Fic
Title: Borealis 76/92: Neighbors - Part 1
Author: tainry
Disclaimer: Not mine, no money.
Rating: R
Characters/Pairing(s): ensemble
Warnings: OCs, PnP & tactile, m/m, f/f
Summary: Wherein Beachcomber and Prime have a snuggle and Miles scares the crap out of them; Airazor and Jury compare notes; Prime requests the pleasure of Barricade’s presence - and Barricade acquiesces; and important devices are tested.
Notes: My portrayal of Barricade is heavily influenced by playswithworms's Project Reset Barricade. <3 Just, y'know, in this case Prowl killed him and there are no hatchlings. ^_^;
I'll get the AO3 post and link done after I get home from doing CE tomorrow... ^^;
~4300 words.
BOREALIS: Neighbors - pt I
I have come back to you broken
take me home
And my body bears this trouble
take me home
Take me back to my beginning
Before the hell of night set in
And I came to this border
take me home
- The Wailin’ Jennys, Starlight
2083 - June
Green waved seas of ferns, and the cheery cloverlike faces of oxalis, strewn with drifts of miner’s lettuce, in the summer breeze. Green and misty gold shone the sunlight through breaks in the immense trees. Second growth, but in this latter part of the 21st century the redwoods towered above like cathedral columns, though only a fifth of their eventual size.
Their footsteps thumped hollow on the tuff lining the trail. Beachcomber kept to the trails, leaping the smaller streams with one arm firmly around Miles’ waist, natural as breathing. Miles remembered he’d felt it an imposition when he’d been younger. Now it felt like a dance. The same dance Beachcomber was always doing, whether he walked in high places or wriggled through hot caves halfway through the crust…or sashaying uninvited across Perceptor’s design desk. Birds chirped and warbled now and then, and woodpeckers knocked, but for the most part the only other sound was the wind catching in the upper treetops, low but strong. They felt only a whisper of it at ground level.
The light grew brighter up ahead, less diffuse, and Beachcomber’s head went up, fields casting forward and whirling with colors and patterns Miles had learned to associate with deep happiness. Someone waiting for them in the clearing. They were four miles along the loop trail from the Oregon base. Perceptor was down in Nevada and Seaspray was in Hong Kong.
Miles could have pinged the cloud mind, but he didn’t, waiting until the curve and slope of the trail led them to the little meadow, and his own eyes could tell him who it was.
Ferns gave way to grasses. The trees tucked their shadows well around their feet. In the center of the meadow, surrounded by trees that dwarfed even him, stood Optimus. Miles set his software to render Prime’s field as a mandala. It whirled slow and stately, reaching toward them, to welcome and enfold them, vivid and complex.
Armor gleaming, all his old dents and gouges healed, even his chameleon mesh had stopped mimicking scratches and worn edges. Knight, avatar, bodhisattva. Prime. His old alt mode was finally beginning to look out of place on the freeways of any continent, what with even the biggest diesels being replaced by fuel cells and the new electrics, and even a few solars, now that atomically precise manufacturing was really taking off, making solar panels cheap, super-efficient and easy to stick onto just about anything; and so he had chosen another. Longer, overlapping plates perfectly replicating truck body parts covered his shoulders and hips, lending him even more of a samurai air than his bodily movement style had always suggested.
Beachcomber ran to his Prime with a happy warble, leaping, caught, clinging to Optimus’ chest, cheek spar pressed to the central seam. He hadn’t seen Optimus in the metal for several years.
“Ahhh, Beachcomber,” Prime rumbled fondly, rearranging his chest armor to better accommodate him.
Miles ambled across the meadow, watching as blue fire threaded over Beachcomber’s armor as the geologist arched and shivered. A few thousand milliseconds was a long time to the robots. Plenty of time to overload once or twice. Miles was up for the climb - 92 didn’t feel a day over 65 - but when Optimus offered a lowered hand he wasn’t going to refuse it. The ride gave him a close-up pan of columnar legs, steely abdomen and sexy, shiny chest. He settled himself on Prime’s left shoulder, where Prime had contrived a space where an agile human might perch in relative security and comfort.
The noble head - eighteen times the size of his own - turned toward him, optics whirling to macro setting. Miles gazed steadily into those optics, drawn in by their mechanical complexity, contemplating the mind behind them. Worlds enough and time, Miles thought. He leaned in, touching his cheek to the hard angled corner of Prime’s mouth. The metal plates moved a little against his skin and Miles smiled. He patted the edge of the cheek-guard.
“Good to see you,” Miles said. A lot of the usual greetings and small-talk was redundant when you were in near-constant contact already. He knew who was well and who having difficulties, who was newly decanted and which of the Graveyard Legion had been re-embodied again. Images flitted through his consciousness of Bee teaching Dani’s granddaughter to drive, even though she was only four; of Tracks stalking across the hangar floor closely pursued by Rapido, scolding him in a fluid mixture of Cybertronian, Spanish, and English; of Prowl in profile, lit by the cool hues of the holotable in the war room. But he could still say it was good to see someone he hadn’t sat on - or in - for a long time.
“And you,” Optimus replied, careful not to dislodge Miles with a nod.
“Who are you listening for?” Beachcomber asked. Prime had been peering intently through the atmosphere when he and Miles had arrived.
“Kup and Springer are on their way back,” Optimus said. “Highbeam will stay with Cybertron, and the small garrison Elita left there, until just before the move. Sentinel has refused to leave the Chaar system, even for this.” The last was uttered with a certain sad resignation. Optimus didn’t know how Sentinel had justified the refusal of their orders to come to Enceladus to his crew, or whether he had even needed to at this point. Once the planet was moved and restoration underway, Prime would go with Borealis - they would protect each other, and neither would let the other do anything too aggressively rash - to meet with Sentinel personally. How he was going to distract Jazz, Ironhide, Ratchet, Prowl and Elita (not to mention Thundercracker and Skyfire, who could fly after them) while he snuck off was a problem for which he did not yet have a satisfactory solution.
