Chasing the Signal
# # #
The war was over.
Optimus Prime, Ultra Magnus, Smokescreen, anyone High Command thought had a chance of getting through to him constantly reminded Blaster of that fact.
The war was over. The Decepticons were scattered to the seven spirals of the galaxy. They weren't a threat anymore.
Blaster didn't need to chase down Soundwave. The Decepticon communications officer wasn't dangerous, couldn't hurt the Autobots in their invincible Golden Age. His absolute determined refusal to let the chase go was irrational. They needed him out with the other Autobots, aiding in the restoration of Cybertron, helping to settle in the Headmasters and Targetmasters, reintegrate the neutrals into a society where laws meant more than how much it cost to bribe the people enforcing them.
The war was over.
The ghost-signal he heard in the depths of Cybertron's new night couldn't be detected by anyone else. It didn't exist, and Blaster was letting his obsession blind him.
They never said that to his face, and he never said it to their faces that at least his focus on Soundwave hadn't deafened him. Because no matter how good their receivers were, no dumb machine could match a comm-officer that could act as his own communications suite.
The war was over. But he still had a job to do.
# # #
He woke in the dead hours of a Terran solar-cycle, the ghost-signal dancing through his comm suite. A snippet of music repeated incessantly in his audials, a falling note ending on a drumbeat.
He tried to trace it back to its source, but it vanished into the din of Cybertron's comm-chatter.
# # #
In the middle of a meeting with the aide of the newly-elected governor of Kaon, the ghost-signal skittered along his frequency-scanners. He broke off from his conversation with the red minibot, optics dimming as his automatic direction finder spun up. Too faint; it couldn't do more than spin in every direction, unable to latch onto the faint signal.
Listening to the signal itself wasn't the only way to trace, though. Blaster's optics shut down entirely as he strained to listen to the silences in the spinning of his finder. Where did it lose the signal entirely?
Because that place would be at a right angle from where the signal came from.
Vaguely, he was aware of a hand laid on his arm but dismissed it as unimportant. Listen...
It was faint, so faint the hum of his own systems sounded like a roar in comparision. He listened to the fading points of the signal, to the rising sound as the direction finder swung back in parallel with it. The general direction was easy: north.
But he was almost on the south pole of the planet. Everything was north of here.
In the middle of the signal-strength rising, it vanished.
Blaster's optics snapped back on. Damn. The broadcast had stopped. He'd have to examine his logs later, but it looked like the only thing he had learned was that he needed to get out of Kaon.
"Blaster?" A soft, female voice asked, tone suggesting that this wasn't the first time she'd said his name.
Oh, blast it, he'd just tuned out Crimson for over a minute. Wincing, he tilted his head down to look the minibot in her yellow optics. "Uh, sorry about that..."
# # #
Just after the waiter brought the arsenic dainty appetizers to his table at the Polyhex restaurant, the signal jangled against him. Blaster froze, an appetizer in his hand. His direction-finder spun up, and he sent activation comms to comm-stations all over the planet. He would triangulate the source of this frequency. He'd had to call in a lot of favors for this, but Soundwave was not going to escape.
It took only a few moments, a handful of the wailing flute notes, before he had a general location.
Which was just as well, as the signal dropped away right before the big comm-tower in Kaon transferred the location to him. The Decepticons had called it Aurknan when they had divided up the planet, and it covered the Sonic Canyons and lands all around them.
The Sonic Canyons. As planets went, Cybertron had a lot of massive gaping holes that were visible from space. The Sea of Light and the Sonic Canyons were the largest of them. In the northern hemisphere, the Sea of Light gave off light, a steady glow that even the Great Shutdown hadn't seemed to affect. In the southern hemisphere, the Sonic Canyons roared. Noise came up from the depths, deafeningly loud at ground-level. Most buildings in Aurknan went up and up, even beyond Iacon and Kaon's towers. People had to get away from the noise, or they would go mad.
Blaster grinned and lifted the arsenic dainty to his mouth. "Hey, Tracks, ever wanted to hit the Sonic Canyons?"
The Corvette eyed him askance. "Why do I suspect this sudden, random conversation shift connects to Soundwave?"
# # #
A falling note ending on a drumbeat woke him out of recharge, systems tingling from a near-overcharge of energy. Combat reflexes, he noted groggily, and then the music invaded his head.
The fine-tuning to listen to an incredibly faint signal on the other side of the world betrayed him. Out here, near the source, the music whelmed him, went straight into his processors and his communications suite. Strings slid across the surface of his mind, backed by a steady, low drumbeat. Was this what Raoul felt as a heartbeat?
It reverberated with the dim roar from the Sonic Canyons, and he had a hard time believing that the music was only inside his own comm systems now. He shook with the power of it, mouth shaping lyrics that the Sonic Canyons brought to him. His optics flickered, dimmed, brightened- He dropped to his knees as the music built in volume and range.
It called to him, enticed him into going under, into letting the music in to wash over him and drown him in the dark.
He struggled against it, tried to think past the high, clear playing of strings and their backing drums. Direction-finder. If he could just spin it up-
He cried out as the signal multiplied, connected to him on every frequency. Some of them felt wrong, too dim and full of noise, not quite in tune with the others. Distantly, he felt his face hit the tiled floor, felt himself thrash. Unimportant. He had to wipe out the noise, tune himself to this-
Gates opened in his comm suite, firewalls extinguished as he let the signal in.
The music built in his head, the roar of Aurknan vanishing into the notes. His head arched back as he stared at nothing, optics filling the room with blue-white light. His mouth worked, lyrics elevated to a three-word phrase echoed and re-echoed.
Receive and transmit.
There was nothing outside of the music. Not Soundwave, not Tracks, not Cybertron. Not Blaster.
Only the music.
# # #
Blaster came back to himself later, coolers whirling like small helicopters, coolant running through his lines like ice. He lay facedown on the floor, and for a long time, he only wondered why it was so quiet. But it was nice to just lie there, and as soon as his systems stopped trying to turn him into an icicle, he was going to drop into recharge...
- Soundwave!
He barely had the energy to lift his head. He wanted to thrash, to get up and give chase, finally catch the bastard-!
He couldn't. He was so close, and he couldn't.
He couldn't even figure out why Soundwave had done this.
The last dregs of energy in his systems sent him tumbling into recharge.
# # #
The signal never came again.
End