Fic
Title: Borealis 73/91: How Can I Keep From Singing - Part III
Author: tainry
Disclaimer: Not mine, no money.
Rating: R
Characters/Pairing(s): Ensemble
Warnings: Robot snuggles, the Sec Def has a potty mouth.
Summary: Wherein Borealis teaches the new jets a dance; Raze returns; robots fight over Earth; Optimus spends some time on the floor; and Elita brings a goodly portion of her crew out for a visit.
Notes: Suggested listening for the fight: Invictus from the Call of Duty soundtrack by Sean Murray. Also, next chapter won't be until December at the earliest, as I'll be writing more of this for NaNoWriMo again this year. XD
~7200 words.
Part I
Part II
How Can I Keep From Singing - Part III
2039 - May
Space is big. Even confining their search to the limits of Jupiter’s orbit gave a rough estimate of 1.99 x 1036 cubic kilometers.
199,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 km3
Perceptor assured Borealis that, during the Cybertronian Empire’s heyday, this would have been a normal in-system traffic control task. Now? Even with the new Light Brigade and all the available jets and a large proportion of Earth’s amateur and professional astronomers keeping eyes on the sky they stood very little chance of finding the two Decepticon warships prior to an attack.
Borealis didn’t like it. Her armor felt tight, the temperature of the energon in her lines was off, and something was hinky with the transmission speed of her efferent wires, making her jittery. Within her cockpit, Orris patted her console.
“I don’t like it either,” he said. “But if you do one more aileron roll while I’m trying to get astrogation captures…”
“Ack, sorry.” Fumbling for calm in lieu of a deep breath, she settled into a recent memory with half her attention, keeping the rest on flying and scanning.
…
2038 - June
Borealis sphynxed herself down and wrapped her arms tight around Prime. He was closer to forty feet tall than thirty these days, despite the latest skein of protomass he'd donated. His protoform was no longer a cool steel blue, but the warm variegated bronze of the Cube. He smelled of ozone and pain and, just now, of summer rain and desert.
"They say they're almost done," she told him. She'd spent whatever time she could spare watching and conversing with Azimuth, Blueshift and Polaris in the big tank; their bodies coiled and intertwined, a triskel of wings and fuselage and really big feet. Once they were out, there would be three more deep-Seekers to ferry the enormous pallets of spacebridge components out to Cybertron. The smaller jets took smaller packets up to geostationary where they were combined into the big bundles the deltas would haul. Despite the near-constant arguments between Perceptor and Scrapper, the bridge's construction was taking far less time than originally estimated now that the Constructicons were helping.
''They're beautiful," Optimus said, cadging a glimpse of them from Borealis' overhead view.
"Well, you know, deltas," Borealis said, a giggle in her subharmonics. “Oop! Gotta go. I’m giving the Pbots a ride from Sri Lanka to Columbia. They’re escorting a new crop of engineers for Gaviotas.”
“Safe journey.” He gave as much of her as he could encompass a squeeze and she squeezed back just hard enough to make his armor creak like a sub going for a depth record.
As she left she passed the inner chamber of the med-Iab, with a new batch of protoforms. Spark-kids of Bluestreak's, mostly. She thought it was interesting that it was mostly the less aggressive of the Autobots who had taken so enthusiastically to the merge process. Um. Not that Perceptor was exactly passive, but his warlike tendencies only emerged when he was stressed and his work interrupted. And Prime. Well, Prime did what he had to.
Later. Growth medium rippled and sloshed as Azimuth poked his head above the surface. He shook it to get the heavy fluid out from where it was dripping and tickling between armor and facial plates, spattering an emerging Polaris in the process.
“Hey! Watch it.” Polaris hefted a glob and threw it at Azimuth. Blueshift decided to stay submerged until his brothers quit horsing around.
“If Ratchet catches you slopping that stuff everywhere,” Borealis said as she entered. She grinned, leaning over the side of the tank to give Azimuth a hand up over the side. Azimuth tried to yank her in, but she was well-braced and used the recoil to pull him out anyway. He clattered to the floor, dripping and awkward as a hatchling, gleaming silver and midnight blue. Polaris was white like Skyfire, and Blueshift’s armor graded from celestite-pale to lapis dark. Good grief, Borealis thought. We’re like a dance troupe with matching leotards. Very pretty, though. Jazz would redouble his efforts to get the deltas to perform in some charity air show now.
“Got all your ducks in a row?” Wheeljack asked, laughing as he came in with Beachcomber, Miles and Perceptor.
“Whoa,” said Miles, dodging a ropy strand of fluid dripping from Polaris’ wings. “Wet jets!”
“We are not ducks,” Azimuth said firmly. His suddenly assumed dignity did not prevent him from folding down for hugs from his progenitors, however.
“Albatrosses, then,” Beachcomber said, his voice low and thrumming with laughter and delight. These enormous sparks had somehow grown from the joining of threads from his and Perceptor’s. Weird physics. It was kind of ridiculous. Fantastic!
“Better at landing, though,” Azimuth said, completely confident.
“Um,” said Borealis.
“Better your landings than mine,” Perceptor said, patting her foot.
“You’d think Grapple would have fixed that angle when you guys were building the base,” Azimuth agreed thoughtfully. “Unless he left it that way on purpose to tease you, Perceptor?”
Perceptor blinked. “He told me he liked the canted angle. It adds visual interest and protects the entrance from the prevailing winds…”
Wheeljack lost his battle to keep a straight face and cackled as he keyed in the big tank’s self-cleaning sequence. As far as he knew, no one was going to be using it for a while. The chamber echoed with the deep hum and hiss as the tank lid lowered and sealed.
“It does add visual interest,” Borealis said in rather a higher voice than usual. “Come on, guys, let’s get some sun on our wings.” She shooed the young jets into the corridor and outside, to dry off and expand in the desert heat.
The sky was liquid and soft in the wake of the afternoon storm, though the sunlight struck their armor like the hissing radiation it was; actinic and fierce on optics that had spent two years underground. Borealis took two hands, coaxed the third to clasp her wingtip, guiding them to the road. Their runway, though they all had the new anti-gravitics. Silverbolt was a little less than four months from returning, and Skyfire had just begun his run out. It was up to Borealis to show them the gulfs and streams of the star-ways.
She transformed and taxied northeast along the road, giving them lots of room to line up behind. Scanning, she listened keenly to their engines as they warmed up. A thrilling, bone-shaking roar, rising in volume and pitch. Autobots and humans gathered at the hangar door to watch.
“Where are we going?” asked Polaris, bouncing on his landing gear.
“Planet 10! Uh, I mean the Sun-Earth L1. Gonna show you a Lissajous orbit first. Uses way less energy.” Plus she liked the name.
Glen watched them take off with what Maggie felt was a rather soppy grin on his face. “That’ll be me in a few decades,” he murmured to her.
“Oh, so the favorite forging of the week is delta, hm?” Maggie poked him and went back inside as the four starships were lost in the haze far above. Once at her station she pinged Red a request and got in reply a little window on one screen tracking their flight.
“Hey, it’s been my favorite for at least two weeks.” Glen soon had a similar window up on one of his screens.
Five hundred miles and climbing. Gleaming blue-white below, black glittering with stars above. Heat from friction with air molecules was replaced by radiation from the sun. The three new deltas had the math, but it wasn’t the same as feeling the maneuvers in your frame, in your engines. Knowing how much energy you were using wasn’t the same as feeling it drain from your lines.
Rather than wait for a fine-tuned launch window, they were going to make a handful of loops around the Earth in order to get themselves lined up on the trajectory they wanted. One side of each loop passed along LEO, and the other side swung far out, almost to the distance of the Moon’s orbit.
VROOM! VRRROOOOOOM! shouted Blueshift as they accelerated around in the last phasing loop and shot toward the Moon. Borealis almost laughed herself off-course. The Moon’s gravity gave them a slingshot boost for the 1.5 million kilometer trip out to the Lagrangian point between Sun and Earth. A gravitational balance point - unstable, but the Lissajous orbit around it could be maintained without using any extra fuel. NASA’s Advanced Composition Explorer was still there in a Lissajous orbit as well, but Borealis showed them how to insert on the flight path so as to avoid the 1300 pound satellite. She’d brought a couple of astronauts up here in 2024 to refuel and upgrade the thing; she didn’t want anyone bashing into it.
They basked in sunlight never shadowed by Earth or Moon, only dimmed at times by the transits of Venus and Mercury. The newly reforged jets stretched and popped their armor, feeling it harden in the bombardment outside the protection of Earth’s magnetic field.
Ready to get closer? Borealis asked. With a snap and crackle of maneuvering thrusters, she fell out of the stable orbit, following the light tug of the gravity well of the Sun.
As they approached the orbit of Mercury, Borealis transformed and adjusted her optics. There was a particular band of high-energy UV that gave a beautiful, highly-detailed image of the chromosphere. She could - and often did - watch for hours, mesmerized by the bubbling granules and bright faculae; the dark sunspots and their plages; the shifting, spiky spicules caused by immense sound waves propagated across the Sun’s surface - the Sun’s very roar - and the fibrous, gleaming plasma in stunning coronal loops. The face of the Sun was always changing.
Borealis almost seemed to have forgotten her charges until hands touched her arms, her wings, her chest. Azimuth wrapped an arm around her waist and kissed her cheek spar, snuggling close but deliberately not obscuring her view. It was their natal star as well.
…
They spiraled down to Earth dizzy and hot and overcharged from their sunward journey, the new jets’ armor second-stage hardened, landing giggling on the mesa top.