As Prime tipped his head back, Miles noticed a wire-thin line of bronze, bright against the darker metal of neck struts and hydraulics. Had that been there before? He traced the bright inclusion with a fingertip, warm and alive with tiny threads of blue energy, eyes widening as he blinked in his macro lenses and saw the microscopic glyphs glowing deep in the texture of the metal. He could feel a faint tug, tides of the nanites in his blood and bones. Optimus' optics whirred, cycling wide and vivid. Something abrupt and very odd happened to his fields. If he’d been human, Miles thought, Optimus would have staggered, sat down; but Prime stood quite still.
“Miles?”
“Did you feel that?” Miles kept his hand where it was. It felt good, that almost magnetic tug. Optimus was warm and comforting.
“That is…possibly very dangerous.”
Oh god, Miles thought, yanking his hand back. Very dangerous. Definitely very stupid. He pictured every tiny machine in his body zinging merrily off in different directions, each now with their own spark and…oh god. Oh shit. Oh god that would have been messy. He was shaking. Optimus curled a hand around him, lifted him down to where Beachcomber clung, optics huge. Beachcomber hugged him rather more fiercely than usual.
“Miles!” Beachcomber whispered, shivering.
“I’m okay,” Miles said, hugging back just as hard. “I think.”
“I would feel easier if we made certain.” Optimus swung around, arms around them both, heading by the most direct route, trees permitting, for the base, and Catscan. Miles heard Beachcomber’s faint squeak of protest, imagined the size of the footprints. Bigfoot. Well, the ferns would recover, there wasn’t a lot of other undergrowth anyway, and the robots tended to broadcast sonics ahead to scare wildlife out from underfoot.
What did you feel? Miles wanted to ask, but didn’t, afraid of the answer.
...
“If I understand previous incidents correctly, you have been very fortunate,” Catscan said.
The blue, green and yellow dots - different kinds of scans - disappeared from Miles’ lenses. “I’m okay?”
“You are.”
“And I’m not going to suddenly turn into a robot?” Not that there was anything wrong with turning into a robot, but he wasn’t done being human yet.
“Not suddenly.”
“Catscan!” Beachcomber yelped. Now was a fine time for the medic to find his sense of humor.
“Do you not intend your mindstate to be copied?”
“Yes.”
Catscan bobbed his shoulder armor in the Cybertronian equivalent of an affirmative nod. “The nanometer-scale machines in your body have not, per the specs I have from Perceptor, been detectably altered.”
“Thanks.” Miles grinned and hopped down from the table into Optimus’ hands. “No touchie Allspark, though. Just in case. Good safety tip, Egon.”
Optimus blinked, processing the reference. “Indeed. I am relieved that there were no unforeseen effects.”
What about foreseen effects? Miles wondered, but again did not ask. He suspected that he’d find out eventually, one way or another.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
Jury landed on the helipad atop the Chau building in Shanghai and transformed. Airazor flew a tight circle around her then alit as well, neat and aerodynamic even in robot mode. Jury called up a brief memory of her sitting like a small falcon on Skyfire’s wrist. Jury herself would sit like a small falcon on Skyfire’s wrist any time, at the least provocation. At the moment, they were ostensibly providing conspicuous air cover for Tracks and Smokescreen, who were doing something diplomatically financial and complicated down on the ground, involving the Australasian battleship prototype. The Predacons had last been spotted in South America, so they weren’t an immediate worry. It would take ten or fifteen minutes for them to circle the planet, even catching a ride with Astrotrain or Blitzwing, but things entering or leaving Earth’s atmosphere were quite carefully watched. The Predacons continued to pose a threat because they were good at camouflage, and stuck to the ground for the most part, under the radar both literally and figuratively. The Autobots didn’t currently know where Starscream was so it was prudent to keep an optic on the sky in any case.
They had a nice view of the city lights from their perch; the famous Pudong skyline, still ornamented by the Oriental Pearl TV tower. The Decepticon attack of 2039 had seared a kilometer-wide diagonal trench to the south, fortunately missing the Yu Garden and the Bund, but altering the course of the Huangpu River, which was now split; emptying directly into the East China Sea as well as into the Yangtze River. The Pudong area was now an island. The Nanjing Road, to the west, leapt the gap as a wide bridge with shops all along each side, lights sparkling and shimmering off the water.
Everything was so small. She was used to that, in the adaptive way Cybertronians were very good at, but sometimes the scale was striking, as now, with the tiny multitudes scurrying around below. And the number of floors in buildings of this height. All her proprioceptive and motor programs were adjusted for urban maneuvering with a minimum of collateral damage. With the Theresa memories, and adjusting her sensory inputs, she could look upon this city with something like a human perspective. Up so high, perilous, bright lights below, an infernal glow out through the rest of the city. Light from below was strange, eerie, to the human perspective, but normal to the Cybertronian. Primus Below. Well, not all humans had worshipped sky gods either. The skyscrapers in the immediate Pudong area were lit top to bottom, day-bright under a tropical-hazy night sky, reflecting off the bottoms of the clouds. Despite massive losses to Decepticon attacks, Shanghai was still one of the most densely populated cities on the planet.
She’d hoped it would be weirder than this, but compared to the billion years of her previous, pre-Graveyard life, the human span provided little more than a translucent overlay. Fascinating, but the insights had not changed who she was. Perhaps after a vorn or three, she could look back and chart small alterations that might have lead to paths she would never have trodden, ideas she would never have had otherwise.
It was hot and humid, but the frequent summer rains had not yet fallen that night. The heat was fine, Jury thought. Reminded her of the Torus States. The humidity felt odd, adding to the thickness of the atmosphere. Jury, like a lot of the Graveyard Legion, tended to keep her shields up most of the time anyway. She rubbed her fingertips together as if feeling the heaviness of the air.
