[Fic] Beyond Silence - 03
Notes and warnings in chapter one.
Thanks to white_aster for beta-ing ^^
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First chapter
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CHAPTER 03
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.:We are so gonna get slagged for this...:.
A hiss of angry static rasped through Frenzy’s comm. .:If you don’t calm down, you most definitely will. Now keep your optics open for anything or our efforts will have been for nothing, and I will not bother to save your plating from the ‘bots.:.
The red cassette was stationed at a vantage point a few hundred mechanometers from the Ark, and he was watching as Rumble edged closer and closer to the fallen ship. The path was erratic but careful and it had been traced especially for this occasion. It was a one-time hack to the Ark’s defenses and so precise it only halted each sensor feed for a few astroseconds, so it had to be perfect or the automatic defenses would fry Rumble on the spot.
Behind the small outcrop where he was hiding, Frenzy tensed sharply as his brother made the last few meters and then sighed in relief when the little blue shape crouched by the wall. Rumble worked furiously on a side panel from the exterior of the ship until it opened and slid inside.
.:Good:. Was all that Ravage said on the other side of the comm link. They fell silent, -waiting for Rumble’s call.
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Ratchet was working in the sickbay. That could have summed up his private diary as much as his job description.
That morning he had been repairing an ankle twist from Hound, who had caught his foot on a small rock, denting the gears a little. He had then performed routine maintenance sessions with a couple of Aerialbots. Afterwards he had thrown some nagging at Ironhide for not taking proper care of recent wounds (and then proceeded to weld a few back together). At noon he had spent exactly ten kliks in the rec room before he had to tend to yet another explosion-induced burn in Wheeljack’s chassis, and after all that, since he already was at his workstation, he had gotten to the task of repairing a few spare parts that could eventually come in handy.
He was perpetually busy. That never changed, whether they were under heavy fire or in a more peaceful period.
The past cycles had felt like the latter, but the quietness in the base was tinged with worry. They had lost a warrior somewhere, and no one was in a mood to enjoy the tranquility.
The Lamborghini twins were particularly restless, since they had been somewhat close to the bot, and a few incidents had gone really badly. One of them had been an overcharged Cliffjumper full of guilt colliding with an even more overcharged Sunstreaker. Every word the golden mech said was usually laced with venom but much more so after the absence of the chattering Datsun. What started as bitter exchanges evolved into slurred insults and eventually into a fist fight that landed them both, Bumblebee, Sideswipe and Prowl into the sickbay (the three latter having tried to separate them without much success).
As the days went by, Ratchet saw a deep gloom descend upon the Ark, and he couldn’t help but feel a bit hopeless at the complete lack of news. After some digging they found out where Bluestreak had been last seen and assumed he had been close to the fight, but they hadn’t even found a fragment of armor at the scene. He was just... missing.
To the medic, and to many other mecha, the whole scenario spelled bad news. After almost ten solar cycles plans were being made for a rescue mission. That he was a captive was almost a certainty.
While he was repairing spare coolant pumps, Ratchet glanced bitterly at one of the berths behind a translucent wall panel. It was occupied by a blue mech that was in deep recharge. Part of his chassis was missing, and the two left limbs were heavily patched with medi-gel and fragments of metallic mesh.
‘Of all times, now.’ He thought angrily.
Mirage would have made both the search and rescue of Bluestreak ten times easier, but he had been injured badly in an accident.
It hadn’t even been a Decepticon attack, just humans being stupid towards each other and waving firearms close to gas stations. Mirage had been called since he was doing some recon close by, and at the time it had been just a robbery. No one had thought it a dangerous situation, at least not for a mech... but experience had proved them wrong.
The doctor narrowed his optics in frustration, thinking how much humans could be moved by greed... just like Cybertronians themselves. Many things were different between their species, but violence, theft, betrayal... those where universal.
His dark musing almost made him miss the ping of an incoming transmission to the sickbay console.
He assumed it was going to be either Prime with an official communication of some sort or Prowl, who sometimes was formal like that. Pretty much everyone else just used his private frequency.
“Make one move Autoslag, and you can kiss your retarded sniper’s aft goodbye.”
His optics widened at the blurry face-plates in the screen and his processor froze as the last words sunk in.
“Good. Now that I have your attention, I have a proposition for you.”
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Vortex hated long distance flights. They made him fidgety.
He had been cooped up in Blast Off´s cargo bay for cycles, and he was bored out of his mind. He had exhausted every entertainment option there was.
