Anniversary Bingo Challenge Response: Fall (part 3 of 4)
Title: Fall
Author: zea_taylor
‘Verse: G1
Rating: T/PG-13
Warnings: Major destruction, Civilian deaths, Angst, Cybertronian profanity.
Part Three
Prompts: Never say never / Saviour
“Jazz, what are you doing?”
It was a good question. Optimus Prime wasn’t the first to ask it. Jazz had ignored the calls from Iacon Command, Red Alert and then Ironhide. He should probably have expected Optimus to be next, but, after all, it wasn’t like the shuttle trip was unauthorized. Jazz had put through the codes himself, and only two mechs had the power to countermand him. One of those was on the communicator now. The other… well, that was rather the point.
For a few klicks, as Jazz adjusted his grip on the shuttle’s controls, he considered ignoring his Prime too. That was easier said than done. Optimus’s deep voice was full of strength and compassion. Jazz had answered to it for vorns. He couldn’t change that now.
“I had to see for myself, Prime. You get that, right?”
Optimus vented a sigh. His voice was understanding, and deeply weary. He wouldn’t show those emotions with many of the mechs under his command. Jazz had been his lieutenant for long enough to be a friend as well as subordinate. Jazz and Prowl both.
“I ordered all the shuttles back to base.”
Jazz had an answer for that, at least. It wasn’t a good one, but Prime could hardly argue with the facts.
“It was already at base. You didn’t say anything about taking one back out.”
An eddy hit the shuttle, and Jazz took a few moments to even out the flight before focusing back on the radio. The flames below made this a dangerous airspace. The near loss of one of their rescue teams had been the deciding factor in calling off the search in the first place.
Optimus Prime was waiting, letting the silence stretch out until his officer felt compelled to fill it.
Jazz knew what was happening. Prowl had worked this trick on him more often than he could count. It had always worked then too.
“Slag it, Optimus! You’ve had me in Iacon all orn. I needed to be here. I needed to see this.” That might be a valid argument if he could bring himself to look. His visor stayed fixed on his controls, fighting the billowing smoke and the columns of turbulent air they concealed. Fallen Praxus lay somewhere in the bottom of the pit, kilometres beneath him. From here, even the ruins were hidden. Only the broken struts and gouges, mute testimony that the city platform had stuck the sides of the pit, were visible: those and the scattered evidence of devastation all around. “I needed to look for myself.”
“I’ve looked and seen, Jazz.” Prime’s voice was heavy. “There was no comfort to be found.”
“Who said I’m looking for comfort?”
Jazz wished he could take back the words as soon as they escaped his vocalisor. They rang with guilt and self-reproach, and the belief that he did not deserve comfort of any kind, even if it were offered.
Optimus Prime’s vents hiccupped and for first time Jazz could remember, he heard a low keen in his friend’s voice. The mech controlled himself, but it took long enough for Jazz to recognise the struggle it took.
“Red Alert told me what happened in the Rec Room.”
“Red should learn to mind his own business.” Jazz’s answer was curt, but lacked serious rancour. Optimus vented a sigh.
“Your actions dictated the timing of Prowl’s leave of absence, not its necessity. Another few orns, and I believe he would have been in Ratchet’s care.”
“Another few orns, Optimus, and Prowl wouldn’t have been in Praxus.”
Again, Optimus had to yield, Jazz’s point unarguable. The Prime fell silent, although whether because he’d run out of things to say or because he was once again waiting for Jazz to take the lead, the Ops mech couldn’t be sure. If the latter, he was out of luck. Jazz wouldn’t be caught again.
He adjusted his visor, then straightened in the pilot’s seat and resolutely lifted his optics to the viewport. He couldn’t stop his own keen spilling into his vocalisor and out into the quiet of the cabin. He’d been in smelting factories that looked less like the forsaken Pit.
“There’s a Praxian saying… was a saying...”
Slag it. Maybe he really was as predictable as Prowl always said. At least he knew Optimus was still listening. The big mech hummed an encouraging note as Jazz went on.