Airazor grinned at her. The falciformer liked this heavy air, she was built to slice through it, and she had not yet been to Cybertron.
After her decantation, Airazor had allowed herself a period of regret for all the art galleries, museums and libraries she could not fit inside. She wasn’t large by Cybertronian standards - about Jazz’s height and rather less massive - but such facilities’ curators were understandably wary of allowing her entry. Hound had helped her assemble a very nice holomatter avatar, but it wasn’t the same. A feeling she could quantify, since an avatar’s sensory abilities were much reduced from those of her actual frame. She could travel the world easily, though, and draw on Autobot accounts to gain her avatar admittance almost anywhere. The Rijksmuseum, the Louvre, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the Forbidden City, the Strahov Library in Prague. Even the Bodleian, where she’d met Rewind, immersed as usual in his own studies.
Optimus had joined her at the Nairobi National Museum in Kenya recently. She’d nearly fallen off her rooftop perch when she’d seen his avatar. Six-foot-six, statuesquely muscular, a deliberate mix of Kikuyu and Maasai features, bright blue eyes to make the avatar’s nature plain. Female.
That made sense, since much of Kenya’s - and indeed most of the continent’s nations’ - leadership was female.
Theresa had been heterosexual, but Airazor had had a job of work to keep her avatar from pouncing Prime’s. She’d had a good in-the-metal snuggle with him once their tour of the museum was done. She agreed with the nearly unanimous Autobot opinions regarding shagging Prime.
(Airazor had been surprised to learn that Ixchel Chase’s last lover, in her late 30’s, had been a woman. Carly had eventually realized that she would always play second fiddle to astrophysics. Which was a bummer but kind of understandable. Their intimate relationship had waned, but they had parted friends when Carly had taken a professorship at Oxford. Jury hadn’t been surprised, having snuggled Borealis a time or six. Ranger and Rain were rather coy about how long they’d known, and both insisted it hardly mattered now, with seven flavors to choose from instead of two-ish.)
Airazor did not share Borealis’ squeamishness about interfacing with her progenitors. Theresa had known Mirage and Hound as friends for a long time before they had kindled Airazor’s spark. And maybe in her most secret of hearts, Theresa had been a little bit in love with Mirage. Especially after Bobby’s death.
We’re finished down here, Tracks told them. Meet you at the airport. The plan was that they would all ride back to the Nevada embassy together in an old C-17. Or Airazor could hitch a long-distance lift with Jury, who was, after all, not an ordinary helicopter.
Airazor sidled closer and they exchanged arm cables. “I keep wondering if this is onanism,” she whispered.
“Pfft!” Jury snickered. See you back at the mesa later, Tracks, Jury knelt and drew Rae into her arms. They watched over each other’s shoulders, slid home a single set of thoracic cables. Risky. Sweeter for it. Airazor’s practical, rational mind disapproved, but her spark spun hot and bright.
Ah. Enjoy. Tracks signed off with a complex of Towers-typical glyphs whose context and connotations Jury had to explain to Airazor. Even in sharp-edged Vanadium, pleasure shared had been a virtue. And Tracks was hardly one to fire shots regarding perilous behavior. Hound would scold them later, but scoldings from Hound generally ended up in kisses and clang.
After a swift, thorough overload that tasted of ultraviolet and platinum,they set out over the East China Sea, passed Japan, skimming the tropical waves of the Pacific. Sometimes Airazor flew upon her own wings, rising high above the clouds only to stoop upon her larger, slower friend; sometimes they climbed sharp and fast, entwining their frames, stroking one another in freefall, pulling up only just in time to avoid a dousing. Jury could follow the equator from landfall to landfall in nine hours, seven if she was in a hurry. They were not in a hurry.
They were just coming in sight of the California coast when the cloud mind gathered, surged, towering into a thunderhead. Something or someone had seriously freaked out Prime. The thunderhead dispersed quickly, though, as whatever had alarmed him passed.
What the slag was that about? Jury wondered. Prime was up in Oregon. Visiting their scientific outpost - and, to put it bluntly, Perceptor’s spawning ground - usually put Optimus in a happy, sometimes joyful mood, but no one seemed to know what was going on. Ratchet was conspicuous by his silence, which Jury took to mean he was yelling at Optimus privately.
As Jury and Airazor crossed into Nevada, Prime rejoined the cloud mind to explain. A nanites-augmented human had made physical contact with Allspark material. Nothing untoward had happened, but the potential had rattled Prime.
The only exposed Allspark material is that bit up on Prime’s neck, isn’t it? Airazor tight-beamed.
Far as I know, Jury said. Which means that of the thousands of nanites-augment humans, it had to have been someone Prime felt comfortable having up on his shoulder.
Of those in Oregon right now, who could have been irresistibly drawn to laying a hand on that shiny bronze line without thinking?
They looked at each other. Miles.
Hey! said Miles, as the same conclusion spread from a handful of foci (Prowl, Nightbeat, First Aid, Mikaela) across the cloud mind.
Sorry, Prime said, even though he had not indicated either directly or indirectly which human. He’d been Prime-tier discreet, in fact.
Aw, forget it. I guess I deserve this. Miles was getting a stern talking-to from both Ratchet and Perceptor, and a lot of ribbing from just about everyone else, Sam adding vid captures of the “Dewbot” from Mission City. (Before the National Guard had cornered and killed it. Optimus, reeling from the deaths of his twin and Jazz, had failed to intervene in time.)
You’re not putting a moratorium on human contact are you? Mikaela asked. Even if only augmented human contact, that meant quite a lot of people these days.
