Fic
Title: Borealis 75/93: Heartlines - pt 2
Author: tainry
Disclaimer: Not mine, no money.
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairing(s): Implied Mirage/Hound/Trailbreaker, brief Jazz/Smokescreen, ensemble
Warnings: Mild robot snuggles, brief mind-rape, OCs, mild violence, human swearing.
Summary: Wherein Jhiaxus has a plan; ships meet in space and Sentinel learns some things; Mirage, Hound, and TB take a bath; Tracks is hurt and Smokey has a sad; humans react to Ranger; Ranger goes through integration; Soundwave attacks and is captured; and Ranger and Sarah have another talk.
~9K words.
Part I
BOREALIS: Heartlines - Part II
2061 - September
Jhiaxus' pattern curdled and roiled sullenly, hemmed on three sides by other patterns baring remembered denta at him, guarding weaker, more diffuse patterns from his predation. There was another avenue open to him, he thought. The apostate Prime had offered him "healing" - Jhiaxus knew well what that meant; he had enacted a great deal of it himself upon others - but Galvatron...
Galvatron, if one was careful, could be manipulated.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
2063 - July
“Two warp signatures confirmed, sir.”
Highbeam stood at his lieutenant’s starboard shoulder, watching the screens. After a moment the readings resolved enough to be consistent with a pair of heavily-laden subclass delta Seekers approaching Cybertronian orbit. As they came in range, Skyfire chirped his IFF, and the youngster he was with did the same. Highbeam did not entirely approve of the spark merging business, but he accepted anyone who made themselves useful, regardless of origin.
“Skyfire and Azimuth on approach for delivery,” the lieutenant said. The pallets of space bridge components were secreted in various places on the planet and both moons, but lately also among the faint rings of debris, visible only at certain angles, and if the current level of starlight was sufficient. Ships and parts of ships and the remains of the myriad space stations and construction platforms, and a few bodies that had never been retrieved by either side.
Hello, Sparkreaver and crew! Azimuth transmitted. Skyfire had long given up reminding Azimuth that while the Sparkreaver had an AI running most of its systems, it was not a sparked ship. Azimuth didn’t care, it just seemed polite to address the ship itself upon initial hail. Didn’t they do that on Star Trek? Come in, Enterprise! Besides, he agreed with Borealis; the Sparkreaver was a goddamn ugly ship, and one had to do something to lighten the mood whenever one looked at it.
Greetings, Skyfire and Azimuth. How fares the Prime? Highbeam was, in his way, no less devoted to Optimus than Ultra Magnus. The data packets the deltas transmitted in return included not just Prime’s status but all the news from Earth, which pleased the crew. Most of said crew - and if pressed, Highbeam would admit himself no exception - had an almost proprietary fondness for the humans, mad as the tiny things were. The humans had stood up under concerted Decepticon attack better than most primitive species had. The Autobots’ last remaining allies.
The Nornir, flying perimeter, danced complex figures at the news of Prime and Elita having kindled a batch of twenty newsparks. Little sisters! they sang, whirling.
A tick and a tug pulled at Azimuth’s long-range sensors. Someone had just exited the nearest wormhole. (For certain values of “nearest”, which were not, given Cybertron’s trajectory and velocity, all that near any more.) Good-sized mass; ship.
Is that…?
Yes. Azimuth, stay on mission. Skyfire continued to adhere his pallet to the inside curve of a pitted and warped hull remnant. Noting the laden fragment’s relative position, orbital path, and speed, he tapped a minute locator tag on the edge of the pallet. It would return a blip only to a coded frequency ping.
But they’re, like, rogues or something. He’s the one who…!
Damaged Prowl, yes I know. We have work to do.
But…!
Azimuth, stay on mission. I’ve already alerted Highbeam. Let him handle them. Sentinel’s ship would be coming into the Nornir’s and then the Sparkreaver’s sensor ranges in a few seconds, but it wouldn’t hurt to give the commander a heads-up.
Thank you, Skyfire, Highbeam said. Yes, there it was. Older code, but the IFF was correct. Sentinel, commander of the Rapacious, this is Highbeam, commander of the Sparkreaver.
Highbeam, huh? Congratulations. What happened to Magnus?
He is the City Commander at Metroplex on Earth.
There was a pause. So. Prime really has moved in on that dirtball.
Highbeam bared the tips of his denta. As the commander of a battalion, there were things Sentinel was entitled to know. But specific instructions had been given regarding this particular battalion and its leader. Not to let a single one of them within ten kilometers of ship or crew, for starters. Highbeam transmitted a slightly edited data packet.
A longer pause, as Sentinel evidently perused the packet’s contents. There was a lot to digest. Sentinel had been out on his own recognizance for quite some time.
…
Traitors. Lockdown and Swindle were a blow. Sentinel had liked them. They were suitably ruthless. They knew what was at stake, what had to be done to win a war like this. Sentinel ground his denta. The arm of his command chair crumpled in his grip. They would be dealt with.
The branched-spark twins, Sunstreaker and Sideswipe. Well, they’d always been wild cards. Insubordinate afts, as much as they could get away with. Sentinel felt he’d been uniquely capable of controlling them, hence their assignment to his battalion. He wished Prime all joy in dealing with them and thereby purged his own irritation at their defection. And obviously Sentinel would not waste any more personnel in the attempt to retrieve his tactician. Silverlance was doing well enough as a replacement for Prowl. Prowl had always been iffy, in retrospect. Dedicated to the Autobots, certainly, but a little squeamish. He’d needed persuasion now and then, though Prowl was smart enough to require only a minimum of rough handling. (Sentinel remembered with visceral satisfaction the one time he had struck Prowl, a blow that had sent the lighter mech flying across the bridge. Prowl had always been weirdly nimble in midair, though, and had landed neatly on his pedes.)
Moving Cybertron. It was just a planet, why bother? They could as easily rebuild on some other world. There were billions of suitable planets in their own galaxy, why even relocate to this “Milky Way”? (Sentinel had just enough xenobiology basics to be quite certain that he did not want to know what “milk” was.)
Metroplex. The building of a cityformer bespoke a certain degree of infrastructure, or at least access to materiel. Prime was making this “Earth” his last stand. Desperate or desperately foolish.
Prime. Salvaging a sliver of the Allspark made sense. Putting that sliver inside his spark chamber? Madness. Along with this disgustingly organic idea of spark-merging, it was clear the Prime had lost his senses. Sentinel had cordially disagreed with many of his policies for eons, but this was…insane. Their leader was insane. Mad as his twin at last.
Sentinel would have to think about this.
The Graveyard Legion. Weird that Prime could still have a stroke of brilliance amid the morass of deviant ideas.
Galvatron and his new legions. Interesting. Looked like a trip to Chaar might be worthwhile.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
It was a dry, dusty day. Sunlight slanted in the hangar door, casting a hot white oval on the polished stone floor. Hound and Trailbreaker came in, filthy from six days on and off road. They caught Mirage coming out of the recharge bay, hugging him, patting his shoulders and back, telling him all about their adventures...and getting him almost as filthy as they were. Mirage made what Ranger thought were rather feeble attempts to fend them off, but he wasn't serious about it. Instead he warbled at them in Cybertronian (of which Ranger bemusedly understood the words, though some of the context was clearly lost on him), and dragged them both down the corridor toward the oil bath.
They'd put in a door since Dani's toddling stage, which a person had to activate via transmitted command. A determined human might still get in, but it would take a certain degree of hacking and hardware skill. Ranger didn't think anyone had ever tried it, not even Maggie. The oil bath was a place there was bound to he roughhousing.
Or something. Ranger interrupted people in the middle of doing things other than bathing almost every time he went down there. He'd taken to keeping his shields up at low level all the time, and he was good at the repeller field shiver.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
Dancing along rooftops was tricky, but Tracks was light. He kept up a steady stream of fire. Starscream wasn't taking him seriously yet, evading in rather lazy rolls and yaws, but Tracks had his shoulder missiles up and charged, and in a handful of seconds Starscream and Skywarp would be in perfect range.
Skywarp disappeared. Tracks lost his lock.
Starscream turned abruptly, and Tracks knew he was now the focus of a crossfire. His vantage now a kill-box. Skywarp was behind him. He kept firing, and launched a volley of missiles. Being dead wasn't so bad, Raze and the others said. (Though they admitted that often the process of dying sucked major exhaust.) They were so close, they hoped, to the end of the war. Shame to get scrapped now. And Tracks wasn't certain what he'd...do, there in the Allspark. He wasn't sure he wouldn't take Barricade's option. There was too much he'd worked too hard to forget; too much in him kept locked away, unexamined.
Slag.
…
Smokescreen left the medbay, pausing at the entrance to the stem corridor. He didn't know where he was headed. The magnetic field of this planet was so powerful tiny birds and other creatures could navigate it with even tinier bits of cellular iron. Sometimes Smokescreen felt he would lose himself in it, scoured down to bare frame, memory and CPU wiped. Sometimes he thought that might not be such a bad thing. Tracks had deliberately run himself out under Seeker-fire, drawing them away from humans and a small pod of Water-Babies. He was going to recover, but he'd be in CR for weeks, maybe a couple of months. There was nowhere Smokescreen needed to be, nothing he could do to help right now.
Fields touched him first, then hands. Jazz. An arm around his waist, giving him somewhere to go. Down the corridor, down the new ramp, into the lower levels, what Sam liked to call the dungeons, but were nothing like. Cool spaces belowground, a small subterranean pond, a second bunkhouse; spaces people could go to for privacy, meditation. Or shagging.
Side by side they went, taking the short, curving hall to the mossary, where the little pond was. A bright disk in the center of the arched ceiling stood in for the sun or moon. No one was there at the moment. Jazz and Smokescreen skirted the whorled patterns of different mosses and delicate river-worn stone mosaics, climbing onto the low stone platform cut into the far curve of the room.
Jazz held him for a long time; lips resting against his cheek spar, hands drifting only slowly on his body, fields like the water of the pond - mirrorlike and still.
I liked the lines of him right off, first time I saw him, Smokescreen said at last, turning his head to kiss Jazz. That compact, tapering torso. Couldn’t ID his exact frame type…Towers custom jobs, you know.
Ohhh yeah.
I didn’t think much of his chances in our platoon, but he was pretty. Nice armor, if a bit light. Nice color. Until I found out that shade of indigo was the color of mourning in the Towers, or had been for about ten or twelve vorns.
That’s a pretty good run, in terms of Towers fads, Jazz chuckled.
Three million years, now. Smokescreen held Jazz tighter. Nobody wanted to talk to him at first. Nobody knew what to say, I think. Even after we saw how he could fly. And fight. Tracks had fought like a tunnel-snake when pressed.
Nobody but you, huh?
Oh, I don’t…I can’t take much credit. My job. He beat me at triplex, our first game. Slagger.
But not since? Grinning, Jazz pushed and Smokescreen pulled, and they lay side by side, hands moving purposefully, fields rising, caressing.
Mmm. Couple times since. I wasn’t paying attention. His harmonics made it clear what Smokescreen had been paying attention to.
Jazz laughed and sank cables into him, enjoying the courteous way Smokey welcomed him into the link. Smokey had nice lines, too, and Jazz set out to enjoy every one of them.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
Mikaela at 72 was not so very different from Mikaela at 44. Like Sophia Loren, Sam thought. Dark hair, good bones. Watching her walk, (especially from behind,) still put the hum in his motor. Besides, 72 wasn't that old. He didn't feel much different than 50, and that was just hitting mature adulthood, right? Bee was the elder partner in their little ménage, anyway, at 3.3 million years old. 72? Small beans.
A tall, black-armored mech Sam didn’t recognize stood next to Ironhide, joining in the noisy hugs as Bumblebee transformed. The batches of new kids had gotten so big and frequent these days Sam didn’t try to keep track. His implant automatically updated his HUD, so he knew the new mech’s name was Ranger.