“’Never say never’. It made me laugh when Prowl told me. I’d been saying that since I was a youngling, and I didn’t think you could get a phrase more Polyhexian. But I was making it a challenge - throwing it as an arrogant dare in Unicron’s face. To Prowl it was just a statement of truth: no matter how small the probability, it’s never zero, not until Primus wakes and we all return to the Matrix and there’s never a never again.”
“Jazz…” Prime’s voice was confused and uneasy, not sure where his lieutenant was going with this. “We need to regroup and consolidate. I need you here. I want you to bring the shuttle back to base.”
“I will.” As Prime lost his certainty, Jazz seemed to find his own. His spark ached. His future seemed emptier and murkier than he could ever remember, but he was sure what he had to do. “When I’m ready.”
There was a whir of vents from Optimus Prime as the mech marshalled his arguments, but Jazz wasn’t done yet.
“Regroup? Yeah. We’ll go on, and we’ll make the Decepticons know it. It won’t be just us either. We’re gonna have mechs knocking at our door any breem, wanting to help. I know that.” A humourless laugh escaped him in a snort. “It’s not like staying neutral is an option any more; Megatron made that pretty slagging clear.” Looking out over the chasm, Jazz shook his helm, determined. “But this comes first. I need to find him, or do everything I can to say I tried. And don’t you dare tell me I ‘never’ will. The mech deserves a decent burial, Prime. He earned that much from us. We owe it to him.”
He signed off before Prime could make his request an order, and powered down the radio receiver so he could honestly say he hadn’t heard any call.
Cycling his vents, trying to calm himself, Jazz adjusted the shuttle’s trim. Taking a firm grip of the controls, he cancelled the programme that had been helping him hold station and immediately felt the little craft buck and fight him. His visored optics on his heads-up display, he slid the shuttle sideways and forward a little, matching its satellite positioning readout to the location Teletraan had derived from Prowl’s last communication.
Where once the city platform had supported towers and streets, bridges and gardens, now the shuttle hung in a turbulent void.
Jazz felt the shudders through his seat, rising until they settled behind his chestplates. He shook off the feeling. He was here for a reason. He’d told Prowl to run, and the tactical officer had to have known the importance of that command. Prowl wouldn’t have just stood still. The question was, where had he gone, and how could Jazz find him?
He switched the hover-mode back in, keeping a tight hold of the stick with one servo as the shuttle bucked and fought despite the stabilisation. With his other, he reached out for the navigation computer, dialling up a view of the city as it was, and overlaying it with a coordinate grid as he tried to get his bearings.
“The Crystal Gardens?” Jazz asked aloud. He thought back, summoning the data file of that last conversation, filtering his friend’s voice and enhancing the background. Most of it was noise, and it took him almost a breem to work through it to identify the anomalies. The faint hint of a child’s laughter dimmed his optics. The slightest of crystalline chimes brought grim satisfaction.
Looking down again at the nav display, Jazz nodded. He had his bearings now. Prowl wouldn’t have needed to take them. He’d talked about the Gardens in terms so familiar that Jazz half felt he’d seen them himself.
A pang of regret flooded his spark. He never had. Now he never would.
It took an effort to shake off the thought. He focussed on the facts, bringing his Ops-trained strategic algorithms to the fore. Prowl was in the Gardens. So what would the tactician have done next?
The main gate of the Crystal Gardens led back into the heart of the city. A second, smaller, exited onto the main Iacon road, just short of the bridge. That was a possibility.
Jazz zoomed in on the archival imaging, frowning as the expanded view of the Gardens came up. The outcrops were a little blurred, the imaging satellite high enough that even Cybertron’s thin atmosphere presented problems. Even so, it was obvious that the route to that gate was far from simple. Prowl had been on the other side of the cultivated area, separated from the gate by several different outcrops and clusters of crystal growth, some rivalling a low tower in size. He’d have had to weave, clamber and climb to get out, either that or follow the labyrinthine path at little more than a crawl.
It felt wrong. Prowl might have assigned the scenario a probability and reasoned his way out of adopting it, before filing it for later review; Jazz dismissed it on instinct alone.
