[rd][fic][Transformers Bayverse] Summer Job 9/9
Summer Job: There And Back Again
by K. Stonham
released 6th June 2011
June 18th, 2010, GMT 0417. Cybertron.
"Okay," said Bobby. "So how we gonna work this?"
"Well," Ratchet offered, "there's no way Jetstorm's coming out of this without more R&R. Repair and reboot," he clarified.
"And no way we can carry him and the protoforms and the humans," Arcee agreed.
"Well, damn." Bobby said. Thought for a moment, looked up at the bot with a flame job and asked, "Can you teleport us to the bridge?"
"From within Wheeljack's lab?" Optimus shook his head. "I would not dare risk it, for the same reasons I could not risk it in the catacombs."
"Though the danger here would be, I think, far more explosive," Jolt agreed.
"Pfeh," Ironhide grumbled. "Weaklings, not able to survive a simple structure collapse."
Arcee raised a wheeled foot and kicked the Topkick none-too-gently.
"Not the humans," Ironhide said. "The rest of you."
Optimus coughed. "Teleporting from outside would be possible," he said.
"Right. We'll go with that," Bobby concluded with a glance at Will Lennox, who gave him a semi-distracted nod.
***
Mikaela glared at her boys. "For the record," she told them, "I am not happy with both of you losing your voices at the same time."
***
Seymour looked at Lennox, who was looking kind of shocked and trying very hard not to steal glances at Buttercup and his two kids. Seymour smirked. Took the military muscle long enough to twig. Unable to resist, he wandered over to the man. "Finally got a clue, Major?" he asked.
Lennox glanced at him. "What the hell are you talking about?"
"Oh, the ever-so-slightly 'alternative lifestyle' that's going on over there," Seymour answered with a head nod in the direction of the little threesome.
Lennox scowled. "It's not our business, so get back to work."
What work, Seymour wanted to ask but didn't. "If it makes you feel better, my sources tell me that 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' will be repealed in the next year or two."
"It's not... our... business!" Lennox growled.
Seymour smirked and tried a different needling tack. "Didn't expect you to turn out to be a speciesist, Lennox."
"First, I'm not. Second, as I've said at least twice, it's none of our business what consenting adults and--"
"Consenting NBE's do in the privacy of their garages?"
The Major glared. "Is breaking people's brains one of your sick hobbies? And third, even if it was my business... I'm just having difficulty wrapping my mind around the idea," he admitted.
Ohh, the voice of inexperience was so fun to taunt. "All I can say," Seymour advised, "is don't knock it 'til you've tried it."
Lennox stared at him. "You didn't. Oh, hell, you did!"
Seymour let his smug expression speak volumes. "I did say I was in love, didn't I? If you're curious about the mechanics, I'm sure she--"
Lennox looked away, visibly forced himself to recover. "This is payback," he demanded in a whisper, looking back at Seymour, "for me shoving my gun in your face back at Hoover Dam, isn't it?"
"Would I be that petty and spiteful?" Seymour asked angelically. Of course he would, but that wasn't the point.
"Oh, go fuck yourself!"
"Naaaah," Seymour drawled, drawing out the moment. "Much more fun to see if Mirage is free and..."
"I'm NOT LISTENING!" Lennox spun around and marched off.
"Not doing much for the Rangers' tough guy image with your hands over your ears, buddy," Seymour called after him.
***
The vehicle interiors were more crowded this time, but even so everyone managed a seat in one of the Autobots before Optimus opened the lab's outer door and the oxygen-enriched air dispersed into the unbreathable Cybertronian atmosphere. Captain Alexander Graham watched through Jolt's front window as Optimus hefted Jetstorm's heavy, patched form and stumbled slightly beneath the jet's weight. Red Alert darted forward and, with a supplicative glance at his leader, helped carry the old Decepticon through the huge opening. The Cybertronians followed, Ratchet last, driving in a half-circle around Jetstorm's prone form. Then Prime went back in and transformed, backing up to the trailer. It automatically hooked into him, folding together seamlessly.
As the Prime drove out of Wheeljack's lab, the lights died behind him. The heavy door slid itself closed, locking with an audible thunk. Optimus drove into position, completing the circle that ringed Jetstorm and Red Alert. And as Alex watched, the increasingly familiar pressure built and blue-white lightning arced around them all. He blinked--
--and as soon as that, they were back at the space bridge. Dark, but not broken like the rest of the planet.