Waitaminit. Ranger. Lennox had died in 2061, two years ago, so this was… Ranger. Cute.
Also. Aaaaaawkward! Sam glanced sidelong at Mikaela. Her HUD would have been similarly updated. Mikaela sailed on, smiling at the clump of robots, serene, guns holstered. Sam did not make the mistake of actually sighing in relief. He was good at this stuff.
Sam, Mikaela tight-beamed, the thought of them erasing one of their kids to fill it with a human mindstate makes me sick to my stomach. But I know - believe me, Ratchet was very thorough - I know they don’t think of it like that at all. And anyway, it isn’t Ranger’s fault. Thanks so much for thinking I was going to create a scene.
What? I didn’t even…! Did I say anything? I totally did not say anything!
You were thinking it.
I was not. I was admiring your ass. Not that Mikaela was easily divertable, but it couldn’t hurt. Besides being true.
Uh huh. Right up until you spotted Ranger and realized who he was. She climbed the stair to the mezzanine, throwing her hips around more than usual, Sam thought, and turned on her high-wattage smile. “Hello, Optimus,” she said aloud, as Prime leaned in so she could hug his cheek.
“Greetings, Mikaela,” said Prime. “I have approved the Stanford-MIT telescope for courier. Blueshift can take it up as soon as it’s ready.”
“Thank you!” Mikaela said, giving him an extra squeeze. If Optimus Prime liked your idea - and anyone was welcome to submit proposals, as long as you could actually build the thing yourself - one of the space-capable Autobots would pop it into orbit for you at a tiny fraction of the cost of a conventional launch. Or sometimes for free. Getting on Smokescreen’s good side was a bonus. There were lots of extra-atmospheric telescopes aloft now, and primary or secondary school experiments, and fleets of clever “space junk” collectors. Mikaela hadn’t been a part of the MIT team, but she’d put in a good word for her alma mater. The newest telescope merited launch on its own; it would look out upon the cosmos in ways humankind had only recently conceived of.
Perceptor had seen what they’d done there and was gleeful.
…
Epps put his feet up on the dash, pleased that he could still do it at his age without a lot of grunting and groaning. Probably that was why Ranger let him. Epps had tried it riding in Prime once and had gotten a slow, crawling tingle of electric charge, which hint he had taken before his calf muscles cramped.
“So is it weird or what, having people ride inside you?” Epps had asked this before, of Mirage, of Ironhide, but they had thought the question itself strange. Physically larger people carried physically smaller people - the world had always been thus. (Except when certain kinds of smaller people, like Huffer or Brawn, were physically much stronger than even larger people. Often this meant towing rather than carrying. Epps had held up his hands in surrender because Mirage would go on and on describing every permutation and exception for hours.) He figured Ranger might have a different perspective.
“I guess it’s not that different from being pregnant,” Ranger said, with every appearance of seriousness. Quite a lot of emotional information could be conveyed by the color and brightness of dashboard lights and dials.
“What!?” Epps squawked.
“Or having a tapeworm.”
“Ugh! Man, you are full of shit!”
Ranger snickered. “Honestly, hadn’t really thought about it.” He bounced on his tires a little. “But now that you mention it, it’s kind of freaking me out! AAAAAAAAA!” He swerved sharply back and forth across the - fortunately empty - road with an ostentatious screech of tires.
“Hey!” Epps protested, clutching at the ohshit bars and yanking his feet down off the dash. “I’m too old for this shit!”
“Now who’s full of it?” Ranger laughed, evening out.
“No, but seriously, this is kinda weird,” Epps felt as though he’d gotten his friend back, that Will had just been “away” for a couple of years and now he’d come home. He just happened to be a twenty-foot-tall robot now. “Guess the next question is, when did they do your last backup?”
“Do I remember what dying is like, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
“Last backup was the day before I died.” Ranger’s dash lights dimmed slightly as he thought. “But I…I remember Jhiaxus. And falling…and losing signal…how can I…? Ironhide. I remember because he does. I was…Lennox was hooked into the cloud mind…” He tried to call up his earliest tank-memories. As Ranger, he couldn’t remember anything from before he had a memory core and CPU to remember with, could he? The spark knew things, though. Could he remember being kindled?
Deep in the center of core programming. A muddle of impressions - all inputs had felt the same; sight, sound, touch, chemo, field, emotion, undifferentiated and hazy. A sense of purpose had been the strongest. The compulsion to burrow into the protomass and seat in what would become his chest. Before that…there would have been a few moments after Ironhide and Ratchet had chosen, before his spark had been carried to the tank. Motion, maybe? Cold? It was so vague, so tangled now in everything he’d experienced since. Overwritten? That wasn’t how Cybertronian memory worked, on a normal basis. They added layers, they didn’t need to erase the old ones until they got very, very old, like Kup. Or unless they wanted to, like Megatron.
Ranger was curious, now. His experience, his point of view, like Borealis’, had made a transition from human to Cybertronian. For Borealis, there was an appreciable jump between the time her brain had been scanned and when she had become aware in-tank.
Things had gotten tangled and weird, but Ranger thought the transition for him had been continuous. As his human body had died, there had been a dizzy kind of…sideways…slip. And the moment his mind fastened on that concept of “sideways” Ranger felt something shift, the memories - nebulous as they were - changing to reinforce his chosen impression. The Allspark hadn’t been involved in his kindling except at a remove, because it had created Ironhide and Ratchet’s sparks. Why did Ranger suddenly feel like his pattern had nevertheless come from the Allspark as well?
The Allspark, Ranger decided, was a slippery bastard and it was a major wonder that Prime had made any progress in using the thing at all.
“Guess nothing really changes,” Epps said. He put his feet back up on the dash. “Guess we just have to find out for ourselves.”
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
2063 - August
A low boom sounded through stone and air, focused by the skylight. Ranger regarded the latest summer thunderstorm with distrust. He knew it was beautiful out there, smelled wonderful, clouds glowing with late afternoon rainbows.
“Ratchet?”
“Hmm?” Ratchet was running a routine diagnostic - a mid-level housekeeping sort of program that Ranger would be able to run on himself after this.
“Could you…trigger me into integration? Like Metroplex?”
Ratchet refocused his optics, hoisted a single optic ridge. He didn’t say anything for a moment, his fields calm and unruffled. Ranger suddenly felt abashed; whiny and immature. He didn’t like the uncertainty, he told himself. He could be taken out of action, in the middle of, say, a rescue operation, and there was nothing he could do about it. He would be impaired, go a little crazy; it could take weeks to come out of.
“Metroplex had been aware for years,” Ratchet said gently. “And cityformers are unusual. Blaster integrated in-tank as well, but he has symbionts.”
“Oh.” Ranger didn’t want to imagine what a host going through integration would do to symbionts. He supposed they had had ways of dealing with it before the Allspark had been jettisoned, when they’d done the building and ensparking the other way around. Maybe they’d kept the symbionts in stasis. It couldn’t have been pleasant.
“We let it come when it may for a reason. It’s adaptive; the emotional pathways are more stable that way. Triggering doesn’t always work, and it can go wrong.”
Ranger’s optics spiraled very wide. “Okay.”
Optimus came in, Ratchet gestured him to a large table. Diverting first to pat Ranger's shoulder, Optimus wandered toward the indicated table as Ratchet finished with Ranger.
"We're going to see if we can delay Prime's growth a little more," Ratchet said at the flare of curiosity in Ranger's fields. "There. You're done. The command string is here." The string highlighted in Ranger's head. "Run that once a month or so, more often if you start to feel any kind of motor lag."
"Yes, Ratchet." Ranger slid from the table, lingered, looked at Prime. The process of donating protomass was something he'd been aware of for years, but had never seen. They had Wells now, but it was something he conceivably might have to do someday. Like giving blood, it seemed like something he should be prepared to do. "May I stay?"
"It's not pleasant," Ratchet warned. Prime nodded, though, and Ranger moved to the next table over, out of the way.
Prime lay ventral side down, limbs spread, fingers and pedal flanges hooked around the edges of the table. Ranger sternly curbed his revving engine.
Ratchet was tempted to stroke the back of Optimus' thigh, just to watch Ranger's fields go wobbly. Instead, he extended the nanoprobe from his left wrist and slipped it between plates of Prime's armor, down to the protoform. Prime gripped the table harder as the revert command seethed through him, and Ratchet began to pull a heavy ribbon of mass into a skein.
Does it hurt? Ranger tight-beamed. Prime's optics were shuttered, and though he made no sound, the lines of tension in his body, and the occasional knives of jagged static stabbing through his closely-held fields were making Ranger's armor stand up. Blue crackles of Allspark energy rippled over Prime's frame; as Ratchet kept pulling, Prime grew visibly smaller, all over, all at once, not entirely smoothly.
Yes and no, Prime replied. Borealis has described the sensation as akin to stretching very sore muscles.
Ah. Ranger hunched his spaulders down into their proper arrangement. Uncomfortable, but not unbearable.
Ratchet snipped off the first ribbon, pressing the end into the completed, metric ton skein, and began another. By the time they were finished there were three skeins, and Optimus was back down to 30 feet tall. Ironhide and Inferno came in to heft two of the skeins - Prime himself took the third - and haul them down to the storage vault.
Should he be doing that?
Ratchet smiled as he heated the nanoprobe to a dull orange to sterilize it. "He's done this so often, as disquieting as it is he recovers immediately." He patted Ranger's back. "He's three tons lighter; he'll be bouncing around the embassy all week and we'll be looking for excuses to shoo him outside, trust me."
…
“I’m not saying we won’t do it, or we’re unwilling,” Alexis Thi Dang, the new Director of the EDF said, lifting a hand and smiling wryly. “I’m just letting you know there’s been some grumbling about cost. Elections are coming up.”
Ranger's attention wandered. Across the holotable, Optimus nodded and responded to Thi Dang, Jazz and Prowl in their usual places at Prime's sides, their fields reading as a single, attentively humming field, banded now and then with bright arcs of humor from Jazz. Lennox had had the field-display app for his implant and HUD, but had usually kept it off - too much information for day-to-day. Watching them made Ranger happy, though. Happy fields. Ironhide stood between him and Jazz, so Ranger leaned around behind him, reaching out to pass his hand through the outer edges, playing with the subtle ribbons of energy. It made his hand happy. How could a hand be happy? But it was, he could feel it, all bubbly and warm, shooting little bolts of happiness up his arm to his spark. His feet were happy, too, shuffling and tapping the nice smooth cool floor. He was getting very warm, the coolness felt good, made him happier. His optics darted around, taking in every detail, everything was so bright and sharp and pretty! Optics were wonderful! He began to tremble a little, but it was mostly like a caffeine buzz, nothing alarming...oooh, Ironhide was wrapping an arm around his waist. His waist was so happy, being close to Ironhide's arm like that! His feet were jealous now, though, because they weren't very close to Ironhide...no, they were too - Ironhide had enormous feet, so Ranger's feet were pretty close to Ironhide’s feet! Feet were happy things! Feet were good to have!
"Mushrooms!" Ranger caroled, giggling. "l never did mushrooms! I was in ROTC!"
"Robot adolescence?" Thi Dang asked.
"Yes," Prime said with a lopsided grin.
"You guys get off easy."
"No argument."
Prowl moved to Ranger's other side as Ironhide maneuvered him out the door and toward the medbay; not touching yet, but there in case. Ranger hummed at him. That bright red chevron was interesting! How cute! Ironhide was being growly! Oops, now his fields were shot with pale yellow embarrassment. Ranger giggled again. Oh, hello, Ratchet! Yay, Ratchet! Ratchet was a funny color, too...wait, that was his armor not his fields...why was he still that color anyway? Ranger's optics were happy to see him, though. Mmm, Ratchet was hooking him up to a thing, table, monitor, whatever. Ranger's arm port was happy now! Data data data! In and out! Oh, an energon feed! Wooo! Energon was happy!