The shuttle bucked and it was almost a relief to take the time to wrestle it back under control. His frustration was building. This careful analysis was more Prowl’s province than his own. It wasn’t that Jazz couldn’t do it. Just that he seldom had time - or patience - to go over the options in such detail.
It might almost be ironic, if it wasn’t so tragic: In the midst of the Decepticon assault, Prowl had been forced to impulsive, unplanned action. And now Jazz was dissecting it with painful care, growing steadily more downcast as he rejected each of his friend’s possible escape routes.
He turned back to the monitor with reluctance. Prowl wouldn’t have gone for the side-gate. So what was the alternative? Sitting still and waiting for the end? Never in a million vorns. Not the mech Jazz knew.
He panned out on the imaging, scrolling from side to side more in desperation than any real expectation. He could easily have missed it, but a single bright pixel in the image caught his optics - a highlight from something where nothing should be.
Most of the cities on Cybertron were built on platforms, resting on the un-navigable spider-web of struts and conduits below. Half the reason Praxus and Iacon thrived in the first place was because they were so hard to assault. Reaching the city platform from the surrounding wastes meant taking a shuttle, or a slow crossing on one of the bridges - unless you had a Seeker’s wings.
So why, well off the side of the platform, halfway between the Iacon Bridge and the smaller route to Polyhex, was a dull gleam of metal reflecting the light of Praxian towers?
He zoomed in again, squinting and tilting his helm to adjust for the satellite perspective. A conduit? It spanned the gap between a relatively stable scaffold on the wasteland side and the city platform. Vanishing below the city platform, it was just another of the unremarkable and overlooked features that kept a city the size of Praxus running.
Prowl had spent half his adult life as a Praxian enforcer, and the other half as a battle tactician. He probably had the blueprints for half of Praxus in his processor. He could have known.
He had to have known.
The mech hadn’t made it safe to the other side. If he had, Jazz wouldn’t be here. But that’s where he must have fallen. That’s where Jazz had to look, and this far from the heart of Praxus and the still-burning inferno, that’s where he had a chance of finding his friend.
There was even a chance Prowl’s frame would be recognisable. The tactician’s armour would have buffered him against an impact that would shatter the civilians around him. It wouldn’t have been enough - not to survive a fall several metro-formers in height - but maybe it would be enough to let Jazz bring Prowl home.
“Never say never.”
Jazz murmured the words aloud, cutting the hover and edging towards the side of the shaft. He’d have to follow the wall down, if he was going to keep his bearings. It would be a tricky balancing act. The flame-driven thermals were wild, unpredictable. They could dash him against an unseen crossbar or scaffold before he knew what had happened. The rescue teams that had descended the Pit in their fruitless search hadn’t dared risk it, noting the empty frames littering the lower layers, kilometres below, but not attempting to recover them. Turbulence, and the threat of unstable debris, would place the rescuers in more danger than even Prime could justify.
Jazz didn’t doubt his own justification.
The shuttle was level with the pitted, irregular surface of the surrounding wasteland. Jazz turned his craft so the cabin faced the pit wall, the powerful spotlights in the shuttle’s nose picking out the broken brackets where the conduit had once landed. Energon had spilled from it, the blackened surfaces all around telling of flash-burning before the supply cut-off. It was a charred, lifeless place, but it was the reference point he needed.
Jazz took a deep vent and started the decent, the spotlights passing over alien shapes as he descended half a Supreme’s height… a full span…
His servos froze on the controls. The vision passed through the pool of light from the shuttle and out of it before he had time to react.
Vents choking, Jazz scrambled for the shuttle’s thrusters and checked the descent. He was almost afraid to react, to believe what he’d seen.
Slowly, so slowly, he eased power back into the thrusters and the shuttle rose. There’d been a warped and twisted surface, jutting out from the shaft wall - part of a larger platform torn in half by the force of the falling city. It had caught his spotlight beams for no more than a few nanoclicks, but there’d been… something… on it.
The klicks stretched out, his systems heating as his vents remained still and strained. Had he imagined it? Surely he hadn’t overshot by this much…
There!