I am considering it, Prime said. Ratchet, Perceptor and I are discussing whether it would be feasible to simply remove and replace that cable. The Allsparky bit might just grow back right away. The regular donation of protomass kept Optimus from growing in overall size, but they hadn’t yet come up with a way to halt the slow spread of the Allspark material through his body.
You need to find an alternative to palladium, Miles joked. Coming up with new elements would be right up Wheeljack’s alley, right? They wouldn’t even need to knock holes in the walls to build a particle collider. Wheeljack probably kept a desktop model beside his bed.
Heh.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
Barricade…
Two patterns answered. Optimus.
Secateur, Chaindrive? They had been friends of Barricade’s before the war.
Yes. We’ve been collecting pieces of Barricade’s pattern. Gathering memories, resonances. Their patterns billowed and swirled, overlapping each other and cradling a small, bright accretion disk. A spark on the verge of ignition. We think it was the shock of his death, and of what he encompassed after, that caused his pattern to splinter. We would otherwise have supposed his personality to have been stronger, more able to sustain a selfness than most. We have enough information to attempt cohesion.
If you would be so kind?
There was a further gathering-in, a contraction; the pattern between Secateur and Chaindrive spiraled, flickered, boiled, rippled into coherence. Optimus ‘ spark pulsed in awe.
Barricade.
Prime…? Hrrrrrngh.
Barricade?
War’s not over?
I’m afraid not. Not quite.
Dragged me out of…slag, Chaindrive, what the Pit…?
Sorry, Cade. Prime’s been calling. We only put you back together so we could talk. You can disperse again if that’s what you want but we wanted to be sure.
Thanks for that, I guess. What the Pit happened…? Oh. Was that Prowl? Barricade’s pattern assimilated eons and worlds of knowledge, expanding, encompassing the notspace within the vessel of the Allspark, contemplating the changes since his death.
Yes.
Hn. You’re not yanking me out just to torment him are you?
No. Soundwave asked that you be reimbodied.
He did, huh?
Do you have any idea why? He was unforthcoming with me.
Maybe. Soundwave still a Con?
Yes.
And he asked you for me. He didn’t ask…Galvatron.
Apparently not. I admit that fear of what Galvatron would do to you was part of my motivation for acquiescing.
Thanks for that too, then. Spark-merging. You’ve been busy.
Mmmhmmm.
Don’t you purr at me like that, when I don’t even have a body!
What kind of body would you like us to prepare for you?
Smooth. All right. Find me a black Suburban…no. Wait, you’re using…yeah, give me about three metrics of you mass to play with I’ll build it myself.
As you wish. And thank you.
…
Optimus ghosted down from the mesa top, striding by the few night-shift folk in the hangar, slipping past Skids and Ratchet asleep in the recharge bay. The heavy door to the growth tank chamber opened to his shortwave code and locked behind him. With another thought he began the warm-up process in an empty tank. Protomass was injected into the thick colloid, sinking like the globs of wax in a lava lamp.
Kindling directly from the Allspark had gotten easier only in the sense that he knew now what to expect, knew how he had to break open, knew what it would feel like. Not dissimilar to being struck by lightning; an event potentially fatal even to Cybertronians if caught unprepared. (Cliffjumper had thought it would be tingly. He was lucky a number of frontliner failsafes had kicked in and nothing mortally important had been fried.)
When he regained consciousness, the occupant of the tank was well snuggled into its mass and Ratchet was peering down at him. Optimus sat up, groaning.
“Who is that?” Ratchet asked, with some asperity, indicating his dislike of Optimus doing things like this without medical supervision. He had every confidence in Prime’s ability to start a growth tank running; he had observed Ratchet or First Aid or Hoist do so often enough. But Optimus did tend to disregard his own safety in disconcerting ways. No amount of scolding for this would be too much, in Ratchet’s estimation.
Optimus regarded the tank. He could no longer communicate with the spark within, not until the body grew a comm system. Strange. Clearly he had much yet to learn. Ratchet was scanning him. Quite deeply. It’s Barricade, he said, embroidering the tight-beam with harmonics requesting secrecy. At least for now.
“Hmm.” Ratchet lifted an orbital ridge, turned to scan the humming tank, and the amber spark within.
Optimus blinked. That had not been a cynical “hmm”, nor an angry one, nor even dubious. An interested, perhaps even hopeful “hmm”. That in itself was hopeful, Optimus felt, though he did not anticipate such forbearance from Bumblebee. As a Decepticon, Barricade had tortured Bee, for information it happened that Bee did not have. Bee had been freed, but the grudge between them was bitter and of long standing.
And then there was Prowl. That would be an entirely different species of problem.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
Six emitters floated in a circle thirty meters in diameter, halfway between the asteroid belt and Jupiter. At the embassy, Metroplex, and the Oregon base, crowds were watching on mist screens. Perceptor’s design or not, Sam thought, grinning, Wheeljack had been involved. The things would either work brilliantly or blow themselves to smithereens.
The Art Deco butterflies unfolded, opening their wings. A blue-green glow spread from the “tails” of their wings, from each to each, and in to the center; a shimmering, coruscating expanse. A broad ripple moved from the outer edge of the disk to the center, as though the bridge horizon was made of some exotic kind of thick, viscous fluid. There was of course no sound, but Sam imagined he heard the Stargate whoosh and watery hum. The outer edge of the disk thickened briefly, then the whole thing winked out. A small side screen replayed the opening and closing in extreme slow motion for the benefit of human ocular equipment which did not naturally operate at something like a thousand frames per second.
“That’s it?”
“My dear Samuel,” Perceptor said, transmitting via the screens from the staging area (a large asteroid that was stationary relative to the six emitters), “that was quite sufficient. We have data enough to analyze for several weeks.”
“One try,” Mikaela whispered to him. “No do-overs.”
Moving a planet, Sam thought. I guess so.
