Title: Invasion
Rating: T
Verse: G1 based AU (mixed in moviverse elements like the Cube)
Genre: drama
Characters: Megatron, Optimus Prime
Warnings: biological warfare
Word Count: ~ 2000
Summary: This fic is a competition piece, written for Lj Competition fun August challenge "Alien Invasion" ( competition - fun . livejournal 39338 . html ). I'm happy to say that it claimed the 2nd place. :-)
Note: breem - Cybertronian minute, joor – Cybertronian hour, orn – Cybertronian day, groon – Cybertronian month, vorn – Cybertronian year
Invasion
Megatron stood by the Ark, fuming in himself at the delay, clawed servos tightening from time to time in accord with his mood. Optimus had another communication from Primus and was discussing it with the remaining priests –not that it helped them any time before. He was sorely tempted to leave the whole priestly baggage on Cybertron, to the mercy of the invaders… no, he shook his helm angrily, he was not going to think about them. It was his failure as Lord Protector that he could only save this handful who were already in the Ark and the hermetically sealed halls of the Matrix Temple. But with nothing to do, only waiting for them his thoughts inevitably went back to how it all began…
The Golden Age deserved its name perfectly. Cybertron was flourishing, the Transformers lived in harmony from the last miner till the honored Prime, energon and precious metals was flowing like river from the colonies and caused everyone to live in comfort and equality. But it was from those colonies where the rot came too that undermined their great empire. Organics were puny, weak and short-lived but they proliferated like rust – and at first they hardly cared about it. Yes, organic bacteria settled into the smallest, darkest niches of their great metallic cities and it was bothersome – but they were hardly dangerous.
Or so they thought at first.
The uncontested rule of their empire made them complacent, even him, the Lord Protector, who only had to defend their empire from decadence as no outside enemy dared to raise their helms in defiance. When he had come into power there used to be some small skirmishes on the farthest colonies, but the Cybertronian military might had put them down quickly and decisively; the mighty Seekers hardly needed to show what they were capable of.
But as the wars and rebellions ceased, the army slowly dwindled. Some left naturally, to become civilians, to find new challenges in the private sectors or in law enforcement; some were demobilized by Senate decrees as the funding for the military was cut and cut again – and he couldn't find arguments strong enough to retain more of the army than the small core of hardened veterans like himself. He had to admit that they simply weren't needed any more. There were no enemies inside or out of the Cybertronian empire, no threat to their glory and might.
How wrong he was.
The organic contamination grew as they ignored it at first; they had been disgusted by the bacteria that ate up the waste oils and various debris, but as it was somewhat even useful, nobody cared much to clean and sterilize those dark, hidden spots where it appeared. Not even when it started to proliferate abundantly and in one orn, when Soundwave finally put the statistics together and presented it to him, they stared at it in a shock close to horror. It was all over Cybertron by that time and didn't even constrain itself to waste materials any more, but eating up the very metals of their cities.
The cleanup process was far too late by that time to fight with an enemy that they didn't understand and weren't even able to see. Universities hardly ever studied organics and disdained those scientists who wished to do so – it was scorned and belittled as a subject. He could thank his own SIC to that prejudice, as the embittered Starscream left the Iacon Academy thoroughly disgusted by his former colleagues and superiors who gave no funding or lab space for organic studies; the Seeker returned to his frame-kin's original calling, the military and Megatron was glad for it.
Even if the Seeker was a handful to have around.
And the Seeker wasn't the only one discouraged from studying the way organics worked – which made it impossible to properly fight with the infestation when it reached huge proportions. Sure, the bacteria was at first easy to destroy by fire or acids; but to their horror, they soon noticed that some always survived in the tiniest nooks on the walls where they couldn't get to them and propagated even faster afterwards. Mutated too, thanks to their short lifespan and highly changeable DNA, creating a new version that was just a bit more resistant every orn.
When the bacteria finally started to evolve to strains that invaded even their living metals, Megatron started to be suspicious. It was his job to be so about everything that threatened their lives and in retrospect he should have had misgivings even earlier. But he too was ignorant about organics, never before considering them as any kind of a threat. But the serial mutations that made the bacteria all the more resistant and invasive despite of everything they did, finally caused him to seek out the source of it. All the smallest Cybertronians he could train and protect against the bacteria were sent out to find the mastermind behind the attack – if there were any.
They found it all right, the Lord Protector mused bitterly, as he finally saw Optimus and the priest walking briskly towards the Ark. It seemed that they have made the decision, for he saw the Cube in Optimus's servos and it wasn't removed from its hallowed place for longer than any of them remembered. Some of the priest were distraught, as their caste has never before left Cybertron; he noticed Mirage's whitened, wide optics and the nervous squirming of Bumblebee, whose vocals fell victim of the ever-changing bacteria too, before he could have been fixed. There were others too, who suffered from the relentless attacks before Ratchet or Hook could treat the infection that, by then didn't limit itself to the buildings.