…
“Thetarix was south of the Rust Sea,” Ironhide whispered, his rough voice unwontedly gentle. “South of the Sonic Canyons, and the wind sent rust into our air so that each sunrise and sunset was like the sunrises and sunsets here, orange and gold, gleaming off windows and buildings and people and the streets themselves. Sometimes the sun was red through the haze all day, a bright optic watching over us.” Ranger lay sprawled in his lap on the recharge table, optics more than half shuttered, purring slightly. Ironhide kept a hand centered on Ranger’s chest. “We kept the Forges hot, building bodies for the Lord Protector’s soldiers. Even with the winds from the Canyons, even at night, it was always warm. I didn’t get to spend as much time there as I would have liked; I had a duty to my Lord, to my squadron. I know you understand that. Maybe, when we have a sun again, I’ll take you there. Won’t be much left, until we rebuild. Once we do, though, I think you’ll like it. Red sun, red Forges, warmth to keep the oil smooth…”
“You’ll be a poet yet,” said Ratchet, ambling by to run a quick scan. Ranger trembled now and then, his body jerking with aborted movements, but he had not had full-blown seizures.
“Shaddup,” Ironhide rumbled.
…
Prowl kept his firewalls solid, though Ranger did not test them, consciously or otherwise. He transmitted small data packets, mostly brief sensory clips. Floating blue crystals and haunting music. The mathematical pleasure of his first liftoff from the port where the Fission Blade had been commissioned. A field of wildflowers bluer than the sky.
“Texas,” Ranger murmured.
“Yes,” Prowl nodded.
“Lone Star. Alamo…Santa Ana…come and take them…every one will be put to the sword…asleep in the arms of the Lord…” Ranger shook, and Prowl held him, singing low until Ranger settled again.
…
Lines of paint this was not, Ranger knew. Chromatophores on nanocells. Like a big, mechanical octopus. Octopus Prime. He traced the pale blue outlines between glimmering cobalt and vivid orange-red. The original had probably been done by some talented low-rider down in SoCal, for some guy who had loved his truck. Ranger loved this truck, too.
Love ran through his fuel lines from his spark, through every system, through his mind; the emotion clear and strangely uncomplicated. He felt rested, restful, in no hurry to move from Prime’s embrace, and the acid-sharp burn of his fidgety, uncomfortable energy seemed to have left him.
“Through already?” Ratchet asked. Ratchet’s hand on his foot felt warm.
Ranger looked up into Prime’s considering optics.
“I think so,” Optimus said.
“Five days.” Ratchet touched Ranger’s cheek, scanned him deeply. It felt weird, but Ranger didn’t twitch. “Most people take almost two weeks. And this was two months earlier than most, three earlier than Borealis. I don’t think it means anything in particular, it’s simply unusual.”
“Okay,” said Ranger.
“I trust you won’t get cocky.”
“No, sir.”
“Released to active duty.”
“Thanks, Ratchet.”
“Once Prime’s done coddling you.”
“Heh.”
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
2063 - September
He could lift an entire bundle of I-beams. Like Superman. This was fun! Ranger placed the bundle where the foreman indicated and straightened, orienting on the next task. The Autobots helped in the ways they were well suited for, while trying to avoid taking human jobs. Usually they weren’t in for full-time, or on any single project from start to finish. They were often simply extra help when it was crunch time.
There was a blur of motion, a knifing flash of fields, a blow that sent him to his knees. Someone grabbed his shoulder, his chin roughly, hauled him upright. He felt cables forcing their way past the port covers in his neck. He couldn’t even scream as a link sliced its way through his autonomic firewalls.
You have anomalous memory data, a cold, emotionless, harmonic-less voice said in his mind. There was tumult, shouting; his gyros weren’t working right. There were guns in his arms but he couldn’t remember what the command codes were to shape them. Something was eating at him inside. Virus.
Soundwave yanked his cables free but held the young mech up as a shield. Ranger’s optics focused finally - now if he could just get his legs to work. Heavy booming crashed from the left. Ranger caught movement in his periphery and shifted his left optic. That was a sight he'd never seen before. Optimus Prime in full charge, running at him, battle mask up, big guns blazing. It was more than a little bit terrifying. It would have been more frightening if he couldn’t feel the blistering transmissions guiding Prime’s ordnance to strike around Ranger, hitting only Soundwave no matter how the Decepticon held him.
Soundwave angled his shields, both the living and the energy, trying to deflect Optimus’ careful fire. A shuff of pedes on dusty ground gave away the position of another mech behind him.
Soundwave spun to face the new threat - and met Elita’s fist. Her punch sent him flying; and when he landed she landed standing on his chest. She crouched and took firm hold of his head. Her narrow face and bared denta filled his view.
“Elita! Please don’t kill him!” cried Prime. Soundwave filed the plea for later analysis.
Elita twisted Soundwave’s head 315 degrees; enough to break things, not quite enough to sever the neck entirely. Soundwave’s body went limp as too many sensory and motor connections were snapped or crushed.
Optimus caught Ranger before he hit the ground, cannons transforming swiftly back to arms, cradling the young mech tenderly. “Ranger? Ranger, status!”
“Fffffffffffffffffff,” Ranger slurred. “Fuck. …That was f-fucked up, man.” He could turn his head now. Oh good, progress. Some part of himself was fighting back. He looked up at Prime’s distraught face. “Something in me.” Prime’s hand felt warm, reassuring on his chest. “Get’t out.”
Ranger, under these circumstances, I must force the link. Prime began, cables spooling slowly out of his neck, hesitating before connecting to Ranger’s cephalic ports.
“Just do it,” Ranger said, while he still could. “Hurry.” He braced for the cautery knife. Prime’s cables clicked home, the link so gentle it took Ranger a ridiculous seven nanoseconds to even realize it had initiated. There was a sense of a rising wave, bright threads, laser-edged, surgical swiftness cutting here and there, relentlessly pursuing the foreign code, hunting it down and killing it completely. There was a rising of Ranger’s self to meet Prime’s oncoming tide; where they crashed together in the middle, Soundwave’s virus would be snuffed out. It dove and dodged like a thing alive, seeking ways under or through, an escape to lie in wait, a burrowing in a backdoor trigger. But the Prime-wave roared, gathering every fragment before it, crushing everything beyond quantum possibilities, pursuing his quarry across all twenty dimensions.
The Allspark made up almost a third of Prime’s body. No malevolent code, no matter how brilliant, could stand against him.
…
Soundwave captured, Laserbeak tight-beamed. Alive.
Ravage sent an unadorned acknowledgement. This had only happened once before, long ago. The standing order was not to attempt rescue. Only two of them were free. Buzzsaw and Rumble had been with Soundwave. Ravage had felt nothing in his spark to indicate that they had been deactivated.
Tracking, Laserbeak said.
Yes, said Ravage, and loped in pursuit.
…
Awareness returned parcel by parcel. Domain by domain. So many pieces went together to create the emergent property of mind. Ranger could feel each of them rebooting, once there were enough of them running; could feel the layers of his self re-assembling. Beneath them all hummed his spark, steady, steadfast, a thing he could trust down to the foundations. The Lennox memories weren’t all of him, as important as they were.
“Optimus?”
“I’m right here.” A big hand settled on his chest, above his spark. It felt as though the hand itself was another spark, the field around it so strong and bright, sending wisps of itself down to touch him through armor and protoform and chamber wall. Ranger’s hands obeyed him without pain, closing on Prime’s hand, keeping it where it was.
There was a pounding at the med-bay door. That was quite an accomplishment, as the entry from the hangar had been engineered to nuclear blast door standards. Ranger sat up. “Ironhide!”
“Better let him in before he breaks something,” Ratchet grumped and opened the door. Ironhide stood poised on the other side, both cannons out and whirling, optics ablaze. Ranger crossed his arms and glared at him.
“Do you mind?” Ranger said. “Trying to get some rest in here. Oof!” He returned Ironhide’s fierce hug. “I’m okay, I think.”
“Where is he?” Ironhide growled at Prime, sounding like an angry Tyrannosaurus rex. “Where is that tunnel-snake slagger? Where are you keeping whatever was left after Elita was done?”
“You do not need that information at this time,” Prime replied amiably.
“Don’t give me that slag!”
“Ironhide…” Optimus wrapped his arms around both Ironhide and Ranger.
Ranger, seeing Ironhide do the same, snuggled into the Prime’s chest. He had this chance, he realized, to be a kid again, in a way. To accept simple reassurance without embarrassment.
“If we kill Soundwave,” Prime continued, “even Prowl cannot foresee what Shockwave will do.”
“Shockwave? “ Ironhide blinked. “What does he have to do with it?”
“Shockwave and Soundwave are twins,” Prime said. Their similarities had always been more than name deep, and Optimus wondered why they had kept their connection a secret, even before the war.
“They’re WHAT???”
Ranger reset his audials. Ironhide was loud, at close range. Prime’s chest was warm, the embrace of his arm, and the contact with Ironhide comforting. Ranger nuzzled into Prime’s shoulder. Peripheries were shutting down but he didn’t try to override. Prime’s voice and fields soothed everyone, no shame in that.
“I would prefer to avoid an escalation at this point. I know this will be difficult, but I think it would be best to release him.” Optimus didn’t blame Elita for damaging the Decepticon as she had. He was pleased at her restraint, given the circumstances. Neither side had been much for taking prisoners for half a million years. It was an expensive, risky operation, and no one had had the resources. Leave the dead. Let the wounded be evacuated by their own side if at all. He did not want to go back to that. Ratchet, bless him, had started working on Soundwave immediately without so much as a raised supraorbital crest.
…
Ranger came online swiftly this time. Elita had taken Ironhide’s place beside him, seated on the edge of the recharge table. She was holding one of his hands, examining it curiously.
“Prime was your diversion,” Ranger said, to be thinking of something other than Elita holding his hand. All that noise and firepower. Of course the rampaging Prime looked like the biggest threat.
Elita smiled. It made her so beautiful Ranger felt his spark wobble. Her helm was so…spiky. She was intimidating, and it was not in Ranger’s nature to be easily intimidated. Now, up close, he could see the remnants of glyphs and decorative etchings; almost a sheen of texture over the dark metal rather than distinct forms. He could read some of it, where the glyphs weren’t too battle-scarred, and filed the meanings away for later perusal. Poetry, seemed to be.
“Yes.”
“Comms were down. Soundwave was jamming everything.”
“Yes. Optimus and I are very old friends. He knew what I was going to do the moment Soundwave grabbed you.”
“You’re going to kill him. Soundwave.”
“If he crosses my path on a battlefield again, yes. Right now he is a prisoner, and Autobots do not execute prisoners of war without full trial. Or we didn’t used to.” Sadness and a host of other, fleeter emotions flickered through her optics and fields.
“The humans will want their own trial. And their own execution.”
“That is why at the moment we are keeping him on embassy grounds. Embassy airspace, as I understand it, extends to low orbit, which is itself considered international airspace.”
Ranger’s optics widened. They could get Soundwave out and never set a pede on United States sovereign soil. The world leaders would have fits, but Prime could handle them. There were complicated extradition treaties regarding human fugitives, but Prime had been adamant that Cybertronian criminals be handled by Cybertronians. For human safety, primarily, although that was becoming a trickier tack to take. The countries with the strongest alliances to them respected the fact that Cybertronians were still an endangered species, and therefore none were to be killed indiscriminately, but not all of humanity agreed.
“Do you remain intent on maintaining celibacy until Sarah’s crossing?”
“What? Yes, of course.”
“Then…you might want to remove your hand from my chest.”
Ranger jerked his hand away and scooted to the head of the table, mortified. “Oh my god, oh my god, I’m so sorry!” Prime was going to k-. No, no he wasn’t. Where had this idea that Optimus and Elita were married come from? That was so weird.
Laughing not unkindly, Elita patted his shoulder and rose. “I wish you a speedy recovery, Ranger,” she said and left him in peace.