Jabbing Brawl in the helmet and practicing his dodging worked for a while (and it had the added fun of someone straightening his rotor blades afterwards). But the thought that if he stopped punching, Vortex would stop poking reached Brawl’s processor at some point and it stopped being fun.
Grinding his heels on the floor also provided interesting annoying-Blast Off time, pretty much like tapping random rhythms on the bulkheads or letting his vocalizer beep haphazardly, but that also eventually ended in Onslaught being harassed into intervention by the shuttle. That led to annoying-Onslaught time, but that was generally a very, very short period of time.
It ended with him being attended by medical drones and isolation, which was no fun at all.
He was about to start poking Swindle with the back of a laser-scalpel, just for a change, when the voice of their living transport sounded briskly through the speakers.
“We are approaching planetary orbit. Landing ETA in 2.3 joors”
A happy smile lit Vortex’s face as he subspaced the tool with a flourish and whooped.
He was so looking forward to having new things to poke at.
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Ratchet’s mind was racing like a glitchmouse in a treadmill.
He had transferred the conversation to his personal quarters’ terminal, per his interlocutor’s demands, but he had managed to send a single ping to Red Alert before leaving the sickbay console. Paranoia would be on his side, he hoped.
Rumble had also warned him about using his internal comm. Ratchet had tried anyway but found out it was being blocked.
At the moment, he was trying to force himself not to snap in anger at the vagueness of the conversation.
“What do you mean 'particular request’?”
“Particular, as in not sanctioned by the bigger boss, Autoglitch.”
“So let me get this straight: Soundwave wants me to meet him, alone, just to talk, and he’ll release Bluestreak... without Megatron knowing about it?”
“Yep, exactly that.”
“You do notice how that is slagging suspicious, don’t you?”
“You do notice how I don’t give a scrap about it being suspicious or not, don’t you? It’s simple: you come, you get the bot; you don’t come, you don’t get nothing. Oh, by the way, did I mention his appointment with Vortex is coming up? His processor's gonna be a decorative paper-weight after that”.
The dark chuckle that followed made the medic shake with rage, but his tanks also constricted at those words. He thought of Bluestreak and how much his mind was already scarred by his past... the idea of him being in Vortex’s servos made his ventilation hitch.
“Fine! Let me clear this wi-”
“Hey-hey, stop that process right there. You tell this to no one. You come alone and you come right now, or there’s no deal.” Rumble sounded decidedly anxious and Ratchet noticed his head swayed a bit from side to side.
It had been doing that since the beginning but suddenly he realized the movement was because the cassette was moving fast, and the broadcasting device was probably held before him with a servo. The background of the staticky image was dark and almost indistinguishable but sometimes there were flickers and strips of light... reflections of more illuminated rooms?.
Why would the little mech be talking while running through dark corridors? Why broadcasting with external hardware?
He proceeded to argue the complications of leaving the Ark without reporting to anyone with half his processor while he tried to understand. Soundwave supposedly (at least by what intel they had on him) was in charge of supervising communications in the Decepticon base. Why on Earth would he resort to this kind of communication method? If he wanted to keep this from Megatron, wasn’t it simpler to scramble the signal or something?
Having a cassette broadcasting a conversation while running around corridors -ducts! not corridors! The mech was too small to have the walls so close and the lights were from the rooms the duct circulated through, so ventilation ducts!- a much more risky move?
If he was in the Decepticon base all he had to do was lock himself in a room and- His train of thought halted abruptly.
He had heard an extremely faint laugh coming from the transmission, almost drowned by Rumble's and his conversation. It had sounded very far away, but he would have recognized it anywhere: No ‘bot laughed quite like Jazz did.
Suddenly he had a very good idea why Rumble was running through air ducts.
A short-wave transmission device wouldn’t rise any alarm if it generated its signals inside the Ark itself. It was assumed that mecha pinged each other all the time, listened to the radio, used their consoles for packet transfer- Primus! The symbiote could be using a barely altered walkie-talkie for that matter.
The medic staggered at the implications and could almost visualize the glitch Red Alert would have as soon as this got out.
He also realized that he had been asked something and the cassette was getting increasingly nervous by his distraction.
“Are you listening? Am I fragging boring you?!?!”
“Just- no, fine. I’ll meet your boss. Give me the coordinates.”
The thought of one of the spy twins running around the Ark was disquieting to say the least, but it was far more worrying that the scraplet was putting himself in this level of danger just to transmit this message to him. He assumed that either something was extremely wrong with Soundwave, something so bad the mech didn’t even trust Hook to solve it (who, he had to grudgingly admit, was quite competent in his job), or this was the most complex and suicidal scam he had ever heard of.
