Title: Drowning
Continuity: Marvel G1
Characters: Challenger Deep, Flame, random OCs
Rating: PG
Genre: Angst
Warnings: Violence
Word Count: +2000
Summary: A submarine charts the troubled waters that led him to the Decepticon cause.
Challenger Deep leaned back in his seat, which was towards the rear of the auditorium. Flame was going to be laughed off stage. That end was inevitable. Still, Challenger Deep resolved to enjoy the show while it lasted. The fiery fellow had produced quite lovely holo slides, although his resources and conclusions were lacking.
Making Cybertron into an engine of planetary exploration had its conceptual merits, but the whole execution that Flame proposed was just cockamamie. Challenger Deep was all for exploration and had even been fortunate enough to travel off-planet a few times, but it was crankcases like Flame who made the whole field into a laughing-stock. Still, jokes were harmless.
Flame, awkwardly carrying several boxes - all that the Academy was letting him keep - glared at Challenger Deep, the only other occupant of the elevator. It groaned and wheezed, scraping along the sides of the tunnel. The elevator was built for freight and accordingly slow, slow as seafloor-spreading. Like all university equipment, it was antiquated and in sore need of maintenance.
Then, Flame's optics narrowed, and dropping his boxes with a sickening crunch, he jabbed a finger at Challenger Deep. He shrieked, "You! You were there."
Challenger Deep winced; he had sat in the back of the auditorium for a reason beyond the cool, murky darkness. He had not wished to be seen at a talk given by a kook like Flame.
"You'll all see! Hah, this is freedom, in a way. No more grubbing for grants. No more bowing and scraping. When the cuts come for you, too, I'll be well on my way to success!" Flame spat, as if prophesying. His optics flashed, and he clasped his hands together, heedless of his dented boxes.
Challenger Deep just shook his head and tried to look away, although the fallen scientist really was fascinating in the awful way of a high-speed train collision.
Flame rubbed his hands together and needled, "The cuts will come for you. Don't think that they won't."
A few millennia later, the joke had lost its humour. Challenger Deep whored himself and his research out to the energy magnates just continue doing that which he loved. Deep under the seas of foreign worlds, there were energy reserves waiting to be tapped. Such he kept telling them, and while he could easily deliver on his promises, interest kept sinking, its hull fatally breached.
Cybertron had more than enough energy. Why pay to have yet more trucked in across the void of space? Conservation had no meaning, not when there was no end in sight to the golden age. The tide pulled him back in to Cybertron, flowing away from the alien seas that he desired most.
Cybertron had fluid bodies of its own. The Sea of Rust and the Mercury Ocean were the most prominent and most troublesome. In fact, the moniker 'Sea of Rust' always made Challenger Deep twitch. The basin was filled with bromine, red-brown like rust to be certain, but bromine nonetheless, not rust at all. Pessimistically, he wondered if maybe the name had stuck not because of the colour but because it was an unforgiving, treacherous sea. Many vessels had wrecked in that bromine expanse, and Challenger Deep had no doubt that more yet would founder. There was mapping work to be done. He worked.
Mapping the Rust Sea only provided a little credit, barely enough to get by on, especially with most shipping companies preferring to use the safe, domesticated canals instead of the marine monster of legend, even if sailing the Rust Sea would have saved them time and thus money.
The Mercury Ocean was far more beloved, especially of rich, aesthetically-built Transformers who had been given fortunes and not the processors to use them. The Mercury Ocean also was, kilogram for kilogram, a more dangerous ocean than the Sea of Rust for the simple reason that it was opaque. While boaters frolicked, submarines yet feared to dive.
Still, sonar needed no light to be effective. Electrosense would work exceptionally well in the metal ocean, and magnetosense would still have its uses. Vibrosense could be installed in a veritable lateral line, to detect the vibrations and currents around a swimmer. Challenger Deep already possessed all these senses in some form, but saving up over a few centuries, he had all of them amped up past the level any sane Transformer would want and beyond, pushing the limits. Challenger Deep saw the medics snickering, and he saw that sight really was quite irrelevant now. He had an opaque visor added, too. The visor went down.
Challenger Deep walked the bottom of an energon tank. There was a leak somewhere, and he had been paid to find it and fix it. Challenger Deep could not put to words how depressed he was. He remembered old Devourist-leaning submarines, and their invocations for Unicron-as-sea to swallow them, drag them down, and crush them - to compact their immortal souls to nothing with all the pressure. Had they not been foolish? Had he not laughed at them, more the fool? The ones who had never come back were the ones with the right idea.
There was the leak. Challenger Deep ran a finger down the hole and searched for the patching compound, knowing that he needed a patch more than some little leak. For all that he had found this leak, he deemed it unlikely that he would ever find that which would make him whole again.
Heat resistant armour was shamefully cheap now, Challenger Deep observed. He could easily figure out why, but he denied such knowledge as swiftly as it came. No one was going into space to explore anymore and...
"What's a submarine need with heat resistant armour?" asked the salesmech.
Challenger Deep had always wanted some, back when the idea of investigating underwater volcanoes and heat vents on alien worlds seemed a viable possibility. Now the thought seemed more alien than those far-away worlds. He explained listlessly, "The smelting-pool repair business pays good money."