“No, no, you don’t need a file,” Borealis said, waving off Blueshift’s offered cable. “Just do this!” She demonstrated, shifting her weight back and forth, pushing hips out with each shift, and holding her hands up near her temples, waving her fingers in time to the music she broadcast. (After giving Red Alert ample warning of what she was up to.)
The other three lined up and joined her, attaining unison almost immediately, despite a good deal of jostling of wings. Before the second verse, Breakaway and Fireflight had joined them and something small and lively whizzed around their heads, getting video from all angles. One of Prime’s battle gnats. The online clip Teletraan put up eventually received over a million hits in less than a week.
“What the heck?” Sam laughed as he and Mikaela drove up to the embassy in Bee.
“Caramelldansen,” Bee explained, after digging around in some older internet files. It was old enough a meme now to be almost vintage. “Also called the uma uma dance.”
It’s not even a dance, Ironhide grumbled from the Lennox farm. They just do the same thing, over and over. For two hours!
Aw, Ironhide, Borealis said. We wanted to see how long it would take before someone came up and started shooting at us!
Very well. Sunstreaker…!
“AWK!” yelled the jets, and scattered.
…
2039 - May
“Got a transit,” Orris said. Borealis snapped her attention back wholly onto the sector he indicated. A dark blip against the stars, tiny at this distance and well “north” of the ecliptic plane. She wasn’t certain at first that it wasn’t just another chunk of random space rock caught by the system’s collective gravity. Orris enhanced his optical feed, and the outline gave it away. The Torment. The chromatophores of the hull had been shifted to matte black, and the en-sig was dampened. They would never have found them unless the ship had happened to pass between them and one particular background star at precisely the right moment.
“Damn you’re good.” All right, she told herself. Fly casual. The protocol was passive scans only, do not engage, tight-beam coordinates and sensor data to Prowl, and get your aft back to Earth. It wouldn’t do to flip over and hare off right away, though. The Cons would know they’d been spotted. Borealis dropped one of Wheeljack’s Little Brown Bird drones and continued on with her sweep. The space between her wings itched, waiting for plasma fire.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
“This one?” Prime asked. “Are you certain?”
Lennox smiled and patted the side of the brand new M1A4 Abrams. “When you told me who you were bringing back I pulled a few strings. Believe me, the American taxpayers will be getting more than a fair return on their dollars.” That wasn’t what really mattered, Lennox knew, but it was the line he’d taken while wheedling the DoD. Wheeljack had already snuck out here to fiddle with it, too.
“Thank you, Will.” Prime knelt and Lennox took up a safe position well behind Prowl and the watching Seekers. Fortunately the Allspark radiation behaved a lot like x-rays in certain ways. For every ten feet of distance, the exposure dropped off exponentially.
Blue lightning struck and the tank unfolded, a blunt, memorable head rising from the shifting planes of the chassis. Blue optics glowed first at Prime, their hands touching briefly before the risen tank focused on Prowl.
“Are we calling you Raze again?” Prowl asked. “Or…?” He stepped into the tank’s embrace, chevron and optics bright.
“Raze will do,” Raze laughed. It was probably best if Impactor stayed dead. He bent his head to kiss Prowl, holding him close against a chest still hot, newly re-embodied spark spinning faster, scents of warm oils and metal and a roiling storm front on the wind, the static causing blue crackles to follow in the wake of Prowl’s roving hands…oh Primus bodies were good.
Thundercracker lunged and caught Prime, Strake hurrying to the other side. They lowered him to his knees and knelt beside him, supporting him as his optics flickered. One kindling at a time wasn’t so bad.
“I guess it’s better to resurrect the old war dogs than drag the new kids out to the front lines,” Lennox murmured, watching the loving reunion of executioner and executed. It took deliberate effort to remind himself of that aspect of the relationship. It hadn’t been Prowl who’d killed Impactor the second time. The living, the dead, the Allspark, the Matrix; and Prime the intersection, the crossroads. Robots, robots everywhere.
“Not all the new kids are soldiers,” Thundercracker said. He looked at the human thoughtfully. “We have civilians again.”
Lennox smiled. The old Seeker sounded pleased.
…
Galaxies away, Galvatron screamed in rage. Far worse than sparks in dying corrupting the purity of his inner power, was the escape of prey rightfully his in death. How dare Prime!
“No matter,” Galvatron snarled, shoving an ostentatiously concerned Knockout aside. “No matter. I shall have my own Graveyard Legion.”
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
LENNOX!
He was out of bed and reaching for his chair-tossed uniform before he was awake.
Libbies just went nuts out there - the Cons are going hot. And…fr-
The signal from Jazz skwarked out for half a second. Lennox ran from his tiny DC apartment, down the stairs and out to where Sideswipe had pulled up at the nearest curb.
-And some fragger just lit off an EMP. Your whole District’s fried, man, outside the hardened gear down in the EDF hubs and that cute little Ratchet Special you got in your head. Prowl thinks it’s probably Lockdown. I agree.
Pulling his pants on in Sideswipe’s passenger seat while the late-model Lamborghini swerved at ludicrous speed through the parking lot that the roads had become wasn’t easy. Lennox concentrated on keeping himself from being bashed around too badly, and what his HUD and the feeds were giving him. There wasn’t power enough left over in his brain to swear. Anybody still up, this is General Lennox, authorization Zulu India Papa 42. Initiate Glass Aegis now, now, now. I repeat: Initiate Glass Aegis now, now, now. Blaster, we global?
Yessir.
Good. Metroplex, status.
Going to Macross in five, General.
God, he wanted to hug that city. Telling her to “go kick their asses, sweetheart,” wasn’t exactly protocol, though. All right. He switched channels, sending a quick burst to Sarah and Anna, waking the latter as she and her family were closer in terms of time-zone. Out west, Sarah was already up feeding the animals. Get to your shelters, m’ladies! Ironhide was at the farm and Roulette was acting as Anna’s car. Love you!
Their replies thrumming across his mind, he vaulted out of Sideswipe and hurled himself at the checkpoint, flashing badge and right iris at the guards and scanners. One of the guards stepped lively and had the door open for him as soon as the machine bleeped green.
Tucking in his shirt, he descended into familiar, tightly controlled chaos. The Secretary of Defense and the Lieutenant Director of the EDF were already at the holotable surrounded by their assistants and the Combatant Commanders’ flag adjutants. The Lieutenant Director made a space for Lennox beside her at the table.
“General,” she said, “all Aegis systems are up and running except two. New York and Ottawa. Prelim reports indicate sabotage. Repair crews are working on them.”
“Lockdown again,” Lennox said. Prowl was going to shit a brick.
“Or the Preds,” Williams added. “How long till Metroplex is in position?”
Little over an hour, came Jazz’s voice from the table. Deltas are all up now, too, carrying our guys. The two Decepticon battleships glowed malevolent purple from high and low 629 million kilometers off the ecliptic plane. The Vivisector had Earth’s Northern Hemisphere in its sights, the Torment had the Southern. Six little red dots lifted from the blue sphere of Earth’s surface, splitting into two groups while a larger green dot preceded them on an intercept course with the Vivisector.
They’re firing, Jazz said. In 35 minutes we find out if the shields work.
Lennox frowned at the Sec Def. “You should be under Cheyenne Mountain, Len.” If the Pentagon was taken out, they’d lose the United States’ second-highest link in the armed forces chain of command and the leader of the EDF. Williams gave him the hairy eyeball.
“When the shit goes down I’m sticking to your charmed ass. Besides, you got the Lambo Twins upstairs, right?” Where Sideswipe was, Sunstreaker was likely not far.
…
As the minutes ticked by, three more Aegis systems crashed, taken out by computer attacks slipping past AIs and human cyber-divers, and by physical explosions. Simple mines had been placed at the bases of the shield emitter towers. Lockdown in vehicle mode was spotted driving off a pier in Massachusetts, any pursuit quickly lost in the ocean after he destroyed a swarm of Kuppies.
…
Above the eastern United States, above Europe and the north coast of Africa, above Johannesburg and Praetoria in the early hours of their morning, the skies burned livid, boiling violet, spitting lightning across the stratopause. At first in eerie silence, then a dull, louring roar fell smothering through the air. Circular points a kilometer across coruscated through the spectrum from crimson to orange to yellow to white, moving across the face of the planet at 1600 kilometers per hour as the planet rotated. Humankind looked up in defiance or hid in terror, each according to their nature and training.
They were using the nightside, aiming for places where the lights were brightest - the simplest way to decimate a civilization.
In the bowels of the Pentagon, Lennox watched the screens. The New York Aegis station had been repaired. Where the shields were up they were holding. Where there were no shields, the Cons’ beams turned everything down to bedrock to plasma.
“Aegis towers down in Indonesia and Singapore,” an adjutant murmured, keeping running tally. “Prague towers back online.”
…
Einstein, bless his heart, might have been wrong, but he’d been working from the best information humans had had at the time. Cybertronian minds and Cybertronian engines could work with classical relativity, and bend it to their purpose.
When Borealis suddenly took off heading “south” away from the Vivisector, requesting a diversion, Prowl began recalculating and sent Smokescreen and Hound into an already messy melee. When at the apogee of her arc she curled into cometary mode, Prowl shuttered his optics. He kept firing, forcing Starscream and Skywarp briefly away from Thundercracker and Strake.
Aiming for the battleship, Borealis - in realspace, not skirting relativistic effects via any of the ways available to her - accelerated to 98% of the speed of light. At this distance she only had to move them a tiny fraction of a degree and the beam would shoot harmlessly past her home planet.