Ranger clonked his forehelm against his drawn-up knee. Where had all this static come from? Jeez. Now he really had to de-frag.
…
They thought they had him in medical stasis. Soundwave had firewalls that did not register as firewalls, and behind them his consciousness was fully active, observing. Thus he was awake during the repairs to his neck - not an altogether comfortable experience. Ordinary physical pain was a stimulus to be ignored.
The room in which he was imprisoned was a near-featureless sphere, flattened to create a level floor. Tiny, soft, lozenge-shapes composed of woven matter and tangled organic fibers were stacked in niches near the door. Other than this, and the constellation of limited-frequency EM lights set into the ceiling, only the striations of the stone from which the chamber had been carved served as decoration. Two burly Autobots stood sentry on either side of the door, and another - a small je; files provided a name; Spiral - clung to the ceiling, weapons out but not fully powered.
He was lying on the bare floor, Ratchet muttering to himself above him, completing the last few linkages. Buzzsaw and Rumble lay quiescent within him, their small, conjugate sparks humming low and steady next to his. In stasis, lightly. Unharmed, and Ratchet had made no attempt to remove them. Strange. It would have been the first thing he would have done. Fools.
The door opened to admit the Prime.
Soundwave had never once in all the long war feared the Prime. For a time, when the Autobots had proved themselves difficult to eradicate, worthy adversaries, he had respected the Prime’s intelligence and wily ingenuity. Not now. The Prime had become weak on this organic-infested planet. Easily manipulated. His defeat was simply a matter of patience. Soundwave agreed with his brother; the Prime's betrayal had been illogical, bordering on incomprehensible, even though Soundwave retained his emotional heuristics, declining his brother's offer of the emotional sim programming he used in his strategic planning.
Soundwave had pointed out that, being spark-twins, they were meant to be halves of a whole. Their complementary but not identical natures had served them well for thousands of vorns, and besides, Shockwave did not have symbionts. Shockwave had accepted this logic and had not pressed the matter again.
Ratchet moved aside as the Prime knelt by Soundwave’s portside shoulder. The Prime drew no weapon, did not touch him.
“Soundwave,” Prime said, his harmonics formal, “take your people and leave this world. Please, let there be peace between us.”
“I am loyal to Galvatron. Galvatron has ordered the extermination of the parasite species infesting this planet.” This information was not new, nor important. A trifle, which would nevertheless bring pain to the Autobots.
“Why?”
An attempt at psychological manipulation. Soundwave ignored it.
“What do you want, Soundwave?”
Capitulation so soon? Within himself, Soundwave experienced the pleasure of a small triumph. He would set them an impossible task. “Give me Barricade.” A demand, no promise of truce attached, no expectation of being granted.
Prime straightened.
By the door, one of the sentries, Prowl, flinched and turned his head away. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. Interesting. A logical surmise would be that this Autobot had been in some way responsible for Barricade’s deactivation.
“His body has lain on the bottom of the Laurentian for decades,” Ratchet said. He had been somewhat surprised at the time that the US government had done as promised. The tracking buttons had indicated a suspiciously long pause at dock before the body had been loaded onto the USS Harry S. Truman; and Ratchet was sure there had been more than strictly Navy personnel aboard for the trip out to the abyss. Prime had elected not to pursue the matter. The humans had had unlimited access to Megatron and the Cube for near a century. It was a little late to be coy. “We can get it for you if that’s what you really want, but it’ll be an unholy mess.” He wondered what bit of hardware Soundwave could be after, and why. He had done the post-mortem himself. Barricade hadn’t been carrying anything unusual.
“No,” said Soundwave, looking directly at Prime. “Give me his spark. A new body.”
“I cannot. His pattern did not remain whole upon passing within the Allspark.”
“Try. You have done this before.”
“I asked willing sparks, and willing sparks answered.”
“You are the Prime, who can refuse?”
Optimus laughed - a reflection of the Matrix, which was convulsed with hilarity.
Does he want a fragging list? Zeta sneered.
“Soundwave, the line between persuasion and coercion is not so blurred.” Optimus leaned fractionally closer. “What Galvatron has done, forcing once-living sparks into new bodies, has been damaging the Allspark itself. If we wish to truly destroy our source of life, then certainly let us continue in that vein. I would rather not.”
“Give me Barricade,” Soundwave said again.
“Why Barricade?” Trying a different track. Soundwave had trusted the old enforcer with Frenzy over a long-term and distant assignment. That was something. Then Frenzy had died (or been killed; even Maggie had trouble calling that one and she’d been in the room); on Barricade’s watch, essentially. That was another thing. Optimus decided he really wanted to know why before he would agree to look for the scattered remnants of Barricade’s pattern.
Soundwave was silent.
They could not force him to tell them, nor to tell the truth if he spoke - not without using tactics Optimus had sworn to himself never to employ again. Prime watched the passive face of the Decepticon, thinking.
“I will look for his pattern,” Prime said, finally. “If he desires re-embodiment we will accommodate him. Whether he rejoins you and your faction will be entirely up to him.”
…
Ravage estimated they were beneath the embassy mesa. He had found the bolt-hole exit deep in the canyons to the north on a previous scouting foray. Breaching the electronic defenses was risky, but Ravage hoped his latest logic bore had moved through this accessory system - and all six baffle doors - without traces even the redoubtable Red Alert could detect. Last door, he tight-beamed. Laserbeak braced high, Ravage braced low, and keyed the door.
It opened, revealing a tiered arcade of Autobot weapons, pointing at them.
After a moment, the Autobots parted, opening a space through which walked the Prime.
“Come with me,” he said, and turned to lead them away, up and then down, deeper into their stronghold. The symbionts followed. Ravage readied his contingent of drones, which could create havoc if nothing else, but could just as easily get himself and Laserbeak shot. The Autobots ranged behind them, and to each side when the corridors were wide enough. Several fell away as they went deeper, but not enough to render the odds favorable.
Ravage kept his growl subsonic, expecting torture, expecting disassembly at the least. His host’s spark was whole and spinning, that was all he could tell. They were brought to a spherical chamber, deeper underground than the bolt-hole tunnel had been. Soundwave lay on the floor, suffering no further indignity than medical paralysis. The Autobots stepped aside, and Ratchet activated Soundwave’s compartment hatch to allow the symbionts to rejoin their host.
Ravage, Laserbeak, dock, Soundwave ordered. He was being allowed transmission. They complied, curling within amidst their remaining two hostmates.
“Are they all right?” Ratchet asked, closing him up.
“Affirmative,” Soundwave was surprised enough to reply. Regard for symbionts was not something he expected from Autobots. Skorponok’s destruction had been savage, though he would not have lived long after Blackout’s deactivation in any case.
Prime stood, and addressed the subclass-delta gestalt leader who had been among the symbionts’ escort, taking the delta’s hand in both of his. “Silverbolt, please take Soundwave off planet and let him go.”
“Prime…I don’t…? Yes, Prime.”
…
Soundwave fully expected to be jettisoned into the local star. He was therefore mildly surprised when the delta carrying him headed directly for the system’s heliopause. He was released with the medical override in place, given a slight shove outward. The delta aimed a not inconsiderable array of weapons at him, then transmitted a code. A tiny device detached from Soundwave’s neck and he could move again.
Without a further word, the delta backed to beyond Soundwave’s weapons range, then turned and dove in a flash for the third planet.
Weakness.
Soundwave hailed the Torment for pick-up.
…
Barricade...
Barricade...
Barricade...
He could only ask. He did not want anything that answered to be torn, poisoned by force. His query belled through the Allspark, whalesong across the deeps.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
Ranger lay on his stomach in the grass, head resting on folded hands, watching her knit. Sarah liked to spend as much of the year as possible eating dinner out on the porch - which in their part of Nevada meant most of the year. In December and January and February there might be cold, rainy days when it just wasn’t worth it.
“Are we still married?” Ranger asked.
Sarah dropped a stitch. “We talked about that before, remember?” How could he forget? Unless he was damaged, he couldn’t, could he? But maybe, now that he’d been through integration he wanted to talk about it again. “Will and I decided, under the circumstances, we’d just have to figure it out for ourselves, when the time came. He always assumed he’d die before I did.”
“Human males are generally shorter lived,” Ranger agreed. Obviously it had been more than that, and the twinkle in his optics indicated he knew that. “When I…woke up, I knew you. I knew we had a connection that was called ‘married’, but whenever I looked at you or thought about you I couldn’t feel the kinds of things I remembered feeling when I did those things before.”
“Ratchet told me your emotions would be kept set very low at first.” It was another in a long list of things she had thought about, fished for a reaction to when it was just theoretical, and found, once theory had become reality, that she needn’t have worried. The situation was, in a way, so strange she had no footing, no basis for panic or anger or revulsion. It was a curiosity. Maybe other people would react differently. She’d long ago given up putting a lot of store by such predictions. You took each day as it happened. You took each person as they were, whether they were robots or humans or dogs.
Ranger nodded. “I knew that, too. I decided to wait and not worry about it. It’s better to wait until after integration anyway. I do love you, now that everything’s put together right. But it’s…sparks love differently.”
“I imagine they do,” Sarah said, grinning. “You can leave the ‘cleaving’ part right out, mister. We can deal with that stuff later.” Sarah admitted she wasn’t that kinky, not like some of the younger kids. And it had been nice, really, the way her physical relationship with Will had softened, mellowed over the years. Their frenzied, volcanic lovemaking whenever he was home on leave had been wonderful; she wouldn’t trade those days for anything. But it had also been fine for some of the fire to ease down. A simple campfire instead of nuclear explosions. Old folks got it on, too; but nobody wanted a broken hip. She wasn’t about to get frisky with a twenty-foot-tall robot who could probably go for days or weeks without stopping.
“Anyway, I don’t think we can say we’re married by any civil or church definition,” she continued. “Till death do us part. Maybe in a Shakespeare definition, though. ‘…Love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds…’ I talked to Pastor Rachel about it more, while you were in the tank. Not the details, of course, just as kind of a question of philosophy.” Those had been coming up more and more these days. Human technology could do amazing things, and the Transhumanists had been talking about these kinds of things since the late 1990’s or earlier. Sarah agreed that it was a good idea to think about what some of this hypothetical technology would mean before it became reality and people were left to fend for themselves with no direction and no help in an increasingly confusing world.
Well. The Autobots would help. Prime sometimes revealed how other species had solved certain problems, always delineating how that species and the circumstances had been different as well as similar. He made suggestions, or, more often, simply restated the situation as he saw it, in remarkably clear terms. The ultimate outsider, but with a surprisingly human insight and unflagging compassion.
Ironhide, interestingly, did in fact treat Ranger almost exactly the same way he had treated Will. She’d asked Borealis about her relationships with Ratchet and Prime, and Borealis had said she did consider them her parents, very much in the human sense; though she also knew and understood things from a Cybertronian perspective. Borealis was completely, unhesitatingly promiscuous with everyone except Prime and Ratchet. Sarah somehow felt that Prime would be willing to take their relationship to a more physically intimate level. It was kind of part of his job. Or at least he seemed religiously inclined to make certain his people were happy, by any and all means available. Ratchet, funnily enough, was a stereotypical mother hen to Borealis. And Sarah didn’t think he’d realized it, despite the teasing. Ratchet seemed to think, in fact, that the teasing was wholly off-base. He was perfectly sane, why was everyone else crazy?
Ranger evoked a nod by movement of certain of his face plates, despite that his head firmly rested on his hands on the ground. “You’re on row 138, stitch 56, by the way. Next should be purl, purl, purl.”
“Ah! I was just going to ask, thank you!” Oh, she loved him. He’d made himself into a walking library of knitting patterns just for her. And…that was a thing Will would have done. Will was in there, she was certain. No matter what the science bots said, this hadn’t been a cold copying of neuron connections and quantum chemical states. The spark Ironhide and Ratchet had created between them somehow also contained Will’s soul.
