(no subject)

[tainry]

Title: Borealis 74/92: Sigh No More - Part I
Author: tainry
Disclaimer: Not mine, no money.
Rating: R
Characters/Pairing(s): Ensemble/several
Warnings: Not very explicit violence; robots snuggling - pnp, spark, tactile; OCs; mention of character death
Summary: Wherein Borealis is bruised, First Aid is tired, there are two funerals and some reminiscing, Spiral and Prowl have a snuggle, the robots help with planetwide disaster relief, snipers attack, Bluestreak snuggles Seekers, Prowl sings, and Springer has some uncomfortable thoughts.
Notes: Lyrics from "May It Be" by Enya on the FotR soundtrack. The Sursameni gleefully stolen from Iain Banks' Matter. "Sigh No More" by Mumford & Sons is a neat song. The notion of districtformers borrowed from the otherworldly and talented kalaryx with permission.
~10K words.


BOREALIS: Sigh No More

2039 - May

Six deltas in the med-bay was at least four too many. Helms and wings knocking ceiling and walls, feet in everyone’s way, including their own. Ratchet shooed Silverbolt and the new ones out. Skyfire at least had had the sense to sit on the floor, taking unobtrusive scans of Borealis in stasis on one table and helping Wheeljack repair the Lambo Twins.

Casualties among the Autobots had been light this round. By dawn Ratchet had discharged most of his patients and the med-bay hummed in its own quiet, intent sort of sleep. Borealis’ optics lit.

Skyfire retracted his monitoring cable and stood, leaning over to stroke her cheek spars - so like Ratchet’s - with the backs of his fingers.

She sifted through status reports and alerts as her HUD came up. She was banged up, but someone had cut away parts of her armor, pounded it back into shape, and reattached it. She hoped she wouldn’t make a habit of this. Pulling a thread from Skyfire’s optical feed, she knew she looked terrible. About how she felt. Everything ached. Skyfire nuzzled her helm.

“You understand now, don’t you, why we don’t do that?” Flying close to c, in realspace, he meant. She sat up, groaning, and he sat next to her.

“Yeah. No more long enough levers for me. If I ever meet Archimedes, I’m gonna kick his ass.”

Skyfire laughed softly. “That was a very physicist-like tactic. I’m sure Prowl’s tucking it away in his memory core.”

“Oh dear.”

Skyfire leaned his chin on her shoulder, smiling. She leaned back, opening connections to cloud mind and Earth’s net. News vids and emergency reports flashed across her mind, shuffled and sorted, and she bolted upright, Skyfire grabbing her and holding her down as she struggled and wailed. “No! Oh no! The winter!”

“Hush, hush. We know, Borealis.” Earth was even now heading toward the beginning of at least ten long, bitter, dark-skied winters. “Perceptor and I have studied these effects before. Every planet is unique, but there are protocols. We can mitigate the worst of it with technology the humans already possess.”

There would still be famine. So many had already died. Cities had been torn in two, separated by glassy canyons a kilometer across. Along coastlines the chasms had filled with ocean, hissing and boiling until the stone cooled. The fires would take months to fully extinguish. New maps would have to be made. Sunsets, where they could be seen at all, would be spectacular.

Borealis pressed her face to the angle between Skyfire’s head and shoulder and keened.

The morning waxed fair, sun through the skylight filling the med-bay. Maggie wandered in, her first coffee steaming in her hand. She climbed the ladder up to Borealis’ table one-handed with the grace of long practice. Women half her age envied her and Mikaela’s shoulders. She clambered and tightroped across hills and flanges of thirty yards of robot landscape; dark blue scuffed and scraped to dull charcoal. A white-armored cave of hand formed around her for the last ascent to a shoulder bigger than her old Civic. Mission Control, the Eagle has landed.

“This won’t stop us,” Maggie said, leaning her body against Borealis’ cheek spar. Even through the parts of the robots that were meant to be armor, you could feel that they were warm and alive. “You know it won’t. New things will be built from this.”

“I do not doubt you,” Skyfire said. “But perhaps it is just as well that the Autobots will be removing back to Cybertron in a few decades.” He was watching the news as well, with different filters.

“Not all of them,” Maggie insisted. She turned and braced her back on Borealis’ helm, sipping her coffee. “Not all of us.”

“No.” His optics were enormous, unreadable, ancient; the scale of his thoughts a gulf Maggie found she couldn’t bridge. He could bend himself to shapes that helped him adapt to vastnesses of time and gravity, but he had never completely bent himself to a shape that Earth could hold and translate. Yet she had audio-visual memories from Hound - so many layers pared away so her brain could make sense of them - of Skyfire kneeling and holding Safeguard close. The starship loved at a level commensurate with his size, and a tenderness.

“Plexie won’t leave,” Borealis said, quiet but sure into Skyfire’s shoulder. “She built herself for here. Hi, Maggie.”

“Mornin’, Little Bird. How’s that headache?”

“Urgh. Battleships are hard.”

“I bet.” Maggie sipped her coffee again, wondering if Borealis thought it smelled good even though she couldn’t drink it. She patted Borealis’ helm and began the long descent. Skyfire handed her down. Out of chivalry or a desire to have her leave more quickly she wasn’t sure until she turned to back down the ladder and saw him tilt his head to kiss Borealis. All right, she could take a hint. No big deal, it was a work-day anyway.

Skyfire nibbled at Borealis’ lip components with short sharp movements, rising fields coloring the birdlike motion with focused heat. His hands were still, but she could feel a kaleidoscope of scans pass through and into her, return signals painting the limits of her pain, guiding him to the places he could help. His snow-white armor was splashed and spattered with carbon - he hadn’t had a chance to bathe yet, hadn’t bothered with cosmetic damage. She cupped his chest with her own hands, replying scan for scan, feeling the thrum of his spark in her wrists, up her arms, in her chest.

Perceptor was online. Still. How long had it been this time? He caressed them across the air, rising from the hasty berth he’d taken in the bunkhouse down the stem corridor. Limping slightly, it took him longer than usual to reach the med-bay, but Skyfire pulled him up between them once he arrived at their table.

He cabled to old friend and new, sharing a pleasant low buzz of desire that slowly subdued the afterimages of terror from the battle. Eight light cannons aligned with his, running off eight sparks of his spark. He’d wanted to drag them all to the lowest floor of Wheeljack’s tower.

“Don’t chide me, Skyfire,” he whispered, shivering. “Please don’t. I know… oh, I know what I’m doing.” He kissed the elder delta fiercely. Vector’s hands… We must align life against cruelty and ending. Borealis flared and unlimbered behind him, stretching her wing-segments, fingertips inquisitive. Skyfire belled and bowed like a cloud-bank. He didn’t answer with words or glyphs, pushing instead across the cables the blowing tide of his love, admiration, affection, gemmed with tiny, distant points of fear.