Part II
Part III
AO3 link
Table of Contents
.
Author: tainry
Disclaimer: Not mine, no money.
Rating: R
Characters/Pairing(s): ensemble
Warnings: OCs, PnP & tactile, m/m, f/f
Summary: Wherein Beachcomber and Prime have a snuggle and Miles scares the crap out of them; Airazor and Jury compare notes; Prime requests the pleasure of Barricade’s presence - and Barricade acquiesces; and important devices are tested.
Notes: My portrayal of Barricade is heavily influenced by playswithworms's Project Reset Barricade. <3 Just, y'know, in this case Prowl killed him and there are no hatchlings. ^_^;
I'll get the AO3 post and link done after I get home from doing CE tomorrow... ^^;
~4300 words.
BOREALIS: Neighbors - pt I
I have come back to you broken
take me home
And my body bears this trouble
take me home
Take me back to my beginning
Before the hell of night set in
And I came to this border
take me home
- The Wailin’ Jennys, Starlight
2083 - June
Green waved seas of ferns, and the cheery cloverlike faces of oxalis, strewn with drifts of miner’s lettuce, in the summer breeze. Green and misty gold shone the sunlight through breaks in the immense trees. Second growth, but in this latter part of the 21st century the redwoods towered above like cathedral columns, though only a fifth of their eventual size.
Their footsteps thumped hollow on the tuff lining the trail. Beachcomber kept to the trails, leaping the smaller streams with one arm firmly around Miles’ waist, natural as breathing. Miles remembered he’d felt it an imposition when he’d been younger. Now it felt like a dance. The same dance Beachcomber was always doing, whether he walked in high places or wriggled through hot caves halfway through the crust…or sashaying uninvited across Perceptor’s design desk. Birds chirped and warbled now and then, and woodpeckers knocked, but for the most part the only other sound was the wind catching in the upper treetops, low but strong. They felt only a whisper of it at ground level.
The light grew brighter up ahead, less diffuse, and Beachcomber’s head went up, fields casting forward and whirling with colors and patterns Miles had learned to associate with deep happiness. Someone waiting for them in the clearing. They were four miles along the loop trail from the Oregon base. Perceptor was down in Nevada and Seaspray was in Hong Kong.
Miles could have pinged the cloud mind, but he didn’t, waiting until the curve and slope of the trail led them to the little meadow, and his own eyes could tell him who it was.
Ferns gave way to grasses. The trees tucked their shadows well around their feet. In the center of the meadow, surrounded by trees that dwarfed even him, stood Optimus. Miles set his software to render Prime’s field as a mandala. It whirled slow and stately, reaching toward them, to welcome and enfold them, vivid and complex.
Armor gleaming, all his old dents and gouges healed, even his chameleon mesh had stopped mimicking scratches and worn edges. Knight, avatar, bodhisattva. Prime. His old alt mode was finally beginning to look out of place on the freeways of any continent, what with even the biggest diesels being replaced by fuel cells and the new electrics, and even a few solars, now that atomically precise manufacturing was really taking off, making solar panels cheap, super-efficient and easy to stick onto just about anything; and so he had chosen another. Longer, overlapping plates perfectly replicating truck body parts covered his shoulders and hips, lending him even more of a samurai air than his bodily movement style had always suggested.
Beachcomber ran to his Prime with a happy warble, leaping, caught, clinging to Optimus’ chest, cheek spar pressed to the central seam. He hadn’t seen Optimus in the metal for several years.
“Ahhh, Beachcomber,” Prime rumbled fondly, rearranging his chest armor to better accommodate him.
Miles ambled across the meadow, watching as blue fire threaded over Beachcomber’s armor as the geologist arched and shivered. A few thousand milliseconds was a long time to the robots. Plenty of time to overload once or twice. Miles was up for the climb - 92 didn’t feel a day over 65 - but when Optimus offered a lowered hand he wasn’t going to refuse it. The ride gave him a close-up pan of columnar legs, steely abdomen and sexy, shiny chest. He settled himself on Prime’s left shoulder, where Prime had contrived a space where an agile human might perch in relative security and comfort.
The noble head - eighteen times the size of his own - turned toward him, optics whirling to macro setting. Miles gazed steadily into those optics, drawn in by their mechanical complexity, contemplating the mind behind them. Worlds enough and time, Miles thought. He leaned in, touching his cheek to the hard angled corner of Prime’s mouth. The metal plates moved a little against his skin and Miles smiled. He patted the edge of the cheek-guard.
“Good to see you,” Miles said. A lot of the usual greetings and small-talk was redundant when you were in near-constant contact already. He knew who was well and who having difficulties, who was newly decanted and which of the Graveyard Legion had been re-embodied again. Images flitted through his consciousness of Bee teaching Dani’s granddaughter to drive, even though she was only four; of Tracks stalking across the hangar floor closely pursued by Rapido, scolding him in a fluid mixture of Cybertronian, Spanish, and English; of Prowl in profile, lit by the cool hues of the holotable in the war room. But he could still say it was good to see someone he hadn’t sat on - or in - for a long time.
“And you,” Optimus replied, careful not to dislodge Miles with a nod.
“Who are you listening for?” Beachcomber asked. Prime had been peering intently through the atmosphere when he and Miles had arrived.
“Kup and Springer are on their way back,” Optimus said. “Highbeam will stay with Cybertron, and the small garrison Elita left there, until just before the move. Sentinel has refused to leave the Chaar system, even for this.” The last was uttered with a certain sad resignation. Optimus didn’t know how Sentinel had justified the refusal of their orders to come to Enceladus to his crew, or whether he had even needed to at this point. Once the planet was moved and restoration underway, Prime would go with Borealis - they would protect each other, and neither would let the other do anything too aggressively rash - to meet with Sentinel personally. How he was going to distract Jazz, Ironhide, Ratchet, Prowl and Elita (not to mention Thundercracker and Skyfire, who could fly after them) while he snuck off was a problem for which he did not yet have a satisfactory solution.
