into danger? It was Sonic's recklessness that caused him to be caught and have his memory erased in the first place. It's all well and good fighting for a just cause, but when you were outgunned and out matched there was no shame in running to fight another day, after all once you're dead, you're dead and then you're of no use to anyone, and because Sonic had slipped up this world had come into being.

Suddenly Cinos' face drooped as realisation dawned on him, he felt cold and he could feel himself going into shock as a penny had just dropped and with a horribly loud clang.

It was his fault, it was all his fault, the empire, Dr. Robotnik's rise to power, Lola's death, the death of all those people in the under cities, this nightmare they were living in, it was all his fault because his other self had been so cocky and selfish! His younger self just wanted to help people he realised that but his pride, his inability to back down from a challenge he knew he couldn't win, his arrogance in thinking whatever the challenge he would always come out on top like he had a guardian angel making sure everything would be alright, his selfish desire to enjoy himself in dangerous situations, all of it that seemed to personify Sonic, and it all meant it was Sonic who had caused all of this and that meant it was also Cinos' fault too.

Cinos screamed into his head, a scream so large that it threatened to break out of his head and exit through his mouth as a real scream but he held it in so as not to make a scene in public so instead he grabbed his pony tail of quills and pulled on them hard as if by inflicting pain on himself he could make the fragments of Sonic in his head feel pain. His eyes began to water as the pressurised scream released itself through pain. Then Cinos crumbled to the floor in his dark hideout and started weeping.

Though he wept he also felt a fresh bout of red hot anger, this time aimed at another person he now loathed just as much as Robotnik. He hated Sonic, it was all Sonics' fault! Which meant it was all Cinos' fault. So it meant it was all 'his' fault...

Cinos just buried his face in his hands and continued to weep.

The mighty Emperor Tim Blakes if possible felt even worse. They had been looking for Cinos for a good couple of weeks and so far they'd found nothing, no trace, it was as if Cinos had magically managed to drop off the planet all together. Tim was fairly sure if they couldn't track him or find him using iris recognition systems then he must be dead. He can't get food without using the chip in his hand, in fact once he appears on the grid his chip would show where he was unless of course he'd dug it out of his hand but then he would never be able to find food. All this meant that if Cinos so much as looked at light from the city he'd be detected.

They even had patrol-bots scouring the under city looking for him, so far they'd turned up nothing, he was certain the spiky rat was dead but Robotnik wouldn't have any of it unless Cinos' body was delivered to him, until they found Cinos dead then they were to treat this situation as if Cinos was still alive.

Robotnik had hit him hard for his failure, he'd taken a great deal of money out of his account. It was all done on computers so all he had to do was shift a decimal point in a computer and Tim's life savings, pilfered when he dips into the Empires budget was over night worth from 42.2 billion to just 40.2 billion, he was worth 2 billion less then he was the other day and there would be no record the account ever contained more than it actually had. He didn't know where the money went, only that it was missing.

This made Tim realise how much control Robotnik had over him. With a click of a button Robotnik could turn him from Emperor of the Mobian Empire right down to a penniless, homeless person. He'd be ruined and it would be about that time he'd put a bullet in his brain.

Tim had thought however that he had outsmarted Robotnik because he had 2 billion in cash in a safe in his private penthouse in the Imperial Tower. Only when he arrived he'd found the safe open and everything was gone, everything. Later that night he was horrified to realise where that money had gone, the news had reported that Cinos was on the run and was extremely dangerous and that 'he', Tim Blakes the Emperor had offered a 2 billion reward to any who captured him.

Tim had realised that if he upset Robotnik again and didn't catch Cinos chances are the scientist would destroy him financially. Tim drummed his fingers together nervously. Each day he noticed more and more of his hard stolen money was going missing from his account, with each day his account became more and more empty. Within a month he'd be broke! Within a couple of weeks he'd have to cut back on stuff like his heated swimming pool or his weekend trips to the vacation planet Flourana, things he didn't want to think about.

"Has he been found yet?!" Robotnik said as the monitor popped up out of his desk again.

"No Robotnik, he's still not showing up!" Tim said, he realised he looked like a troubled man and pleaded with Robotnik to stop siphoning off money from his own account to add to the reward money.

"If you want me to stop, find him!" Robotnik said flatly.

"But he hasn't shown up on any scanner, he must be dead. The computers haven't detected his presence at all!" Tim argued, knowing with every second that Robotnik wasn't appeased with good news his account became more and more empty.

"You have all the security forces scanning for Cinos biodata?" Robotnik asked darkly as if this was a stupid thing to do.

"Of course, how else do we find him?" Tim asked as he started to shake.

"Refine your search" Robotnik ordered "Check for how many sightings of 'unknowns' you have."

"What?" Tim asked quizzically. An unknown was someone who's iris scan or biodata didn't match anyone in their records, the only way to fool biodata or iris scan was to change your own eyes, a process which resulted in the patient going blind and even if Cinos did this he'd need a doctor and to get a doctor he'd need to go into the open where he'd be picked up immediately. Not only was the idea a bad one it was stupid.

"Do it!" Robotnik ordered. Tim did as he was asked, he brought up a list of iris scans over the past two days, there were billions so Tim narrowed the search to any whos scans didn't correlate to anyone. But this was impossible, Cinos was registered, everyone was registered, there were no pair of eyes on this planet or in the entire empire that weren't registered.