She hit the shielding at the midpoint of the cannon. The Vivisector’s station-keeping thrusters stood no chance; the battleship flipped end over end in a wild rotation that slammed the crew to the fore and aft bulkheads. The shield had buckled at the point of impact, damaging the cannon enough to trigger an automatic shutdown.
Lightspeed whooped with laughter, remembering how he and Borealis had been watching Shark Week last fall. Certain sharks had a very similar hunting strategy. I love when Great Whites fly! he sang. Primus on a pogo stick, I didn’t know you could move that fast in realspace!
Cliffjumper shot Stalker in the aft and shrugged. Yeah? So what?
Run the calculation for mass at that speed, Skydive told him.
Wha-… Oh. Oooh! As a body closely approaches the speed of light, the mass as measured by an observer that is stationary relative to the moving body increases, becoming infinite at the speed of light itself. Borealis had hit the Vivisector at almost five times her normal mass.
I’m surprised she didn’t punch a hole right through the thing, Skydive said. Although Thunderwing had had amazing shields, too.
Borealis! Are you okay? Azimuth tight-beamed. She hadn’t altered trajectory and her engines were out. She was coasting, but very, very fast, and headed out of the system. No reply. He launched a handful of Wheeljack’s extra-annoying missiles at a nearby clump of Cons and took off after her.
Get out of the way, get out of the way, GET OUT OF THE WAY! was shouted across every Autobot frequency. Mechs fled in every direction, Autobots pursued by Decepticons who didn’t know why they were running, but weren’t going to stick around to find out.
Metroplex was in range.
The Vivsector’s shields held for three minutes. Metroplex paused in her barrage to give the mechs inside a chance to get out, watching and counting, relaying video and stats to Ultra Magnus within her command chamber.
“Where’s Jhiaxus?” Magnus wondered aloud. The Terrorcons had been out in the melee from the moment the deltas had arrived with the Autobot troops. “He’s hardly one to go down with his ship.”
The city around him quivered with leashed power. “Yes or no, Ultra Magnus!”
Trying to salvage Jhiaxus’ ship would be an order of magnitude more trouble than it would be worth. Magnus shuddered just thinking about it. “Light it up.”
A web of incandescence linked city and battleship for an instant. A new star shone briefly in Earth’s sky. Metroplex gave a triumphant roar, sending waves of exultation through Magnus as she changed course, focused on the Torment 1.2 billion kilometers away.
…
It was just a big, rusty old semi. But no ordinary vehicle with any electronics should be moving. Sunny and Sides transformed and unlimbered their guns.
“You moron! Your buddy set off an EMP two hours ago!” Sideswipe yelled.
Jhiaxus transformed and shot him.
…
Lennox lay where he’d been blasted, under a pile of monitors and desk fragments against a wall, ears ringing, nose bleeding. What the hell? The DC towers were holding, the second battleship was hightailing it out of the system with Metroplex snarling at its heels. Fires raged and scars had been seared across the planet that would take geological time to heal, but the fight was over and humanity was still standing. What now?
He needed to get up, to assess the situation, call for help. The implant in his skull was operating but his brain couldn’t seem to make sense of the input. He felt a change in air pressure, squinted against the bright early morning sunlight that shouldn’t be reaching him down here in the basement, saw a huge, shadowy shape approaching.
Jhiaxus reached for the tiny flesh creature. He so wanted to capture one of the Autobots’ particular friends, to explore the interesting modifications, do a little recreational dissection. The Autobots’ reaction to what was left would be entertaining as well.
Someone grabbed him by the pelvic anchor-bolt and threw him backwards, out into the crater of debris his entry had created. Jhiaxus rolled with the impact and tried to regain his feet, but whomever it was was shooting at him now, hitting him with depleted-plutonium shells followed by some kind of plasma beams striking the same places as the solid shells, so quickly his armor couldn’t react fast enough to prevent damage.
Later. There would be plenty of time for specimen collecting once he’d rendezvoused with what was left of his crew. The slagging cityformer had destroyed his ship, but Bludgeon could be made to share. He took to his flight mode and departed.
Sending a last few rounds after him, Atrandom watched long enough to make certain he wasn’t going to double back, then turned a frantic search to the rubble. Movement, sound, heartbeats - life! “Lennox!”
…
Aw, Primus, Air Raid groaned. Not Abominus again! We just got the smell washed off from last time.
Yeah, said Slingshot. Where’s Defensor?
Look at Earth, guys, Silverbolt said, and you tell me where Hot Spot and his team are. Dark plumes of smoke like bruises were spreading across the pale blue globe.
…
“Worms.” Cascade shook her shoulder. “Worms, come on, we have to go.” The horizon was on fire.
Worms finally looked up from the microorganisms happily reproducing in a still bend of the creek. “Oh. Oh no…” Goldfish herded followed them up the embankment and onto the road. Ryder and Lightskein had already transformed, engines idling impatiently.
“Hot Spot wants us to take this section of the southeastern border,” Cascade told them. “Marina, Anticline, and Fumarole have the next ten kilometers. Castle, Rook, and Knight, Botanica, Slate, and Tideline have the northwest. Shearwater and Tern are running air support.”
They weren’t equipped for fire suppression and rescue the way Inferno and the Protectobots were, but the Water Babies could help.
…
Skyfire! Azimuth, towing Borealis’ inert cometary form, met the elder deep-Seeker at geostationary orbit above Earth. Skyfire had been leading the attack on the Torment.
Transforming, Skyfire unhooked Borealis and ran his hands along the overlapping plates of her tightly closed armor. Azimuth chirped him the full sensory file of what she’d done.
I’m pretty sure she’s alive in there, Azimuth said, transforming as well. But she’s still not responding.
Reckless, Skyfire thought. Prime and Ratchet would have suffered if she’d managed to kill herself with that stunt. He prodded gently at one of the few marginally permeable seams around the engine’s exhaust. She’s alive, he said gruffly. Ratchet, I’m taking her to L4 to keep her warm until you can get up here. As far as I can tell she’s compacted her externals and bounced her CPU pretty hard. We might have to cut her armor off before she can transform again.
Flat-bottomed girls you make the rockin’ world go round! Streetwise - up to his optics in a structure fire - sang.
…
“Told you,” Williams said, hauling Lennox to his feet. “Charmed ass. Damn that was one ugly motherfucker. What is that motherfucking smell…?”
“Terrorcons,” Atrandom grumbled. She grinned suddenly, receiving annoyed pings from the Twins, who were coming online after the pounding Jhiaxus had given them. They’d been knocked out, but were not as badly damaged as the Con had probably thought if he’d left them like that. Rummaging through the debris, she uncovered another survivor. After a quick scan showed no broken bones or internal injuries, she helped the dazed aide to his feet. “Sorry, boys, but you’ll be living with that for a while.”
Williams exchanged a look with Lennox. “Wife’s gonna kick my ass, I bring this stank home.”
“Stay outta my apartment,” Lennox said. “Maybe we can get Inferno to douse us with something. Preferably something that doesn’t take our skin off.”
“Good luck with that,” said Atrandom. “I’m starting with aqua regia, myself.”
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
2039 - June
3 AM. The midnight of the soul, according to Bradbury. Optimus felt he now knew what the human author had meant. The cool stone floor felt good against his overheated cheek guard.
First would come a barbed, brittle puckering; as though a microscopic black hole had lodged in something vital. He had learned that at that point he had a handful of seconds to distance himself, to reach the safety of the ground. The puckering grew into tearing, rending; white-hot levinbolts scouring his mind and body from within, power wrenched, riven away, twisted into the spark-form Galvatron desired. Shutting off his pain receptors was ineffectual. This pain wasn’t transmitted through his body, interpreted by his CPU. This pain existed as an integral aspect of every part of him the Allspark had infiltrated.
The cool stone floor felt good. Not moving felt good. Frantic pings and requests flooded his comms, but he kept the door locked, gave terse replies. He’d be properly functional again shortly. He had to be.
Powerful arms lifted him from the floor. A familiar field enveloped him. Familiar hands touched his face. Optimus kept his optics off, shut down his vocoder before a groan escaped as he was moved, turned over. The hands touched his frame here and there, sought beneath his armor. Metal skin touching metal opened a link.
Optimus?
How can I solace anyone like this? Optimus thought. What kind of harbor am I now?
The body entwining his seemed to phase insubstantial for a moment, then doubled strangely, sinking into him, between his armor and protoform, between his legs, between his chest plates, between himself and the pain. Sails whose color he could feel as vividly as sight wrapped around them.
Vector had seen what became of Primes who had been broken. He would not allow a similar fate to befall this one.
Optimus. Beloved, I cannot stay long. Can you unlatch your armor?
It took a grinding four seconds for Optimus to recall where within his memory core he’d stashed the codes that freed his armor from his protoform. One by one, then in a tumult the heavy plates and crumpling chameleon mesh fell away. He felt small and cold and vulnerable, shivering until Vector’s hands trailed blue glyphs in their wake along the planes and segments and whorls of his naked body, stirring his spark from its wounded lassitude.
“You must resist him.” Vector’s lips brushed his forehelm.
“I’ve been trying.” For the past six years the “attacks” had come every two or three months. Each time Optimus tried to call out to his twin, to reinstate their old spark-pulse code, the twin code. No answer. He tried through the Allspark itself, delving within; but the sickness from Galvatron’s moiety drove him back, impenetrable.
Vector shook his head but his voice was gentle, soothing. “You attempt only to blunt the force of injury to yourself. The Allspark itself is in distress. You must try to affect the kindlings Galvatron forces.”
“Impose my will over Galvatron’s.” Optimus shuddered. How could that not end in disaster?