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Table of Contents
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Author: tainry
Disclaimer: Not mine, no money.
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairing(s): Implied Mirage/Hound/Trailbreaker, brief Jazz/Smokescreen, ensemble
Warnings: Mild robot snuggles, brief mind-rape, OCs, mild violence, human swearing.
Summary: Wherein Jhiaxus has a plan; ships meet in space and Sentinel learns some things; Mirage, Hound, and TB take a bath; Tracks is hurt and Smokey has a sad; humans react to Ranger; Ranger goes through integration; Soundwave attacks and is captured; and Ranger and Sarah have another talk.
~9K words.
Part I
BOREALIS: Heartlines - Part II
2061 - September
Jhiaxus' pattern curdled and roiled sullenly, hemmed on three sides by other patterns baring remembered denta at him, guarding weaker, more diffuse patterns from his predation. There was another avenue open to him, he thought. The apostate Prime had offered him "healing" - Jhiaxus knew well what that meant; he had enacted a great deal of it himself upon others - but Galvatron...
Galvatron, if one was careful, could be manipulated.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
2063 - July
“Two warp signatures confirmed, sir.”
Highbeam stood at his lieutenant’s starboard shoulder, watching the screens. After a moment the readings resolved enough to be consistent with a pair of heavily-laden subclass delta Seekers approaching Cybertronian orbit. As they came in range, Skyfire chirped his IFF, and the youngster he was with did the same. Highbeam did not entirely approve of the spark merging business, but he accepted anyone who made themselves useful, regardless of origin.
“Skyfire and Azimuth on approach for delivery,” the lieutenant said. The pallets of space bridge components were secreted in various places on the planet and both moons, but lately also among the faint rings of debris, visible only at certain angles, and if the current level of starlight was sufficient. Ships and parts of ships and the remains of the myriad space stations and construction platforms, and a few bodies that had never been retrieved by either side.
Hello, Sparkreaver and crew! Azimuth transmitted. Skyfire had long given up reminding Azimuth that while the Sparkreaver had an AI running most of its systems, it was not a sparked ship. Azimuth didn’t care, it just seemed polite to address the ship itself upon initial hail. Didn’t they do that on Star Trek? Come in, Enterprise! Besides, he agreed with Borealis; the Sparkreaver was a goddamn ugly ship, and one had to do something to lighten the mood whenever one looked at it.
Greetings, Skyfire and Azimuth. How fares the Prime? Highbeam was, in his way, no less devoted to Optimus than Ultra Magnus. The data packets the deltas transmitted in return included not just Prime’s status but all the news from Earth, which pleased the crew. Most of said crew - and if pressed, Highbeam would admit himself no exception - had an almost proprietary fondness for the humans, mad as the tiny things were. The humans had stood up under concerted Decepticon attack better than most primitive species had. The Autobots’ last remaining allies.
The Nornir, flying perimeter, danced complex figures at the news of Prime and Elita having kindled a batch of twenty newsparks. Little sisters! they sang, whirling.
A tick and a tug pulled at Azimuth’s long-range sensors. Someone had just exited the nearest wormhole. (For certain values of “nearest”, which were not, given Cybertron’s trajectory and velocity, all that near any more.) Good-sized mass; ship.
Is that…?
Yes. Azimuth, stay on mission. Skyfire continued to adhere his pallet to the inside curve of a pitted and warped hull remnant. Noting the laden fragment’s relative position, orbital path, and speed, he tapped a minute locator tag on the edge of the pallet. It would return a blip only to a coded frequency ping.
But they’re, like, rogues or something. He’s the one who…!
Damaged Prowl, yes I know. We have work to do.
But…!
Azimuth, stay on mission. I’ve already alerted Highbeam. Let him handle them. Sentinel’s ship would be coming into the Nornir’s and then the Sparkreaver’s sensor ranges in a few seconds, but it wouldn’t hurt to give the commander a heads-up.
Thank you, Skyfire, Highbeam said. Yes, there it was. Older code, but the IFF was correct. Sentinel, commander of the Rapacious, this is Highbeam, commander of the Sparkreaver.
Highbeam, huh? Congratulations. What happened to Magnus?
He is the City Commander at Metroplex on Earth.
There was a pause. So. Prime really has moved in on that dirtball.
Highbeam bared the tips of his denta. As the commander of a battalion, there were things Sentinel was entitled to know. But specific instructions had been given regarding this particular battalion and its leader. Not to let a single one of them within ten kilometers of ship or crew, for starters. Highbeam transmitted a slightly edited data packet.
A longer pause, as Sentinel evidently perused the packet’s contents. There was a lot to digest. Sentinel had been out on his own recognizance for quite some time.
…
Traitors. Lockdown and Swindle were a blow. Sentinel had liked them. They were suitably ruthless. They knew what was at stake, what had to be done to win a war like this. Sentinel ground his denta. The arm of his command chair crumpled in his grip. They would be dealt with.
The branched-spark twins, Sunstreaker and Sideswipe. Well, they’d always been wild cards. Insubordinate afts, as much as they could get away with. Sentinel felt he’d been uniquely capable of controlling them, hence their assignment to his battalion. He wished Prime all joy in dealing with them and thereby purged his own irritation at their defection. And obviously Sentinel would not waste any more personnel in the attempt to retrieve his tactician. Silverlance was doing well enough as a replacement for Prowl. Prowl had always been iffy, in retrospect. Dedicated to the Autobots, certainly, but a little squeamish. He’d needed persuasion now and then, though Prowl was smart enough to require only a minimum of rough handling. (Sentinel remembered with visceral satisfaction the one time he had struck Prowl, a blow that had sent the lighter mech flying across the bridge. Prowl had always been weirdly nimble in midair, though, and had landed neatly on his pedes.)
Moving Cybertron. It was just a planet, why bother? They could as easily rebuild on some other world. There were billions of suitable planets in their own galaxy, why even relocate to this “Milky Way”? (Sentinel had just enough xenobiology basics to be quite certain that he did not want to know what “milk” was.)
Metroplex. The building of a cityformer bespoke a certain degree of infrastructure, or at least access to materiel. Prime was making this “Earth” his last stand. Desperate or desperately foolish.
Prime. Salvaging a sliver of the Allspark made sense. Putting that sliver inside his spark chamber? Madness. Along with this disgustingly organic idea of spark-merging, it was clear the Prime had lost his senses. Sentinel had cordially disagreed with many of his policies for eons, but this was…insane. Their leader was insane. Mad as his twin at last.
Sentinel would have to think about this.
The Graveyard Legion. Weird that Prime could still have a stroke of brilliance amid the morass of deviant ideas.
Galvatron and his new legions. Interesting. Looked like a trip to Chaar might be worthwhile.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
It was a dry, dusty day. Sunlight slanted in the hangar door, casting a hot white oval on the polished stone floor. Hound and Trailbreaker came in, filthy from six days on and off road. They caught Mirage coming out of the recharge bay, hugging him, patting his shoulders and back, telling him all about their adventures...and getting him almost as filthy as they were. Mirage made what Ranger thought were rather feeble attempts to fend them off, but he wasn't serious about it. Instead he warbled at them in Cybertronian (of which Ranger bemusedly understood the words, though some of the context was clearly lost on him), and dragged them both down the corridor toward the oil bath.
They'd put in a door since Dani's toddling stage, which a person had to activate via transmitted command. A determined human might still get in, but it would take a certain degree of hacking and hardware skill. Ranger didn't think anyone had ever tried it, not even Maggie. The oil bath was a place there was bound to he roughhousing.
Or something. Ranger interrupted people in the middle of doing things other than bathing almost every time he went down there. He'd taken to keeping his shields up at low level all the time, and he was good at the repeller field shiver.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
Dancing along rooftops was tricky, but Tracks was light. He kept up a steady stream of fire. Starscream wasn't taking him seriously yet, evading in rather lazy rolls and yaws, but Tracks had his shoulder missiles up and charged, and in a handful of seconds Starscream and Skywarp would be in perfect range.
Skywarp disappeared. Tracks lost his lock.
Starscream turned abruptly, and Tracks knew he was now the focus of a crossfire. His vantage now a kill-box. Skywarp was behind him. He kept firing, and launched a volley of missiles. Being dead wasn't so bad, Raze and the others said. (Though they admitted that often the process of dying sucked major exhaust.) They were so close, they hoped, to the end of the war. Shame to get scrapped now. And Tracks wasn't certain what he'd...do, there in the Allspark. He wasn't sure he wouldn't take Barricade's option. There was too much he'd worked too hard to forget; too much in him kept locked away, unexamined.
Slag.
…
Smokescreen left the medbay, pausing at the entrance to the stem corridor. He didn't know where he was headed. The magnetic field of this planet was so powerful tiny birds and other creatures could navigate it with even tinier bits of cellular iron. Sometimes Smokescreen felt he would lose himself in it, scoured down to bare frame, memory and CPU wiped. Sometimes he thought that might not be such a bad thing. Tracks had deliberately run himself out under Seeker-fire, drawing them away from humans and a small pod of Water-Babies. He was going to recover, but he'd be in CR for weeks, maybe a couple of months. There was nowhere Smokescreen needed to be, nothing he could do to help right now.
Fields touched him first, then hands. Jazz. An arm around his waist, giving him somewhere to go. Down the corridor, down the new ramp, into the lower levels, what Sam liked to call the dungeons, but were nothing like. Cool spaces belowground, a small subterranean pond, a second bunkhouse; spaces people could go to for privacy, meditation. Or shagging.
Side by side they went, taking the short, curving hall to the mossary, where the little pond was. A bright disk in the center of the arched ceiling stood in for the sun or moon. No one was there at the moment. Jazz and Smokescreen skirted the whorled patterns of different mosses and delicate river-worn stone mosaics, climbing onto the low stone platform cut into the far curve of the room.
Jazz held him for a long time; lips resting against his cheek spar, hands drifting only slowly on his body, fields like the water of the pond - mirrorlike and still.
I liked the lines of him right off, first time I saw him, Smokescreen said at last, turning his head to kiss Jazz. That compact, tapering torso. Couldn’t ID his exact frame type…Towers custom jobs, you know.
Ohhh yeah.
I didn’t think much of his chances in our platoon, but he was pretty. Nice armor, if a bit light. Nice color. Until I found out that shade of indigo was the color of mourning in the Towers, or had been for about ten or twelve vorns.
That’s a pretty good run, in terms of Towers fads, Jazz chuckled.
Three million years, now. Smokescreen held Jazz tighter. Nobody wanted to talk to him at first. Nobody knew what to say, I think. Even after we saw how he could fly. And fight. Tracks had fought like a tunnel-snake when pressed.
Nobody but you, huh?
Oh, I don’t…I can’t take much credit. My job. He beat me at triplex, our first game. Slagger.
But not since? Grinning, Jazz pushed and Smokescreen pulled, and they lay side by side, hands moving purposefully, fields rising, caressing.
Mmm. Couple times since. I wasn’t paying attention. His harmonics made it clear what Smokescreen had been paying attention to.
Jazz laughed and sank cables into him, enjoying the courteous way Smokey welcomed him into the link. Smokey had nice lines, too, and Jazz set out to enjoy every one of them.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
Mikaela at 72 was not so very different from Mikaela at 44. Like Sophia Loren, Sam thought. Dark hair, good bones. Watching her walk, (especially from behind,) still put the hum in his motor. Besides, 72 wasn't that old. He didn't feel much different than 50, and that was just hitting mature adulthood, right? Bee was the elder partner in their little ménage, anyway, at 3.3 million years old. 72? Small beans.
A tall, black-armored mech Sam didn’t recognize stood next to Ironhide, joining in the noisy hugs as Bumblebee transformed. The batches of new kids had gotten so big and frequent these days Sam didn’t try to keep track. His implant automatically updated his HUD, so he knew the new mech’s name was Ranger.