After a couple of seconds of shifting through the data he got a result. At first he saw nothing, but then his blood froze when there was one single listing of 'unknown Iris Scan person unknown' there was someone on the planet who did not exist in official records!

He brought up a picture of who this person was. A dull white looking creature with dark green eyes, a rebreather on, a pair of glasses in his hands and his quills tied back into a pony tail, but the thing that really made Tim excited was that he was a hedgehog, more so he was wearing a pair of red shoes, buckled with the white strap that Cinos wore the last time Tim had seen him!

"You have a hit?" Robotnik asked

"Yes, a hedgehog!" Tim said excitedly. After scanning the hedgehog his iris would've automatically been entered into a database and tracked. He tracked the hedgehog and found out he'd gone back down into the under levels. "And we've got him!"

Tim relaxed. In a couple of hours they'd have Cinos back in his clutches and soon everything will be back to normal.

"Don't congratulate yourself yet" Robotnik said "You could've snagged Sonic several times and each time he escapes your net before you can close it. Your track record so far doesn't inspire me with much confidence. If you fail again I'll appoint someone more suitable to this task and you will pay the price."

The screen went blank again. Tim was suddenly shaking again, his cushy life was under threat and by a stupid little rodent who wouldn't conform to the rest of society. When he gets his hands on this little rat he'll erase his memory himself and he'll have the machines beams turned on so brightly it'll burn the rats brain out and turn him into a vegetable so he couldn't cause him any financial trouble again.

When the security forces arrived and began combing the lower levels in Metaltropolises they were two days too late. Cinos had gone, he'd finally been given a birth on a garbage ship and was currently over a hundred miles above Mobius' surface.

Cinos peering out of the viewport of the shuttle he was on and he could see the ship he'd be spending the next few weeks on. It was one ugly looking thing, it looked like one of those tubes you'd store tennis balls inside. The stern housed the bridge and the engines, the bow had a ring with claws to help manoeuvre large garbage pods into it, it looked like a giant maw of a mythical sea creature and the mid sections of the ship didn't exist except for three arms that snaked away from the edge of the bow to join at the stern. Between these arms were three large spheres, garbage pods five times the size of Robotropolises itself, smaller craft guided these pods into the ships that were first fired into space and then collected to be fed into this larger ships maw to be swallowed by the bow and to be stored in the mid section until they were jettisoned into the sun. It was painted a rusting, brown colour or the colour of poo someone in the seat behind him crudely said. This massive, ten mile long craft was called Black Hole.

The ship didn't look aerodynamic, it was built in space, for space and there was no air in space so a space ship could be any shape or size you wanted because they were never designed to land on or enter the atmosphere of a planet. If they tried the ship would just collapse into itself because its skeleton wasn't strong enough to survive a planets strong gravity. At least that's what someone jabbering in the seat behind Cinos was saying but Cinos wasn't really listening nor was he that interested.

Ships like this weren't capable of hyperspace as they were never supposed to leave the system, their purpose was to transport things to the sun, dump them then turn back, go to other colonies in the local system to collect burnable garbage then return back to Mobius. Hyperdrive was reserved for passenger transport ships, interstellar cargo carriers and the imperial space navy, hyperdrive was expensive so why waste it on cargo and garbage ships travelling in system, a journey that usually takes the best part of a year.

Cinos looked out of the window and saw the blue marble of Mobius receding into the distance, getting smaller and smaller. His home, the place where he was born and the place he'd assume he'd die, but now he had the feeling he was destined to die in space, on his own and alone fighting a force he couldn't hope to defeat.

Perhaps there were some rebels out there that would take him in, allow him to help their fight against this monstrosity of an empire Robotnik had created. All he knew was that if Robotnik managed to get his hands on him again then he wouldn't have to worry about being Sonic or Cinos anymore, because he'd be neither, memory wiped clean again then what would Robotnik do with him? Program a new personality or decide he was too dangerous and turn him into a vegetable? Maybe he'd even go so far as to actually kill him this time.

To the side of Mobius, orbiting around like a second moon was the Death Egg. Cinos was staring at the one place where he knew Robotnik was, the puppet master for the empire was onboard that giant space station. Cinos wished he could reach out, grab it and crush it, to him it had turned into a symbol of Robotnik's tyranny and he wanted the overweight, planet sized, mass of blubber with the stupid moustache to pay for everything.

As the shuttle craft accelerated closer towards the MWMT vessel Black Hole, Cinos stared out of the porthole at the Death Egg, trying to see if he could spot Robotnik in one of those tiny windows and as if trying to communicate through telepathy Cinos thought a message, a simple three letter sentence that carried a lot of his rage and anger, and warned Robotnik never to let his guard drop for even a second because no matter how long it took, one day...

'...I'm coming back!'

To Be Continued...

Authors notes: Wow, a lots happened in this chapter hasn't it?

I'd really appreciate anyone who could give me more reviews of this story so I know how well it's being received.

I've made Cinos hate his original Sonic identity for many reasons, mostly to add an extra layer to the character, imagine finding out your mind is an invention and that your personality would probably eventually be overridden to make room for someone who –in your mind- thought he was better then you and more important, you'd be pretty upset too.

Hope you guys enjoyed the new chapter

Cheers