“You forget one of your greatest skills,” Vector laughed. “Wheedle the Allspark itself. Turn the kindling. Send the Decepticons good sparks and true. Yes, they will suffer, surrounded as they will be by remorselessness. But in the end you aim to save them all, do you not? And if Galvatron’s new battalions contain within them the seeds of kindness, how much sooner, how much easier might the end of the war come?”
Optimus stared at him. “The miskindlings are harming the Allspark.”
“Yes.”
“Prowl hypothesizes that Galvatron and I are changing it, that we have embodied it.”
“Clever Prowl,” Vector purred. Wrapping a hand around the back of Optimus’ helm, he pressed their mouths together, pulling their chests into conjunction. Optimus at last bestirred his limbs, clutching at the ancient Prime. “You are a healer of sparks, Optimus. All sparks…” Vector opened him, opened himself, disassembling the false spaces between them.
When Optimus came out of recharge, Vector was gone. So was the pain.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
2039 - November
The Autobot parking lot behind the moon was getting crowded. Elita inserted her ship into a halo orbit at the Earth-Moon L2. The Ark was there, along with Smokescreen’s cruiser and Ultra Magnus’ long-range shuttle.
“Everybody’s ready to drop,” Chromia said. Elita unlocked herself from the pilot’s chair and joined them in the airlock.
…
“Uh, Optimus…?”
The fireball was coming right toward them. Some of the newer, younger embassy staff bailed to the sides. Optimus took a few steps closer. The cometary form carved a hundred-meter trench in the desert, halting so close to the road a couple of dirt clods tipped over onto the asphalt. Optimus leaned on his knees and laughed.
“Show-off,” Sam muttered, grinning up at Prime. No way was that Kup. Springer maybe? Why hadn’t Prime told anyone who was coming? It was someone pretty big anyway. As the form unfolded and stood, he thought for a second it was Chromia. No, the colors were wrong.
“Elita,” Prime hummed, embracing her warmly. She smiled, not accustomed to having to look up to meet his optics.
“Oh ho!” said Sam. He scuttled hastily out of the way, dragging Mikaela with him as the embassy mechs, plus Ultra Magnus and Bluestreak, visiting from Metroplex, converged on Prime and Elita with happy shouts and much banging of hands and shoulders and armor. Introductions were made where needed via cloud mind, human and Cybertronian curiosity and joy-of-reunion shared and expanded.
“How many?” Ratchet asked after some while.
Elita curled a finger around one of his cheek spars and pulled him in for a nuzzle. “Cubes of high-grade should you break out?”
“That too,” Ratchet agreed.
“Nineteen of us came,” she said. “I know you wanted me to bring everyone, Optimus, but we couldn’t bear to leave Cybertron completely unguarded.”
“I understand,” Prime said, hugging her so their armor creaked.
“I meant to ask you before; what are these?” Elita plucked one of the wipers away from Prime’s windshield, then let it snap back in place with a loud THWAPP. Optimus flinched, clapping a hand to his chest, emitting a garbled burst of noise from his vocoder.
“I so did not need to see that,” Sam groaned, having attained a reasonable perch on one of Bee’s shoulders. Mikaela had the other.
“Wow,” said Mikaela. “That’s going to be all over the tabloids by tomorrow. ‘OPTIMUS PRIME’S GIRLFRIEND GIVES NIPPLE-TWEAKS IN PUBLIC’…”
“Very like the media-drones in Iacon,” Elita laughed. The tangle of mechs around them ooohed and swayed with her laugh.
Prime was saved from further comments or explanations by the arrival of another cometary protoform. This one at a more discreet distance from the road.
Optics lowered as she uncurled from her crater. Faces turned away. No one spoke. (Except Fireflight. He couldn’t bring himself not to look at her, and his brothers caught and held him before he could run to embrace her.) Sam felt his stomach twist. He’d never seen them act like this. Never. Shunning, Bee explained via tight-beam, was gravely serious for Cybertronians. People had died from it, long ago.
Chromia walked the empty space that opened between herself and Prime. Head up and armor taut, fields painfully neutral.
“Aw, c’mere,” Prime said, holding out his arms. Chromia wished Ironhide at least would shoot her, but Prime’s subharmonics had been imperative. She accepted the embrace if only for the wave of relief coursing through the gathered mechs. Silverbolt let Fireflight go and Prime relinquished his hold to let Chromia pet down the jet’s anxiously rutched wings.
“I gave the order,” Elita said.
“I chose the way I carried it out,” Chromia insisted. “I’m sorry, Optimus.”
“It is not me you should apologize to,” Prime said.
Prowl stood rigid, head turned aside. The formality was unnecessary. He didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t want to think about it. His battle systems kept trying to run sims of Beta’s death. He wanted to bolt into the Security Office. Thundercracker knelt behind him, hands on Prowl’s shoulders - not restraining him; lending support - with Strake prickly and stiffly upright beside them.
Chromia felt as though she’d fallen ten thousand meters to land across a diatanium beam. Her spark lurched in her chest, but she patted Fireflight’s shoulders and moved past him toward Prowl.
She touched his hand, offering an arm cable. Strake hissed but she ignored him. “Prowl. I’m so sorry. I…I need to know what you’re feeling.”
Turning his head finally to look at her, Prowl accepted the link. A flash, thermonuclear annihilation, and then his looping memories and emotional tumult were locked behind hard firewalls.
Prowl… she entreated. I deserve…what you can show me. I didn’t think how our use of that alloy would upset you. It never occurred to me.
No. Cruel enough, what was done to me without my knowledge or consent. Cruel enough what I have done to others already. He touched her face, pressed his forehelm to hers. There’s no need to add to it. Chromia shivered and retracted the cable as he severed the link.
Fireflight dashed to her side, winding an arm around her shoulders, bestowing a quicksilver nuzzle upon Prowl, and baring his denta at Strake, who snapped back at him. Thundercracker rolled his optics, but giggles fluttered across the cloud mind at the two younger jets. There was something of a grin between them that couldn’t be entirely masked by the overt hostility. Chromia allowed herself to be drawn back into the cluster surrounding Elita and Prime.
Two more living meteorites landed. Firestar and Moonracer - soon encompassed by old friends. Red came pelting out of the Security Office and tackled Firestar and Inferno, knocking them all to the ground in a noisy tangle. No one had seen Red laughing like that in tens of thousands of years. Powerglide nearly crashed as he arrived from Oregon to sweep Moonracer up and swing her around.
“I can’t believe you’re still alive, you glitch,” Moonracer hooted, giving his shoulder a shove. “You call that flying?”
“Oh, shut up and kiss me,” Powerglide said. Arcee, however, had detached herself from Chromia and stuck her head between them, catching Moonracer’s kiss instead, setting Powerglide squalling like a stepped-on glitchmouse until Cliffjumper and Windcharger joined them in a rowdy clump.
Three more carved new craters in the sand. Then another two and six and four, all but one bounding into welcoming arms, voices chorused, harmonics ringing across the desert.
The last to land paused at the edge of the road. Matte black with jagged patterns of dark red that made her difficult to see amid the rubble of long-dead cities. She knew from Chromia’s memories which one he was - so different now from the slim, dark mech he’d been. Standing between two alphas. She knew the instant he noticed her.
Prowl took a single slow, deliberate step; nothing precipitous, nothing to startle her; but then he was running and his knees carved furrows in the road as he dropped and Spiral was in his arms - impossible, impossible - and warbling keens rose and fell from their throats and cables bound them tight.
“That’s…impossible,” Jazz said, knowing better as he said it. “I heard her in there, man! How can that be her?”
Prime turned to him, appalled at his First Lieutenant as he hadn’t been since the earliest, roughest days of the war. “You told him she was dead?”
Jazz clenched his jaw. “As much as. I thought she was!”
“Jazz… Never mind. I could have made the same mistake.”
But you didn’t, Jazz thought. Angry mostly at himself. Prime had volunteered to Mirage that Sleight was alive; if Jazz hadn’t known Optimus as well as he did, he’d have thought that a careless, almost cruel slip. Except Mirage had been kinda…bouncy…ever since. Slag. I gotta get Ratchet to give me a tune-up.
Three million years had separated them. Three million years was torn apart, categorized, repartitioned, shared and reassembled. Prowl accepted Spiral’s horror at what he’d become and done and not done. Spiral confessed to her own hard-driven cruelties, and to having volunteered for the spark chamber modification. She rode the forecasting loop this threw his CPU into, holding his body fast as he shook with visions of her nova. Prime knelt beside them, setting his mouth against Prowl’s helm.
I’m all right, Prowl sent. He couldn’t stop the loop outright, but he could alter his focus, let it run its course without being trapped by it. Spiral held him, alive, spark spinning bright. She looked up - and up - at the approach of the two Seekers. She kept Prowl’s head cradled to her chest and extended her denta.
“Fierce little je,” Thundercracker said, approving.
They’re trining, Jazz explained helpfully.
Shut up, Jazz, said Prowl.
And you’re trine leader, Jazz continued.
Shut up, Jazz, said Thundercracker, but he was grinning. Spiral released Prowl at last and leapt to the Seeker’s shoulder, stalking up to his face, hands on hip gimbals. She cocked her head, taking in the blue optics in the raptor’s face.
“I think I like you, too,” she said.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
“Nice suit,” Optimus told the new Secretary of Defense. Leonard Williams had finally retired with a tidy pension and his wife to an equally tidy little house on the Canadian border, far from bright lights and big cities.
“Like it?” Epps said, spreading his arms. “Wife picked it out.”
“I suspected as much.”
“What? What’s wrong with what I pick out?”