The fears were charted, navigated by, approached and orbited. Skyfire laughed and surrendered, pulling them with him as he rolled onto his side on the repair table, Perceptor happily pinned between the deltas.

Perceptor sammich! Borealis hummed.

“Yes, but I’m afraid there’s more bun than meat,” Perceptor said, and Borealis almost fell off the table. In retaliation, Skyfire extended a fine manipulator and stroked the scar on Perceptor’s neck, watching, pleased, as Perceptor writhed.

Seeing him, feeling him, Borealis dove, following his consciousness as it wavered, slipped into different states on his way through and recovery from overload. He gladly shared his mind with her, and with Skyfire. His truncated memories helped make him seem like a much younger person, one with little experience other than immersion in war. He had given up his civilian life, bit by bit, in order to save something larger. Skyfire’s sadness swept over them swift and powerful as a gamma burst, but brief, both honed and blunted by acceptance. Perceptor let them wind around him, touching, petting, mourning what was lost.

“That is not all that I am,” he said, and he opened his spark chamber. Teal light mingled with pale blue and deeper blue as the deltas followed, unleashing a binary around him, their meshing coronae passing entirely through his body, bending around his own chamber to create wave patterns that sent him over the edge again.

“Don’t fight it,” Skyfire murmured. “You’re that tired.”

“I’ll take you with me yet,” Perceptor gasped, and pulsed the spinning of his spark, throwing the waves back at them, coupled with giddy pleasure through the cables.

Skyfire locked an arm between himself and Borealis’ shoulder to keep them from mashing Perceptor between them as they arched and warbled, laughing as the table beneath them groaned. “Aren’t we a fine trio,” he said, as the blue static seeped into the table’s grounding wires and faded. “Red Alert taught us too well.”

“Toes,” said a small voice from the floor.

Borealis lit her optics. Tessera - minus one lower arm - stood at the repair bay door. There was quite an expanse of delta feet hanging over the edge of the table. Perceptor giggled and beckoned and Tessera climbed up between him and Borealis, collecting her bit on the way. She arranged herself in the rather uncannily boneless way she had between her progenitors, began the preliminary shut-down protocols for recharge and blinked shyly at Skyfire.

“Can we recharge now?” Skyfire asked.

“Yes, dear,” said Perceptor.

<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>

First Aid stood as he finished treating the last patient in the row, to find that that was the last row of patients. The next section of supine people on tarps were the human doctors catching some sleep while they could before the next group of med-evac helis came in. Mirage appeared at his elbow with a full cylinder of energon. Aid wanted to kiss him.

Prowl, Jazz and Smokescreen were organizing the worldwide mobilization of food, personnel and supplies, while Smokescreen underhandedly kept a surreptitious optic on where the money was going, particularly whether it was going to where it was supposed to, or disappearing down individual pockets. They and Teletraan, as usual, kept an active site open where anyone who wanted to access their observational data could do so. Everyone knew what everyone else was doing, or not doing. Not everyone was pleased with this transparency. But the complaints appeared as well, on the same page as observations regarding the complainants. One could accuse Prowl, say, of doctoring the numbers, but most human authorities tended to respond to such allegations with raised eyebrows and a tired, “Really…?” With optional rolling of eyes. Not that this stopped the yelling, but it tapered off fairly quickly. The Autobots had enthusiastically shared intel for over twenty years; and they were always terrifyingly scrupulous in allowing the humans to do with that data whatever they chose.

Aid activated his articulation locks to keep himself from falling over until he’d finished the entire cylinder. “Oh, Mir. Thank you.” According to his readouts it wasn’t enough, but it would keep him from involuntary shutdown for another 24 hours. Mirage wrapped an arm around his waist.

“Come. Rest. Blades says you have half an hour.”

They found a rubble-covered hill, where partial walls hid them from the smoky morning. A beam of sunlight found Mirage’s helm as he lifted his face to Aid’s, rainbows blooming across the iridescent metal like the warmth blooming between them, rising through the spectrum. Mirage’s hands danced beneath Aid’s armor, telling ancient stories in motion and pressure and patterns of pleasure that Aid didn’t know enough Cybertronian history yet to decipher fully. Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. Gilgamesh in the original Sumerian. He found himself spiraling into overload, clutching at Mirage, gasping cries escaping him.

He reflexively fought falling into recharge for a moment, but then came to his senses. He set a timer and let himself go. Half an hour of shutdown would be nice.

<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>

2039 - November

There was solace to be had in the hum of wheels on a road. Comfort offered by the wind across a body. Daveed Wazir’s funeral had been not unlike Ixchel Chase’s all those years ago. More colleagues than family, little official fanfare, a handful of self-important academics making unfelt eulogies.

Wheeljack had enjoyed their talks over the years. Sometimes he brought Mirage or Tracks along; gaining as much from the Tower mechs’ tales as the human - some of the details were equally new to both of them. Wheeljack had known many Towers mechs, had built many things at their requests, both sensible and fanciful, but he had never lived in the Towers, hadn’t been built and programmed for that peculiar environment.

“There were apartments within apartments,” Mirage explained once. “Suites within suites. Unlike the cities, who plan everything down to the nanometer, the Towers were spontaneously added to and modified and disassembled and reassembled and changed constantly; growing like a living forest, up into the sky, down into the canyon separating them from the Universities. If you knew the way, you could travel from suite to suite of a night, from party to party, and never see or smell or taste or feel a field or hear music the same in any chamber. Artists and poets and singers, musicians, playwrights, actors, dancers, and architects; dabblers, dilettantes, innovators, synaesthetes, and integratrixes mingled and argued and forged new ideologies and arts.

“The rest of Cybertron preferred us to stay in the Towers, but of course we didn’t. We happily made nuisances of ourselves anywhere the whims took us. We had to see and experience everything. We had to talk with people, even if we later decided they were boring.” Mirage laughed, leaning toward his listeners in their candle-lit dark as though imparting a delicious secret. “You’ve never been shooed properly if you’ve never been shooed by a century guardian.”

Daveed had set up a camera in one corner. He knew Wheeljack was recording for him, but he liked having his own set of disks, a copy from a slightly different point of view, with all the static and pixellations his old video camera provided. There was something human and flawed and homey about it. Daveed had never seen the Blair Witch movie. On nights like this his empty garage took on the atmosphere of a sheik’s tent on a caravan route, and Daveed knew he was hearing tales millennia older and lightyears more exotic. He wished with all his heart that he didn’t have to sleep. Although even if he nodded off, the robots might continue talking, leaving the recordings behind as proof the enchantment had been real for Daveed to find the next morning. He wasn’t certain how they had carried him to his bed, though.