If they were aiming to lure him away from his HQ just to capture him, they could have done so from a far safer distance.
Rumble told him a location half a joor's drive away and promptly ended the transmission.
Ratchet returned to the sickbay and subspaced a number of things, including a full med-kit and an extra gun.
He still didn’t understand what the frag was going on or what he was going to find when he met the Decepticon TiC, but he was damn well gonna be armed when he did.
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Red Alert was always, not quite ironically, alert.
He looked at everything and watched everyone. The halls and corridors, the rec room, the shooting range... he was still hoping that someday Prime would finally let him install cameras in personal quarters. He just didn’t comprehend why no one understood the necessity and the DANGERS of not being able to watch everywhere.
After he checked for the umpteenth time the signal of the Lambo twins while they were engaged in potentially pranking rec time, a ping from the sickbay hailed him.
When he answered, there was no response, though, and the monitor from the room in question showed it was completely empty, save for Mirage’s still form.
Red Alert frowned slightly and rewound the security feed of the room a few kliks, his optics narrowing with suspicion.
The scene was rather normal; it was just Ratchet working, then talking to someone in the console and leaving. The image input signal was normal, but all sound was gone.
Perhaps the sensor had been damaged? The ping had come right before the medic turned off the console.
The Security Director proceeded to follow Ratchet’s path through other security feeds and couldn’t help but think the cranky mech’s scowl looked tighter than usual. Red Alert eventually followed him to his personal quarters where he stood now.
He pinged the medic, half planning the lecture he was going to give on wasting the resources of the security department, but after a few kliks of waiting the medic wouldn’t answer his calls. The uneasiness he had started to feel when he noticed the odd video started blooming in outright worry, and he resolved to go talk to the mech himself.
As he padded quickly through the corridors, he got tired of sending polite “please contact me” pings and hailed Ratchet directly on his personal frequency. Red Alert found it blocked.
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“Prime, we have a situation!”
Optimus put down the datapad he was reading in his office and a sigh escaped his vents.
“What is it, Red Alert?”
He had said that same phrase so many times that it had became an oddly comforting routine, like wishing ‘good morning’ to the mecha he saw at the beginning of the day. Even so, he answered every time with the same interest and always paid attention to what the smaller ‘bot had to say. No matter what the situation was each time, he had never dismissed his security chief’s worry, and he wasn’t about to start now. He also felt a small pang of pity each time he heard “We have a situations”, and wished there was something he could do to make his officer’s life a bit less stressful.
“I received a call from the sickbay sent by Ratchet after talking with some unknown mech in his console. He was blocking the screen with his frame... that camera needs a new placement, by the way. Immediately after sending they call, Ratchet went to his quarters and refuses to answer my comms. Also, I think the security feed from the sickbay has been tampered with, since the audio is not working properly. I suspect Ratchet might in some kind of trouble. He was frowning deeply when he went to his personal quarters.”
“Hmmm, our CMO tends to frown quite a lot, Red Alert,” rumbled the Prime before he could stop himself. He knew it would probably irritate the mech, but it was nothing if not the truth.
“I’m serious, Optimus. I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s not normal for Ratchet to avoid answering his comm. I am going to check on him as we speak”
“Well, you are right in that his behavior is somewhat odd.”
A few kliks passed while Red Alert made his way through the ship, and Optimus waited patiently behind his desk. The channel remained open, so he heard as the red and white mech knocked a few times on the medic’s door, and after some moments he heard a staticky gasp.
“He’s not here anymore!”
“He left his quarters? Perhaps he returned to the sickbay to-”
“No, he’s not in the Ark! He wasn’t opening his door, so I asked Teletraan for his location, and he said Ratchet left the ship less than five kliks ago.”
Optimus decided that that was more than ‘somewhat odd’, specially for a mech like Ratchet who didn’t get out pretty much at all. He pinged his CMO himself. He didn’t get an answer, either, so he filed an urgent request to the Ark’s computer as well, asking for the remote location of Ratchet’s signal.
The Prime’s optics widened in surprise when the soft voice from the speakers informed him that the medic’s signature could not be tracked.
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Frenzy punched his brother in the shoulder when it was in reach.
“Ow, what the frag!?”
“That was damn good! That spot near the top still not secured?”
“No, ‘s not, you walking glitch.” Rumble punctuated his answer with a slap of his own, which was followed by a swift exchange of kicks, punches, and general relief-induced violence. They ended up panting in the dirt.
.:How's the rest going? Beak?:.
