Author: Post-Dark of the Moon, pre-Age of Extinction. Spoilers for the first three movies. Lore and setting talk. One shot that may get sequels.
Aftershock
He came online with a start.
He would have come online with guns blazing, even if it wasn't his style, but slipping into stasis lock in the middle of a firefight was a good way to put even Ratchet on edge. There was just one little problem. His pulse rifle had been removed. Come to think of it, several functions had been deactivated.
He began to take in his surroundings. An unfamiliar ceiling. A metal slab and the clamps binding him to it. A Cyclopean figure looming at his periphery.
It was then that he realized the gravity of his situation.
It was bad enough their rescue operation had stumbled into an ambush, as much as they had been expecting one. Now he found himself in Decepticon clutches, with the brains behind some of Megatron's deadliest superweapons standing over him with that dull, empty stare dragging itself out of that featureless faceplate.
"Shockwave."
"Ratchet."
Ratchet didn't know what to expect.
Shockwave, perhaps the most brilliant mind of Cybertron, had sided with Lord High Protector Megatron in his declaration of war against Optimus, not yet Prime. It was unusual to say the least. Most of the military models had followed their commander into the Decepticon fold, and most of the civilian models took on the Autobot emblem. There were exceptions, of course. In fact, it was these exceptions that had the most success. Ironhide, Ultra Magnus, Prowl and Bumblebee on the one hand. Starscream, Shockwave and the Constructicons on the other (although Starscream had transferred from the science division to the armed forces well before the war).
But Shockwave's loyalties had only ever been a matter of convenience. When the Decepticon armies approached the industrial city of Kaon, then-Senator Shockwave had rallied the disenfranchised labor models against the city's ruling elite, delivering unto Megatron a factory-fortress that would prove invaluable to the war effort.
It could have happened virtually any other way. He could have escaped the city. He could have joined the Autobots. He could have undermined the working class to stop their revolution before it started rather than leading them to it.
But Shockwave did none of these things. He presented Megatron what would eventually become key to the Decepticon war machine and asked for the guarantee that he remain free to conduct his research unmolested.
For Megatron to deny the terms would be to risk Shockwave sabotaging the city's industrial plants and turning the horde against the Decepticon army at the gates. And so Shockwave got everything he ever wanted - a palatial laboratory perched upon the Tagan Heights, a steady supply of Autobot POWs as test subjects and the freedom to study the fabled Golden Age of Cybertron to resurrect the lost gestalt technology that had made the likes of Devastator possible.
Every loss, gamble and betrayal was acceptable in the pursuit of Cybertron's ancient knowledge.
Ratchet was morbidly curious as to what plans the one-eyed schemer had in mind for him.
"I still function," Ratchet said. "To what do I owe that singular pleasure?"
Shockwave took him in with his inscrutable eye. Ratchet thought to ask again when he spoke.
"There are too few mechs of science left to us," Shockwave said without that fickle weakness called emotion. "Our war has cost us our planet and our way of life. If we are to find our way back to things as they were and in fact should be, we need no longer fight amongst ourselves. I have need of your assistance and those who have come with you."
If Ratchet breathed as the humans did, he might have huffed.
"This is your idea of extending the olive branch? Ambushing my team, taking us captive and dictating terms in the middle of your operating room?" He paused, considering, and then it struck him how foolish he had been. "How I do know the others are even still alive?"
"These are not terms of surrender but an offer of civility," Shockwave said, finally taking his penetrating gaze off of his captive/guest to play his servos across a data pad. He presented it for Ratchet to see a screen split between two different containment cells. "As you can see, your associates remain in working order."
Ratchet's shoulders finally loosened. He hadn't even realized he was so rigid until that moment.
The feed was not particularly high quality, but the two figures on the screen were undeniably Mirage and Sideswipe. Mirage paced as much as his cell would allow, while Sideswipe laid perfectly still on a similar slab in what Ratchet assumed was a secondary lab. His optics weren't even open.
"There's something wrong with him," Ratchet said, trying to keep the panic out of his voice even as he ran a mental diagnostic based on what little he could see. "Why isn't Sideswipe moving?"
"We had need to sedate him."
"Why did you have that need?"
"As one of the few remaining twin sparks, his assistance will be invaluable in our research."
Ratchet felt a shadow fall over his spark.
Of course. How could he think of Shockwave without Flatline?
Flatline had been Shockwave's chief assistant once upon a time, the same Flatline who split Arcee's spark in three in a barbaric effort to artificially bolster Decepticon ranks as the war dragged on and Cybertron started to die. The two had already had a falling out by the time Flatline captured Arcee and mutilated her spark to revive her sisters-in-arms, Elita-One and Chromia, as twisted parodies, but Flatline's experiments into spark fission had been the direct result of Shockwave's gestalt research. If his mentor had found a way to combine sparks, why couldn't he find a way to divide them?
"That's what this all comes down to, Shockwave? You want me to step in as your new surgical aide as you operate on Sideswipe, my friend?"
