From Dusk 'til Dawn part 2
Title: From Dusk 'til Dawn
Part: 2/?
Rating: T
Characters: Skywarp, others mentionned.
Summary: They couldn't safely give Skywarp's power to their present soldiers, but there was always a chance new soldiers could inherit this gift. Too bad for Skywarp that, in the end, nobody cared about what he wanted. Mostly painless… Yeah, right. It had been horrible, or at least, it was until he finally entered stasis lock. He had woken up much later, still in the Medbay. Except this time, attention hadn’t been focused on him, but rather on a series of small CR chambers; five of them, to be exact. Two, he had learned from Scrapper once he was finally able to grasp what the Constructicon was saying, contained sparks coming only from him. Almost his clones, in a way. The other three had been made with the spark of other Decepticons, though he didn’t say who, and Skywarp hadn’t wanted to know anyway. Five possible sparklings... It was too much to handle. A single one would have been bad enough, but so many... He hadn’t cried in front of anyone. He had managed to go back to his quarters before suffering a nervous breakdown. After a decent amount of time, he had managed to pull himself back on his feets and think about the situation. Sparklings. His. He hadn’t needed that. He still didn’t have any use for them. Pit, he didn’t even know if any would finish developing! One of them was already weak and on the verge of fading away when he had left the medical bay. How long would the others last? And if none of them made it through... Would Megatron order another try? He shuddered, thinking about the moment Hook had opened his spark chamber. He had been frozen in fear, unable to move. Not that he could have anyway; since he had thrashed wildly around for a good while once they had brought him to the Medbay, they had bound him to the berth. Scary. He didn’t want to experience that ever again. So, even though he wasn’t much of a believer, he began to pray to Primus. Not because he was concerned about his unwanted offsprings, but because he cared more about himself and his sanity. Some of the others had congratulated him on his future creatorhood. Well, most of them were amused, some of them sneered at him, and one or two did seem somewhat displeased by the methods. Thundercracker was among them, unsurprisingly. He had never agreed with the first project, and if he wasn’t very vocal on what he thought of the second, one could guess he wasn’t too happy. But all, even him, had to agree on one fact: more soldiers on Earth could only be a good thing. The more he thought about that, the less sense it made. If they needed new soldiers so badly, why had nobody onboard ever said so? Or on Cybertron, for that matter? It puzzled him that no other Decepticon had ever tried what Starscream and his cohort had done to him. Then again, Cybertronians took care of their young. They didn’t have so many of them in the first place; it was logical to protect them, to hold them as almost holy. For Autobots anyway, and more than a few Decepticons. The others didn’t care. Most of the mechs and femmes he had met before this “trip” to Earth hundreds of vorns ago were the old fashioned kind; a sparkling born out of love and care, not of selfish desires, even for the Empire. Best way to make a loyal soldier, they said. And they were probably right. So, there probably weren’t any volunteers in the vicinity of the scientists who wanted to try anyway. And usually, just to avoid pointless riots, commanders and appointed officials tended to listen to general advice. Now, he doubted this was applied to Autobot prisoners. He knew for sure that some of them were used as test subjects in a few Labs on Cybertron. You didn’t have to be a genius to understand what exactly some of the conversations between Megatron and Shockwave were about. Personally, he wouldn’t have been surprised if he was told at least half of Shockwave newest’s recruits had been sparked by unwilling Autobots and immoral or just sadistic Decepticons. It could be considered sickening, he supposed. But they were at war, and such behavior wasn’t punished. He didn’t know what to think about that. Taking small bits of a Spark and forcing the merging with a pre-selected piece of another one was an idea based on efficiency; a manipulation to obtain better soldiers, if the sparks could grow to maturity and be inserted in a protoform. In wartime, it seemed logical to do so. If more soldiers gave their consent to do so, then the sheer number of soldiers obtained would be incredible. Then again, with the shortage of energon on the planet, perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea. He didn’t doubt some people in the scientific community had thought about that anyway. But if one of them had even suggested the idea in some cities, he had probably been sent to the Pit by every single inhabitant. ‘You don’t manipulate new lives for stupid purposes’ was the general consensus. Skywarp was more lenient to this way of thinking. In fact, if he was really honest with himself, he would have proclaimed the same thing. Too bad public opinion was against him on the Nemesis. Unlike what he had hoped at first, he still wasn’t allowed outside the base. When Soundwave had calmly told him the news, he thought he would go mad. Didn’t they know flying mechs needed the air as badly as they needed energon? He could have teleported away, of course, but he was too worried about the consequences once he had to return to the ship. Funny; a not-so-long times ago, he wouldn’t have minded, or even though about that. In a way, he had matured. Forced grounding and unholy experiments did that to you. Somehow, it didn’t make sense. How much times and resources had Megatron wasted in creating those... sparks? And sparklings born from spark splitting were... well, they were sparklings! Kids, unable to defend themselves from anything, and very likely to hurt themselves if they weren’t kept under strict