Cybertronian commands issued from Optimus. Red Alert jerked up, said something that even Alex could tell was a protest. Optimus' reply was uncompromising. Red Alert was tense for a moment longer, then sagged in acquiescence.
Bumblebee's driver door opened, then shut behind Sam as he got out.
***
Sam looked up at Red Alert for a moment, then walked forward. The air was cool, but Bumblebee had had the heaters on and Ratchet's blanket had helped dispel most of his shudders. He still felt drained, though, and knew he was going to collapse as soon as he found a flat enough surface. The mech looked hesitantly down at him, then knelt, offering both hands. Sam stepped easily on that platform and was raised into the air as Red Alert stood. A cable snaked out of Red's shoulder and hovered in the air by him.
Sam placed his hand on the offered means of communication and closed his eyes, falling into code.
Red was... well, Red Alert thought fast. Faster than Sam had experienced with Bumblebee or Optimus. A rushing torrent of code roared through him, and Sam let himself fall into it, flowing with it, offering up his own thoughts and the instruction of the Allspark knowledge within him.
Red Alert's optics brightened as he assimilated the data. He strode abruptly toward the space bridge. Sam felt the first beginnings of stuffiness in his lungs, but ignored the pull to breathe as Red jacked another cable into the machine. It sprang to life under his cybernetic touch, blue-white light spilling through all the seamlines of the space bridge control board. Red entered what Sam gave him, and Sam opened his eyes again to see the familiar galaxy of golden glyphs spiraling into the dark sky.
And there, that one was Earth. He pointed at it. Red disengaged from the bank. He looked around, first at the circle of Autobots within the bridge, gaze lingering on Optimus, then again, looking further out, at the ruins of his world.
Sam absolutely could not tell what Red Alert was feeling as the Autobot reached up, hooked a claw into the glyph that meant Earth, and sent them all to another species' home world.
***
Thin predawn light spilled across the English countryside, pale gray shading toward pink as the planet spun on. All was quiet save the the occasional vehicle that drove down the A-344. Elsewise, sheep dozed or munched a mouthful of grass.
The bucolic nirvana was interrupted as a blast of compressive atmosphere suddenly cracked outward, heralding refugees arriving from an alien planet via space bridge.
Inside the bridge's ring, humans disembarked from the alien vehicles, taking appreciative first breaths of the air of their home planet. Moving back, they milled around, watching as tires folded back down, even on Optimus' trailer, which had never been on Earth before, and the vehicles stood, transforming into robots.
"So, the plan?" Major Will Lennox asked Optimus, who had not transformed.
"Emergency medical transport of the injured back to Diego Garcia," Ratchet answered before the Prime could speak.
"Agreed," Optimus said. "Sam," he addressed the human Prime, "unfortunately, we need you to stay here and replace the monument."
"Then you get to the infirmary," Ratchet said, casting a gimlet optic on Sam.
Sam, obviously well trained or maybe just in enough pain, didn't argue with the medic, only nodded in response.
"Well, then, everyone else out of teleport range," Will called out. "We're running out of time here. Move it!"
Mechs and humans hustled up and out of the pit that contained the space bridge. Sam, strangely, hesitated, then walked up to Optimus, placing a hand on the other Prime's metal grill. He stood there for a minute--communicating?--then stepped back, nodding. He walked to the edge of the pit, where Bumblebee boosted him up and over his head to the ledge. Then the yellow mech backed up, took a slight running start, and sprang up and over NEST's heads, landing in a tidy somersault on the grass beyond. The confines of the bridge were clear of extraneous personnel.
Light flashed again and the mechs within--Optimus, Ratchet, Ironhide, Arcee, Jolt, and Jetstorm--were gone.
Will walked over to the kid, who was looking narrow-eyed down at the pit. "So what's that about?" he asked.
Sam turned to look at him, mimed scribbling something on a pad of paper, and raised an eyebrow. Will happened to have a pen and paper in one of his pockets and fished it out, handing it over.
Sam wrote. Turned the pad around, handed it back to Will.
He read it.
He read it again.
"You're serious?" he asked, looking at the kid.
Sam smirked.