"Your outrage is noted, Ratchet," Shockwave said, speaking his name aloud for the second time as dispassionately as the first. "However, it is unnecessary. I do not intend to make a tripartate out of Sideswipe. I only seek to understand the nature of the twin spark."
"That was a mystery to us even before the war. What makes you think you are any closer to understanding it in the bowels of this station?"
"This is no mere space station. You are aboard the Nemesis-class battleship, Trypticon."
Ratchet smiled ruefully. Between the dozens of Decepticons lying in wait, what was now obviously a falsified distress signal and a Nemesis waiting in the wings, the three of them had been doomed from the start.
"If nothing else, you are clever," Ratchet said. "Tell me, how did you imitate Kup's distress signal? Did you cut his IFF signal out of him?"
"I have had no contact with that Autobot since leaving Cybertron, and even if I had, there was no need for surgery. His schematics were simple enough to emulate."
"He was quite the rust bucket, wasn't he?" Ratchet said with a mirth one would not have expected of a man helpless before a butcher. "But how did you know Sideswipe was on Earth? No, don't tell me. You must have seen him in Chicago. But that just begs more questions, doesn't it? How is it that I can see a Decepticon die on the planet Earth and encounter him again in deep space? Don't tell me. You went ahead and performed the surgery on yourself, didn't you?"
Shockwave took in the wave of words, waiting for Ratchet to stop or slow down. He had seen this before, the captive who resigned himself to his fate and resigned himself to it with scorn or sarcasm. It was a good thing. The sooner Ratchet accepted the full gravity of the situation, the sooner he could be made to understand. Shockwave needed only humor him.
"Your supposition is correct. For all of Flatline's faults, his theory as to the procedure to fabricate a divided spark has merit. Having collected his findings after his termination, I corrected the worst of the flaws in his procedure and split my spark in three, equal pieces. If it makes this scenario simpler for you to understand, the 'Shockwave' you encountered on the planet Earth was indeed my original chassis."
"What a pity. For all that I've heard about you, it's my first time meeting you in person, and it's a clone."
"That is incorrect. When I split my spark, I split it into three, equal pieces, as I have already told you. Each of these bodies is equally deserving of being treated as a genuine expression of my presence." He paused. "However, if it is easier for you to arrive at an understanding, you may call this vessel 'Aftershock.' Or do you believe the Arcee components designated Elita-One and Chromia were somehow lesser beings?"
"How dare you!" Ratchet snapped even as he felt the bindings bite into his wrists and ankles, and he did not care. "You can't even begin to understand what she went through! That 'surgery' was botched! I can't even bring myself to think of it as a proper procedure. The pain, the confusion, the phantom memories, the loss of identity the damage done to her psyche... Imagine what it must have been like to wake up in triplicate, wearing someone else's skin like a suit!"
"Tell me more," said Shockwave, or Aftershock, or whoever the cyclops might have been, even as his servos glided over the data pad. Ratchet saw this, hated it and decided it wasn't worth biting his tongue.
"As if she hadn't gone through enough trauma losing them, she had to stare them in the face every day and feel herself inside them. Then when she finally reaches Earth and is among her own kind again after who-knows-how-many-cycles, she had to put on a brave face and pretend to be something she's not for the benefit of the humans!"
"What did she pretend to be?" Shockwave said, servos a whir.
"She pretended to be one of them!" The words exploded from his mouth with all the force of one of the Ironhide's ion cannons. Ironhide who had died for the Earthlings. Just like Jazz. Just like Arcee. "We had to fight tooth and nail to make them realize we were living, thinking, feeling creatures, and we had to keep reminding them of it every step of the way! Where we saw friends and brothers, they saw weapons platforms with advanced AI. We let them give us names like 'Dino' and 'Q' because they were more comfortable with those names than Mirage and Wheeljack! We let them get away with using the Cube to terminate sparklings! We let them dump Optimus's body on that runway like so much scrap instead of giving him his due because they saw him as nothing more than a pile of scrap!
"And in spite of it all, in spite of all of that, Optimus told us to call them 'the Sisters.' Because it was easier that way. It was easier to make them think we were just like them instead of explaining the way your pet monster bastardized our biology and violated the dead. It would have been too easy for the humans to think of us as interchangeable, something like a tank that didn't have any feelings and could be rebuilt and reprogrammed on a whim. So we let them believe that comforting lie while Arcee went mad trying to maintain the illusion."
The silence that followed was deafening. And then,
"It was for the best that she died in Egypt. All of her."
And in that moment, Ratchet hated himself.
Shockwave began speaking slowly.
"Were we to take the proper steps, such a deception may not be necessary again."
Ratchet turned his face, his stare probing, searching, reaching, begging for an answer.
"I have spent my life in the pursuit of the secrets lost with the end of the Golden Age. Reclaiming the gestalt technology was just one small part of it. If we, as a species, could attain such mastery of the universe once before, we may surely do so again." The scientist leaned in very close, his data pad set aside, his one eye burning like a supernova. "It is vital that we do so as soon as possible."