supervision every astroclicks. They wouldn’t be like the Stunticons, or those bothersome Aerialbots and Dinobots, who were already adults the moment they were sparked! You couldn’t just compare a spark delivered by Vector Sigma to a ‘normal’ spark. Even if those sparklings lived - which was doubtful, since one of them had already faded away yesterday, a fact Thundercracker had informed him of softly; the fool actually thought he cared about them. But it would be a lie to say he hadn’t felt vaguely sorry - they wouldn’t be able to carry a weapon or be soldiers for hundreds of vorns. So either Megatron had opted for patience - unlikely, since he hadn’t cared one second about his well being or the possibility of him offlining if anything went too wrong. And the mech had always wanted fast results - or he had, as humans said, something up his sleeve. Something was definitively up. And he didn’t think he would like it. Like he thought, two more sparks extinguished before being fully matured. Of five, only two were left now. And although their exostructures were perfectly formed now, they were still in CR chambers. And they were growing. Slowly, of course, but much more faster than normals Cybertronians. It had dawned on him then. It had been the plan all along. A means for Starscream to test a formula of accelerated grown he had perfected a long time ago and hadn’t been able to test. And somehow, he had managed to make Megatron agree without taking a fusion cannon blast in the chest. He didn’t know exactly what they had put in those chambers, but so far, it seemed to work without any ill effects. Meaning, he probably wouldn’t have to be strapped down again to repeat the operation. It was a huge relief. Now, if only he could be sure it would continue to go without a hitch... As their primary donor and test subject, Skywarp had unrestricted access to the part of the Medbay that housed the two remaining sparklings. He had come to see them two times only. The first, after the first one had extinguished. He wanted to reassure himself the others would make it. The second, by sheer curiosity, to see what the survivors looked like. As the front panel was in semi-transparent glass, it wasn’t too hard to distinguish their features. They looked a lot like him, it seemed. Or rather, they looked like every Cybertronian Jets. But even though they were built on the same model, they were different. One seemed rather short and painted in soft colors, mostly white and blue with some green stripes, and had a slightly different helm. The other had his dark coloring, with some magenta mixed into his frame with the purple. Not too bad. He just hoped neither of them would turn out to be a miniature Starscream. One was troublesome enough. Everybody on board could testify. And he hoped at least one of them had inherited his teleportation gift. If not, then it was almost a given someone would want to try again. But just one... would that be enough to satisfy Lord Megatron? He hoped so, but deep down, he knew already it wouldn’t be so simple. It never was. Ah, well... Wait and see. He would deal with that when the moment was right. Passively, Skywarp observed the computer readings coming from one of the chambers. Everything seemed normal. Information was fed to the sparklings’ still developing cranial units. Everything they would need to know at the different phases of their development was steadily downloaded. Outside of firewalls and antivirus, they were given some form of education. It included a history of Cybertron, Decepticon-oriented of course, a few science courses - he wondered who added that in the program - files on Cybertronian and English alphabets and numbers, detailed Cybertronian anatomy and, from what he had seen, how to handle a rifle. It seemed right to him. They were at war. It was logical they knew how to defend themselves from any enemy. But he didn’t think the occasional “Hail Megatron!”, “Destroy the Autobots!” or “Obey the master of every Decepticons” he had seen in the screen on a regular basis were such great ideas. He had nothing against indoctrination, really. He shared most of the ideas transmitted. But somehow, thinking his sparklings were programmed with such things didn’t really put him at ease. It was like they wanted to transform them into stupid drones even before they could develop a personality. The things it made him go through... It was almost as if he cared for the little ones. And he didn’t want to care. It wasn’t like he had even wanted them in the first place! Still, if he ever saw something like “Don’t hesitate to give up your life for the cause” in there, he was likely to break something or just beat the slag out of the one responsible. Namely, his fellow Seeker, if he wasn’t mistaken. He knew Starscream still did tests on them sometimes, but towards what purpose, Skywarp didn’t know. Knowing the Air Commander, it couldn’t be good, though. He wondered if Megatron knew exactly what his treacherous Second was doing. The odds were in favors of ‘yes’ on this one. He had caught a glimpse of Soundwave in the vicinity last time Starscream had touched something in the Medbay. So would the ocasional traitor pay the Constructicons a visit in the near future? Mmm, he hoped so. For once he wouldn’t be the one in pain... A soft sound pulled him from his musings. He barely refrained from screaming when he looked behind him to see what it was. He had talked with Starscream about that. The two future Decepticons soldiers were offline and would remain this way until someone took them out of the CR chamber. They couldn’t be online. Had never been before. Wouldn’t be until the scientists deemed them fit for duty. He strongly wanted to believe them, because it would be incredibly troublesome if not. The base wasn’t equipped to welcome sparklings or younglings. They had to be - to stay - offline. But behind the glass panel of the CR chamber, a pair of onlined crimson optics, wide and innocent, were staring at him in wonder.