One day Wheeljack brought him to the embassy, and up to the mesa top to talk with the Seekers and Prowl. When the three landed, Prowl initially kept himself firmly between Thundercracker and Strake and the human. Daveed stood firm. He wanted to talk with all of them. It was important. Even though, he thought, the dinosaurs themselves could not have been so imposing.

“How many humans have you personally killed?” Daveed asked, cutting to the heart.

“Are the numbers that important?” Thundercracker clacked his mandibles. Not reticent but a combination of disgusted and curious. “4,712. I have discovered the names of 3,658 of them.”

Daveed felt odd. But he was concentrating very hard on the very large predator with whom he was speaking. “Is…is that important to you? Knowing the names?”

“Names, voices, sparks,” Thundercracker said, touching his own helm, throat, chest. “All are important.”

“The names recall the individuals,” Prowl explained. “Raw numbers alone turn people into objects. Knowing, understanding the relationships between people is part of our learning process.”

“Punishment, you mean?”

“Consequences,” Thundercracker said. “More effective than punishment, in the long run.”

Daveed looked at Strake. Wheeljack had explained a goodly deal about all three of them. Daveed was given to understand that trining was something akin to marriage; a certain formality of emotional bond, though the physical requirements were quite different.

“I…I wanted to ask you about that. About the Decepticon side of the story, and how you’re feeling now, fitting in, or…or not?” Predator! Giant predator! He was hesitant to say anything about switching sides, turncoats, traitors. Civil wars were always difficult for the populace. How much worse when the civil war had nearly ended the civilization itself?

“What difficulty we endure now is unimportant,” Thundercracker said. “Reconciling will be difficult. Rebuilding will be difficult. And maybe it’s too soon to think about those things. We are Cybertronians. We adapt, we transform. Megatron’s Great Experiment, his plans for expansion, for remaking our race into a superior version of itself… It felt so noble at the time. It felt like what we needed.”

“It was exciting,” Strake agreed. “We were the Empire’s guardians. We were strong and beautiful and everyone loved us, wanted to be us.” He struck a dramatic pose, and even Daveed, from his perspective so close to the ground, so far from the alien’s world, could see the irony thus conveyed. “We were programmed to believe we were the superior form of life in the universe. And Megatron’s armies were the best of the best.”

“Strange how similar events in your species’ recent history are,” Thundercracker said. “Every horror your people have visited upon each other we have also committed, to a far greater degree.”

Daveed rubbed his forehead, wishing he didn’t understand so well. “How do you cope with that knowledge, then?”

“As best we can,” Strake said, examining the trees around them as though they might contain enemies. Or as though he had suddenly acquired a compelling interest in botany.

“Remorse can be gained by sharing the memory files of the injured party,” Thundercracker explained. “Even, usually, if the injured party was deactivated. But once the spark’s snuffed, it can’t forgive.”

“Murder was your one unforgivable crime, then,” Daveed said. This too was familiar. He was Mizrahi on his mother’s side.

“Yes,” said Prowl. “Civil procedures aside.”

“What was the punishment?”

“Medical stasis until the Council decided what to do with you. Depended on a lot of things.” Thundercracker scraped a talon along a cheek spar. “If the spark was deemed …how would you put it, Prowl? Healthy? Salvageable? Worthy?”

“Depending on the era, usually ‘healthy’. But there were times when ‘worthy’ would be more appropriate. There were lexicons of definitions for both.”

“Yeah. Comes down to, long as your spark wasn’t psycho, you got benefit of the doubt and they’d just fiddle with your programming, maybe reforge you ae if you’d been something more aggressive.”

Daveed set aside his emotional and physical reaction to the notion of being forcibly rebuilt, body changed by order of the state. “Knowing what you do now about what happens to your sparks after death, would you keep those laws as they were or modify them?”

Thundercracker laughed and nudged Prowl’s shoulder. “I know what Prime’s gonna have you and Spiral doing, once the war’s over.”

“For one thing, the murdered can in some cases be consulted,” Prowl said. “Not…not always.” He shuttered his optics. Strake lunged at him, hugging him hard until the flashback eased its grip. Daveed sat motionless, bearing witness, knowing he had been asking the correct people the correct questions. He was glad he’d come, despite how terrifying the Seekers were.

“Optimus talked with the Dalai Lama a lot,” Thundercracker said quietly. “And Desmond Tutu. And Dorothee Soelle. He took especially the Buddhist notions of forgiveness to spark. It won’t be the same on Cybertron, when this is over. It can’t be. Not forgiving creates discord in the cloud mind. Almost a fifth of our remaining number is Con, and two fifths of all Cybertronians have taken a life.” Would death really bring him, or Prowl, peace? Thundercracker wasn’t so sure. They couldn’t count on oblivion. Perchance to dream. Perchance his aft. Prime’s ruling was scorchingly clever. It could be that their only hope lay in continued life. Only by living out their sentences could they make amends and gain some measure of peace before surrendering to the Allspark.

On another day, Tracks joined them in a park, sunny and clear in autumn, too bright for spooky tales, perhaps, yet Daveed had unsettling dreams that night.

“Polyhex, as you no doubt guess from the name,” Tracks began, “was composed of six districtformers, rather than a single city-entity. One of those six was called the Well Market, because she was the biggest commercial district of offworld goods on the planet. At the bottom of Cybertron’s gravity well, you see?”

Daveed nodded. He knew the deep-Seekers thought in terms of gravity and many of their senses were tuned to its fluctuations and gradients in the universe. The Allspark was also sometimes called the Well of All Sparks. Daveed thought it was interesting that a species that did not have much use for water nevertheless did have a word for “well”. There were such things as oil wells, he reminded himself.

“At the Well Market you could buy anything you could think of, and many things most people couldn’t. There were energy exchange columns at all the entrances; just open a fuel line and get coded chits the offworlders would accept as money. The only place on Cybertron you needed them.”

Mirage nodded. The distinction between goods and services was somewhat blurred on Cybertron. “The Well Market was actually below one of the other five districts of Polyhex; three above three below. Our cities were usually sunk some distance into the active layer, straddling the older shells. Anyway, this made getting there interesting for the aliens, but once there most of them could remove their respirators, because the whole district was atmospherically modified. Bubbles for oxygen-breathers, bubbles for methane-breathers, bubbles for carbon-dioxide-breathers, separated by selective fields rather than airlocks.”

“Imagine getting Skyfire through an airlock down there,” Tracks laughed. “People that big could walk the main thoroughfares, but the Well Market had a lot of narrow side streets. Mechs Prime’s size or larger usually borrowed a proxy drone.”