.:Following the ambulance. I’m already blocking several search processes and incoming transmissions. The Autobots are looking for this slagging medic already, Rumble! He was not supposed to contact them.:.
.:He didn’t! I was there with the comm scrambling stuffs ‘n all!:.
.:He warned them somehow.:. A soft static burst, the cassette equivalent of a huff. .:I started the scrambling before he headed to the rendezvous point, so they are going to have a hard time tracking him anyways:.
.:What about that dirt sniffing slag-for-chips? The green one:.
.:He might be able to follow the trail, but he’s going to have a Pit of a hard time when I activate the decoys:.
.:Cleeevaaaaaah, birdbrain!:. they both chorused.
.:Not even going to answer to that. How are the others doing?:.
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It would not have been correct to say that Ravage was terrified, because that just didn’t happen. Somehow, though, it was happening right now.
He glanced at the mech walking at his side towards the nearest exit hatch. The red visor was dim and flickering slightly. The gait was firm, but the cybercat saw Soundwave stumble a few times out of the corner of his optics. The exhaustion was visible in every stiff joint and in every hermetically clamped seam.
Ravage had never seen Soundwave look so bad without being in the sickbay, and even then at least there was the reassuring knowledge that the damage was physical and fixable.
Now though, Ravage knew his boss’ processor was probably just as bad as his external systems.
When Ratbat and himself had tackled this part of the plan, they realized they would have to spin a very elaborate tale. Making Soundwave leave the base would need every ounce of their creativity and planning hability.
They had purposely broken long-distant signal boosters and took every pain they could to make it look like an Autobot sabotage. They had made aged tracks and left semi-hidden ‘bot signatures through the autonomous net of the compound. They had even made sure the hardware malfunction was in one of the bigger mechanisms that required a larger mech to fix, not a cassette.
Ravage and Ratbat knew that only very particular circumstances would make their carrier leave the Decepticon HQ when he had works in progress inside. They knew that Soundwave would not take any kind of support other than his cassettes, but the reason HAD to be very good.
That was why Ratbat and Ravage had taken this task together: Ratbat’s efficiency and precise thinking would take care of every aspect of the story, and then he would hand it to Ravage. Ravage, whose loyalty had never wavered, even for a second, would make the tale far easier to sell. The cybercat had been disgusted by the idea, but he had understood the lie had a higher purpose.
Then he had gone to Soundwave.
He had appeared from the shadows by the door of the workstation and politely pinged his boss. Soundwave had spun slowly in his seat and looked at him, and Ravage had been able to feel that seething rage that was filling the spark of the bigger mech. Of his carrier. It was quickly gone when Soundwave cut off his side of the bond, but it was enough for the smaller mech to shiver in place.
Ravage had managed to keep his troubled state of mind from his vocalizer when he spoke. Cold and precise, he unfolded the lie without ever breaking optic contact.
The dismay and fear came flooding back when Soundwave got up. Not fear for his life -Ravage doubted Soundwave would hurt him, and even if the blue mech had tried to, he was way faster and would have fled- but for Soundwave himself.
Soundwave hadn’t asked anything.
Of the thousands of small details and explanations the two symbiotes had been sure they would have to address, Soundwave had asked nothing. No discussion of Autobots positioned in the area, no demands for aerial surveillance, no inquiry as to why maintenance hadn’t been requested sooner. Nothing.
He had just heard Ravage and got up, ready to leave.
Soundwave had never gone into any situation without looking at it from many, many angles, and even then, he would do so carefully, detailing every step.
Now he was just following his own cassettes wherever they told him to go and nothing more.
This was what had terrified Ravage.
He hoped desperately that the plan would work.
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.:Everyone is in position? Ratbat?:.
.:Everything’s fine in the cameras, and the cat has already left with Soundwave.:.
.:Buzzsaw?:.
.:Dirge just left the Autobot alone two kliks ago. The conehead didn’t see me, of course:. Buzzsaw said and he chuckled when he saw the sniper huddle a little more under his gaze. .:Hmmm, I don’t think the little ‘bot likes me much:.
.:Oh don’t worry birdbrain, we don’t like you either:. Both twins’ nervous laughter echoed through the bond. They were amusing themselves to avoid thinking of what was going on.
.:Ravage, how are you doing with the schedule? Did he-?:.
.:Fine!:. The cybercat snapped. .:Just make sure the Autobot is there when we arrive:. He hesitated, something hardly ever seen in Ravage. .:Rumble and Frenzy, too. Laserbeak, this will probably get messy.:.
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Chapter 04 >
Cheers 0w0