Do not own Transformers, Hasbro does. Enjoy zee storee!
20 miles west of Santa Fe, New Mexico
Suri Cortez woke up in pitch blackness. As usual, she had a headache. Ignoring it, she groaned into a sitting position. The white tank-top she wore felt cold against her skin. She flipped on the lamp beside the bed, bathing the hotel room in a warm glow. The scars on her arms and chest seemed to give off an icy blue light of their own. Of course, Suri knew that her "scars" were really alterations in her skin pigmentation that just happened to form alien symbols. It was just easier to say that they were scars. The runic symbols covered her entire body except her face. They were one of many results of a near death encounter with a Decepticon named Starscream. One day, disguised as an F/A 22 Raptor USAF Fighter Jet, the alien robot crashed head on into Suri's North Carolina home, killing her parents and her unborn brother.
Thinking of that day five years ago, Suri felt a shiver run up her spine. Unusually, she found she could no longer cry since her family's funeral. But since then, she and her best friend and guardian, Diesel, had tracked Starscream all over the western hemisphere. However, since yesterday, Diesel had lost Starscream's signal and they were stuck in a small town outside Santa Fe.
Suri rubbed he eyes and swung her feet over the edge of the bed. She padded over to the sink and splashed her face with cold water. Looking at her reflection in the mirror, she shuddered. The alien markings began at the nape of her neck and ran down her body like a waterfall. She looked at her hands, where the symbols ran in spirals up each finger. Disgusted, she turned away from the mirror.
After going through the motions of a regular morning, Suri tucked her father's old handgun into her jacket, pulled on her black gloves and walked out the hotel room door into the pre-dawn New Mexico air. In the parking lot she spied Diesel under a street light, in the form of a red '05 Dodge Viper. At her approach, he flashed his high beams and revved his engine so loud it was almost deafening. Suri smiled.
"Morning, Dee." The headlights flashed again. "Rest well?" two flashes. "Let's get out of here. I know you need to stretch." There was a popping noise and the driver's side door swung open. Suri climbed in and the Viper sped out of the parking lot and onto the highway.
The eastern horizon was just beginning to glow with a grey light when Diesel pulled off the highway and down a backroad that led to an area shielded by low hills. The stars had disappeared hours ago and the sky was totally black. This was the perfect time for Diesel to transform. Suri climbed out of the car. As soon as her feet touched the sandstone ground, there was the sound of metal grinding against metal. She turned to where a few seconds ago there had been a small sports car. She had to crane her neck to see the two-story tall robot that had taken its place. Diesel tilted his head back and sighed- a sound that reminded Suri of a car being crushed in a compressor.
"It feels like forever since I stood up last." He said, his accented, metallic voice reverberating through the sandstone and into Suri's chest. She smiled apologetically from her perch on a rock.
"I know and I'm sorry, but we had to keep going to get out of Boulder yesterday. It's just not safe with such a large population." Diesel crouched so Suri wouldn't have to crane her neck as much.
"Su, we need to talk about where we have to go from here." Su was her nickname, which Diesel only used when he was being serious.
"Okay, shoot."
I lost Starscream's signal yesterday, as you know, and haven't been able to pick it up again, which would lead me to think that he might be off-planet." Suri nodded. "Earlier this morning I intercepted another signal." He paused for Suri to respond.
"Where's it coming from?"
"A remote island in the Indian ocean." Suri stiffened. Now she understood why Diesel was being so serious. She didn't respond. "I understand your uneasiness, Su, but the signal was from an Autobot. And I have good reason to believe it was from one of my team." Decades ago, before Diesel had crashed to Earth, he'd been part of a team of six, including himself. Then a year before he'd met Suri, they were separated when Diesel's navigation system was thrown off by the magnetic poles of Saturn and Jupiter.
Suri pulled her motorcycle jacket tighter around her shoulders. She thought for a moment and sighed. She hated the ocean, but Diesel's team might be there. She knew this business was about sacrifices and she had to be readily prepared to make those. And they could use the extra help.
"Are you within comm range?" she asked running a hand though her thick black hair.
"No. But if we make it to the California line I'll see what I can do." Suri rubbed her hands together, eager to get back on the road again.
"Alright, let's roll." She paused, "Umm…Diesel?"
"Yeah?"