“Oh! Proxy drones!” Mirage’s optics brightened. “Those were fun! They came in bright colors and they were simple - just arms, legs, torso, head - nothing fancy but anyone could hook into one and control it without having to fiddle with specialized proprioceptive algorithms. And they didn’t transform.”

“Remember Kaleid?” Tracks said. “That used to freak her out.” He looked at Daveed. “Kaleid always had at least four alt modes, often six, and she was always changing them. There were repair and reformat shops that wouldn’t let her in because she was so particular, and the transform geometries got really complicated.”

“I remember the night she got stuck between hoversled and skimmer,” Mirage said, chuckling. “You could literally hear her yelling from the University Side. I asked Moonheight over in Helium. He’d thought someone had stepped on a turbofox.”

“Ouch,” said Wheeljack. “I actually did that once, on accident. Had to reset my audials, after. Anyway, now, me, the thing I liked most about the Well Market was getting lost in it. The shops and stalls changed all the time, and there were a couple of places like Knockturn Alley, where things got a little rascally and a mech did well to cache her money-chits cleverly. The aVevbri have a lot of tentacles, and they’re fast. If you got really lost, Well herself would tell you where you were, but the shortwave maps were never updated on purpose, and it was deep enough most people couldn’t hear the stars, and Cybertron doesn’t have a magnetic field - imagine the havoc! - so compasses like you have here on Earth wouldn’t work.

“Oh yes, getting lost was a traditional pastime,” Mirage said. “Like in Venice. You inevitably found all the best places that way. There was a corner stall that served the most fantastic arsenic-molybdenum pretzels, oh Primus.”

Tracks sat up and pointed at him. “I know exactly the stall you mean! Wryhinge’s!”

“Yes!”

They reminded Daveed of any other travelers, trading memories. What did it matter if the other travelers he knew before now had only toured places on one planet, instead of many? The horizons expanded as they might; the call of the road, the lure of the journey was the same.

They talked through that day and night, and in the morning, after he’d nodded off in mid-story and been somehow carried to his hotel bed, Daveed had dreamt of aliens, shadowy forms with glittering eyes and mis-arranged faces, pacing through veils of force and smoggy atmospheres, hawking wares he could not identify, in languages he didn’t know, and he hadn’t any money and they had tried to cut him, to get him to open a vein to pay in blood.

On another summer’s day, they met at a grassy patch by the road near Middle Lake in Golden Gate Park. Mirage and Tracks liked San Francisco despite the frequent rain. The hills were fun to drive and the scenery was always interesting.

Daveed sat at a park bench and ate a bento lunch while the three mechs sat or sprawled carefully on the ground.

“Do you know,” Daveed said, obviously embarrassed but willing to plunge through it, “when I first saw the two of you, I noticed the traces of decoration on your bodies. I wondered if perhaps you were elites, aristocracy of some kind.” The rules of primogeniture would not, of course, operate in quite the same way among robots.

“Aristocracy? Us?” Mirage grinned as Tracks made level-3 rudeness coughing noises, remembering the ambassador from Sursamen. Nobles! The Sursameni had of course made the assumption based on his own society’s structure. But Mirage, whose name had been Susurrus back then, had fallen among a heap of his friends later, helpless with laughter. Nobles, if he was understanding the concept correctly, were the wealthiest and most respected and powerful tier of a hierarchical society. In one way or another; apparently this got messy sometimes. Residents of the Towers, by contrast, were widely regarded by the rest of Cybertron as weird at best, deviant at worst, and tolerated with varying mixes of affection, covert admiration and incomprehension. They had virtually no power as the Sursameni would have understood it, aside from the cultural power inherent in art and literature. Wealth was a chancy notion among Cybertronians, most of whom could transmute other elements to gold or platinum or high-grade plutonium within their bodies; though most people wouldn’t see the point of doing so unless one was damaged and needed such elements for self-repair, and the energy cost generally made the process not worth the effort. Anyone could walk around with a gold-plated aft if they wanted one, but they'd get laughed at by everyone else.

Tracks, coming from Vanadium Tower, where the collective sense of humor had more knives in it than that of Iridium, remembered that ambassador, and the jokes his friends had played on the unsuspecting Sursameni embassy.

Daveed watched them, working hard to understand, finding his way by many false paths around the idea of their society, which no longer seemed to fit any of the neat anthropological labels he’d learned at university. Aliens. Aliens! And even that word seemed inadequate, self-centered, xenophobic.

He let Wheeljack read all his notes, not just the official ones he meant to publish, but his private journal entries, his interior struggles, wrestled into words on paper. Held so carefully, like a doll’s book, in Wheeljack’s big hands, delicate tools unreeling from his fingertips to turn the pages; his optics visibly focusing on the tiny handwriting. Daveed felt that Wheeljack would be kind, would not savage his fragile human thought processes. And there were questions, Daveed was sure, that he hadn’t thought to ask, but that might occur to the engineer.

How odd to think Wheeljack might understand him better than most of his fellow humans.

Wheeljack shared his thoughts with candor, too, Daveed felt. He could never be empirically certain of course - everyone’s mind was its own Chinese box. He introduced Daveed to Prime, who also answered every question with a gentle comfortableness that set Daveed at ease despite Prime’s size and status. The UN council kept trying to elect Prime as their President. Prime declined all such offers, stating that he was not qualified for such roles. He had been built as a leader of his own species alone. Daveed had warmed to him quickly, had been excited to be able to ask questions not only of the living Prime, but have answers relayed from the previous Primes as well. Cybertronian living history, living memory…well, there was a tricky concept.

Living memory was shared, distributed across all living Cybertronians, like bacterial RNA, flashing across the population fast as thought, facilitated by the AIs. AIs who were not themselves alive as measured by Cybertronians, for whom the presence or absence of a spark seemed to be more fundamental than the presence or absence of a vertebral column or cell nuclei. A binary distinction.

And the memories themselves could have come from mechs who were no longer living. The Matrix was only the most obvious example. Mirage and Tracks in particular seemed to be repositories of their subculture’s collective recollection. Keepers of the culture itself, in all its richness and variety.

The sensory opulence never stopped amazing him. They recorded all their inputs, not just sight and sound, but touch and chemoreception and EM information and gravity data and emotional states and spectra of things human science hadn’t dreamt of yet. Even attempting to encompass what the merest fraction of that kind of sharing was like had been overwhelming until Daveed accepted his own limitations and went with what he could understand.

“When we first began, I wanted to ask if you could give me the video without the text data and target sights or whatever those are. The HUD layer, I suppose? But then I realized that’s how you see. I had to learn to accept that complexity of input if I was going to have any chance of understanding anything about how you perceive your surroundings.” The little man smiled. “I knew then how completely I was out of my depth. But I couldn’t give it up.”