Waitaminit. Ranger. Lennox had died in 2061, two years ago, so this was… Ranger. Cute.
Also. Aaaaaawkward! Sam glanced sidelong at Mikaela. Her HUD would have been similarly updated. Mikaela sailed on, smiling at the clump of robots, serene, guns holstered. Sam did not make the mistake of actually sighing in relief. He was good at this stuff.
Sam, Mikaela tight-beamed, the thought of them erasing one of their kids to fill it with a human mindstate makes me sick to my stomach. But I know - believe me, Ratchet was very thorough - I know they don’t think of it like that at all. And anyway, it isn’t Ranger’s fault. Thanks so much for thinking I was going to create a scene.
What? I didn’t even…! Did I say anything? I totally did not say anything!
You were thinking it.
I was not. I was admiring your ass. Not that Mikaela was easily divertable, but it couldn’t hurt. Besides being true.
Uh huh. Right up until you spotted Ranger and realized who he was. She climbed the stair to the mezzanine, throwing her hips around more than usual, Sam thought, and turned on her high-wattage smile. “Hello, Optimus,” she said aloud, as Prime leaned in so she could hug his cheek.
“Greetings, Mikaela,” said Prime. “I have approved the Stanford-MIT telescope for courier. Blueshift can take it up as soon as it’s ready.”
“Thank you!” Mikaela said, giving him an extra squeeze. If Optimus Prime liked your idea - and anyone was welcome to submit proposals, as long as you could actually build the thing yourself - one of the space-capable Autobots would pop it into orbit for you at a tiny fraction of the cost of a conventional launch. Or sometimes for free. Getting on Smokescreen’s good side was a bonus. There were lots of extra-atmospheric telescopes aloft now, and primary or secondary school experiments, and fleets of clever “space junk” collectors. Mikaela hadn’t been a part of the MIT team, but she’d put in a good word for her alma mater. The newest telescope merited launch on its own; it would look out upon the cosmos in ways humankind had only recently conceived of.
Perceptor had seen what they’d done there and was gleeful.
…
Epps put his feet up on the dash, pleased that he could still do it at his age without a lot of grunting and groaning. Probably that was why Ranger let him. Epps had tried it riding in Prime once and had gotten a slow, crawling tingle of electric charge, which hint he had taken before his calf muscles cramped.
“So is it weird or what, having people ride inside you?” Epps had asked this before, of Mirage, of Ironhide, but they had thought the question itself strange. Physically larger people carried physically smaller people - the world had always been thus. (Except when certain kinds of smaller people, like Huffer or Brawn, were physically much stronger than even larger people. Often this meant towing rather than carrying. Epps had held up his hands in surrender because Mirage would go on and on describing every permutation and exception for hours.) He figured Ranger might have a different perspective.
“I guess it’s not that different from being pregnant,” Ranger said, with every appearance of seriousness. Quite a lot of emotional information could be conveyed by the color and brightness of dashboard lights and dials.
“What!?” Epps squawked.
“Or having a tapeworm.”
“Ugh! Man, you are full of shit!”
Ranger snickered. “Honestly, hadn’t really thought about it.” He bounced on his tires a little. “But now that you mention it, it’s kind of freaking me out! AAAAAAAAA!” He swerved sharply back and forth across the - fortunately empty - road with an ostentatious screech of tires.
“Hey!” Epps protested, clutching at the ohshit bars and yanking his feet down off the dash. “I’m too old for this shit!”
“Now who’s full of it?” Ranger laughed, evening out.
“No, but seriously, this is kinda weird,” Epps felt as though he’d gotten his friend back, that Will had just been “away” for a couple of years and now he’d come home. He just happened to be a twenty-foot-tall robot now. “Guess the next question is, when did they do your last backup?”
“Do I remember what dying is like, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
“Last backup was the day before I died.” Ranger’s dash lights dimmed slightly as he thought. “But I…I remember Jhiaxus. And falling…and losing signal…how can I…? Ironhide. I remember because he does. I was…Lennox was hooked into the cloud mind…” He tried to call up his earliest tank-memories. As Ranger, he couldn’t remember anything from before he had a memory core and CPU to remember with, could he? The spark knew things, though. Could he remember being kindled?
Deep in the center of core programming. A muddle of impressions - all inputs had felt the same; sight, sound, touch, chemo, field, emotion, undifferentiated and hazy. A sense of purpose had been the strongest. The compulsion to burrow into the protomass and seat in what would become his chest. Before that…there would have been a few moments after Ironhide and Ratchet had chosen, before his spark had been carried to the tank. Motion, maybe? Cold? It was so vague, so tangled now in everything he’d experienced since. Overwritten? That wasn’t how Cybertronian memory worked, on a normal basis. They added layers, they didn’t need to erase the old ones until they got very, very old, like Kup. Or unless they wanted to, like Megatron.
Ranger was curious, now. His experience, his point of view, like Borealis’, had made a transition from human to Cybertronian. For Borealis, there was an appreciable jump between the time her brain had been scanned and when she had become aware in-tank.
Things had gotten tangled and weird, but Ranger thought the transition for him had been continuous. As his human body had died, there had been a dizzy kind of…sideways…slip. And the moment his mind fastened on that concept of “sideways” Ranger felt something shift, the memories - nebulous as they were - changing to reinforce his chosen impression. The Allspark hadn’t been involved in his kindling except at a remove, because it had created Ironhide and Ratchet’s sparks. Why did Ranger suddenly feel like his pattern had nevertheless come from the Allspark as well?
The Allspark, Ranger decided, was a slippery bastard and it was a major wonder that Prime had made any progress in using the thing at all.
“Guess nothing really changes,” Epps said. He put his feet back up on the dash. “Guess we just have to find out for ourselves.”
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
2063 - August
A low boom sounded through stone and air, focused by the skylight. Ranger regarded the latest summer thunderstorm with distrust. He knew it was beautiful out there, smelled wonderful, clouds glowing with late afternoon rainbows.
“Ratchet?”
“Hmm?” Ratchet was running a routine diagnostic - a mid-level housekeeping sort of program that Ranger would be able to run on himself after this.
“Could you…trigger me into integration? Like Metroplex?”
Ratchet refocused his optics, hoisted a single optic ridge. He didn’t say anything for a moment, his fields calm and unruffled. Ranger suddenly felt abashed; whiny and immature. He didn’t like the uncertainty, he told himself. He could be taken out of action, in the middle of, say, a rescue operation, and there was nothing he could do about it. He would be impaired, go a little crazy; it could take weeks to come out of.
“Metroplex had been aware for years,” Ratchet said gently. “And cityformers are unusual. Blaster integrated in-tank as well, but he has symbionts.”
“Oh.” Ranger didn’t want to imagine what a host going through integration would do to symbionts. He supposed they had had ways of dealing with it before the Allspark had been jettisoned, when they’d done the building and ensparking the other way around. Maybe they’d kept the symbionts in stasis. It couldn’t have been pleasant.
“We let it come when it may for a reason. It’s adaptive; the emotional pathways are more stable that way. Triggering doesn’t always work, and it can go wrong.”
Ranger’s optics spiraled very wide. “Okay.”
Optimus came in, Ratchet gestured him to a large table. Diverting first to pat Ranger's shoulder, Optimus wandered toward the indicated table as Ratchet finished with Ranger.
"We're going to see if we can delay Prime's growth a little more," Ratchet said at the flare of curiosity in Ranger's fields. "There. You're done. The command string is here." The string highlighted in Ranger's head. "Run that once a month or so, more often if you start to feel any kind of motor lag."
"Yes, Ratchet." Ranger slid from the table, lingered, looked at Prime. The process of donating protomass was something he'd been aware of for years, but had never seen. They had Wells now, but it was something he conceivably might have to do someday. Like giving blood, it seemed like something he should be prepared to do. "May I stay?"
"It's not pleasant," Ratchet warned. Prime nodded, though, and Ranger moved to the next table over, out of the way.
Prime lay ventral side down, limbs spread, fingers and pedal flanges hooked around the edges of the table. Ranger sternly curbed his revving engine.
Ratchet was tempted to stroke the back of Optimus' thigh, just to watch Ranger's fields go wobbly. Instead, he extended the nanoprobe from his left wrist and slipped it between plates of Prime's armor, down to the protoform. Prime gripped the table harder as the revert command seethed through him, and Ratchet began to pull a heavy ribbon of mass into a skein.
Does it hurt? Ranger tight-beamed. Prime's optics were shuttered, and though he made no sound, the lines of tension in his body, and the occasional knives of jagged static stabbing through his closely-held fields were making Ranger's armor stand up. Blue crackles of Allspark energy rippled over Prime's frame; as Ratchet kept pulling, Prime grew visibly smaller, all over, all at once, not entirely smoothly.
Yes and no, Prime replied. Borealis has described the sensation as akin to stretching very sore muscles.
Ah. Ranger hunched his spaulders down into their proper arrangement. Uncomfortable, but not unbearable.
Ratchet snipped off the first ribbon, pressing the end into the completed, metric ton skein, and began another. By the time they were finished there were three skeins, and Optimus was back down to 30 feet tall. Ironhide and Inferno came in to heft two of the skeins - Prime himself took the third - and haul them down to the storage vault.
Should he be doing that?
Ratchet smiled as he heated the nanoprobe to a dull orange to sterilize it. "He's done this so often, as disquieting as it is he recovers immediately." He patted Ranger's back. "He's three tons lighter; he'll be bouncing around the embassy all week and we'll be looking for excuses to shoo him outside, trust me."
…
“I’m not saying we won’t do it, or we’re unwilling,” Alexis Thi Dang, the new Director of the EDF said, lifting a hand and smiling wryly. “I’m just letting you know there’s been some grumbling about cost. Elections are coming up.”
Ranger's attention wandered. Across the holotable, Optimus nodded and responded to Thi Dang, Jazz and Prowl in their usual places at Prime's sides, their fields reading as a single, attentively humming field, banded now and then with bright arcs of humor from Jazz. Lennox had had the field-display app for his implant and HUD, but had usually kept it off - too much information for day-to-day. Watching them made Ranger happy, though. Happy fields. Ironhide stood between him and Jazz, so Ranger leaned around behind him, reaching out to pass his hand through the outer edges, playing with the subtle ribbons of energy. It made his hand happy. How could a hand be happy? But it was, he could feel it, all bubbly and warm, shooting little bolts of happiness up his arm to his spark. His feet were happy, too, shuffling and tapping the nice smooth cool floor. He was getting very warm, the coolness felt good, made him happier. His optics darted around, taking in every detail, everything was so bright and sharp and pretty! Optics were wonderful! He began to tremble a little, but it was mostly like a caffeine buzz, nothing alarming...oooh, Ironhide was wrapping an arm around his waist. His waist was so happy, being close to Ironhide's arm like that! His feet were jealous now, though, because they weren't very close to Ironhide...no, they were too - Ironhide had enormous feet, so Ranger's feet were pretty close to Ironhide’s feet! Feet were happy things! Feet were good to have!
"Mushrooms!" Ranger caroled, giggling. "l never did mushrooms! I was in ROTC!"
"Robot adolescence?" Thi Dang asked.
"Yes," Prime said with a lopsided grin.
"You guys get off easy."
"No argument."
Prowl moved to Ranger's other side as Ironhide maneuvered him out the door and toward the medbay; not touching yet, but there in case. Ranger hummed at him. That bright red chevron was interesting! How cute! Ironhide was being growly! Oops, now his fields were shot with pale yellow embarrassment. Ranger giggled again. Oh, hello, Ratchet! Yay, Ratchet! Ratchet was a funny color, too...wait, that was his armor not his fields...why was he still that color anyway? Ranger's optics were happy to see him, though. Mmm, Ratchet was hooking him up to a thing, table, monitor, whatever. Ranger's arm port was happy now! Data data data! In and out! Oh, an energon feed! Wooo! Energon was happy!