"Brother. Finally decided I see."
Optimus was looking sad, but determined. The Cube in his servos flickered angry blue glyphs on its surface – Primus too was in a bad mood apparently.
"Yes. We must leave now to save our race."
"I told you that groons ago." – Megatron wasn't even angry any more. They lost dozens during these last groons who could have been saved, but he sort of understood Optimus; as the Prime had to try whatever he could and only gave up when Primus himself was proving helpless in the relentless waves of those minuscule but terrifying organics.
"I had to try every avenue brother. You know that."
"For Primus's sake stop that inane chatter and get your afts into the Ark!" – Starscream, as usual was in a bad mood and wasn't mincing his words. He never was, not since he saw the mighty towers of Vos fell as bacteria ate through their foundations and saw most of his frame-kin lose their ability to fly thanks to a strain that corrupted their flight sensors. He was one of the fortunate ones to be in Iacon and saved from that fate – but from then on he was eternally in a dark mood, mourning his city and his kin.
They stopped the discussion and got into the Ark almost meekly. A few hundred only, out of the millions and some of them scarred forever by healed infections, by lost kin or bondmates, by their gnawing sense of failure to protect their home from the invaders… They launched the survivors of their race into the vastness of space, flew like beaten losers that they were, leaving the rusting ruins of the Golden Age and the Cybertronian Empire behind.
"We will come back." – Megatron growled darkly as he stood in front of the viewscreen, watching with a desperate helplessness as Cybertron grew smaller on it, as they left it behind. There were no pursuit, no attack outright – their enemy didn't operate that way. It made them no less terrifying.
"We will if we can, brother. It is our home and will remain so." – Optimus put a servo on his tense, grey shoulders, his light blue digits massaging it lightly to relieve the tension. "We have to find a way to either fight with them or talk to them."
"You still believe that they can be convinced to talk? They never gave you a single answer."
"They are intelligent. We know that. They can be reached somehow, I'm sure. They can't be all belligerent."
"They certainly seem so."
"We have wronged them in the past and they retaliated. Maybe we can find a common ground or make up to them."
"We will retaliate too. They went too far. I won't parley with a race that asks no questions but destroys everything."
"We will do what we can, what we should, brother. Don't wallow in defeat."
A race that they had wronged, as Optimus said. Megatron knew that it was so, he gathered the evidence of what happened and how. It didn't make it any easier to face with, especially as it was he himself who ultimately started the chain of events. That seemingly serene blue-green planet, third in orbit around its sun, home for a deceptively small and weak organic species. Humans. The word became a swearword since they discovered the full extent of their actions.
They had been subdued quickly upon discovery, their size, strength and technology could not stand up to Cybertronian strength, size and firepower. Invaded, beaten down – albeit they were unusually tenacious in resisting, Megatron remembered with a scowl from personal experience -, their cities and leaders destroyed, their planet integrated into the empire. The planet offered very little that they haven't already had, so the occupation was mostly for show and the puny little organics mostly left to live their insignificant lives alone. All right, some of the more adventurous youths and more vicious of fighters enjoyed hunting them for sport and it was wrong, he realized too late.
But they never gave up fully, Megatron had to give them that. Lacking the strength and size to beat their conquerors, they turned to a weapon that they mastered perfectly and what Cybertronians had no experience with: engineered bacteria, designed to invade Cybertron invisibly first, ineradicably next and aggressively at last. His agents found the hiding humans far too late and for every one they found and killed there were thousands of others, hiding in the smallest spaces of Cybertron. Their sheer numbers and size made them the enemies that finally brought down the empire.
Hardly bigger than their bacteria, at least from the Cybertronian viewpoint, they went unnoticed until it was far too late. They had their biological weapon mutated so often that Cybertronian scientists were left baffled and unable to follow the actual threat and create countermeasures. Thousands fell under the attacks of the tiny germs and even more were forced to serve their new masters by ingenious viruses enslaving their processors. Their own mechs were turned against them, fought to defend the humans by throwing themselves on his warriors, and that was the saddest sight amongst all the destruction and pain…
In the end they had no other choice left but to flee. To save their lives and freedom, to protect their Prime and the Matrix that housed the past and the future, to live to fight another orn. Even that expression came from one of the human languages, Megatron thought bitterly. They had to learn from their tiny enemy, first a lesson in humility, then in perseverance. But they would learn and come back, he promised to himself. No matter what Optimus thought of them and their intentions, the humans will pay.
He swore to live to see that orn.