“I’ve seen your t-shirts.”
Table of Contents
.
Author: tainry
Disclaimer: Not mine, no money.
Rating: R
Characters/Pairing(s): Ensemble
Warnings: Robot snuggles, the Sec Def has a potty mouth.
Summary: Wherein Borealis teaches the new jets a dance; Raze returns; robots fight over Earth; Optimus spends some time on the floor; and Elita brings a goodly portion of her crew out for a visit.
Notes: Suggested listening for the fight: Invictus from the Call of Duty soundtrack by Sean Murray. Also, next chapter won't be until December at the earliest, as I'll be writing more of this for NaNoWriMo again this year. XD
~7200 words.
Part I
Part II
How Can I Keep From Singing - Part III
2039 - May
Space is big. Even confining their search to the limits of Jupiter’s orbit gave a rough estimate of 1.99 x 1036 cubic kilometers.
199,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 km3
Perceptor assured Borealis that, during the Cybertronian Empire’s heyday, this would have been a normal in-system traffic control task. Now? Even with the new Light Brigade and all the available jets and a large proportion of Earth’s amateur and professional astronomers keeping eyes on the sky they stood very little chance of finding the two Decepticon warships prior to an attack.
Borealis didn’t like it. Her armor felt tight, the temperature of the energon in her lines was off, and something was hinky with the transmission speed of her efferent wires, making her jittery. Within her cockpit, Orris patted her console.
“I don’t like it either,” he said. “But if you do one more aileron roll while I’m trying to get astrogation captures…”
“Ack, sorry.” Fumbling for calm in lieu of a deep breath, she settled into a recent memory with half her attention, keeping the rest on flying and scanning.
…
2038 - June
Borealis sphynxed herself down and wrapped her arms tight around Prime. He was closer to forty feet tall than thirty these days, despite the latest skein of protomass he'd donated. His protoform was no longer a cool steel blue, but the warm variegated bronze of the Cube. He smelled of ozone and pain and, just now, of summer rain and desert.
"They say they're almost done," she told him. She'd spent whatever time she could spare watching and conversing with Azimuth, Blueshift and Polaris in the big tank; their bodies coiled and intertwined, a triskel of wings and fuselage and really big feet. Once they were out, there would be three more deep-Seekers to ferry the enormous pallets of spacebridge components out to Cybertron. The smaller jets took smaller packets up to geostationary where they were combined into the big bundles the deltas would haul. Despite the near-constant arguments between Perceptor and Scrapper, the bridge's construction was taking far less time than originally estimated now that the Constructicons were helping.
''They're beautiful," Optimus said, cadging a glimpse of them from Borealis' overhead view.
"Well, you know, deltas," Borealis said, a giggle in her subharmonics. “Oop! Gotta go. I’m giving the Pbots a ride from Sri Lanka to Columbia. They’re escorting a new crop of engineers for Gaviotas.”
“Safe journey.” He gave as much of her as he could encompass a squeeze and she squeezed back just hard enough to make his armor creak like a sub going for a depth record.
As she left she passed the inner chamber of the med-Iab, with a new batch of protoforms. Spark-kids of Bluestreak's, mostly. She thought it was interesting that it was mostly the less aggressive of the Autobots who had taken so enthusiastically to the merge process. Um. Not that Perceptor was exactly passive, but his warlike tendencies only emerged when he was stressed and his work interrupted. And Prime. Well, Prime did what he had to.
Later. Growth medium rippled and sloshed as Azimuth poked his head above the surface. He shook it to get the heavy fluid out from where it was dripping and tickling between armor and facial plates, spattering an emerging Polaris in the process.
“Hey! Watch it.” Polaris hefted a glob and threw it at Azimuth. Blueshift decided to stay submerged until his brothers quit horsing around.
“If Ratchet catches you slopping that stuff everywhere,” Borealis said as she entered. She grinned, leaning over the side of the tank to give Azimuth a hand up over the side. Azimuth tried to yank her in, but she was well-braced and used the recoil to pull him out anyway. He clattered to the floor, dripping and awkward as a hatchling, gleaming silver and midnight blue. Polaris was white like Skyfire, and Blueshift’s armor graded from celestite-pale to lapis dark. Good grief, Borealis thought. We’re like a dance troupe with matching leotards. Very pretty, though. Jazz would redouble his efforts to get the deltas to perform in some charity air show now.
“Got all your ducks in a row?” Wheeljack asked, laughing as he came in with Beachcomber, Miles and Perceptor.
“Whoa,” said Miles, dodging a ropy strand of fluid dripping from Polaris’ wings. “Wet jets!”
“We are not ducks,” Azimuth said firmly. His suddenly assumed dignity did not prevent him from folding down for hugs from his progenitors, however.
“Albatrosses, then,” Beachcomber said, his voice low and thrumming with laughter and delight. These enormous sparks had somehow grown from the joining of threads from his and Perceptor’s. Weird physics. It was kind of ridiculous. Fantastic!
“Better at landing, though,” Azimuth said, completely confident.
“Um,” said Borealis.
“Better your landings than mine,” Perceptor said, patting her foot.
“You’d think Grapple would have fixed that angle when you guys were building the base,” Azimuth agreed thoughtfully. “Unless he left it that way on purpose to tease you, Perceptor?”
Perceptor blinked. “He told me he liked the canted angle. It adds visual interest and protects the entrance from the prevailing winds…”
Wheeljack lost his battle to keep a straight face and cackled as he keyed in the big tank’s self-cleaning sequence. As far as he knew, no one was going to be using it for a while. The chamber echoed with the deep hum and hiss as the tank lid lowered and sealed.
“It does add visual interest,” Borealis said in rather a higher voice than usual. “Come on, guys, let’s get some sun on our wings.” She shooed the young jets into the corridor and outside, to dry off and expand in the desert heat.
The sky was liquid and soft in the wake of the afternoon storm, though the sunlight struck their armor like the hissing radiation it was; actinic and fierce on optics that had spent two years underground. Borealis took two hands, coaxed the third to clasp her wingtip, guiding them to the road. Their runway, though they all had the new anti-gravitics. Silverbolt was a little less than four months from returning, and Skyfire had just begun his run out. It was up to Borealis to show them the gulfs and streams of the star-ways.
She transformed and taxied northeast along the road, giving them lots of room to line up behind. Scanning, she listened keenly to their engines as they warmed up. A thrilling, bone-shaking roar, rising in volume and pitch. Autobots and humans gathered at the hangar door to watch.
“Where are we going?” asked Polaris, bouncing on his landing gear.
“Planet 10! Uh, I mean the Sun-Earth L1. Gonna show you a Lissajous orbit first. Uses way less energy.” Plus she liked the name.
Glen watched them take off with what Maggie felt was a rather soppy grin on his face. “That’ll be me in a few decades,” he murmured to her.
“Oh, so the favorite forging of the week is delta, hm?” Maggie poked him and went back inside as the four starships were lost in the haze far above. Once at her station she pinged Red a request and got in reply a little window on one screen tracking their flight.
“Hey, it’s been my favorite for at least two weeks.” Glen soon had a similar window up on one of his screens.
Five hundred miles and climbing. Gleaming blue-white below, black glittering with stars above. Heat from friction with air molecules was replaced by radiation from the sun. The three new deltas had the math, but it wasn’t the same as feeling the maneuvers in your frame, in your engines. Knowing how much energy you were using wasn’t the same as feeling it drain from your lines.
Rather than wait for a fine-tuned launch window, they were going to make a handful of loops around the Earth in order to get themselves lined up on the trajectory they wanted. One side of each loop passed along LEO, and the other side swung far out, almost to the distance of the Moon’s orbit.
VROOM! VRRROOOOOOM! shouted Blueshift as they accelerated around in the last phasing loop and shot toward the Moon. Borealis almost laughed herself off-course. The Moon’s gravity gave them a slingshot boost for the 1.5 million kilometer trip out to the Lagrangian point between Sun and Earth. A gravitational balance point - unstable, but the Lissajous orbit around it could be maintained without using any extra fuel. NASA’s Advanced Composition Explorer was still there in a Lissajous orbit as well, but Borealis showed them how to insert on the flight path so as to avoid the 1300 pound satellite. She’d brought a couple of astronauts up here in 2024 to refuel and upgrade the thing; she didn’t want anyone bashing into it.
They basked in sunlight never shadowed by Earth or Moon, only dimmed at times by the transits of Venus and Mercury. The newly reforged jets stretched and popped their armor, feeling it harden in the bombardment outside the protection of Earth’s magnetic field.
Ready to get closer? Borealis asked. With a snap and crackle of maneuvering thrusters, she fell out of the stable orbit, following the light tug of the gravity well of the Sun.
As they approached the orbit of Mercury, Borealis transformed and adjusted her optics. There was a particular band of high-energy UV that gave a beautiful, highly-detailed image of the chromosphere. She could - and often did - watch for hours, mesmerized by the bubbling granules and bright faculae; the dark sunspots and their plages; the shifting, spiky spicules caused by immense sound waves propagated across the Sun’s surface - the Sun’s very roar - and the fibrous, gleaming plasma in stunning coronal loops. The face of the Sun was always changing.
Borealis almost seemed to have forgotten her charges until hands touched her arms, her wings, her chest. Azimuth wrapped an arm around her waist and kissed her cheek spar, snuggling close but deliberately not obscuring her view. It was their natal star as well.
…
They spiraled down to Earth dizzy and hot and overcharged from their sunward journey, the new jets’ armor second-stage hardened, landing giggling on the mesa top.