As Prime tipped his head back, Miles noticed a wire-thin line of bronze, bright against the darker metal of neck struts and hydraulics. Had that been there before? He traced the bright inclusion with a fingertip, warm and alive with tiny threads of blue energy, eyes widening as he blinked in his macro lenses and saw the microscopic glyphs glowing deep in the texture of the metal. He could feel a faint tug, tides of the nanites in his blood and bones. Optimus' optics whirred, cycling wide and vivid. Something abrupt and very odd happened to his fields. If he’d been human, Miles thought, Optimus would have staggered, sat down; but Prime stood quite still.
“Miles?”
“Did you feel that?” Miles kept his hand where it was. It felt good, that almost magnetic tug. Optimus was warm and comforting.
“That is…possibly very dangerous.”
Oh god, Miles thought, yanking his hand back. Very dangerous. Definitely very stupid. He pictured every tiny machine in his body zinging merrily off in different directions, each now with their own spark and…oh god. Oh shit. Oh god that would have been messy. He was shaking. Optimus curled a hand around him, lifted him down to where Beachcomber clung, optics huge. Beachcomber hugged him rather more fiercely than usual.
“Miles!” Beachcomber whispered, shivering.
“I’m okay,” Miles said, hugging back just as hard. “I think.”
“I would feel easier if we made certain.” Optimus swung around, arms around them both, heading by the most direct route, trees permitting, for the base, and Catscan. Miles heard Beachcomber’s faint squeak of protest, imagined the size of the footprints. Bigfoot. Well, the ferns would recover, there wasn’t a lot of other undergrowth anyway, and the robots tended to broadcast sonics ahead to scare wildlife out from underfoot.
What did you feel? Miles wanted to ask, but didn’t, afraid of the answer.
...
“If I understand previous incidents correctly, you have been very fortunate,” Catscan said.
The blue, green and yellow dots - different kinds of scans - disappeared from Miles’ lenses. “I’m okay?”
“You are.”
“And I’m not going to suddenly turn into a robot?” Not that there was anything wrong with turning into a robot, but he wasn’t done being human yet.
“Not suddenly.”
“Catscan!” Beachcomber yelped. Now was a fine time for the medic to find his sense of humor.
“Do you not intend your mindstate to be copied?”
“Yes.”
Catscan bobbed his shoulder armor in the Cybertronian equivalent of an affirmative nod. “The nanometer-scale machines in your body have not, per the specs I have from Perceptor, been detectably altered.”
“Thanks.” Miles grinned and hopped down from the table into Optimus’ hands. “No touchie Allspark, though. Just in case. Good safety tip, Egon.”
Optimus blinked, processing the reference. “Indeed. I am relieved that there were no unforeseen effects.”
What about foreseen effects? Miles wondered, but again did not ask. He suspected that he’d find out eventually, one way or another.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
Jury landed on the helipad atop the Chau building in Shanghai and transformed. Airazor flew a tight circle around her then alit as well, neat and aerodynamic even in robot mode. Jury called up a brief memory of her sitting like a small falcon on Skyfire’s wrist. Jury herself would sit like a small falcon on Skyfire’s wrist any time, at the least provocation. At the moment, they were ostensibly providing conspicuous air cover for Tracks and Smokescreen, who were doing something diplomatically financial and complicated down on the ground, involving the Australasian battleship prototype. The Predacons had last been spotted in South America, so they weren’t an immediate worry. It would take ten or fifteen minutes for them to circle the planet, even catching a ride with Astrotrain or Blitzwing, but things entering or leaving Earth’s atmosphere were quite carefully watched. The Predacons continued to pose a threat because they were good at camouflage, and stuck to the ground for the most part, under the radar both literally and figuratively. The Autobots didn’t currently know where Starscream was so it was prudent to keep an optic on the sky in any case.
They had a nice view of the city lights from their perch; the famous Pudong skyline, still ornamented by the Oriental Pearl TV tower. The Decepticon attack of 2039 had seared a kilometer-wide diagonal trench to the south, fortunately missing the Yu Garden and the Bund, but altering the course of the Huangpu River, which was now split; emptying directly into the East China Sea as well as into the Yangtze River. The Pudong area was now an island. The Nanjing Road, to the west, leapt the gap as a wide bridge with shops all along each side, lights sparkling and shimmering off the water.
Everything was so small. She was used to that, in the adaptive way Cybertronians were very good at, but sometimes the scale was striking, as now, with the tiny multitudes scurrying around below. And the number of floors in buildings of this height. All her proprioceptive and motor programs were adjusted for urban maneuvering with a minimum of collateral damage. With the Theresa memories, and adjusting her sensory inputs, she could look upon this city with something like a human perspective. Up so high, perilous, bright lights below, an infernal glow out through the rest of the city. Light from below was strange, eerie, to the human perspective, but normal to the Cybertronian. Primus Below. Well, not all humans had worshipped sky gods either. The skyscrapers in the immediate Pudong area were lit top to bottom, day-bright under a tropical-hazy night sky, reflecting off the bottoms of the clouds. Despite massive losses to Decepticon attacks, Shanghai was still one of the most densely populated cities on the planet.
She’d hoped it would be weirder than this, but compared to the billion years of her previous, pre-Graveyard life, the human span provided little more than a translucent overlay. Fascinating, but the insights had not changed who she was. Perhaps after a vorn or three, she could look back and chart small alterations that might have lead to paths she would never have trodden, ideas she would never have had otherwise.
It was hot and humid, but the frequent summer rains had not yet fallen that night. The heat was fine, Jury thought. Reminded her of the Torus States. The humidity felt odd, adding to the thickness of the atmosphere. Jury, like a lot of the Graveyard Legion, tended to keep her shields up most of the time anyway. She rubbed her fingertips together as if feeling the heaviness of the air.