“I’m glad. It’s like a backup, what you’re doing, ya know.” Wheeljack touched Daveed’s back between the shoulder-blades, as gentle as Daveed had thought he would be. He’d been slapped harder by over-jolly human colleagues.

“Drives always fail,” Daveed said ruefully. “No such thing as too many backups.”

“You got that right,” Wheeljack laughed.

…

Hound, Prowl, Arcee and Cliffjumper met them at the hangar door as they drove up and transformed.

“Oh,” said Wheeljack. “Hey.” They took his hands and Mirage’s hands and drew them inside, down the stem corridor, to a sphere-room banded in red and ochre and honey amber like the inside of a gas giant’s cloud layer.

Prowl was the largest of them now, the base the rest of them built themselves around, attached themselves to. The holdfast. They swayed around him, in motion relative to his steadiness, their minds streamering down into murky depths and cold. Exposing the loss, tracing its borders, pulling up the insidious roots before they could lodge too deep. Cold currents stirred the waters of this world’s oceans. Cold currents brought the richest nutrients, enabled new blooms of life.

“Doesn’t seem fair,” Wheeljack said, “to only know somebody a couple of decades. Doesn’t seem long enough. Pretty obvious, huh? We know it in our processors how long they live the minute we come down and load up the nets. I just hadn’t really thought about it. Anybody could see he was getting up there, I just didn’t really think about it.” Daveed, ironically, had declined the mindstate backups. He wanted his work to speak for him. His individual life, his human mind by itself, he’d said, was no more important than anyone else’s. Wheeljack would remember him, without having to reproduce him in a metal body, creating a person that wouldn’t really be him any more.

Mirage refused to think about the lines on Bobby’s face, the silver in Theresa’s hair, the beautiful daughters each in their turn marrying princes - brave princes and sincere; they dared not be otherwise - and transforming their parents into grandparents. Hound didn’t push, only held him. The inevitable would come when it would, borrowing misery ahead of time wouldn’t help.

<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>

I’m staying, Spiral tight-beamed. She and Prowl were curled up on the highest tier of berths in the bunkhouse, next to the door, where they would be easily overlooked by anyone entering. They’d been there for two days. No one seemed particularly inclined to disturb them. I’m not going back to Cybertron until we all do. I’d like to stay here with you and Prime. And your trine. She didn’t have to append or ask: if it’s all right with you. The surge of joy-exultation-relief-desire in his fields and over the still-warm cables was more than answer enough. Although he added a small glyph of fond rebuke over the insistence of her and everyone else on this trining nonsense. He wasn’t an alpha. He’d never been an alpha. Sixty-nine years had yet to pass before he could consider whether he wanted to be reforged as an alpha.

“That’s not even a vorn,” Spiral laughed. “You’re still fun to tease - you’re adorable when you’re flustered; though I think at least half that fluster sometimes is exaggeration. For the benefit of whoever’s teasing you.”

“If you intend to spread that rumor in the most efficient manner,” Prowl murmured against her helm, “I suggest you tell Teletraan, Cliffjumper, Huffer and Grapple first. In that order. They’re the biggest gossips on the planet.” Among a cohort of Autobots no less, and Autobots in general were a gossipy bunch at baseline.

Spiral laughed and tickled his chest. He opened instantly under her fingers. Her laugh turning to a soft hum, she followed suit, pressing the edges of their chambers together, their consciousnesses sinking together, spins synching together, reaching for the wholeness that was their origin and ultimate fate.

<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>

“Yeah, we gotta get that outta there but there won’t be a crane available that can handle the weight until next week.” The foreman checked his datapad. When he looked up again, Optimus Prime and Elita One had waded out and positioned themselves at either end of the capsized tanker.

“Where do you want it?” Elita asked. The foreman pointed.

With no outward signal, the two robots lifted. The trickiest part had been finding handholds where the tanker itself wouldn’t buckle under the strain. Each step perfectly in unison, they moved the damaged hulk to a cleared space by the road, where it could be easily maneuvered later into a drydock for repairs or disassembly.

“That’s… You…” the foreman gaped. With a visible effort he took hold of himself and closed his mouth. “Thanks. Thank you.” The leader of a whole planet (the foreman hadn’t had time for months to watch much TV; he wasn’t clear on who Elita was, exactly, but he was glad enough of her help), up to his knees - and that was a long way up - in grease and mud and oil and garbage and soot, helping the East Coast recovery crews in any way he could. Which so far seemed to mean mostly doing a lot of heavy lifting. Really heavy lifting. That hadn’t been the biggest tanker on the Atlantic by a long sight, but Mary and Joseph it was quite a thing to see it picked up and maneuvered like an oversized couch.

Elita dusted off her hands. “Next?”

<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>

There was a soft chuff. By the time the incoming sound waves reached her audials, Borealis was already moving. She stuck her hand between missile and Thundercracker’s portside optic, its target. The needle-like missile scraped along her chine and went whining away harmlessly into the scrub. She hadn't even felt it, really, but she rubbed that wrist thoughtfully as she watched the human would-be sniper scurry away through the abandoned building. She was appalled to realize that she had a target lock on him. She had weapons that could pierce his tiny body or fry him alive, even from blocks away and through any intervening structures. Repressing a shudder, she turned to glare at Thundercracker instead.

What the hell have I done? Why did I do that? He deserves anything he gets. The projectile probably would have blinded him at most, but it was hard to be certain. Even bargain basement IEDs these days could be surprisingly sophisticated, and optics were one of a Seeker's few vulnerable points.

She considered. Perhaps it was because her spark had evolved from Ratchet’s and Prime's. She would have done as much for anyone, tried to protect anyone if she found herself in a position to do so. It was an Autobot-ly thing to do. And...and maybe she hadn't thought about who it even was. No, you big lummox; you think at nanosecond speeds. You knew who you were protecting.

Thundercracker regarded her, blue optics unblinking. Thank you, he tight-beamed. You didn’t have to do that, but thank you.

She bared her denta and growled in reply. When he brushed her wrist with his wingtip, though, she didn’t jerk her hand away.

<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>

The earthquake turned the hillside to a tossing, frothing slurry of mud, rocks, debris that had been houses, cars and bicycles, and everything else in its path. Travelling at a speed faster than the average human could run, with the consistency of wet concrete, no one in the way stood a chance. Inferno, therefore, ran right in.

Plucking the entire family off their verandah just before the wave of mud and what was essentially shrapnel hit their house, he held them above his head and braced for the impact. Back the way he’d come would bring him to the edge of the slide sooner, so that way he headed, leaning almost parallel with the slope of the hill, taking each step with calculated care.