There was a fierce conviction in that statement that was dreadfully out of place in a logician like Shockwave and his permutation. Ratchet had read the intelligence reports concerning Megatron's pet mad scientist, who loved only cold, hard logic and hated waste and emotion, as paradoxical as it might have been. For someone like that to speak with such fervor…
Cybertronian life had been dying out for millennia. It was common knowledge. So why this urgency?
"Why now?"
"Tell me, doctor," Shockwave stood up and back, putting a professional distance between them again. "What do you know of the Quintessons?"
Ratchet blinked. He had just bared his spark and had seen Shockwave show some sliver of emotion for what could have been the first time in centuries. What did the Quintessons have to do with anything?
Yes, he had read the data files as a young mech and visited the museum in Iacon dedicated to the Great Revolution against the Quintesson occupation. He knew the history of their invasion, which ended the Golden Age and forced Cybertron into a period of stagnation and slavery before the great Prima rose up against them and became a martyr to the cause. Then Nova Prime took up the torch and carried his people to ultimate victory and liberation. He even had some murky recollection of a Quintesson Pan Galactic Co-Prosperity Sphere somewhere in the far reaches of space.
But Ratchet had never met a Quintesson in his life. If not for the romanticized monuments to Cybertronian culture heroes, he might never have heard of the Quintessons at all. The data files of his youth had assured him with no small amount of spite and sarcasm (more than he would expect from a scholarly work) that if you were to hear a Quintesson tell the tale, the Holy Quintesson Empire had been the guiding light of the universe, boldly venturing out into the void to discover and conquer other, less evolved species to teach those poor barbarians the path to enlightenment. The Quintesson's burden, it was called. That the Quintessons empire had fallen apart and lived on as only a shadow of its former self was the greatest tragedy civilization had ever suffered, the Quintesson account went.
But that was the Cybertronian account of the Quintesson account. What did Ratchet really know about the Quintessons?
"Almost nothing," Ratchet admitted. "I know what I've been taught, and I know that history is written by the winners. If you want me to parrot back what I've been told, then the Quintessons are a race of five-faced conquistadores who bombed us back into the Tin Age generations ago and adopted a scorched earth policy during their retreat. They're the reason we have only scraps and legends left of the Golden Age, if you believe in there ever was a Golden Age at all."
"You do not believe?" Aftershock asked, head tilted in a childishly inquisitive way.
"I believe… I believe there are things I don't have a way of explaining right now. I believe the Matrix of Leadership did something I've never seen done before and that if the Dynasty of Primes really did speak to that human child, it's a miracle or a sufficiently advanced science." He lapsed into a silence and felt the eye burning into him more intensely than ever. "I believe that so much of our history has been lost to war that it's impossible to pick apart the facts and the fairy tales. All I can do now is try to do the most good with the information I've been given."
The Shockwave-that-was-Aftershock took this all in with another lengthy silence, and then he moved.
Ratchet flinched away as best he could and wished that if he were to die, he could have at least died fighting. Then Aftershock began releasing the restraints on his legs, and Ratchet didn't know what to think.
"You are precisely the mech I had in mind," Aftershock said, as if that was an explanation. "I do not need a zealot, but a realist who knows his strengths and weaknesses." He released the clamps around Ratchet's arms. "More importantly, I need a mech who possesses the capacity for emotion that I lack."
Aftershock moved away, and Ratchet did not move immediately. He knew that his room was likely being monitored by a number of Decepticons ready to shoot through the door if he moved against their commander, who must have been carrying a weapon on his person as well. No, he sat up very slowly and swung his legs over the table without standing.
"We have been talking for some time now, Shock, I mean, Aftershock, but I still don't know what it is you want me to do."
Aftershock didn't even bother to look him in the optics, his hands and attention devoted to the data pad.
"There is a war coming, Ratchet. It will be both like and unlike the war we have waged for so long. It will be a war smaller yet infinitely crueler. The Quintessons have not forgotten their eons-old grudge against our kind who dealt the first blow to their lost imperium, and they will not pass up this opportunity to make slaves of us again."
Had the words come from anyone else, Ratchet might have brushed them off as jingoistic paranoia. But there was that ramrod certainty, that unflinching conviction again.
"What do you base this on?"
"Unlike so many of our kind, I have not forgotten the Quintessons and the very real threat they pose. It was they who saw the golden Cybertron and they who hold the answers to its resurrection." Aftershock seemed to be done, but then he looked up and noticed what must have been incredulity on Ratchet's face. "They are imperialists. It is in their nature to take the best of what their vassal states have to offer. In my capacity as a Senator before the war, before even Megatron achieved his rank of Lord High Protector, I possess a degree of clearance that would surprise you. I am aware of movements within the Quintesson sector. I still possess the codes for the last few surveillance satellites of ours spread throughout the region. I know full well that they have learned to bide their time and sharpen their swords. I know that the Quintessons long for the return of the Five-Sided Empire, and they will begin with us."
It was in this moment of madness, as an Autobot aboard a Decepticon destroyer, having just had a frank discussion with a sworn enemy and hearing that an ancestral enemy of his tattered race may go on the war path again all too soon, that Ratchet decided to entertain a little bit of insanity.
"How can I help?"