Airazor grinned at her. The falciformer liked this heavy air, she was built to slice through it, and she had not yet been to Cybertron.
After her decantation, Airazor had allowed herself a period of regret for all the art galleries, museums and libraries she could not fit inside. She wasn’t large by Cybertronian standards - about Jazz’s height and rather less massive - but such facilities’ curators were understandably wary of allowing her entry. Hound had helped her assemble a very nice holomatter avatar, but it wasn’t the same. A feeling she could quantify, since an avatar’s sensory abilities were much reduced from those of her actual frame. She could travel the world easily, though, and draw on Autobot accounts to gain her avatar admittance almost anywhere. The Rijksmuseum, the Louvre, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the Forbidden City, the Strahov Library in Prague. Even the Bodleian, where she’d met Rewind, immersed as usual in his own studies.
Optimus had joined her at the Nairobi National Museum in Kenya recently. She’d nearly fallen off her rooftop perch when she’d seen his avatar. Six-foot-six, statuesquely muscular, a deliberate mix of Kikuyu and Maasai features, bright blue eyes to make the avatar’s nature plain. Female.
That made sense, since much of Kenya’s - and indeed most of the continent’s nations’ - leadership was female.
Theresa had been heterosexual, but Airazor had had a job of work to keep her avatar from pouncing Prime’s. She’d had a good in-the-metal snuggle with him once their tour of the museum was done. She agreed with the nearly unanimous Autobot opinions regarding shagging Prime.
(Airazor had been surprised to learn that Ixchel Chase’s last lover, in her late 30’s, had been a woman. Carly had eventually realized that she would always play second fiddle to astrophysics. Which was a bummer but kind of understandable. Their intimate relationship had waned, but they had parted friends when Carly had taken a professorship at Oxford. Jury hadn’t been surprised, having snuggled Borealis a time or six. Ranger and Rain were rather coy about how long they’d known, and both insisted it hardly mattered now, with seven flavors to choose from instead of two-ish.)
Airazor did not share Borealis’ squeamishness about interfacing with her progenitors. Theresa had known Mirage and Hound as friends for a long time before they had kindled Airazor’s spark. And maybe in her most secret of hearts, Theresa had been a little bit in love with Mirage. Especially after Bobby’s death.
We’re finished down here, Tracks told them. Meet you at the airport. The plan was that they would all ride back to the Nevada embassy together in an old C-17. Or Airazor could hitch a long-distance lift with Jury, who was, after all, not an ordinary helicopter.
Airazor sidled closer and they exchanged arm cables. “I keep wondering if this is onanism,” she whispered.
“Pfft!” Jury snickered. See you back at the mesa later, Tracks, Jury knelt and drew Rae into her arms. They watched over each other’s shoulders, slid home a single set of thoracic cables. Risky. Sweeter for it. Airazor’s practical, rational mind disapproved, but her spark spun hot and bright.
Ah. Enjoy. Tracks signed off with a complex of Towers-typical glyphs whose context and connotations Jury had to explain to Airazor. Even in sharp-edged Vanadium, pleasure shared had been a virtue. And Tracks was hardly one to fire shots regarding perilous behavior. Hound would scold them later, but scoldings from Hound generally ended up in kisses and clang.
After a swift, thorough overload that tasted of ultraviolet and platinum,they set out over the East China Sea, passed Japan, skimming the tropical waves of the Pacific. Sometimes Airazor flew upon her own wings, rising high above the clouds only to stoop upon her larger, slower friend; sometimes they climbed sharp and fast, entwining their frames, stroking one another in freefall, pulling up only just in time to avoid a dousing. Jury could follow the equator from landfall to landfall in nine hours, seven if she was in a hurry. They were not in a hurry.
They were just coming in sight of the California coast when the cloud mind gathered, surged, towering into a thunderhead. Something or someone had seriously freaked out Prime. The thunderhead dispersed quickly, though, as whatever had alarmed him passed.
What the slag was that about? Jury wondered. Prime was up in Oregon. Visiting their scientific outpost - and, to put it bluntly, Perceptor’s spawning ground - usually put Optimus in a happy, sometimes joyful mood, but no one seemed to know what was going on. Ratchet was conspicuous by his silence, which Jury took to mean he was yelling at Optimus privately.
As Jury and Airazor crossed into Nevada, Prime rejoined the cloud mind to explain. A nanites-augmented human had made physical contact with Allspark material. Nothing untoward had happened, but the potential had rattled Prime.
The only exposed Allspark material is that bit up on Prime’s neck, isn’t it? Airazor tight-beamed.
Far as I know, Jury said. Which means that of the thousands of nanites-augment humans, it had to have been someone Prime felt comfortable having up on his shoulder.
Of those in Oregon right now, who could have been irresistibly drawn to laying a hand on that shiny bronze line without thinking?
They looked at each other. Miles.
Hey! said Miles, as the same conclusion spread from a handful of foci (Prowl, Nightbeat, First Aid, Mikaela) across the cloud mind.
Sorry, Prime said, even though he had not indicated either directly or indirectly which human. He’d been Prime-tier discreet, in fact.
Aw, forget it. I guess I deserve this. Miles was getting a stern talking-to from both Ratchet and Perceptor, and a lot of ribbing from just about everyone else, Sam adding vid captures of the “Dewbot” from Mission City. (Before the National Guard had cornered and killed it. Optimus, reeling from the deaths of his twin and Jazz, had failed to intervene in time.)
You’re not putting a moratorium on human contact are you? Mikaela asked. Even if only augmented human contact, that meant quite a lot of people these days.