“No, no, you don’t need a file,” Borealis said, waving off Blueshift’s offered cable. “Just do this!” She demonstrated, shifting her weight back and forth, pushing hips out with each shift, and holding her hands up near her temples, waving her fingers in time to the music she broadcast. (After giving Red Alert ample warning of what she was up to.)
The other three lined up and joined her, attaining unison almost immediately, despite a good deal of jostling of wings. Before the second verse, Breakaway and Fireflight had joined them and something small and lively whizzed around their heads, getting video from all angles. One of Prime’s battle gnats. The online clip Teletraan put up eventually received over a million hits in less than a week.
“What the heck?” Sam laughed as he and Mikaela drove up to the embassy in Bee.
“Caramelldansen,” Bee explained, after digging around in some older internet files. It was old enough a meme now to be almost vintage. “Also called the uma uma dance.”
It’s not even a dance, Ironhide grumbled from the Lennox farm. They just do the same thing, over and over. For two hours!
Aw, Ironhide, Borealis said. We wanted to see how long it would take before someone came up and started shooting at us!
Very well. Sunstreaker…!
“AWK!” yelled the jets, and scattered.
…
2039 - May
“Got a transit,” Orris said. Borealis snapped her attention back wholly onto the sector he indicated. A dark blip against the stars, tiny at this distance and well “north” of the ecliptic plane. She wasn’t certain at first that it wasn’t just another chunk of random space rock caught by the system’s collective gravity. Orris enhanced his optical feed, and the outline gave it away. The Torment. The chromatophores of the hull had been shifted to matte black, and the en-sig was dampened. They would never have found them unless the ship had happened to pass between them and one particular background star at precisely the right moment.
“Damn you’re good.” All right, she told herself. Fly casual. The protocol was passive scans only, do not engage, tight-beam coordinates and sensor data to Prowl, and get your aft back to Earth. It wouldn’t do to flip over and hare off right away, though. The Cons would know they’d been spotted. Borealis dropped one of Wheeljack’s Little Brown Bird drones and continued on with her sweep. The space between her wings itched, waiting for plasma fire.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
“This one?” Prime asked. “Are you certain?”
Lennox smiled and patted the side of the brand new M1A4 Abrams. “When you told me who you were bringing back I pulled a few strings. Believe me, the American taxpayers will be getting more than a fair return on their dollars.” That wasn’t what really mattered, Lennox knew, but it was the line he’d taken while wheedling the DoD. Wheeljack had already snuck out here to fiddle with it, too.
“Thank you, Will.” Prime knelt and Lennox took up a safe position well behind Prowl and the watching Seekers. Fortunately the Allspark radiation behaved a lot like x-rays in certain ways. For every ten feet of distance, the exposure dropped off exponentially.
Blue lightning struck and the tank unfolded, a blunt, memorable head rising from the shifting planes of the chassis. Blue optics glowed first at Prime, their hands touching briefly before the risen tank focused on Prowl.
“Are we calling you Raze again?” Prowl asked. “Or…?” He stepped into the tank’s embrace, chevron and optics bright.
“Raze will do,” Raze laughed. It was probably best if Impactor stayed dead. He bent his head to kiss Prowl, holding him close against a chest still hot, newly re-embodied spark spinning faster, scents of warm oils and metal and a roiling storm front on the wind, the static causing blue crackles to follow in the wake of Prowl’s roving hands…oh Primus bodies were good.
Thundercracker lunged and caught Prime, Strake hurrying to the other side. They lowered him to his knees and knelt beside him, supporting him as his optics flickered. One kindling at a time wasn’t so bad.
“I guess it’s better to resurrect the old war dogs than drag the new kids out to the front lines,” Lennox murmured, watching the loving reunion of executioner and executed. It took deliberate effort to remind himself of that aspect of the relationship. It hadn’t been Prowl who’d killed Impactor the second time. The living, the dead, the Allspark, the Matrix; and Prime the intersection, the crossroads. Robots, robots everywhere.
“Not all the new kids are soldiers,” Thundercracker said. He looked at the human thoughtfully. “We have civilians again.”
Lennox smiled. The old Seeker sounded pleased.
…
Galaxies away, Galvatron screamed in rage. Far worse than sparks in dying corrupting the purity of his inner power, was the escape of prey rightfully his in death. How dare Prime!
“No matter,” Galvatron snarled, shoving an ostentatiously concerned Knockout aside. “No matter. I shall have my own Graveyard Legion.”
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
LENNOX!
He was out of bed and reaching for his chair-tossed uniform before he was awake.
Libbies just went nuts out there - the Cons are going hot. And…fr-
The signal from Jazz skwarked out for half a second. Lennox ran from his tiny DC apartment, down the stairs and out to where Sideswipe had pulled up at the nearest curb.
-And some fragger just lit off an EMP. Your whole District’s fried, man, outside the hardened gear down in the EDF hubs and that cute little Ratchet Special you got in your head. Prowl thinks it’s probably Lockdown. I agree.
Pulling his pants on in Sideswipe’s passenger seat while the late-model Lamborghini swerved at ludicrous speed through the parking lot that the roads had become wasn’t easy. Lennox concentrated on keeping himself from being bashed around too badly, and what his HUD and the feeds were giving him. There wasn’t power enough left over in his brain to swear. Anybody still up, this is General Lennox, authorization Zulu India Papa 42. Initiate Glass Aegis now, now, now. I repeat: Initiate Glass Aegis now, now, now. Blaster, we global?
Yessir.
Good. Metroplex, status.
Going to Macross in five, General.
God, he wanted to hug that city. Telling her to “go kick their asses, sweetheart,” wasn’t exactly protocol, though. All right. He switched channels, sending a quick burst to Sarah and Anna, waking the latter as she and her family were closer in terms of time-zone. Out west, Sarah was already up feeding the animals. Get to your shelters, m’ladies! Ironhide was at the farm and Roulette was acting as Anna’s car. Love you!
Their replies thrumming across his mind, he vaulted out of Sideswipe and hurled himself at the checkpoint, flashing badge and right iris at the guards and scanners. One of the guards stepped lively and had the door open for him as soon as the machine bleeped green.
Tucking in his shirt, he descended into familiar, tightly controlled chaos. The Secretary of Defense and the Lieutenant Director of the EDF were already at the holotable surrounded by their assistants and the Combatant Commanders’ flag adjutants. The Lieutenant Director made a space for Lennox beside her at the table.
“General,” she said, “all Aegis systems are up and running except two. New York and Ottawa. Prelim reports indicate sabotage. Repair crews are working on them.”
“Lockdown again,” Lennox said. Prowl was going to shit a brick.
“Or the Preds,” Williams added. “How long till Metroplex is in position?”
Little over an hour, came Jazz’s voice from the table. Deltas are all up now, too, carrying our guys. The two Decepticon battleships glowed malevolent purple from high and low 629 million kilometers off the ecliptic plane. The Vivisector had Earth’s Northern Hemisphere in its sights, the Torment had the Southern. Six little red dots lifted from the blue sphere of Earth’s surface, splitting into two groups while a larger green dot preceded them on an intercept course with the Vivisector.
They’re firing, Jazz said. In 35 minutes we find out if the shields work.
Lennox frowned at the Sec Def. “You should be under Cheyenne Mountain, Len.” If the Pentagon was taken out, they’d lose the United States’ second-highest link in the armed forces chain of command and the leader of the EDF. Williams gave him the hairy eyeball.
“When the shit goes down I’m sticking to your charmed ass. Besides, you got the Lambo Twins upstairs, right?” Where Sideswipe was, Sunstreaker was likely not far.
…
As the minutes ticked by, three more Aegis systems crashed, taken out by computer attacks slipping past AIs and human cyber-divers, and by physical explosions. Simple mines had been placed at the bases of the shield emitter towers. Lockdown in vehicle mode was spotted driving off a pier in Massachusetts, any pursuit quickly lost in the ocean after he destroyed a swarm of Kuppies.
…
Above the eastern United States, above Europe and the north coast of Africa, above Johannesburg and Praetoria in the early hours of their morning, the skies burned livid, boiling violet, spitting lightning across the stratopause. At first in eerie silence, then a dull, louring roar fell smothering through the air. Circular points a kilometer across coruscated through the spectrum from crimson to orange to yellow to white, moving across the face of the planet at 1600 kilometers per hour as the planet rotated. Humankind looked up in defiance or hid in terror, each according to their nature and training.
They were using the nightside, aiming for places where the lights were brightest - the simplest way to decimate a civilization.
In the bowels of the Pentagon, Lennox watched the screens. The New York Aegis station had been repaired. Where the shields were up they were holding. Where there were no shields, the Cons’ beams turned everything down to bedrock to plasma.
“Aegis towers down in Indonesia and Singapore,” an adjutant murmured, keeping running tally. “Prague towers back online.”
…
Einstein, bless his heart, might have been wrong, but he’d been working from the best information humans had had at the time. Cybertronian minds and Cybertronian engines could work with classical relativity, and bend it to their purpose.
When Borealis suddenly took off heading “south” away from the Vivisector, requesting a diversion, Prowl began recalculating and sent Smokescreen and Hound into an already messy melee. When at the apogee of her arc she curled into cometary mode, Prowl shuttered his optics. He kept firing, forcing Starscream and Skywarp briefly away from Thundercracker and Strake.
Aiming for the battleship, Borealis - in realspace, not skirting relativistic effects via any of the ways available to her - accelerated to 98% of the speed of light. At this distance she only had to move them a tiny fraction of a degree and the beam would shoot harmlessly past her home planet.
