Peace Through Tyranny

by gruff

Fanfic prequel to canon fiction The Magnificent Six by Simon Furman. A Decepticon assassin is sent to Stanix to kill Megadeath. Very loose parody of Apocalypse Now, but with original plot and new content

Peace Through Tyranny by gruff

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CHAPTER 1 The Walk

The Walk from the Front Line was never an easy one. It was usually reserved for those incapable of going the distance, or without the desire to keep going. Some were captured. Some were killed. Others prayed to Primus they would become deactivated in the chilling nights that were plagued by the tormenting sounds of those who's prayers were being answered, those who would no longer be burdened with the pain of The Walk, those who had longed to be at One with the Matrix. All around lay the silent, peaceful empty cages that once housed the Sparks of fallen soldiers, comrades and one-time enemies. On The Walk there were no enemies, just opportunities. If Primus were being merciful, such Angels would provide that final pain to end all Pains.

Hope is a dangerous instinct. Amidst the Pains of the Walk, to hope for the end, any end, could bring one of two consequences. Primus might deliver and send an Angel, be it the welcoming insignia of an enemy cluster bomb charged with delivering your final pain, or the equally well-received insignia of an ally there to take your strains and end your Pains. But the other, and more usual consequence, was nothing. And then the Walk is encumbered with all the additional weight that hopeful of emptiness had brought. Tonight there were no Angels.

The Pains of the Battlefield were no less real for me. Knees twisted, oozing oil like a saturated sponge. Cracking, splintering and echoing the pains from my previous step and every step before. Snap. Another joint failure. Another pain. Another trophy to add to the massing battle scars that threatened to engulf my entire body. Unable to transform, I was deep in remains of enemy territory; territory that once belonged to the Autobots, that once belonged to the Decepticons, but now belonged to the dead. Out here there was no-one to see you, no-one to help you and no-one to kill you. All you could do was drag your living corpse towards your command post, and throw yourself upon their mercy and skills, whereupon the Walk was over. And for the time being your war was over. The Pain would remain for some time, until it was quashed long enough for the cycle of life on the Front Line to begin anew.

I had been providing artillery cover for the Seekers above the shattered city of Ricon, their job to hit one of the landmarks within this dead territory. This was the token attack the High Commanders needed to declare publicly that they had 'regained control' of this region, only for the enemy to do the same the next day. This was a mission I had undertaken one thousand times before. There would not be any Autobots here. They had long since retreated; their turn was tomorrow. However, my regiment and I rolled forward to shell the bunkers anyway as planned. Perhaps I was to play Angel to a stricken enemy? Chance had another agenda. This time the retreated Autobots were not retreated. They were there and they opened fire. A plan of such Military precision was rare in this wilderness of disorientation and misinformation. My regiment was suffering badly and we were forced back, their persistent firing herding us exactly where they wanted us; in our haste we broke formation and took cover, cover that had been planted, cover that offered no sanctuary.

In my robot form, shifting under the apparently random debris that littered the arena the mines were triggered. They were distributed to cause maximum damage and the impact nearly ripped my legs from my torso; others were less fortunate. Aside from the clouds of metallic dust and remnants of soldiers raining down, the sky was empty. The Autobot ambush had worked and the Seekers left. They had no desire to be caught, downed by an Autobot surface-to-air missile that we were no longer able to intercept. They had no desire to make the Walk.

The blitz continued for several hours until the retreats were made by both forces leaving the territory to the dead once more. It was now that my Walk started. Isolated in a desert of death, I tried not to hope for an end, I merely concentrated on my Walk. This baron region of the dead territory offered small glimmers of hope from time to time. Hope that I had not asked for was handed to me in the form of abandoned temporary fuelling stations, and dying Empties whose energon I could pirate to prolong my Pains and fuel my Walk.

My Walk was over. Primus had sent no Angels, no-one to end it for me, for which I was finally grateful. I had reached the furthest most Decepticon command zone, a region that dared to hold its own in an otherwise dead territory. An almost deserted post that provided temporary homes for a limited number of soldiers. I opened the door and with my final steps collapsed into the barracks. Around me lay other crippled comrades who had lived their Walk and survived. They were now receiving their rewards, the treatment of their injuries and the end of their Pains. Now it was my turn; my Walk was over.

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CHAPTER 2 The Brief

IT was two months and a transfer to a more permanent Military Hospital later when they arrived. They had authority, certainly, but not over Straxus, Megatron, Shockwave, Scorponok, or any of the other big hitters in charge of the Decepticon campaign. Crucially, not over Megadeath either. They were Skywarp, Razorclaw and Snapdragon. Skywarp was one of Megatron's most trusted aides, holding a joint second-in-command position over the tyrant's troops. Razorclaw was in a similar position under Shockwave's command and Snapdragon was a ranking advisor to Scorponok. Straxus answered to nobody and everybody answered to Straxus. Megadeath, it appeared, was answering to nobody.