The ruined platform came into view. Its edge was ragged and hanging out over nothing. If any of the surrounding walkways connected to it, Jazz couldn’t see them. Perhaps there had once been a settlement down here, before megavorns of development had buried it deep. Jazz didn’t know and didn’t care. What mattered was that he was barely more than a tower’s height below the surface. And Prowl had armour and shock buffers as strong as Wheeljack could make them. Was it possible…? Or was he chasing a shadow of his own imagining?
His visor focussed, switching to infrared and back again, cycling through the entire electromagnetic spectrum and sorting the data, his search urgent and desperate.
There!
He’d seen it in passing and now he found it again. A crumpled shape, coated in a layer of dust and crystal shards. It took several klicks for Jazz even to be sure it was a mech, let alone one who looked halfway intact. He edged the shuttle closer, fighting the eddies, and winced as he washed the still form with the jet of exhaust from his thrusters.
The crystal dust billowed, glittering in the disturbed air. Beneath, Jazz glimpsed black and white plating, scuffed almost beyond recognition and huddled protectively around something small and grey.
It could have been anyone. Jazz knew, with a Primus-born certainty, that it wasn’t.
Cool air flooded Jazz’s system as his vents reset. He scrabbled blindly for the radio receiver. His servo found it without his optics ever leaving the viewport. The comms unit seemed to take forever to power up, long enough that Jazz was already close to setting down before he heard the hiss of the still-open channel to Iacon.
“Ratchet!” He yelled the name, not bothering with call signs or courtesies.
“He’s already on his way to you. Him and Optimus Prime,” Red Alert reported crisply, his answer instantaneous, as if he’d been poised and waiting for the call. “What’s wrong?”
Jazz laughed, too exhausted and exhilarated and terrified to wonder if the reaction was even halfway appropriate. The shuttle landed with a bump, and Jazz was out of the pilot’s seat within microklicks.
“Nothing,” he called back over his shoulder as he headed for the hatch. “Everything and nothing, and… please, Primus… after today and this whole slagging nightmare… something might just work out right.”
Author: zea_taylor
‘Verse: G1
Rating: T/PG-13
Warnings: Major destruction, Civilian deaths, Angst, Cybertronian profanity.
Part Three
Prompts: Never say never / Saviour
“Jazz, what are you doing?”
It was a good question. Optimus Prime wasn’t the first to ask it. Jazz had ignored the calls from Iacon Command, Red Alert and then Ironhide. He should probably have expected Optimus to be next, but, after all, it wasn’t like the shuttle trip was unauthorized. Jazz had put through the codes himself, and only two mechs had the power to countermand him. One of those was on the communicator now. The other… well, that was rather the point.
For a few klicks, as Jazz adjusted his grip on the shuttle’s controls, he considered ignoring his Prime too. That was easier said than done. Optimus’s deep voice was full of strength and compassion. Jazz had answered to it for vorns. He couldn’t change that now.
“I had to see for myself, Prime. You get that, right?”
Optimus vented a sigh. His voice was understanding, and deeply weary. He wouldn’t show those emotions with many of the mechs under his command. Jazz had been his lieutenant for long enough to be a friend as well as subordinate. Jazz and Prowl both.
“I ordered all the shuttles back to base.”
Jazz had an answer for that, at least. It wasn’t a good one, but Prime could hardly argue with the facts.
“It was already at base. You didn’t say anything about taking one back out.”
An eddy hit the shuttle, and Jazz took a few moments to even out the flight before focusing back on the radio. The flames below made this a dangerous airspace. The near loss of one of their rescue teams had been the deciding factor in calling off the search in the first place.
Optimus Prime was waiting, letting the silence stretch out until his officer felt compelled to fill it.
Jazz knew what was happening. Prowl had worked this trick on him more often than he could count. It had always worked then too.