***
The space bridge, fortunately, fit neatly inside one of the hangars on Diego Garcia. Sam's idea had been well-conceived, and they would have far easier access to the ancient technology if they needed it in the future. Optimus actually felt a little giddy about that as he reached into the open console and removed the critical circuit he and Sam had rebuilt. He hesitated, then, knowing he was unobserved, slipped it into his subspace where it would be safe and unreachable until they needed to use the bridge again.
***
The tons of earth slowly gathered themselves up and rose, hovering half a foot above the grass as Sam marshalled his wavering attention, forcing the dirt together, getting every last speck back into the mass. He moved it across the land silently, having to push it all up over the field fence.
He wobbled, shook his head. Rotate, he thought, trying to match the original placement angles. Dizzy.
Oh he was so not going to protest Ratchet's infirmary diagnosis.
Optimus knelt behind him, put a gentle hand on Sam's back. Offering support.
Right, he was a Prime. He could do this. Optimus could do the mass teleports, he could do the mass telekinesis.
Sam took a slow, deep breath that scraped his throat like a dull knife across raw flesh, and slowly, carefully, fit the dirt back into the deep pit. Like popping a peg into a hole, he thought.
And just as he was finished, just as he let go, red sunlight spilled across the land.
A heartbeat later, the man and the mech were gone, home halfway across the world.
***
Sam got twenty-four hours bed rest before he was released from Ratchet and Dr. Michelson's care complete with a bottle of painkillers that he largely ignored. Mikaela, fortunately, had taken a twenty-minute break from helping Ratchet and made a couple of international calls, telling not only her family but Sam's that they were working overnight at their internship and would be back tomorrow.
(Sam thought about his parents, and their reaction to him not making curfew by a whole day, and concluded he had the most wonderful girlfriend on the whole planet. Bumblebee, once Sam conveyed this, did not disagree. He'd been on the wrong end of Judy's bat-wielding threats more than once.)
But thus it was that Sam missed seeing a once-in-a-Cybertronian-lifetime event, though he heard about it later from three sources. First he got a rough, abbreviated version from Ratchet, who was a bit distracted over where to start with so many protoforms in stasis. Later, after he was released, he got a more sympathetic and detailed telling from (of all people) Simmons. And finally, a day later and on a different continent, he got the full tale and back story from Optimus, who firmly believed that to understand Hound and Mirage's reaction, Sam needed to know what the mech in question had once been to both of them.
Hound and Mirage had apparently returned to the base just as the protoforms were being carried into the infirmary hangar. The pair of them were too small, as with the humans, to be of much help in the endeavor without the use of slow and cumbersome human equipment that the humans and Cybertronians alike usually disdained.
This didn't stop them from wandering down the edges of Prime's trailer, looking at the stasis-locked forms of their fellow Autobots.
Mirage had frozen, still as a living human could never be.
"Mirage?" Hound asked, then followed her gaze.
He forgot his human simulation breathing algorithms.
"It's..." Mirage whispered.
Hound didn't even bother to finish her thought. The both of them broke for the trailer in the same instant, jumping up, clambering over the silvery railing to reach one particular protoform nestled among the others. They each stared at it for a moment, then reached out, their human seemings dropping away as they made contact with the metal skin.
"Trailbreaker," Hound said.
Mirage broke down, wrapping her arms around as much of the protoform as she could reach.
("The three of them," Optimus explained, "had a relationship much like your, Mikaela, and Bumblebee's. They were separated by the search for the Allspark. Trailbreaker was needed to stay on Cybertron and defend our remaining Autobots... and the two of them were eminently suited for infiltration, scouting, and reconnaissance in our search."
"Wow," Sam keyed into his cellphone. There really wasn't much else he could say. "I'm glad they're back together."
"As am I," said Optimus.)
***
Will really didn't want to have this conversation with the kid.
And Simmons' spare remark about "consider it practice for your own kid in twelve years" hadn't helped any.
But someone had to man up and point out all the possible things that could go wrong with a human-Autobot threesome, so he took a deep breath and strode forward to do it.
Only to be blocked by a Topkick. It opened its door to him in clear expectation.
Momentarily derailed (and perhaps a little bit relieved), he raised an eyebrow but clambered up inside regardless. The door shut behind him. "What's up?" he asked his friend.
"Simmons," Ironhide said, "told Mirage that you were going to have a talk with Sam."
"Yeah." Will let the statement dangle.
"Don't."
He blinked. That wasn't what he'd been expecting. "Thought you'd see it the way I do, big guy." It wasn't a good idea, either from the human side of the equation or the Cybertronian one.