Firestar - a cow under one arm and a car full of humans under the other - watched him even as she made her own swift way to safer ground. She heard metal striking metal, saw Inferno jerk, falter…and regain his balance and momentum. The flow of the slide was up to his chest. With a last heave, he leapt clear, onto what Firestar hoped was a more stable section of hillside. A long spar of metal - a lightpost, she realized after a moment - was sticking out of his side. No, sticking through his side. If it had gone in a meter closer to midline… Well, it was hard to tell. Probably his spark chamber would have deflected it, unless the angle was just exactly unluckily right. But she’d read about straws being punched through two by fours by tornadoes. The velocities weren’t quite the same here, but there was a lot of force, a lot of mass, behind the flow.

Inferno set the family down, spoke to them briefly in their own language, and sauntered over to Firestar as she set her passengers down as well. He grinned. “Just like old times, ey?” Firestar laughed and punched his shoulder with a resounding clang. She took hold of the lightpost and yanked, her optics and Inferno’s locked as she hauled the length of metal out of him. Sparks flew and energon dripped, but nothing important had been hit.

“Yeah,” Firestar said. “Guess it is.”

<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>

Having a proper eyrie to return to after a long flight felt good and right. Thundercracker had been more moved than he wanted to let on that Metroplex had built herself deliberately with a space for his kind to be comfortable. The mosaics on the columns and thin, arching bands of walls and domed ceilings were exquisite; fractal compositions in blues and golds and whites, evoking clouds and air deepening to eternal night and stars.

He toyed with the notion of having himself and Strake remanded to Bluestreak’s supervision permanently now that Spiral was staying. He could imagine how Strake would take that. Not that they didn’t like Blue. Fragging kid was ridiculously personable, though he could be jumpy if TC and Strake approached him too silently. Prowl didn’t like being pounced either. Strake had nearly gotten his face shot off enough times you’d think he’d learn not to do that. Young alphas and moving objects. Never a good combination

Strake landed next to him, black wings glossy in the high mountain sunlight. He nibbled on Thundercracker’s mouth before leading the way down the ramp spiraling the interior of the tower. Bluestreak met them halfway, reaching up for hugs and pressing his helm against their chests, listening to their sparks spin fiercely, not yet slowed after their flight.

“Ultra Magnus is out with the others in Marrakech,” Blue told them. “So it’s us and Plexie for tonight. Polaris says he’s bringing Prowl and Spiral out here in a few weeks so Spiral can meet Plexie and Prowl can catch up with Nightbeat and Afterburner. I think they’re tracking more than food supplies, don’t you? Nightbeat definitely has a chemoreceptor for trouble.”

They followed him down and out to a nearby garden, settling around a glowing sculpture that functioned as a fire pit without actually burning any precious wood. The trickle and rush of fountains nearby meshed with the wind through Metroplex’s towers and sails, though between her arms they were sheltered from the cold. The amber light from the sculpture reflected into the niche with Kalis’ column, creating a chiaroscuro of the abstract form.

“It makes me sad that Kalis won’t say anything anymore.” Blue nestled between the two Seekers, squirming himself a space among their angles and armor where he could feel their heat, and the hum of their sparks. “I almost miss the screaming. At least it was something. You knew he was in there.”

Thundercracker bowed his head to nibble on Bluestreak’s audial. There was no form of Cybertronian life that hadn’t been damaged or destroyed. Rebuilding would take eons. He found himself anxious to start; he wanted the boring part, the dying and killing and attacks and feints and counterattacks and convoluted strategies, to be over so that they could get to the interesting part of the story. The remaking part. The growing, living part. He drew air through the vents in his forearms, pulling the wet, green scents of the garden into his chemoreceptors. This weird planet was getting to him.

“Yeah,” said Strake. “Now we have to take Smokescreen’s word that he’s still functioning. Or calculating. Whatever it is AIs do when they’re not talking.”

“We could ask Prowl,” Blue giggled.

“Heh.” Thundercracker quirked his mouth in a half-grin. “Lance wasn’t much of a blabbermouth. Military AIs aren’t so much.” Spiral had originally been a district AI for one of the Torus States. Definitely a blabbermouth. A very attractive blabbermouth, though.

“That’s not the first thing you want to do when you see Prowl again,” Bluestreak said, squiggling closer to Strake.

“Maybe not,” Thundercracker rumbled, wrapping a hand around Blue’s body, pinning him against Strake, dipping his raptor’s head to nuzzle and nibble on Blue’s door-wings and dorsal armor. Blue squeaked and scrabbled at Strake’s chest plates, optics flickering. Strake thrummed, watching Blue’s face, intrigued by his open sensitivity and unleashed arousal. Thundercracker bit gently at the curve of armor protecting Blue’s starboard hip, grinning as Blue scrambled to partition charge to keep from overloading. Winding Blue up never stopped being delightful. Blue’s body was so similar to what Prowl’s might have been, if Prowl hadn’t been assigned to Sentinel’s battalion and gone all badass halfway to Decepticon levels of armor and fury.

Strake sunk talons into the backs of Blue’s knees, finding the hidden sensory nodes as Thundercracker stroked Blue’s legs slowly and gently; the contrast of sharp and smooth sending Blue shuddering close to the brink again. Thundercracker offered cables. Blue inserted them eagerly, opening a full body link the moment the connection firmed.

Rearing up, head tossing, wings splayed and trembling, Thundercracker shouted, echoed by Strake; imagery and mythology of this planet melding strangely with theirs; eagles locked in mating flight, electric dragons streaming blue fire.

Curled between the Seekers, more than halfway to recharge, Blue reached toward the bronze column. His hand fell short of the haptic pad, but Strake shifted, placing his own hand there, linking their shuddering fields with Kalis. Thundercracker, in the half astrosecond before he too shut down into recharge, reflected that the post-overload fizzies were probably the last thing an AI wanted to experience, but maybe it would give Kalis something new to think about.

<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>

2040 - January

Elita and Prime waved from the grassy verge of a runway at Dover AFB in Delaware as Polaris touched down and opened his ramp for his passengers. Prowl and Spiral transformed and approached Prime and Elita, Prowl offering each of them an arm cable.

Most of the Vivsector’s surviving crew appear to be hiding - or attempting to hide - planetside. Jhiaxus himself is most likely aboard the Torment with Bludgeon and Starscream. Certain isolated “accidents” and seemingly unrelated killings of humans in remote areas probably were neither accidental nor unrelated.

No sign of Soundwave, I take it? Elita asked.

Not yet. I estimate 74 percent probability that he is aboard the Torment as well.

Elita nodded. If he’s down here instead we’ll never find him unless he wants us to. Every police chief and military base commander had Red Alert’s personal contact info, but that wouldn’t be enough.

“The two crews wouldn’t have meshed well,” said Spiral. “A few days in close quarters with the Terrorcons can’t have been anyone’s idea of fun. Jhiaxus must have gotten them into stasis or we’d have heard from them by now, but until he did...”