“Slag it, Optimus! You’ve had me in Iacon all orn. I needed to be here. I needed to see this.” That might be a valid argument if he could bring himself to look. His visor stayed fixed on his controls, fighting the billowing smoke and the columns of turbulent air they concealed. Fallen Praxus lay somewhere in the bottom of the pit, kilometres beneath him. From here, even the ruins were hidden. Only the broken struts and gouges, mute testimony that the city platform had stuck the sides of the pit, were visible: those and the scattered evidence of devastation all around. “I needed to look for myself.”
“I’ve looked and seen, Jazz.” Prime’s voice was heavy. “There was no comfort to be found.”
“Who said I’m looking for comfort?”
Jazz wished he could take back the words as soon as they escaped his vocalisor. They rang with guilt and self-reproach, and the belief that he did not deserve comfort of any kind, even if it were offered.
Optimus Prime’s vents hiccupped and for first time Jazz could remember, he heard a low keen in his friend’s voice. The mech controlled himself, but it took long enough for Jazz to recognise the struggle it took.
“Red Alert told me what happened in the Rec Room.”
“Red should learn to mind his own business.” Jazz’s answer was curt, but lacked serious rancour. Optimus vented a sigh.
“Your actions dictated the timing of Prowl’s leave of absence, not its necessity. Another few orns, and I believe he would have been in Ratchet’s care.”
“Another few orns, Optimus, and Prowl wouldn’t have been in Praxus.”
Again, Optimus had to yield, Jazz’s point unarguable. The Prime fell silent, although whether because he’d run out of things to say or because he was once again waiting for Jazz to take the lead, the Ops mech couldn’t be sure. If the latter, he was out of luck. Jazz wouldn’t be caught again.
He adjusted his visor, then straightened in the pilot’s seat and resolutely lifted his optics to the viewport. He couldn’t stop his own keen spilling into his vocalisor and out into the quiet of the cabin. He’d been in smelting factories that looked less like the forsaken Pit.
“There’s a Praxian saying… was a saying...”
Slag it. Maybe he really was as predictable as Prowl always said. At least he knew Optimus was still listening. The big mech hummed an encouraging note as Jazz went on.
“’Never say never’. It made me laugh when Prowl told me. I’d been saying that since I was a youngling, and I didn’t think you could get a phrase more Polyhexian. But I was making it a challenge - throwing it as an arrogant dare in Unicron’s face. To Prowl it was just a statement of truth: no matter how small the probability, it’s never zero, not until Primus wakes and we all return to the Matrix and there’s never a never again.”
“Jazz…” Prime’s voice was confused and uneasy, not sure where his lieutenant was going with this. “We need to regroup and consolidate. I need you here. I want you to bring the shuttle back to base.”
“I will.” As Prime lost his certainty, Jazz seemed to find his own. His spark ached. His future seemed emptier and murkier than he could ever remember, but he was sure what he had to do. “When I’m ready.”
There was a whir of vents from Optimus Prime as the mech marshalled his arguments, but Jazz wasn’t done yet.
“Regroup? Yeah. We’ll go on, and we’ll make the Decepticons know it. It won’t be just us either. We’re gonna have mechs knocking at our door any breem, wanting to help. I know that.” A humourless laugh escaped him in a snort. “It’s not like staying neutral is an option any more; Megatron made that pretty slagging clear.” Looking out over the chasm, Jazz shook his helm, determined. “But this comes first. I need to find him, or do everything I can to say I tried. And don’t you dare tell me I ‘never’ will. The mech deserves a decent burial, Prime. He earned that much from us. We owe it to him.”
He signed off before Prime could make his request an order, and powered down the radio receiver so he could honestly say he hadn’t heard any call.
Cycling his vents, trying to calm himself, Jazz adjusted the shuttle’s trim. Taking a firm grip of the controls, he cancelled the programme that had been helping him hold station and immediately felt the little craft buck and fight him. His visored optics on his heads-up display, he slid the shuttle sideways and forward a little, matching its satellite positioning readout to the location Teletraan had derived from Prowl’s last communication.
Where once the city platform had supported towers and streets, bridges and gardens, now the shuttle hung in a turbulent void.