She hit the shielding at the midpoint of the cannon. The Vivisector’s station-keeping thrusters stood no chance; the battleship flipped end over end in a wild rotation that slammed the crew to the fore and aft bulkheads. The shield had buckled at the point of impact, damaging the cannon enough to trigger an automatic shutdown.
Lightspeed whooped with laughter, remembering how he and Borealis had been watching Shark Week last fall. Certain sharks had a very similar hunting strategy. I love when Great Whites fly! he sang. Primus on a pogo stick, I didn’t know you could move that fast in realspace!
Cliffjumper shot Stalker in the aft and shrugged. Yeah? So what?
Run the calculation for mass at that speed, Skydive told him.
Wha-… Oh. Oooh! As a body closely approaches the speed of light, the mass as measured by an observer that is stationary relative to the moving body increases, becoming infinite at the speed of light itself. Borealis had hit the Vivisector at almost five times her normal mass.
I’m surprised she didn’t punch a hole right through the thing, Skydive said. Although Thunderwing had had amazing shields, too.
Borealis! Are you okay? Azimuth tight-beamed. She hadn’t altered trajectory and her engines were out. She was coasting, but very, very fast, and headed out of the system. No reply. He launched a handful of Wheeljack’s extra-annoying missiles at a nearby clump of Cons and took off after her.
Get out of the way, get out of the way, GET OUT OF THE WAY! was shouted across every Autobot frequency. Mechs fled in every direction, Autobots pursued by Decepticons who didn’t know why they were running, but weren’t going to stick around to find out.
Metroplex was in range.
The Vivsector’s shields held for three minutes. Metroplex paused in her barrage to give the mechs inside a chance to get out, watching and counting, relaying video and stats to Ultra Magnus within her command chamber.
“Where’s Jhiaxus?” Magnus wondered aloud. The Terrorcons had been out in the melee from the moment the deltas had arrived with the Autobot troops. “He’s hardly one to go down with his ship.”
The city around him quivered with leashed power. “Yes or no, Ultra Magnus!”
Trying to salvage Jhiaxus’ ship would be an order of magnitude more trouble than it would be worth. Magnus shuddered just thinking about it. “Light it up.”
A web of incandescence linked city and battleship for an instant. A new star shone briefly in Earth’s sky. Metroplex gave a triumphant roar, sending waves of exultation through Magnus as she changed course, focused on the Torment 1.2 billion kilometers away.
…
It was just a big, rusty old semi. But no ordinary vehicle with any electronics should be moving. Sunny and Sides transformed and unlimbered their guns.
“You moron! Your buddy set off an EMP two hours ago!” Sideswipe yelled.
Jhiaxus transformed and shot him.
…
Lennox lay where he’d been blasted, under a pile of monitors and desk fragments against a wall, ears ringing, nose bleeding. What the hell? The DC towers were holding, the second battleship was hightailing it out of the system with Metroplex snarling at its heels. Fires raged and scars had been seared across the planet that would take geological time to heal, but the fight was over and humanity was still standing. What now?
He needed to get up, to assess the situation, call for help. The implant in his skull was operating but his brain couldn’t seem to make sense of the input. He felt a change in air pressure, squinted against the bright early morning sunlight that shouldn’t be reaching him down here in the basement, saw a huge, shadowy shape approaching.
Jhiaxus reached for the tiny flesh creature. He so wanted to capture one of the Autobots’ particular friends, to explore the interesting modifications, do a little recreational dissection. The Autobots’ reaction to what was left would be entertaining as well.
Someone grabbed him by the pelvic anchor-bolt and threw him backwards, out into the crater of debris his entry had created. Jhiaxus rolled with the impact and tried to regain his feet, but whomever it was was shooting at him now, hitting him with depleted-plutonium shells followed by some kind of plasma beams striking the same places as the solid shells, so quickly his armor couldn’t react fast enough to prevent damage.
Later. There would be plenty of time for specimen collecting once he’d rendezvoused with what was left of his crew. The slagging cityformer had destroyed his ship, but Bludgeon could be made to share. He took to his flight mode and departed.
Sending a last few rounds after him, Atrandom watched long enough to make certain he wasn’t going to double back, then turned a frantic search to the rubble. Movement, sound, heartbeats - life! “Lennox!”
…
Aw, Primus, Air Raid groaned. Not Abominus again! We just got the smell washed off from last time.
Yeah, said Slingshot. Where’s Defensor?
Look at Earth, guys, Silverbolt said, and you tell me where Hot Spot and his team are. Dark plumes of smoke like bruises were spreading across the pale blue globe.
…
“Worms.” Cascade shook her shoulder. “Worms, come on, we have to go.” The horizon was on fire.
Worms finally looked up from the microorganisms happily reproducing in a still bend of the creek. “Oh. Oh no…” Goldfish herded followed them up the embankment and onto the road. Ryder and Lightskein had already transformed, engines idling impatiently.
“Hot Spot wants us to take this section of the southeastern border,” Cascade told them. “Marina, Anticline, and Fumarole have the next ten kilometers. Castle, Rook, and Knight, Botanica, Slate, and Tideline have the northwest. Shearwater and Tern are running air support.”
They weren’t equipped for fire suppression and rescue the way Inferno and the Protectobots were, but the Water Babies could help.
…
Skyfire! Azimuth, towing Borealis’ inert cometary form, met the elder deep-Seeker at geostationary orbit above Earth. Skyfire had been leading the attack on the Torment.
Transforming, Skyfire unhooked Borealis and ran his hands along the overlapping plates of her tightly closed armor. Azimuth chirped him the full sensory file of what she’d done.
I’m pretty sure she’s alive in there, Azimuth said, transforming as well. But she’s still not responding.
Reckless, Skyfire thought. Prime and Ratchet would have suffered if she’d managed to kill herself with that stunt. He prodded gently at one of the few marginally permeable seams around the engine’s exhaust. She’s alive, he said gruffly. Ratchet, I’m taking her to L4 to keep her warm until you can get up here. As far as I can tell she’s compacted her externals and bounced her CPU pretty hard. We might have to cut her armor off before she can transform again.
Flat-bottomed girls you make the rockin’ world go round! Streetwise - up to his optics in a structure fire - sang.
…
“Told you,” Williams said, hauling Lennox to his feet. “Charmed ass. Damn that was one ugly motherfucker. What is that motherfucking smell…?”
“Terrorcons,” Atrandom grumbled. She grinned suddenly, receiving annoyed pings from the Twins, who were coming online after the pounding Jhiaxus had given them. They’d been knocked out, but were not as badly damaged as the Con had probably thought if he’d left them like that. Rummaging through the debris, she uncovered another survivor. After a quick scan showed no broken bones or internal injuries, she helped the dazed aide to his feet. “Sorry, boys, but you’ll be living with that for a while.”
Williams exchanged a look with Lennox. “Wife’s gonna kick my ass, I bring this stank home.”
“Stay outta my apartment,” Lennox said. “Maybe we can get Inferno to douse us with something. Preferably something that doesn’t take our skin off.”
“Good luck with that,” said Atrandom. “I’m starting with aqua regia, myself.”
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
2039 - June
3 AM. The midnight of the soul, according to Bradbury. Optimus felt he now knew what the human author had meant. The cool stone floor felt good against his overheated cheek guard.
First would come a barbed, brittle puckering; as though a microscopic black hole had lodged in something vital. He had learned that at that point he had a handful of seconds to distance himself, to reach the safety of the ground. The puckering grew into tearing, rending; white-hot levinbolts scouring his mind and body from within, power wrenched, riven away, twisted into the spark-form Galvatron desired. Shutting off his pain receptors was ineffectual. This pain wasn’t transmitted through his body, interpreted by his CPU. This pain existed as an integral aspect of every part of him the Allspark had infiltrated.
The cool stone floor felt good. Not moving felt good. Frantic pings and requests flooded his comms, but he kept the door locked, gave terse replies. He’d be properly functional again shortly. He had to be.
Powerful arms lifted him from the floor. A familiar field enveloped him. Familiar hands touched his face. Optimus kept his optics off, shut down his vocoder before a groan escaped as he was moved, turned over. The hands touched his frame here and there, sought beneath his armor. Metal skin touching metal opened a link.
Optimus?
How can I solace anyone like this? Optimus thought. What kind of harbor am I now?
The body entwining his seemed to phase insubstantial for a moment, then doubled strangely, sinking into him, between his armor and protoform, between his legs, between his chest plates, between himself and the pain. Sails whose color he could feel as vividly as sight wrapped around them.
Vector had seen what became of Primes who had been broken. He would not allow a similar fate to befall this one.
Optimus. Beloved, I cannot stay long. Can you unlatch your armor?
It took a grinding four seconds for Optimus to recall where within his memory core he’d stashed the codes that freed his armor from his protoform. One by one, then in a tumult the heavy plates and crumpling chameleon mesh fell away. He felt small and cold and vulnerable, shivering until Vector’s hands trailed blue glyphs in their wake along the planes and segments and whorls of his naked body, stirring his spark from its wounded lassitude.
“You must resist him.” Vector’s lips brushed his forehelm.
“I’ve been trying.” For the past six years the “attacks” had come every two or three months. Each time Optimus tried to call out to his twin, to reinstate their old spark-pulse code, the twin code. No answer. He tried through the Allspark itself, delving within; but the sickness from Galvatron’s moiety drove him back, impenetrable.
Vector shook his head but his voice was gentle, soothing. “You attempt only to blunt the force of injury to yourself. The Allspark itself is in distress. You must try to affect the kindlings Galvatron forces.”
“Impose my will over Galvatron’s.” Optimus shuddered. How could that not end in disaster?