…
“Thetarix was south of the Rust Sea,” Ironhide whispered, his rough voice unwontedly gentle. “South of the Sonic Canyons, and the wind sent rust into our air so that each sunrise and sunset was like the sunrises and sunsets here, orange and gold, gleaming off windows and buildings and people and the streets themselves. Sometimes the sun was red through the haze all day, a bright optic watching over us.” Ranger lay sprawled in his lap on the recharge table, optics more than half shuttered, purring slightly. Ironhide kept a hand centered on Ranger’s chest. “We kept the Forges hot, building bodies for the Lord Protector’s soldiers. Even with the winds from the Canyons, even at night, it was always warm. I didn’t get to spend as much time there as I would have liked; I had a duty to my Lord, to my squadron. I know you understand that. Maybe, when we have a sun again, I’ll take you there. Won’t be much left, until we rebuild. Once we do, though, I think you’ll like it. Red sun, red Forges, warmth to keep the oil smooth…”
“You’ll be a poet yet,” said Ratchet, ambling by to run a quick scan. Ranger trembled now and then, his body jerking with aborted movements, but he had not had full-blown seizures.
“Shaddup,” Ironhide rumbled.
…
Prowl kept his firewalls solid, though Ranger did not test them, consciously or otherwise. He transmitted small data packets, mostly brief sensory clips. Floating blue crystals and haunting music. The mathematical pleasure of his first liftoff from the port where the Fission Blade had been commissioned. A field of wildflowers bluer than the sky.
“Texas,” Ranger murmured.
“Yes,” Prowl nodded.
“Lone Star. Alamo…Santa Ana…come and take them…every one will be put to the sword…asleep in the arms of the Lord…” Ranger shook, and Prowl held him, singing low until Ranger settled again.
…
Lines of paint this was not, Ranger knew. Chromatophores on nanocells. Like a big, mechanical octopus. Octopus Prime. He traced the pale blue outlines between glimmering cobalt and vivid orange-red. The original had probably been done by some talented low-rider down in SoCal, for some guy who had loved his truck. Ranger loved this truck, too.
Love ran through his fuel lines from his spark, through every system, through his mind; the emotion clear and strangely uncomplicated. He felt rested, restful, in no hurry to move from Prime’s embrace, and the acid-sharp burn of his fidgety, uncomfortable energy seemed to have left him.
“Through already?” Ratchet asked. Ratchet’s hand on his foot felt warm.
Ranger looked up into Prime’s considering optics.
“I think so,” Optimus said.
“Five days.” Ratchet touched Ranger’s cheek, scanned him deeply. It felt weird, but Ranger didn’t twitch. “Most people take almost two weeks. And this was two months earlier than most, three earlier than Borealis. I don’t think it means anything in particular, it’s simply unusual.”
“Okay,” said Ranger.
“I trust you won’t get cocky.”
“No, sir.”
“Released to active duty.”
“Thanks, Ratchet.”
“Once Prime’s done coddling you.”
“Heh.”
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
2063 - September
He could lift an entire bundle of I-beams. Like Superman. This was fun! Ranger placed the bundle where the foreman indicated and straightened, orienting on the next task. The Autobots helped in the ways they were well suited for, while trying to avoid taking human jobs. Usually they weren’t in for full-time, or on any single project from start to finish. They were often simply extra help when it was crunch time.
There was a blur of motion, a knifing flash of fields, a blow that sent him to his knees. Someone grabbed his shoulder, his chin roughly, hauled him upright. He felt cables forcing their way past the port covers in his neck. He couldn’t even scream as a link sliced its way through his autonomic firewalls.
You have anomalous memory data, a cold, emotionless, harmonic-less voice said in his mind. There was tumult, shouting; his gyros weren’t working right. There were guns in his arms but he couldn’t remember what the command codes were to shape them. Something was eating at him inside. Virus.
Soundwave yanked his cables free but held the young mech up as a shield. Ranger’s optics focused finally - now if he could just get his legs to work. Heavy booming crashed from the left. Ranger caught movement in his periphery and shifted his left optic. That was a sight he'd never seen before. Optimus Prime in full charge, running at him, battle mask up, big guns blazing. It was more than a little bit terrifying. It would have been more frightening if he couldn’t feel the blistering transmissions guiding Prime’s ordnance to strike around Ranger, hitting only Soundwave no matter how the Decepticon held him.
Soundwave angled his shields, both the living and the energy, trying to deflect Optimus’ careful fire. A shuff of pedes on dusty ground gave away the position of another mech behind him.
Soundwave spun to face the new threat - and met Elita’s fist. Her punch sent him flying; and when he landed she landed standing on his chest. She crouched and took firm hold of his head. Her narrow face and bared denta filled his view.
“Elita! Please don’t kill him!” cried Prime. Soundwave filed the plea for later analysis.
Elita twisted Soundwave’s head 315 degrees; enough to break things, not quite enough to sever the neck entirely. Soundwave’s body went limp as too many sensory and motor connections were snapped or crushed.
Optimus caught Ranger before he hit the ground, cannons transforming swiftly back to arms, cradling the young mech tenderly. “Ranger? Ranger, status!”
“Fffffffffffffffffff,” Ranger slurred. “Fuck. …That was f-fucked up, man.” He could turn his head now. Oh good, progress. Some part of himself was fighting back. He looked up at Prime’s distraught face. “Something in me.” Prime’s hand felt warm, reassuring on his chest. “Get’t out.”
Ranger, under these circumstances, I must force the link. Prime began, cables spooling slowly out of his neck, hesitating before connecting to Ranger’s cephalic ports.
“Just do it,” Ranger said, while he still could. “Hurry.” He braced for the cautery knife. Prime’s cables clicked home, the link so gentle it took Ranger a ridiculous seven nanoseconds to even realize it had initiated. There was a sense of a rising wave, bright threads, laser-edged, surgical swiftness cutting here and there, relentlessly pursuing the foreign code, hunting it down and killing it completely. There was a rising of Ranger’s self to meet Prime’s oncoming tide; where they crashed together in the middle, Soundwave’s virus would be snuffed out. It dove and dodged like a thing alive, seeking ways under or through, an escape to lie in wait, a burrowing in a backdoor trigger. But the Prime-wave roared, gathering every fragment before it, crushing everything beyond quantum possibilities, pursuing his quarry across all twenty dimensions.
The Allspark made up almost a third of Prime’s body. No malevolent code, no matter how brilliant, could stand against him.
…
Soundwave captured, Laserbeak tight-beamed. Alive.
Ravage sent an unadorned acknowledgement. This had only happened once before, long ago. The standing order was not to attempt rescue. Only two of them were free. Buzzsaw and Rumble had been with Soundwave. Ravage had felt nothing in his spark to indicate that they had been deactivated.
Tracking, Laserbeak said.
Yes, said Ravage, and loped in pursuit.
…
Awareness returned parcel by parcel. Domain by domain. So many pieces went together to create the emergent property of mind. Ranger could feel each of them rebooting, once there were enough of them running; could feel the layers of his self re-assembling. Beneath them all hummed his spark, steady, steadfast, a thing he could trust down to the foundations. The Lennox memories weren’t all of him, as important as they were.
“Optimus?”
“I’m right here.” A big hand settled on his chest, above his spark. It felt as though the hand itself was another spark, the field around it so strong and bright, sending wisps of itself down to touch him through armor and protoform and chamber wall. Ranger’s hands obeyed him without pain, closing on Prime’s hand, keeping it where it was.
There was a pounding at the med-bay door. That was quite an accomplishment, as the entry from the hangar had been engineered to nuclear blast door standards. Ranger sat up. “Ironhide!”
“Better let him in before he breaks something,” Ratchet grumped and opened the door. Ironhide stood poised on the other side, both cannons out and whirling, optics ablaze. Ranger crossed his arms and glared at him.
“Do you mind?” Ranger said. “Trying to get some rest in here. Oof!” He returned Ironhide’s fierce hug. “I’m okay, I think.”
“Where is he?” Ironhide growled at Prime, sounding like an angry Tyrannosaurus rex. “Where is that tunnel-snake slagger? Where are you keeping whatever was left after Elita was done?”
“You do not need that information at this time,” Prime replied amiably.
“Don’t give me that slag!”
“Ironhide…” Optimus wrapped his arms around both Ironhide and Ranger.
Ranger, seeing Ironhide do the same, snuggled into the Prime’s chest. He had this chance, he realized, to be a kid again, in a way. To accept simple reassurance without embarrassment.
“If we kill Soundwave,” Prime continued, “even Prowl cannot foresee what Shockwave will do.”
“Shockwave? “ Ironhide blinked. “What does he have to do with it?”
“Shockwave and Soundwave are twins,” Prime said. Their similarities had always been more than name deep, and Optimus wondered why they had kept their connection a secret, even before the war.
“They’re WHAT???”
Ranger reset his audials. Ironhide was loud, at close range. Prime’s chest was warm, the embrace of his arm, and the contact with Ironhide comforting. Ranger nuzzled into Prime’s shoulder. Peripheries were shutting down but he didn’t try to override. Prime’s voice and fields soothed everyone, no shame in that.
“I would prefer to avoid an escalation at this point. I know this will be difficult, but I think it would be best to release him.” Optimus didn’t blame Elita for damaging the Decepticon as she had. He was pleased at her restraint, given the circumstances. Neither side had been much for taking prisoners for half a million years. It was an expensive, risky operation, and no one had had the resources. Leave the dead. Let the wounded be evacuated by their own side if at all. He did not want to go back to that. Ratchet, bless him, had started working on Soundwave immediately without so much as a raised supraorbital crest.
…
Ranger came online swiftly this time. Elita had taken Ironhide’s place beside him, seated on the edge of the recharge table. She was holding one of his hands, examining it curiously.
“Prime was your diversion,” Ranger said, to be thinking of something other than Elita holding his hand. All that noise and firepower. Of course the rampaging Prime looked like the biggest threat.
Elita smiled. It made her so beautiful Ranger felt his spark wobble. Her helm was so…spiky. She was intimidating, and it was not in Ranger’s nature to be easily intimidated. Now, up close, he could see the remnants of glyphs and decorative etchings; almost a sheen of texture over the dark metal rather than distinct forms. He could read some of it, where the glyphs weren’t too battle-scarred, and filed the meanings away for later perusal. Poetry, seemed to be.
“Yes.”
“Comms were down. Soundwave was jamming everything.”
“Yes. Optimus and I are very old friends. He knew what I was going to do the moment Soundwave grabbed you.”
“You’re going to kill him. Soundwave.”
“If he crosses my path on a battlefield again, yes. Right now he is a prisoner, and Autobots do not execute prisoners of war without full trial. Or we didn’t used to.” Sadness and a host of other, fleeter emotions flickered through her optics and fields.
“The humans will want their own trial. And their own execution.”
“That is why at the moment we are keeping him on embassy grounds. Embassy airspace, as I understand it, extends to low orbit, which is itself considered international airspace.”
Ranger’s optics widened. They could get Soundwave out and never set a pede on United States sovereign soil. The world leaders would have fits, but Prime could handle them. There were complicated extradition treaties regarding human fugitives, but Prime had been adamant that Cybertronian criminals be handled by Cybertronians. For human safety, primarily, although that was becoming a trickier tack to take. The countries with the strongest alliances to them respected the fact that Cybertronians were still an endangered species, and therefore none were to be killed indiscriminately, but not all of humanity agreed.
“Do you remain intent on maintaining celibacy until Sarah’s crossing?”
“What? Yes, of course.”
“Then…you might want to remove your hand from my chest.”
Ranger jerked his hand away and scooted to the head of the table, mortified. “Oh my god, oh my god, I’m so sorry!” Prime was going to k-. No, no he wasn’t. Where had this idea that Optimus and Elita were married come from? That was so weird.
Laughing not unkindly, Elita patted his shoulder and rose. “I wish you a speedy recovery, Ranger,” she said and left him in peace.