Jazz felt the shudders through his seat, rising until they settled behind his chestplates. He shook off the feeling. He was here for a reason. He’d told Prowl to run, and the tactical officer had to have known the importance of that command. Prowl wouldn’t have just stood still. The question was, where had he gone, and how could Jazz find him?
He switched the hover-mode back in, keeping a tight hold of the stick with one servo as the shuttle bucked and fought despite the stabilisation. With his other, he reached out for the navigation computer, dialling up a view of the city as it was, and overlaying it with a coordinate grid as he tried to get his bearings.
“The Crystal Gardens?” Jazz asked aloud. He thought back, summoning the data file of that last conversation, filtering his friend’s voice and enhancing the background. Most of it was noise, and it took him almost a breem to work through it to identify the anomalies. The faint hint of a child’s laughter dimmed his optics. The slightest of crystalline chimes brought grim satisfaction.
Looking down again at the nav display, Jazz nodded. He had his bearings now. Prowl wouldn’t have needed to take them. He’d talked about the Gardens in terms so familiar that Jazz half felt he’d seen them himself.
A pang of regret flooded his spark. He never had. Now he never would.
It took an effort to shake off the thought. He focussed on the facts, bringing his Ops-trained strategic algorithms to the fore. Prowl was in the Gardens. So what would the tactician have done next?
The main gate of the Crystal Gardens led back into the heart of the city. A second, smaller, exited onto the main Iacon road, just short of the bridge. That was a possibility.
Jazz zoomed in on the archival imaging, frowning as the expanded view of the Gardens came up. The outcrops were a little blurred, the imaging satellite high enough that even Cybertron’s thin atmosphere presented problems. Even so, it was obvious that the route to that gate was far from simple. Prowl had been on the other side of the cultivated area, separated from the gate by several different outcrops and clusters of crystal growth, some rivalling a low tower in size. He’d have had to weave, clamber and climb to get out, either that or follow the labyrinthine path at little more than a crawl.
It felt wrong. Prowl might have assigned the scenario a probability and reasoned his way out of adopting it, before filing it for later review; Jazz dismissed it on instinct alone.
The shuttle bucked and it was almost a relief to take the time to wrestle it back under control. His frustration was building. This careful analysis was more Prowl’s province than his own. It wasn’t that Jazz couldn’t do it. Just that he seldom had time - or patience - to go over the options in such detail.
It might almost be ironic, if it wasn’t so tragic: In the midst of the Decepticon assault, Prowl had been forced to impulsive, unplanned action. And now Jazz was dissecting it with painful care, growing steadily more downcast as he rejected each of his friend’s possible escape routes.
He turned back to the monitor with reluctance. Prowl wouldn’t have gone for the side-gate. So what was the alternative? Sitting still and waiting for the end? Never in a million vorns. Not the mech Jazz knew.
He panned out on the imaging, scrolling from side to side more in desperation than any real expectation. He could easily have missed it, but a single bright pixel in the image caught his optics - a highlight from something where nothing should be.
Most of the cities on Cybertron were built on platforms, resting on the un-navigable spider-web of struts and conduits below. Half the reason Praxus and Iacon thrived in the first place was because they were so hard to assault. Reaching the city platform from the surrounding wastes meant taking a shuttle, or a slow crossing on one of the bridges - unless you had a Seeker’s wings.
So why, well off the side of the platform, halfway between the Iacon Bridge and the smaller route to Polyhex, was a dull gleam of metal reflecting the light of Praxian towers?
He zoomed in again, squinting and tilting his helm to adjust for the satellite perspective. A conduit? It spanned the gap between a relatively stable scaffold on the wasteland side and the city platform. Vanishing below the city platform, it was just another of the unremarkable and overlooked features that kept a city the size of Praxus running.
Prowl had spent half his adult life as a Praxian enforcer, and the other half as a battle tactician. He probably had the blueprints for half of Praxus in his processor. He could have known.
He had to have known.
The mech hadn’t made it safe to the other side. If he had, Jazz wouldn’t be here. But that’s where he must have fallen. That’s where Jazz had to look, and this far from the heart of Praxus and the still-burning inferno, that’s where he had a chance of finding his friend.
