Content advice: SPOILERS for Dark of the Moon, fix-it fic.
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"My clone," Starscream snarled, "has no charisma."
Soundwave took a moment to reply. On screen, Starscream's clone bowed and scraped, repeating servile phrases recorded by Lazerbeak while they were still on Earth. Of course it had no charisma.
"It fools the Autobots," Soundwave stated. It fooled the humans too. It had even fooled the hatchlings, who'd taken to nestling in its cockpit in the days before the evacuation.
Now, the hatchlings trained on delta level while the hiss of welding and the clang of construction floated up from the lower tiers.
"The Autobots are mindless," Starscream huffed, but at least he'd stopped complaining about his clone.
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No Decepticons remained on Earth, only their doubles.
Uncanny and non-sentient, they'd been an expensive drain on resources, the Nemesis stripped bare to build them.
But they were an investment, and that was how Soundwave had presented it to Megatron in the wake of the battle in Egypt.
A worthwhile investment to ensure the continuity of their species.
Megatron had agreed.
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Time lag was an issue.
Intel arrived late, delayed by the sheer gulf of space between Earth and Cybertron. Each clone had been fitted with cameras, a transmitter wired to its cortex. Command saw what their clones saw, but not at the same time.
Key events could only be witnessed after the fact. Ironhide's death, Sentinel's betrayal, the distribution of the pillars. Nothing could be changed, only observed. If something went wrong, it was already too late to act.
Starscream hated it. The waiting, the worry, the thought that now, this very breem, the Autobots could be taking Sentinel apart. They could be coming to the realisation he wasn't the mech they thought he was. Just another fake, a drone's cybernetic brain in the dead Prime's body.
They'd see Shockwave's hand in the structure, Soundwave's touch in the programming, and everything would be lost.
Starscream paced, his denta grinding and talons clicking.
He wished it could be over.
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It was one thing to see your clone live, Soundwave mused, and another to watch it die. He didn't flinch as Bumblebee's canon ripped a path up through his double's chest, obliterating the head. But still, it was hardly pleasant. A monitor went blank; there would be no more data from that source.
The Lazerbeak clone's death had been more affecting. None of the cameras had picked it up, but a drone had seen the corpse. Another head lost, neck cables blunt as though melted. Disconcerting to see, but it was all for the better. A vaporised head meant no evidence. And no evidence was exactly what they wanted to leave.
Other monitors went blank, other clones and their transmitters destroyed.
Good.
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A hatchling chirped. Its claws tapped a rhythm on the floor, and its optics were a pattern of keen little lights all blinking at different times. Starscream extended a toe and dragged the small frame under the protection of his fuselage. He wasn't sure how it had got onto the bridge of the grounded Nemesis – Megatron playing favourites probably – but that was no reason to let it get stepped on.
As for Megatron himself, he was silent. He stood over the console, observing the wreck of a creature Shockwave had manufactured in his image. But it was arrogant enough, and had enough of the real Megatron about it that Starscream could almost imagine they'd brought the clone back with them by accident.
He was disappointed when it didn't kill the human female. Watching Sam dispatch his own clone had been a sickening exercise in second-hand embarrassment; it would have been a pleasing kind of justice had Megatron's clone dispatched Sam's mate.
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Shockwave arrived late. He stood at the back, and studied the monitors one by one. He wasn't interested in the crowd, just the images from Soundwave's surveillance. So many dead already, so much achieved.
He wouldn't admit it aloud, but the redesigns had been a challenge. Not Sentinel, nor the drones, but the creation of hundreds of replica pillars, each one intended not to form a space bridge, but to create a hard-light hologram large enough to be viewed by almost one quarter of the Earth.
It had been easier to assist Soundwave in the construction of duplicates of the Russian cosmonauts. Just another trap to lure the Autobots and their human collaborators. The photographs had been so easy to fake, they didn't bear thinking about. But the hologram, that was a task worthy of his genius.
Soundwave duplicated one of the feeds, then froze the image. It was as though Cybertron itself pushed through the Earth's upper atmosphere.
Shockwave's mandibles snicked together; it was stunning.
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The real pillars hung around Cybertron, their secrets unlocked, their vast potential already making up for the loss of energon and precious components used for the clones.
They formed a chain of small rings, each one a gateway to a useful resource, each one bringing the Decepticons closer to pure energon, and the true revival of their planet.
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The hatchling crawled up Starscream's leg, and butted him in the knee. After a while, Starscream gave in and allowed it to claw its way onto his shoulder. It faced the screens, head tilted and vocaliser active.
It wouldn't understand what it was seeing, but perhaps it would remember. And when it gained the ability to speak, it might tell its batch-mates of the day it had sat on the great Air Commander Starscream's shoulder and watched as the Autobots destroyed Cybertron.
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Megatron laughed at the death of his clone. Such a weak thing, Soundwave knew, engineered to be damaged, programmed to submit to the Sentinel drone's abuse. A broken thing, but necessarily so – after all, who would believe that any Autobot could take on Megatron at even half his strength and live?
From his perch on the bank on monitors, Lazerbeak ruffled his wings. "The Prime drone is dead," he commented, as the penultimate screen went blank: Sentinel had been destroyed. "Fifteen astroseconds until detonation."
The final screen flickered. There was one camera left, a lone Insecticon – another drone, but tiny, not a warrior. One little spy to make absolutely certain that what needed to be done was done.
Tension built as the astroseconds passed. Then it happened: one after another the pillars exploded in a hail of red-hot shrapnel. Metal rained, the heat of each blast liquefying casings and incinerating circuits.
"No evidence," Soundwave said, and Megatron smiled.
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The hatchling clung to Starscream like a case of cosmic rust. He ought to have taken it back to the training ground, but there was no time. The announcement had to be made, and how would it look if Starscream wasn't there, standing at Megatron's side?
Better to be present, plus one hatchling, than miss the opportunity to sear his own image into the processors of every Decepticon present; the victors of the war against the Autobots, the saviours of their species.