“Agreed,” said Prime.

“I wonder if the Predacons are using the Constructicons’ city in Norway as a base,” Elita said. “We could send someone up there, with Scavenger perhaps, to see.”

I’ll go, Polaris said, not quite bouncing on his landing gear.

First we’ll have to find out if you can fit through the door, Prime said, winking at him.

Oh. Yeah.

Prowl looked north, sensory chevron rising. “Hmmm.”

Spiral and Elita shivered. Prime would have, but he’d braced himself.

“It was in part the recording Blaster sent of your singing to Prime that triggered us to come here,” Spiral said, taking Prowl’s hand. Me in particular. I had to see you, after that.

“As Thundercracker said,” Prime rumbled happily, “your singing has become a healing balm.”

Prowl’s optics widened. The clunk of the articulation locks in his knees engaging sounded loud in the brief silence following Prime’s statement. Spiral and Elita laughed and hugged him.

“Are you forecasting?” Spiral whispered, when he didn’t respond further and remained motionless, thunderstruck.

I have merged with Prime, he said slowly, lifting a hand to his throat. He had damaged his vocal apparatus screaming. Each time it had repaired itself per his nanocell programming. But Ratchet had explained once that the damage was so pervasive after some incidences that the programming itself had suffered tiny changes. His voice had changed over the years, over the decades, now. His voice had been changed.

Several times, Prime agreed, with such expansive self-satisfaction both Spiral and Elita wanted to kick him.

Prime’s spark and the Allspark are alloyed.

Optimus’ optics flared as he jumped to the same conclusion. “It seems the Allspark answered your request before you asked it, Prowl.”

“Jazz said time was a strange variable, within,” Spiral said. Jazz’s apologies, she had decided, were almost worth manufacturing offenses to get. The incident that had landed Spiral in Elita’s battalion had indeed very nearly killed her. Her spark may well have flickered, and in that flickering sent a copy of itself back to the Allspark. Hence the echoes he had perceived of her presence there. Elita’s battalion was almost entirely composed of mechs everyone else thought were dead.

“When will you sing for us again?” Elita asked, no few layers of harmonics in her own remarkable voice. Prowl’s optics irised to pinpricks. Now he was forecasting.

“Tonight, apparently,” he said.

…

They arrived at the embassy amid chaos. Soundwave had attacked the Technobots, sonic and CPU bores setting the gestaltmates against each other. Scattershot had nevertheless combined with his brothers, one by one, until Computron stood mentally whole to defy the ancient Decepticon and send him into retreat. They couldn’t hold it, though. Physically they were in trouble. Strafe’s spark chamber was breached, Lightspeed’s throat was spraying energon and Nosecone had taken a shot from Afterburner to the helm which had melted optics and face, and heat-damaged the CPU behind them. Azimuth had evac’d them to the embassy, where Wheeljack and Ratchet were in the process of hauling the non-ambulatory ones into the repair bay. Prowl sprinted to help Wheeljack with Strafe.

“Worst case scenario,” Elita said. She and Prime stood at the holotable, tracking documented attacks and possible incidents with feeds from Red in the Security office. “Soundwave’s on the planet. Going after the newsparks. I don’t think I like that.”

Optimus suppressed a shudder at the harmonics in her voice. Primus help Soundwave now.

…

Strafe’s optics lit. Med-bay ceiling. Well, he’d seen that before often enough. Prowl was leaning over the repair table, stroking his helm. That was…a little bit unusual.

“What the slag…?”

“Easy.” Prowl laid a hand on his chest. “What do you remember?”

Accessing his memory core hurt. How the slag did that work? He was his team’s field medic, he ought to understand it. There weren’t any sensory nodes there were there? No, there were…why was his CPU so sludgy? He ground away at the resistance. Oh. Soundwave. “That bastard…”

“He remembers all right,” Ratchet said drily.

“How’s Nosecone?” Strafe tried again to sit up but Prowl held him down with apparent ease. His lateral systems were only getting minimal power.

“Needs a new face,” said Scattershot, appearing in Strafe’s field of vision on the other side from Prowl. “But Hound already has Mirage and Tracks working on a design. I have a feeling old Nosey’s gonna be a heartbreaker when they’re done with him.” Scattershot pressed his forehelm to Strafe’s. “Slag it, you scared me half to death, Raf.” It had been Strafe’s injury that had jarred Scattershot, jarred all of them, into their combined mode. Killing a gestalt by mortally wounding one of its members was a tricky business. A plan like that could backfire, and you probably didn’t want to be at ground zero when it did.

“Which one of us put the hole in me?”

“I honestly don’t know, and I don’t want to. We were all firing wildly at that point. It could have been Soundwave.”

“Energy traces indicate it was an enhanced heavy-plasma weapon of a type the Decepticons commonly use,” Prowl said. “It was Soundwave.” Not that the Technos hadn’t done a lot of damage to each other anyway, but the near-fatal shot had been from outside.

“All right,” Ratchet grumbled. “Strafe, don’t make me put you back into medical stasis.” He glared at Scattershot and Prowl. “Try to get him to recharge.”

Strafe grinned up at Prowl. “Sing me to sleep? You did for Blades that one time.” Having the Protectobots as older brothers would have been an order of magnitude more aggravating if it wasn’t systematically impossible to hate them. First Aid would simply hug you into submission if you tried.

Prowl nodded. The silver hand on the new protomass patch across Strafe’s chest shifted, fingers spreading, feeling the vibration of the spark beneath.

May it be an evening star
Shines down upon you
May it be when darkness falls
Your heart will be true
You walk a lonely road
O how far you are from home

Mornie utulie
Believe and you will find your way
Mornie alantie
A promise lives within you now…

Maggie jumped up from her workstation and bounced around the human scaled area, hands clasped in front of her mouth. “Omigod omigod omigod that was Elvish!” There was a better than even chance that the first mech Maggie’s future robot self would tackle, post-integration, would be a certain tactician. Him or Hound; she couldn’t decide. Both, then? Her skin was still tingling from the harmonics.

<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>

2040 - August

Avoiding detection by humans used to be easy, Divebomb knew from intel files Starscream had reluctantly shared with Bludgeon and Razorclaw. When it was just radar? No contest. But the Autobots had been interfering, and the humans were little mimics themselves, barely intelligent though they were.

Nevertheless, the highly concentrated urban environment provided many possibilities. There! Frag. That color! Not even the slightest nod toward subtlety there. The scout. All alone. How convenient. He was even carrying his organic parasites. Three with one shot, if Divebomb was lucky. What fun! He repositioned himself slightly, homing in on the spark signature with specially modified sensors. One shot three kills. Well, the humans barely counted, but Divebomb was in a good mood. He had a new gun, one that should punch through the scout’s light armor easily. He just had to remember to get out of range or hide once he’d made the shot. There were a lot of humans and collectively their puny weapons were a nuisance.