“You forget one of your greatest skills,” Vector laughed. “Wheedle the Allspark itself. Turn the kindling. Send the Decepticons good sparks and true. Yes, they will suffer, surrounded as they will be by remorselessness. But in the end you aim to save them all, do you not? And if Galvatron’s new battalions contain within them the seeds of kindness, how much sooner, how much easier might the end of the war come?”
Optimus stared at him. “The miskindlings are harming the Allspark.”
“Yes.”
“Prowl hypothesizes that Galvatron and I are changing it, that we have embodied it.”
“Clever Prowl,” Vector purred. Wrapping a hand around the back of Optimus’ helm, he pressed their mouths together, pulling their chests into conjunction. Optimus at last bestirred his limbs, clutching at the ancient Prime. “You are a healer of sparks, Optimus. All sparks…” Vector opened him, opened himself, disassembling the false spaces between them.
When Optimus came out of recharge, Vector was gone. So was the pain.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
2039 - November
The Autobot parking lot behind the moon was getting crowded. Elita inserted her ship into a halo orbit at the Earth-Moon L2. The Ark was there, along with Smokescreen’s cruiser and Ultra Magnus’ long-range shuttle.
“Everybody’s ready to drop,” Chromia said. Elita unlocked herself from the pilot’s chair and joined them in the airlock.
…
“Uh, Optimus…?”
The fireball was coming right toward them. Some of the newer, younger embassy staff bailed to the sides. Optimus took a few steps closer. The cometary form carved a hundred-meter trench in the desert, halting so close to the road a couple of dirt clods tipped over onto the asphalt. Optimus leaned on his knees and laughed.
“Show-off,” Sam muttered, grinning up at Prime. No way was that Kup. Springer maybe? Why hadn’t Prime told anyone who was coming? It was someone pretty big anyway. As the form unfolded and stood, he thought for a second it was Chromia. No, the colors were wrong.
“Elita,” Prime hummed, embracing her warmly. She smiled, not accustomed to having to look up to meet his optics.
“Oh ho!” said Sam. He scuttled hastily out of the way, dragging Mikaela with him as the embassy mechs, plus Ultra Magnus and Bluestreak, visiting from Metroplex, converged on Prime and Elita with happy shouts and much banging of hands and shoulders and armor. Introductions were made where needed via cloud mind, human and Cybertronian curiosity and joy-of-reunion shared and expanded.
“How many?” Ratchet asked after some while.
Elita curled a finger around one of his cheek spars and pulled him in for a nuzzle. “Cubes of high-grade should you break out?”
“That too,” Ratchet agreed.
“Nineteen of us came,” she said. “I know you wanted me to bring everyone, Optimus, but we couldn’t bear to leave Cybertron completely unguarded.”
“I understand,” Prime said, hugging her so their armor creaked.
“I meant to ask you before; what are these?” Elita plucked one of the wipers away from Prime’s windshield, then let it snap back in place with a loud THWAPP. Optimus flinched, clapping a hand to his chest, emitting a garbled burst of noise from his vocoder.
“I so did not need to see that,” Sam groaned, having attained a reasonable perch on one of Bee’s shoulders. Mikaela had the other.
“Wow,” said Mikaela. “That’s going to be all over the tabloids by tomorrow. ‘OPTIMUS PRIME’S GIRLFRIEND GIVES NIPPLE-TWEAKS IN PUBLIC’…”
“Very like the media-drones in Iacon,” Elita laughed. The tangle of mechs around them ooohed and swayed with her laugh.
Prime was saved from further comments or explanations by the arrival of another cometary protoform. This one at a more discreet distance from the road.
Optics lowered as she uncurled from her crater. Faces turned away. No one spoke. (Except Fireflight. He couldn’t bring himself not to look at her, and his brothers caught and held him before he could run to embrace her.) Sam felt his stomach twist. He’d never seen them act like this. Never. Shunning, Bee explained via tight-beam, was gravely serious for Cybertronians. People had died from it, long ago.
Chromia walked the empty space that opened between herself and Prime. Head up and armor taut, fields painfully neutral.
“Aw, c’mere,” Prime said, holding out his arms. Chromia wished Ironhide at least would shoot her, but Prime’s subharmonics had been imperative. She accepted the embrace if only for the wave of relief coursing through the gathered mechs. Silverbolt let Fireflight go and Prime relinquished his hold to let Chromia pet down the jet’s anxiously rutched wings.
“I gave the order,” Elita said.
“I chose the way I carried it out,” Chromia insisted. “I’m sorry, Optimus.”
“It is not me you should apologize to,” Prime said.
Prowl stood rigid, head turned aside. The formality was unnecessary. He didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t want to think about it. His battle systems kept trying to run sims of Beta’s death. He wanted to bolt into the Security Office. Thundercracker knelt behind him, hands on Prowl’s shoulders - not restraining him; lending support - with Strake prickly and stiffly upright beside them.
Chromia felt as though she’d fallen ten thousand meters to land across a diatanium beam. Her spark lurched in her chest, but she patted Fireflight’s shoulders and moved past him toward Prowl.
She touched his hand, offering an arm cable. Strake hissed but she ignored him. “Prowl. I’m so sorry. I…I need to know what you’re feeling.”
Turning his head finally to look at her, Prowl accepted the link. A flash, thermonuclear annihilation, and then his looping memories and emotional tumult were locked behind hard firewalls.
Prowl… she entreated. I deserve…what you can show me. I didn’t think how our use of that alloy would upset you. It never occurred to me.
No. Cruel enough, what was done to me without my knowledge or consent. Cruel enough what I have done to others already. He touched her face, pressed his forehelm to hers. There’s no need to add to it. Chromia shivered and retracted the cable as he severed the link.
Fireflight dashed to her side, winding an arm around her shoulders, bestowing a quicksilver nuzzle upon Prowl, and baring his denta at Strake, who snapped back at him. Thundercracker rolled his optics, but giggles fluttered across the cloud mind at the two younger jets. There was something of a grin between them that couldn’t be entirely masked by the overt hostility. Chromia allowed herself to be drawn back into the cluster surrounding Elita and Prime.
Two more living meteorites landed. Firestar and Moonracer - soon encompassed by old friends. Red came pelting out of the Security Office and tackled Firestar and Inferno, knocking them all to the ground in a noisy tangle. No one had seen Red laughing like that in tens of thousands of years. Powerglide nearly crashed as he arrived from Oregon to sweep Moonracer up and swing her around.
“I can’t believe you’re still alive, you glitch,” Moonracer hooted, giving his shoulder a shove. “You call that flying?”
“Oh, shut up and kiss me,” Powerglide said. Arcee, however, had detached herself from Chromia and stuck her head between them, catching Moonracer’s kiss instead, setting Powerglide squalling like a stepped-on glitchmouse until Cliffjumper and Windcharger joined them in a rowdy clump.
Three more carved new craters in the sand. Then another two and six and four, all but one bounding into welcoming arms, voices chorused, harmonics ringing across the desert.
The last to land paused at the edge of the road. Matte black with jagged patterns of dark red that made her difficult to see amid the rubble of long-dead cities. She knew from Chromia’s memories which one he was - so different now from the slim, dark mech he’d been. Standing between two alphas. She knew the instant he noticed her.
Prowl took a single slow, deliberate step; nothing precipitous, nothing to startle her; but then he was running and his knees carved furrows in the road as he dropped and Spiral was in his arms - impossible, impossible - and warbling keens rose and fell from their throats and cables bound them tight.
“That’s…impossible,” Jazz said, knowing better as he said it. “I heard her in there, man! How can that be her?”
Prime turned to him, appalled at his First Lieutenant as he hadn’t been since the earliest, roughest days of the war. “You told him she was dead?”
Jazz clenched his jaw. “As much as. I thought she was!”
“Jazz… Never mind. I could have made the same mistake.”
But you didn’t, Jazz thought. Angry mostly at himself. Prime had volunteered to Mirage that Sleight was alive; if Jazz hadn’t known Optimus as well as he did, he’d have thought that a careless, almost cruel slip. Except Mirage had been kinda…bouncy…ever since. Slag. I gotta get Ratchet to give me a tune-up.
Three million years had separated them. Three million years was torn apart, categorized, repartitioned, shared and reassembled. Prowl accepted Spiral’s horror at what he’d become and done and not done. Spiral confessed to her own hard-driven cruelties, and to having volunteered for the spark chamber modification. She rode the forecasting loop this threw his CPU into, holding his body fast as he shook with visions of her nova. Prime knelt beside them, setting his mouth against Prowl’s helm.
I’m all right, Prowl sent. He couldn’t stop the loop outright, but he could alter his focus, let it run its course without being trapped by it. Spiral held him, alive, spark spinning bright. She looked up - and up - at the approach of the two Seekers. She kept Prowl’s head cradled to her chest and extended her denta.
“Fierce little je,” Thundercracker said, approving.
They’re trining, Jazz explained helpfully.
Shut up, Jazz, said Prowl.
And you’re trine leader, Jazz continued.
Shut up, Jazz, said Thundercracker, but he was grinning. Spiral released Prowl at last and leapt to the Seeker’s shoulder, stalking up to his face, hands on hip gimbals. She cocked her head, taking in the blue optics in the raptor’s face.
“I think I like you, too,” she said.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
“Nice suit,” Optimus told the new Secretary of Defense. Leonard Williams had finally retired with a tidy pension and his wife to an equally tidy little house on the Canadian border, far from bright lights and big cities.
“Like it?” Epps said, spreading his arms. “Wife picked it out.”
“I suspected as much.”
“What? What’s wrong with what I pick out?”
“I’ve seen your t-shirts.”
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