Ranger clonked his forehelm against his drawn-up knee. Where had all this static come from? Jeez. Now he really had to de-frag.
…
They thought they had him in medical stasis. Soundwave had firewalls that did not register as firewalls, and behind them his consciousness was fully active, observing. Thus he was awake during the repairs to his neck - not an altogether comfortable experience. Ordinary physical pain was a stimulus to be ignored.
The room in which he was imprisoned was a near-featureless sphere, flattened to create a level floor. Tiny, soft, lozenge-shapes composed of woven matter and tangled organic fibers were stacked in niches near the door. Other than this, and the constellation of limited-frequency EM lights set into the ceiling, only the striations of the stone from which the chamber had been carved served as decoration. Two burly Autobots stood sentry on either side of the door, and another - a small je; files provided a name; Spiral - clung to the ceiling, weapons out but not fully powered.
He was lying on the bare floor, Ratchet muttering to himself above him, completing the last few linkages. Buzzsaw and Rumble lay quiescent within him, their small, conjugate sparks humming low and steady next to his. In stasis, lightly. Unharmed, and Ratchet had made no attempt to remove them. Strange. It would have been the first thing he would have done. Fools.
The door opened to admit the Prime.
Soundwave had never once in all the long war feared the Prime. For a time, when the Autobots had proved themselves difficult to eradicate, worthy adversaries, he had respected the Prime’s intelligence and wily ingenuity. Not now. The Prime had become weak on this organic-infested planet. Easily manipulated. His defeat was simply a matter of patience. Soundwave agreed with his brother; the Prime's betrayal had been illogical, bordering on incomprehensible, even though Soundwave retained his emotional heuristics, declining his brother's offer of the emotional sim programming he used in his strategic planning.
Soundwave had pointed out that, being spark-twins, they were meant to be halves of a whole. Their complementary but not identical natures had served them well for thousands of vorns, and besides, Shockwave did not have symbionts. Shockwave had accepted this logic and had not pressed the matter again.
Ratchet moved aside as the Prime knelt by Soundwave’s portside shoulder. The Prime drew no weapon, did not touch him.
“Soundwave,” Prime said, his harmonics formal, “take your people and leave this world. Please, let there be peace between us.”
“I am loyal to Galvatron. Galvatron has ordered the extermination of the parasite species infesting this planet.” This information was not new, nor important. A trifle, which would nevertheless bring pain to the Autobots.
“Why?”
An attempt at psychological manipulation. Soundwave ignored it.
“What do you want, Soundwave?”
Capitulation so soon? Within himself, Soundwave experienced the pleasure of a small triumph. He would set them an impossible task. “Give me Barricade.” A demand, no promise of truce attached, no expectation of being granted.
Prime straightened.
By the door, one of the sentries, Prowl, flinched and turned his head away. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. Interesting. A logical surmise would be that this Autobot had been in some way responsible for Barricade’s deactivation.
“His body has lain on the bottom of the Laurentian for decades,” Ratchet said. He had been somewhat surprised at the time that the US government had done as promised. The tracking buttons had indicated a suspiciously long pause at dock before the body had been loaded onto the USS Harry S. Truman; and Ratchet was sure there had been more than strictly Navy personnel aboard for the trip out to the abyss. Prime had elected not to pursue the matter. The humans had had unlimited access to Megatron and the Cube for near a century. It was a little late to be coy. “We can get it for you if that’s what you really want, but it’ll be an unholy mess.” He wondered what bit of hardware Soundwave could be after, and why. He had done the post-mortem himself. Barricade hadn’t been carrying anything unusual.
“No,” said Soundwave, looking directly at Prime. “Give me his spark. A new body.”
“I cannot. His pattern did not remain whole upon passing within the Allspark.”
“Try. You have done this before.”
“I asked willing sparks, and willing sparks answered.”
“You are the Prime, who can refuse?”
Optimus laughed - a reflection of the Matrix, which was convulsed with hilarity.
Does he want a fragging list? Zeta sneered.
“Soundwave, the line between persuasion and coercion is not so blurred.” Optimus leaned fractionally closer. “What Galvatron has done, forcing once-living sparks into new bodies, has been damaging the Allspark itself. If we wish to truly destroy our source of life, then certainly let us continue in that vein. I would rather not.”
“Give me Barricade,” Soundwave said again.
“Why Barricade?” Trying a different track. Soundwave had trusted the old enforcer with Frenzy over a long-term and distant assignment. That was something. Then Frenzy had died (or been killed; even Maggie had trouble calling that one and she’d been in the room); on Barricade’s watch, essentially. That was another thing. Optimus decided he really wanted to know why before he would agree to look for the scattered remnants of Barricade’s pattern.
Soundwave was silent.
They could not force him to tell them, nor to tell the truth if he spoke - not without using tactics Optimus had sworn to himself never to employ again. Prime watched the passive face of the Decepticon, thinking.
“I will look for his pattern,” Prime said, finally. “If he desires re-embodiment we will accommodate him. Whether he rejoins you and your faction will be entirely up to him.”
…
Ravage estimated they were beneath the embassy mesa. He had found the bolt-hole exit deep in the canyons to the north on a previous scouting foray. Breaching the electronic defenses was risky, but Ravage hoped his latest logic bore had moved through this accessory system - and all six baffle doors - without traces even the redoubtable Red Alert could detect. Last door, he tight-beamed. Laserbeak braced high, Ravage braced low, and keyed the door.
It opened, revealing a tiered arcade of Autobot weapons, pointing at them.
After a moment, the Autobots parted, opening a space through which walked the Prime.
“Come with me,” he said, and turned to lead them away, up and then down, deeper into their stronghold. The symbionts followed. Ravage readied his contingent of drones, which could create havoc if nothing else, but could just as easily get himself and Laserbeak shot. The Autobots ranged behind them, and to each side when the corridors were wide enough. Several fell away as they went deeper, but not enough to render the odds favorable.
Ravage kept his growl subsonic, expecting torture, expecting disassembly at the least. His host’s spark was whole and spinning, that was all he could tell. They were brought to a spherical chamber, deeper underground than the bolt-hole tunnel had been. Soundwave lay on the floor, suffering no further indignity than medical paralysis. The Autobots stepped aside, and Ratchet activated Soundwave’s compartment hatch to allow the symbionts to rejoin their host.
Ravage, Laserbeak, dock, Soundwave ordered. He was being allowed transmission. They complied, curling within amidst their remaining two hostmates.
“Are they all right?” Ratchet asked, closing him up.
“Affirmative,” Soundwave was surprised enough to reply. Regard for symbionts was not something he expected from Autobots. Skorponok’s destruction had been savage, though he would not have lived long after Blackout’s deactivation in any case.
Prime stood, and addressed the subclass-delta gestalt leader who had been among the symbionts’ escort, taking the delta’s hand in both of his. “Silverbolt, please take Soundwave off planet and let him go.”
“Prime…I don’t…? Yes, Prime.”
…
Soundwave fully expected to be jettisoned into the local star. He was therefore mildly surprised when the delta carrying him headed directly for the system’s heliopause. He was released with the medical override in place, given a slight shove outward. The delta aimed a not inconsiderable array of weapons at him, then transmitted a code. A tiny device detached from Soundwave’s neck and he could move again.
Without a further word, the delta backed to beyond Soundwave’s weapons range, then turned and dove in a flash for the third planet.
Weakness.
Soundwave hailed the Torment for pick-up.
…
Barricade...
Barricade...
Barricade...
He could only ask. He did not want anything that answered to be torn, poisoned by force. His query belled through the Allspark, whalesong across the deeps.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
Ranger lay on his stomach in the grass, head resting on folded hands, watching her knit. Sarah liked to spend as much of the year as possible eating dinner out on the porch - which in their part of Nevada meant most of the year. In December and January and February there might be cold, rainy days when it just wasn’t worth it.
“Are we still married?” Ranger asked.
Sarah dropped a stitch. “We talked about that before, remember?” How could he forget? Unless he was damaged, he couldn’t, could he? But maybe, now that he’d been through integration he wanted to talk about it again. “Will and I decided, under the circumstances, we’d just have to figure it out for ourselves, when the time came. He always assumed he’d die before I did.”
“Human males are generally shorter lived,” Ranger agreed. Obviously it had been more than that, and the twinkle in his optics indicated he knew that. “When I…woke up, I knew you. I knew we had a connection that was called ‘married’, but whenever I looked at you or thought about you I couldn’t feel the kinds of things I remembered feeling when I did those things before.”
“Ratchet told me your emotions would be kept set very low at first.” It was another in a long list of things she had thought about, fished for a reaction to when it was just theoretical, and found, once theory had become reality, that she needn’t have worried. The situation was, in a way, so strange she had no footing, no basis for panic or anger or revulsion. It was a curiosity. Maybe other people would react differently. She’d long ago given up putting a lot of store by such predictions. You took each day as it happened. You took each person as they were, whether they were robots or humans or dogs.
Ranger nodded. “I knew that, too. I decided to wait and not worry about it. It’s better to wait until after integration anyway. I do love you, now that everything’s put together right. But it’s…sparks love differently.”
“I imagine they do,” Sarah said, grinning. “You can leave the ‘cleaving’ part right out, mister. We can deal with that stuff later.” Sarah admitted she wasn’t that kinky, not like some of the younger kids. And it had been nice, really, the way her physical relationship with Will had softened, mellowed over the years. Their frenzied, volcanic lovemaking whenever he was home on leave had been wonderful; she wouldn’t trade those days for anything. But it had also been fine for some of the fire to ease down. A simple campfire instead of nuclear explosions. Old folks got it on, too; but nobody wanted a broken hip. She wasn’t about to get frisky with a twenty-foot-tall robot who could probably go for days or weeks without stopping.
“Anyway, I don’t think we can say we’re married by any civil or church definition,” she continued. “Till death do us part. Maybe in a Shakespeare definition, though. ‘…Love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds…’ I talked to Pastor Rachel about it more, while you were in the tank. Not the details, of course, just as kind of a question of philosophy.” Those had been coming up more and more these days. Human technology could do amazing things, and the Transhumanists had been talking about these kinds of things since the late 1990’s or earlier. Sarah agreed that it was a good idea to think about what some of this hypothetical technology would mean before it became reality and people were left to fend for themselves with no direction and no help in an increasingly confusing world.
Well. The Autobots would help. Prime sometimes revealed how other species had solved certain problems, always delineating how that species and the circumstances had been different as well as similar. He made suggestions, or, more often, simply restated the situation as he saw it, in remarkably clear terms. The ultimate outsider, but with a surprisingly human insight and unflagging compassion.
Ironhide, interestingly, did in fact treat Ranger almost exactly the same way he had treated Will. She’d asked Borealis about her relationships with Ratchet and Prime, and Borealis had said she did consider them her parents, very much in the human sense; though she also knew and understood things from a Cybertronian perspective. Borealis was completely, unhesitatingly promiscuous with everyone except Prime and Ratchet. Sarah somehow felt that Prime would be willing to take their relationship to a more physically intimate level. It was kind of part of his job. Or at least he seemed religiously inclined to make certain his people were happy, by any and all means available. Ratchet, funnily enough, was a stereotypical mother hen to Borealis. And Sarah didn’t think he’d realized it, despite the teasing. Ratchet seemed to think, in fact, that the teasing was wholly off-base. He was perfectly sane, why was everyone else crazy?
Ranger evoked a nod by movement of certain of his face plates, despite that his head firmly rested on his hands on the ground. “You’re on row 138, stitch 56, by the way. Next should be purl, purl, purl.”
“Ah! I was just going to ask, thank you!” Oh, she loved him. He’d made himself into a walking library of knitting patterns just for her. And…that was a thing Will would have done. Will was in there, she was certain. No matter what the science bots said, this hadn’t been a cold copying of neuron connections and quantum chemical states. The spark Ironhide and Ratchet had created between them somehow also contained Will’s soul.
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Table of Contents
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