He fired.

Neither Sam nor Mikaela would remember afterward whether Bee had been travelling at freeway speed or stuck in traffic. They could barely recall what city they’d been in at the time. There was shock and heat and blinding light and they were ragdolls thrown clear, not noticing their own injuries until later, when they couldn’t ignore them.

“Spark chamber breach!” Mikaela shouted. “Sam get everyone back away from him.” She squinted in a particular way and her corneas darkened, allowing her to look directly into Bee’s chest without damaging her retinas. Miles wasn’t the only one packing some interesting modifications.

She climbed to the ragged edge of the hole, assessing damage, sending her vid feed to Ratchet, digging in the back seat for her toolkit. There were small gaps she could weld, small lines she could cap or reconnect, but the worst of the damage was simply beyond her physical strength without her waldoes. She kept her stinging eyes wide open, keeping the feed open, watching Bee’s spark sputter and fade, shrinking for a moment to a tiny seed in a suddenly dark, cavernous chamber.

“No,” she whispered. “Dammit, Bee, don’t you dare…”

The darkness seemed to spread from the interior of the chamber. Mikaela blinked angrily. The little golden light wasn’t out, not yet! And then the shadow, she realized, was the looming wings of Skyfire, landing afoot beside them, bending down, the sun bright on his shoulders, refracting off his helm. Sword in hand and ringing trumpets wouldn’t have surprised her.

He knelt, pulling a cable from his own torso and plugging it into Bee. The golden sun flared and sputtered and grew to its accustomed size. Mikaela wrapped both hands around the power cable and rested her cheek against it. An enormous fingertip touched her back.

“Mikaela, you are absorbing dangerous amounts of radiation.”

“I don’t care. Not leaving him.” Her nanites would take care of the worst of it, and she’d have to drink Perceptor’s hideous cocktail later in horrific quantities. It would be worth it.

“Very well,” said Skyfire, and transformed around all three of them. Sam hadn’t gone far, either.

…

Sam ran a hand through his hair. Thank god for male pattern baldness heritability traits. His maternal grandfather had had a full head of hair his entire life. Good Italian genes.

Mikaela had finally fallen asleep. They were in sleeping bags up on her gantry, overlooking Bee’s repair table at the embassy. Skyfire had flown them direct, carried them in himself. Sam barely understood what was happening outside the pain in his chest. Ratchet had grabbed him for a moment there, injected him with something, scanned him, and let him go. What the hell had that been about? He rubbed at his breastbone. Still kind of tender. Had someone been pounding on his chest, or was that because Bee had a gaping hole in his?

No, that had been repaired. Soft grey protomass like pulled taffy stretched across the opening. There was already more yellow armor appearing than there had been last night. Bee’s optics were dark, but the spark monitor made reassuring bleeps.

Damn, that had been close. He had thought they’d won a major battle, with Metroplex chasing the Cons off - albeit a pyrrhic one, given the damage to the planet. Could have been a lot worse, though. But these guerrilla attacks were nasty. And frightening. They’d lost eleven more of the Graveyard Legion, and Huffer had nearly been killed last month, too. Tough little guy, though. He’d shot the Con who’d sniped him and then approached to take a trophy, thinking the target dead. The rest of the Autobots had been dodging sniper fire as well; except Metroplex. No one was messing with Morocco these days.

Maybe they should all move to her for a while. Blue would love the company. Sam could work on his tan. Mikaela could work on her tan. Mmm!

<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>

2042 - March

Fields and towns below huddled under a blanket of snow likely to stay in place for another month or two. Prime brought up the rear of the procession leaving Holyhood Cemetery. Just behind the Lambo Twins. Reginald Simmons had been laid to rest in the family plot there, rubbing decaying elbows with senators and Boston mayors and a handful of Kennedys.

Borealis circled, keeping pace with Prime’s progress, surfing silently above the planet on her AG drives like an enormous manta ray. She’d never liked Simmons exactly. She’d been just as glad when he’d written his books and left the government for better pay. None of the Autobots could forget he’d had Bumblebee tortured in the name of Sector Seven’s curiosity. She couldn’t say she’d wished him dead of a massive stroke, though. He’d been a mean, small man who didn’t handle power well, but he’d gotten better the less authority he’d had.

The Twins had enjoyed their antagonistic friendship with him. She felt bad for them. No one else would take their teasing as well as Simmons had, nor give as good as he got.

Rest in peace, jerkface. She flipped her wings and headed for Logan International where she’d be picking Prime and the others up.

One by one, Ixchel Chase’s family had passed away, married, borne children, nurtured grandchildren. Borealis had tracked every change, but kept a distance. The gulf between a funeral and an awakening in a tank was a chasm she didn’t know how to fly across.

<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>

Hunting Cons on Chaar was almost like the good old days when there were plenty of Cons to hunt. That thought itself took away some of the fun. As did the inescapable knowledge that Prime felt every death. Springer never let it weight his arms with hesitation during battle; but afterward, in the dark and quiet of the recharge bay, regrets and restless worries ate at him like scraplets; going for the juicy bits first.

And now Turmoil had shot the Trion down. It was badly damaged, hidden in a canyon on the far side of Chaar, with holo-net above. Brace said the ship could be repaired, but it might take a while to fabricate parts. The crew would be using parts of themselves as raw materials, unless they could scavenge enough of the right ores without attracting Con attention.

They’d been so close. The war would be as good as over if only they could kill a few more Cons. A hundred more, six hundred more. At least kill all the worst of them, then start again with only good, unpolluted sparks.

Springer folded convulsively around his spark, gritting his denta. Megatron’s philosophy had been the same; hence the drone army, hence the slaughter of most of Cybertron’s three billion inhabitants. Purge the inferior, start again with the strongest. So easy, so easy to keep following the patterns of thought that had led them this far, kept a few of them alive. So hard to forge new protocols, algorithms, cultures of survival.

“Spanner says Freewheel’s gonna make it.” Roadbuster stood at the door, leaning on the frame. Springer uncurled and sat up. They didn’t use internal comms any more than they could help. No telling who was listening, this close to Shockwave.

Pyro leaned over the side of the bunk above Springer. “So are we heading out yet?” Springer flicked his forehelm (which suspiciously resembled Prime’s; and didn’t Pyro take a lot of ribbing for that) with a resonant spanng.

“Not until Guzzle’s team gets back,” Springer said. “Which should be in about three breems, if nothing’s gone wrong.”

“Oh Primus.”

Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V

Table of Contents

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