"I've seen too many friends die to deny them any chance at happiness, no matter how fleeting."
"They won't live nearly as long as Bumblebee. You want him to live with that sparkbreak?"
"His spark'll be broken either way. At least this way he gets some happy memories out of it."
"Closet romantic, 'Hide?"
The truck's engine rumbled.
"And the kids?" Will asked.
"They love him. He loves them. We accept it because Bumblebee is one of us. And Sam is one of us. And Mikaela... well, she might as well be one of us, the way Ratchet's adopted her." Ironhide was silent for a moment. "Let them have their happiness, Major. There's little enough of it to be found in a war."
Will thought about it. "Has anyone talked to them about it at all?" he finally asked.
"Bumblebee knows our concerns," the weapons specialist replied. "And when Sam told Optimus, he got the same talk. Ratchet spoke with Mikaela. They all know. They're neither foolish nor stupid, and will go forward with it regardless."
Will was silent a moment further, considering, then let it go. "I'll drop it," he told Ironhide. "But if they get married, I want an invite to the wedding."
The Topkick snorted. "Can't imagine what you'd have to do to get kicked off the guest list."
***
They dropped Mikaela at home first, then Sam and Optimus and Bumblebee drove in silence to the Witwicky's. Hound and Mirage had refused to be parted from their rediscovered partner, and so Bumblebee for now had been moved up to a higher level of surveillance for his human.
Judy was waiting for them in the driveway, her arms crossed. Sam got out of the car. "And just where have you been, young man?" she asked, eyes blazing.
Sam glanced at his car. Its speakers crackled to life. "I, I've been to another planet, Ma," Bumblebee said.
Judy's jaw dropped open. "What?" she half-demanded, half-whispered.
"It's a long story," Optimus explained. "Sam helped us perform a rescue of some of our comrades from Cybertron, and in doing so injured his vocal cords. Ratchet kept him under surveillance for a day before releasing him."
"Fear his wrath!" Bumblebee added in.
Judy's expression changed entirely. "You got hurt?" she demanded of her son. "Oh, Sammy! Let me look at you. Chicken soup!" she said. "Or tomato, that'd be better for your throat...."
Sam rolled his eyes at his mother's flustered pats as she checked him for further undiscovered injuries. He pulled the bottle of pills out of his pocket and shook it, catching her attention. She took it from him and proceeded to read the label. "Take as needed, with food...."
It was, Optimus reflected, watching his human brother get herded toward his family's domicile, an innocuous ending to a mission that could have gone much more badly for all concerned.
***
NEST carefully monitored information about Stonehenge for a while, and were generally relieved that the site's disruption seemed to have passed without comment. Certainly if any of the pagans sensed anything different during their solstice rituals a few days later, it went unreported.
In fact, the only blip that popped up on their radar was an archaeogeological survey several months afterward that revealed a heretofore undiscovered ring of disturbed earth in a perfect circle of 160 meters diameter, centered on the standing stones. A flurry of academic exchanges regarding the discovery came through NEST's search protocols for nearly two years, then tapered sharply off.
Sam, his voice recovered by the time of the survey, just smirked and unhelpfully suggested fairy rings as a cover story.
*~*~*
A/N: There. Summer Job, done. The wonderful Simmons/Lennox conversation in this chapter was written by the brilliant drharper, who graciously let me use it in the story. The full list of Autobots rescued from Cybertron is this: Red Alert, Wheeljack, Trailbreaker, First Aid, Groove, Blades, Streetwise, Hot Spot, Transmutate, Perceptor, Inferno, Firestar, Teletraan, Elita One, Smokescreen, Beachcomber, Seaspray, Gears, and Huffer. I debated long and hard over this list; some (Red, Jack, TB, and Percy) were always givens. Others were taken from reader requests. And some (Transmutate, Teletraan) were just to see what I might be able to do with the character. That said, many of these characters are in bad shape, and the Autobots have no way of synthesizing energon. Ratchet's going to have to prioritize; some of them may likely remain in stasis for a long time and have no effect on future stories. But at least they're rescued! Also, given that Elita One is on my list, I'm obviously not taking The Reign of Starscream as canon for this 'verse. And, finally, yes, I have been waiting a very long time to use that line from The Last Starfighter.... ^_^ It may even have been what inspired this entire story.