There was even a chance Prowl’s frame would be recognisable. The tactician’s armour would have buffered him against an impact that would shatter the civilians around him. It wouldn’t have been enough - not to survive a fall several metro-formers in height - but maybe it would be enough to let Jazz bring Prowl home.
“Never say never.”
Jazz murmured the words aloud, cutting the hover and edging towards the side of the shaft. He’d have to follow the wall down, if he was going to keep his bearings. It would be a tricky balancing act. The flame-driven thermals were wild, unpredictable. They could dash him against an unseen crossbar or scaffold before he knew what had happened. The rescue teams that had descended the Pit in their fruitless search hadn’t dared risk it, noting the empty frames littering the lower layers, kilometres below, but not attempting to recover them. Turbulence, and the threat of unstable debris, would place the rescuers in more danger than even Prime could justify.
Jazz didn’t doubt his own justification.
The shuttle was level with the pitted, irregular surface of the surrounding wasteland. Jazz turned his craft so the cabin faced the pit wall, the powerful spotlights in the shuttle’s nose picking out the broken brackets where the conduit had once landed. Energon had spilled from it, the blackened surfaces all around telling of flash-burning before the supply cut-off. It was a charred, lifeless place, but it was the reference point he needed.
Jazz took a deep vent and started the decent, the spotlights passing over alien shapes as he descended half a Supreme’s height… a full span…
His servos froze on the controls. The vision passed through the pool of light from the shuttle and out of it before he had time to react.
Vents choking, Jazz scrambled for the shuttle’s thrusters and checked the descent. He was almost afraid to react, to believe what he’d seen.
Slowly, so slowly, he eased power back into the thrusters and the shuttle rose. There’d been a warped and twisted surface, jutting out from the shaft wall - part of a larger platform torn in half by the force of the falling city. It had caught his spotlight beams for no more than a few nanoclicks, but there’d been… something… on it.
The klicks stretched out, his systems heating as his vents remained still and strained. Had he imagined it? Surely he hadn’t overshot by this much…
There!
The ruined platform came into view. Its edge was ragged and hanging out over nothing. If any of the surrounding walkways connected to it, Jazz couldn’t see them. Perhaps there had once been a settlement down here, before megavorns of development had buried it deep. Jazz didn’t know and didn’t care. What mattered was that he was barely more than a tower’s height below the surface. And Prowl had armour and shock buffers as strong as Wheeljack could make them. Was it possible…? Or was he chasing a shadow of his own imagining?
His visor focussed, switching to infrared and back again, cycling through the entire electromagnetic spectrum and sorting the data, his search urgent and desperate.
There!
He’d seen it in passing and now he found it again. A crumpled shape, coated in a layer of dust and crystal shards. It took several klicks for Jazz even to be sure it was a mech, let alone one who looked halfway intact. He edged the shuttle closer, fighting the eddies, and winced as he washed the still form with the jet of exhaust from his thrusters.
The crystal dust billowed, glittering in the disturbed air. Beneath, Jazz glimpsed black and white plating, scuffed almost beyond recognition and huddled protectively around something small and grey.
It could have been anyone. Jazz knew, with a Primus-born certainty, that it wasn’t.
Cool air flooded Jazz’s system as his vents reset. He scrabbled blindly for the radio receiver. His servo found it without his optics ever leaving the viewport. The comms unit seemed to take forever to power up, long enough that Jazz was already close to setting down before he heard the hiss of the still-open channel to Iacon.
“Ratchet!” He yelled the name, not bothering with call signs or courtesies.
“He’s already on his way to you. Him and Optimus Prime,” Red Alert reported crisply, his answer instantaneous, as if he’d been poised and waiting for the call. “What’s wrong?”
Jazz laughed, too exhausted and exhilarated and terrified to wonder if the reaction was even halfway appropriate. The shuttle landed with a bump, and Jazz was out of the pilot’s seat within microklicks.
“Nothing,” he called back over his shoulder as he headed for the hatch. “Everything and nothing, and… please, Primus… after today and this whole slagging nightmare… something might just work out right.”