And if the armour was faulty and a smelting pool melted him down to nothing but slag and dross?
Challenger Deep had to say that the thought excited him a little.
Megatron was a crank. There was no other word for it. No one could promise so much to the disenfranchised and expect to deliver. He was, what, a gladiator gone rogue, trying his hand at politics? Still, the fellow had raw charisma. No wonder he had been a favoured fighter. He certainly could put on a good show, although as good shows went, everyone knew what the outcome would be before the match even started.
Challenger Deep idly peeled a strip of congealed slag off one of his shins and listened to the big screen holo in the square. He was not the only one, although he guessed that most everyone else was actually watching the blasted thing. By the end of Megatron's speech, Challenger Deep has risen to his feet and was cheering along with everyone else, caught in the undertow.
Of course this was madness, but submarines were as apt to be mad as any. Were not the tide and lunatics kin, held in sway by the moons? Challenger Deep's academic past was a matter of public record, and he could only hope that the recruiter would not think to check, so eager were the Decepticons for new troops. Greedy as they were for fresh metal, he still doubted that an Iaconian academic would too welcome. Thankfully, the blinding visor hid those Iaconian blue optics, iconic as anything.
"A submarine, huh?" the recruiter said sceptically. Bathed in quiet sound, he had the up-thrust wings that easily marked a Seeker. Challenger Deep could never remember there being quite so many Seekers, but with the rise of Megatron, there seemed to be no end of Seekers now.
"I'm rated for dive under the Mercury Ocean and Sea of Rust as well as many-" Challenger Deep started to say.
"You'll do the Sea of Rust?" the recruiter cut him off, words edged as scalpels. The Seeker's voice was even and measured, but his fuel pump spurted irregularly; he was surprised.
"I've heard the myths," Challenger Deep replied. He had even wished the myths were true more times than he cared to admit, as an academic of science and rationality. "They're just myths."
"Well, well, well," the recruiter snickered. "The Autobots do send some convoys over that blasted sea. If the medics check out that you're fit to deep-six them, you're in."
"That visor comes up, doesn't it?" inquired the examining medic sharply.
"No," Challenger Deep said. He could barely remember what seeing was like or if he still had the software drivers to do it.
"If you're worried about being Iaconian, I already know that," the medic noted coolly. "There are a number of Iaconian Decepticons. It isn't my place to judge character. Now, schematics indicate that it should just rotate up and -"
Challenger Deep shook his head, slipping away from the medic's cold fingers as they sought out his helm-latches. He said flatly, "I don't use my optics."
"Hnn. We'll see how far you get in target practice with that attitude," the medic scoffed.
"We? I won't see anything," Challenger Deep corrected without a trace of humour.
The moons had definitely gotten the better of Challenger Deep. They said that Megatron was silvery-pale, like the moons, like the quicksilver of the Mercury Ocean. Challenger Deep was just glad that he could not see and that he would not see when he got out of boot camp and was turned to killing.
He was especially happy that he had not seen the two punks who had driven railroad spikes through his wrists and ankles and pinned him up to the side of the camp as a crude sort of prank. Challenger Deep could simply tell his very visually-oriented sergeant that he had not seen who had pinned him up here. There would be the usual punishment for failure - a beating of some sort, but the sergeant would not press Challenger Deep for any more details that he obviously could not provide.
Challenger Deep waited a few days to listen if his assailants had also believed the lie by omission that he had not perceived who they were. They only pranked him because they thought could get away with it, he being blind as he was. Then, when they were complacent about escaping judgement for their crime, Challenger Deep grabbed them both.
Challenger Deep shook a little. He told himself that he was just trying to flick the metal droplets from his frame before they cooled, but he knew better. He had just killed them both by taking them for a swim in the local smelting pool. He had thought that killing would be terrifyingly hard. Challenger Deep was wrong. He was terrified by how easy he found murder. He curled up on his bunk, and the metal congealed into solid beads on his frame, dull decorations.
Boot camp was never quite so bad after that. No one seriously thought that Challenger Deep was behind the other two recruits' disappearance - a blind Iaconian playing at sailor? They deemed him unlucky, though, or rather, a source of bad luck, someone not to be touched for fear that the bad luck would spread, contagious and pernicious as rust. Challenger Deep shook his head. It was still only bromine.
Challenger Deep examined his new torpedo tubes curiously. Deep-sixing Autobot convoys out in the Sea of Rust was his mission mandate. Right. He could do it. If anything, he thought sinking ships would be easier than murdering those two other recruits, as he all he had to do was point and fire with the torpedoes. He would not need to touch the ships at all and feel greasy life slip between his fingers. This mission took him closer to where he wanted to be, and if the Decepticons won, there would be other planets to... plunder. He could call it exploring if he wanted, he could say that he was going to fit in excellent studying and data-gathering during his off-time, but what was that but plunder of information? Primus, when had he become a pirate, and how had he not noticed?
Oh, right, he was blind.
The End
Author's Note: This is an old fic of mine, written on 2006-05-07, tossed up here to collect my fanfic in one place.