I am considering it, Prime said. Ratchet, Perceptor and I are discussing whether it would be feasible to simply remove and replace that cable. The Allsparky bit might just grow back right away. The regular donation of protomass kept Optimus from growing in overall size, but they hadn’t yet come up with a way to halt the slow spread of the Allspark material through his body.
You need to find an alternative to palladium, Miles joked. Coming up with new elements would be right up Wheeljack’s alley, right? They wouldn’t even need to knock holes in the walls to build a particle collider. Wheeljack probably kept a desktop model beside his bed.
Heh.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
Barricade…
Two patterns answered. Optimus.
Secateur, Chaindrive? They had been friends of Barricade’s before the war.
Yes. We’ve been collecting pieces of Barricade’s pattern. Gathering memories, resonances. Their patterns billowed and swirled, overlapping each other and cradling a small, bright accretion disk. A spark on the verge of ignition. We think it was the shock of his death, and of what he encompassed after, that caused his pattern to splinter. We would otherwise have supposed his personality to have been stronger, more able to sustain a selfness than most. We have enough information to attempt cohesion.
If you would be so kind?
There was a further gathering-in, a contraction; the pattern between Secateur and Chaindrive spiraled, flickered, boiled, rippled into coherence. Optimus ‘ spark pulsed in awe.
Barricade.
Prime…? Hrrrrrngh.
Barricade?
War’s not over?
I’m afraid not. Not quite.
Dragged me out of…slag, Chaindrive, what the Pit…?
Sorry, Cade. Prime’s been calling. We only put you back together so we could talk. You can disperse again if that’s what you want but we wanted to be sure.
Thanks for that, I guess. What the Pit happened…? Oh. Was that Prowl? Barricade’s pattern assimilated eons and worlds of knowledge, expanding, encompassing the notspace within the vessel of the Allspark, contemplating the changes since his death.
Yes.
Hn. You’re not yanking me out just to torment him are you?
No. Soundwave asked that you be reimbodied.
He did, huh?
Do you have any idea why? He was unforthcoming with me.
Maybe. Soundwave still a Con?
Yes.
And he asked you for me. He didn’t ask…Galvatron.
Apparently not. I admit that fear of what Galvatron would do to you was part of my motivation for acquiescing.
Thanks for that too, then. Spark-merging. You’ve been busy.
Mmmhmmm.
Don’t you purr at me like that, when I don’t even have a body!
What kind of body would you like us to prepare for you?
Smooth. All right. Find me a black Suburban…no. Wait, you’re using…yeah, give me about three metrics of you mass to play with I’ll build it myself.
As you wish. And thank you.
…
Optimus ghosted down from the mesa top, striding by the few night-shift folk in the hangar, slipping past Skids and Ratchet asleep in the recharge bay. The heavy door to the growth tank chamber opened to his shortwave code and locked behind him. With another thought he began the warm-up process in an empty tank. Protomass was injected into the thick colloid, sinking like the globs of wax in a lava lamp.
Kindling directly from the Allspark had gotten easier only in the sense that he knew now what to expect, knew how he had to break open, knew what it would feel like. Not dissimilar to being struck by lightning; an event potentially fatal even to Cybertronians if caught unprepared. (Cliffjumper had thought it would be tingly. He was lucky a number of frontliner failsafes had kicked in and nothing mortally important had been fried.)
When he regained consciousness, the occupant of the tank was well snuggled into its mass and Ratchet was peering down at him. Optimus sat up, groaning.
“Who is that?” Ratchet asked, with some asperity, indicating his dislike of Optimus doing things like this without medical supervision. He had every confidence in Prime’s ability to start a growth tank running; he had observed Ratchet or First Aid or Hoist do so often enough. But Optimus did tend to disregard his own safety in disconcerting ways. No amount of scolding for this would be too much, in Ratchet’s estimation.
Optimus regarded the tank. He could no longer communicate with the spark within, not until the body grew a comm system. Strange. Clearly he had much yet to learn. Ratchet was scanning him. Quite deeply. It’s Barricade, he said, embroidering the tight-beam with harmonics requesting secrecy. At least for now.
“Hmm.” Ratchet lifted an orbital ridge, turned to scan the humming tank, and the amber spark within.
Optimus blinked. That had not been a cynical “hmm”, nor an angry one, nor even dubious. An interested, perhaps even hopeful “hmm”. That in itself was hopeful, Optimus felt, though he did not anticipate such forbearance from Bumblebee. As a Decepticon, Barricade had tortured Bee, for information it happened that Bee did not have. Bee had been freed, but the grudge between them was bitter and of long standing.
And then there was Prowl. That would be an entirely different species of problem.
<{>~~~<(o)>~~~<}>
Six emitters floated in a circle thirty meters in diameter, halfway between the asteroid belt and Jupiter. At the embassy, Metroplex, and the Oregon base, crowds were watching on mist screens. Perceptor’s design or not, Sam thought, grinning, Wheeljack had been involved. The things would either work brilliantly or blow themselves to smithereens.
The Art Deco butterflies unfolded, opening their wings. A blue-green glow spread from the “tails” of their wings, from each to each, and in to the center; a shimmering, coruscating expanse. A broad ripple moved from the outer edge of the disk to the center, as though the bridge horizon was made of some exotic kind of thick, viscous fluid. There was of course no sound, but Sam imagined he heard the Stargate whoosh and watery hum. The outer edge of the disk thickened briefly, then the whole thing winked out. A small side screen replayed the opening and closing in extreme slow motion for the benefit of human ocular equipment which did not naturally operate at something like a thousand frames per second.
“That’s it?”
“My dear Samuel,” Perceptor said, transmitting via the screens from the staging area (a large asteroid that was stationary relative to the six emitters), “that was quite sufficient. We have data enough to analyze for several weeks.”
“One try,” Mikaela whispered to him. “No do-overs.”
Moving a planet, Sam thought. I guess so.
Part II
Part III
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