"Could you please ask for a rendezvous on the mainland?"
"Sure, Suri." He said, shifting back into the red Viper. Suri could hear the smile in his voice. She just rolled her eyes and got into the passenger seat.
Indian Ocean, Coordinates: Classified
Major Lennox was sweating. As was the rest of his team, and they had good reason. They could not get this wrong; too much was resting on this. He motioned for his two scouts to move ahead.
"Okay, guys, I want this op watertight. Everybody got that? Water-tight." There was a chorus of 'yes sir's' and 'copy that's' before there was a sporadic series of movements. The scouts moved fifteen yards ahead of the rest of the team and sighted up through their rifle optics. Through his night vision goggles, Lennox saw the discreet hand gesture that said all was clear. In a barely audible whisper that was the result of too many Black Ops missions, he ordered the second wave to move in. The four soldiers moved five yards ahead of the first two.
"All clear, Major. No targets in sight." Lennox inwardly cursed himself. What were they playing at?
"Alright, everybody watch your six. They're here." There was a moment of unsteady silence, broken intermittently by men breathing heavily. Lennox felt his heart pounding in his chest. This wasn't like them at all.
"Okay, Gamma, move up. Delta at their three, Epsilon, their nine. Everyone else, fan out. I want this over with yesterday." There was a hustle of quiet movement. The three teams created a semi-circle five yards ahead of the Beta team. The remaining soldiers formed two lines where the semi-circle ended. Ahead of the group was a wide plain of nothing but open space and grass. There, they waited, crouched like apes with guns. If there was anything Lennox hated, it was the long, slow silence before the eruption of combat.
"Major Lennox, I have two inbound enemy contacts, sir. Coming up fast on our ten." Said a soldier after what seemed like hours.
"Hold fire." Lennox could practically feel his men gripping their triggers in anticipation.
"Coming in hot, sir, two-hundred meters."
"Hold." He could hear the engines revving as the targets picked up speed.
"One hundred meters."
"Hold."
"Fifty meters."
"Hold." He could see them now, just on the other side of the plain and approaching rapidly.
"Thirty meters."
"Hold."
"Fifteen meters, sir."
"Hold." He was going to wait until the last possible second.
"Five meters, sir!"
"Hold." There was one meter between them now and it was closing fast. This was where everything looked as if it were playing out in slow motion. He felt himself shout the order to fire at will and saw his men unload several magazines' worth of bullets into the oncoming targets. But they kept coming. The targets were on top of them, and then they were flying over their heads. He shouted to get down. Before they could even get up, Lennox felt a heavy, metal hand roll him over. He was looking into the smiling face of Skids.
"You are out, yo! Yeah! You can't hit me! I'm too fast for yo punk ass!" The crazy Autobot continued on like this. Lennox groaned. He'd never hear the end of it now. He sat up and watched as the Autobot twins did their ridiculous little victory dance and bumped chests.
"That's twins: seventeen, humans: one." Reported a voice on a loudspeaker. "Pack it up, Major, that's enough for one day." Lennox nodded and held up his right thumb, saying he understood. He called out to his group and they all started walking back to the base.
"Take it easy guys; we'll get 'em next time." They hadn't taken two more steps when alarms started going off. It threw the group of soldiers into defense mode. They all began to spin around wildly looking for the source of the disturbance. An automated voice sounded over the loudspeaker.
"Unauthorized signal intrusion! Unauthorized signal intrusion! Major Lennox, report to hangar 1-A! Major Lennox, report to hangar 1-A!" On instinct, Lennox began to sprint for the airstrip that led to the cluster of military hangars and barracks. It took him several minutes to reach the 1-A hangar, which was buzzing with alarms and signal analysts. Computers sat in rows, humming, adding to the noise. Moving over to a switch on the wall, he shut down the alarm and the red flashing lights. The hangar became quiet.
"What've we got?" he asked of anyone. For a moment no one moved. "What've we got?! Come on people, talk to me!" From the back row of the computers, a voice called;
"Major, back here." Lennox moved between the large monitors until he saw a slight boy no older than nineteen, sitting at one of the computers, wide, green eyes glued to the screen.
"What's your name, son?"
"Chase, sir. Chase Harris."
"Alright, Harris, what's the problem?"
"Well, sir, we've detected a short wave signal radiating from a small moving point somewhere near the Arizona-California line. There appears to be a sort of encryption in the signal but I can't figure out exactly what its saying."
"Pull up what you've got so far."
"That's that thing, sir; I haven't gotten past the original symbols that were encrypted in the first place."
"Okay, pull up the symbols you've got so far." Repeated Lennox in exasperation.
"Yes sir." With a few taps of the keyboard, Harris was able to pull up several cross-referencing windows with symbols being compared with a range of dead languages. Lennox recognized the symbols immediately. He turned back to Harris.
"Are you cross referencing these with the Cybertronian database?" Harris paused.
"Not yet…sir."
"Well, that sounds like a good idea to me. How 'bout you?"
"It does, sir." As Harris began his work pulling up the small database they had compiled on the Cybertronian language, Lennox turned to the other assembled analysts.
"Okay, while he's doing that, somebody alert the Autobots. For all we know this could be a rouge Decepticon trying to find us and win favor with Megatron. Go." There was a bustle of movement as Lennox turned back to Harris. "Have those transferred to the big screen at the JCS comm station, will you."
"Yes sir." He could see the look in Harris' eyes that said he didn't get paid enough for his talents in this job. Lennox smirked, he'd wise up sooner or later.
He made his way out of hangar 1-A, toward the largest building on the property. It was already glowing with blue and yellow light which told him that the Autobots had been informed promptly after his order had been given. That pleased him. It meant that in the face of something more serious, they'd be ready faster. Once inside, Lennox saw that Optimus Prime was already examining the symbols on the largest LCD flatscreen mounted on the fifty foot tall catwalk. At his approach, the Autobot leader looked up at him.
"Good evening, Major." He greeted in his grinding, metallic voice. Lennox nodded his head in response.
"Evening. Are you understanding any of this?" He asked climbing the stairs to the top of the catwalk. Optimus looked back at the screen and made a contemplative noise, or what Lennox interpreted to be a contemplative noise.
"Not the language itself, but the signal-print looks very familiar."
"How much has been translated?" Lennox asked the assistant comm chief.
"Almost all, but it's patchy, some of these symbols we don't even have in the database."
"Pull it up." At his command, a small paragraph with blank holes appeared on the monitor in front of him. He read it, a bit confused.
'Now at… holding point… respond… Prime… Cortez… human female…. guardian… Decepticon… off-planet…' It repeated itself over and over. Lennox shook his head.
"Its gibberish, none of these words has any important meaning." He started chewing on his knuckle, a nervous habit he'd picked up in Afghanistan. "Can you open up another cross reference? They might be using other languages symbols and mixing it with Cybertronian." The comm chief nodded and expanded the reference field. Nothing matched.
"Major, I may know what the problem is." Offered Optimus. Lennox nodded. "We have only given you the most recent adaptation of our language for your database. It is possible that whoever is sending out the signal is using an older dialect."
"Do you know it?"
"Only a minor knowledge, but it might help to fill in some of these blank spots." By this time, Lennox was willing to try anything. He turned to the comm chief and nodded.
It was nearly midnight before most of the message had been decoded. But all the same, Lennox read and re-read the message in awe. It wasn't at all what he had expected.
'Now at 32 deg.43' N, 114 deg.37' W Holding point west. Respond immediately. Request audience with Optimus Prime. Reporting: Diesel, Cargo: Suri Cortez, human female, victim of Decepticon attack. Lost signal. Assuming off-planet. Respond immediately.'
" Can we check these coordinates?"
"Already done, sir. Yuma, Arizona. I pulled up everything we have on a Cortez, Suri as well, sir." That made Lennox swell with pride. He didn't even have to ask anything and the order would be done. These were good men and women here.
"And?"
"Over a million Cortez's living in the U.S. at the moment, sir. Filtering for possible Decepticon contact, and…got one. North Carolina address, Christina and Miguel Cortez, says here they died back in 2004 after a Raptor jet crashed into their house."
"Any children?"
"One daughter, a Suri Alaina Cortez, was reported missing after her parent's funeral."
"Great work. Send back a response. Say that we're prepared to meet them at Long Beach Naval Complex tomorrow. Stress that we will meet them."
Ok, first chapter for ya. The rest of my chapters may or may not be this long, I haven't decided yet. Anywho, plz review.