They plucked me from my quarters and took me to a distant, run-down, former holding room to brief me. It was to the point. No small-talk, no speculation, just the facts as their intelligence had provided. Megadeath was hoarding troops. He had apparently developed a passion and ability to convert troops from all manner of commands, factions and allegiances into his own. His region of Stanix was running dangerously close to being dangerously run. He ranked as equal to Megatron and others, and was to answer to Straxus, but over the years he had become reckless, rebellious and almost renegade. Quite where he was seemed to be a mystery, quite what his goals were, was debatable, quite what his mental state was, was unknown.

It was clear that Skywarp felt threatened for Megatron by Megadeath. Razorclaw and Snapdragon went further and felt threatened for Straxus. A coup, a revolution, an uprising, call it was you like, was not being looked upon favourably by the High Command, yet the evidence was pointing in this direction. It appeared thousands of troops had become amalgamated into his command, for they had met with Megadeath, never to return to Megatron, Shockwave or Scorponok. "Or Optimus Prime." said Ultra Magnus, stepping from the shadows and making his presence known. I looked up. It was him. He was here. So were Skywarp, Razorclaw and Snapdragon. I looked up again. It was Ultra Magnus alright. I made a move to stand up, but Snapdragon placed a hand on my shoulder preventing me. I made no sound; I did not need to. They already knew the questions I was burning to get answered.

The Autobots, it seemed, though losing the war felt confident a victory over the Decepticons was possible. The Decepticons, it was clear, felt victory over the Autobots was inevitable. However, both the Autobots and Decepticons had no contingency plans for a third party split. A rival faction formed by Megadeath and all who had converted to his way of thinking was of no benefit to either side. "This war is between the Autobots and the Decepticons. There is no room for a common foe like Megadeath." explained Razorclaw.

"However, Straxus, it seems, has yet to fully comprehend the consequences a Megadeath uprising might bring." explained Skywarp. "And Megatron dismisses Megadeath as an idle threat." he shook his head. "But we believe otherwise."

And the Autobots? "Optimus Prime believes it is the right of all Transformers to choose their beliefs, their ideals and their allegiance." explained Ultra Magnus. "Optimus Prime believes if an Autobot chooses to defect, he has the right to do so and without any Autobot repercussions."

"Optimus Prime is a fool." continued Razorclaw, Ultra Magnus making no reaction to the frank reference to his commander. "Shockwave is a fool. Straxus is a fool." He sat down and faced me. He could see in my eyes that I wanted to know how real Megadeath's threat could be. "The rate he is absorbing troops is significant." It was typically blunt from Razorclaw.

"But why? Why Megadeath? Why would Autobots and Decepticons join him? What can he offer?" I asked.

"Victory." he answered. "Hope and sanctuary. All the things we cannot." I waited for a more extensive explanation. "For thousands of years both Autobots," he paused, visibly disgusted at the very word, "and the Decepticons have been at war." I already knew that. "Yet how much progress have we made?" He continued, casting an ugly glance in Ultra Magnus's direction. "Victory over the Autobots is inevitable, but will take time. At this rate it could take millions of years of near-stalemate before we can win."

"He is right. It will take millions of years," echoed Ultra Magnus, "but victory will be in the form of peace. It will be when both sides down their weapons and admit that war is both unnecessary and futile."

"But either way," growled Razorclaw, "it is going to take time!" A clenched fist beat the table. Hard. "If Megadeath continues to persuade troops to defect to his faction at his present rate, half of Cybertron will be against us within a thousand years!" Skywarp shook his head somewhat. The fury in Razorclaw had momentarily gotten the better of him. He was exaggerating, but he went on to say that he must be stopped before this happens, whether or not the Autobots were on board.

Skywarp disagreed, and admitted reluctantly that the Autobots were potential allies against Megadeath. "Our intelligence suggests his propaganda is very persuasive, so who knows how many troops he has converted already?"

Razorclaw ignored Skywarp's unanswerable question and explained that quite some time ago Thunderwing, one of Shockwave's elite Special Operations soldiers, had been following Megadeath, making crucial observations and making regular reports back. His intelligence was proving to be both reliable and informative. However, his reporting then became both haphazard and inaccurate. "He gave us some estimates of numbers. Those in the dead region between Taggon and Stanix seemed particularly low. We believe they have already been uprooted and joined Megadeath in Scyk." What about Thunderwing? "He was captured and forced to turn on Shockwave, to sell him misleading information." Forced? "Thunderwing was loyal. He would have never defected to Megadeath." Was? "We have received no further word from him in over a year. We believe he failed to cooperate and was executed."

I looked up at Ultra Magnus, wanting to know the Autobots' stance on the situation. "I for one believe in Thunderwing's findings. I also believe the Decepticons are taking this threat seriously," he looked over at the three lieutenants, "if they are to ask for Autobot assistance." He paused. "Now if this intelligence is genuine, which we believe it is, what is Megadeath's big Plan with all his troops? And when will he be ready to put it into action?"

"Within one year." suggested Snapdragon. "Within one thousand years." he contradicted himself, clearly not too impressed by speculative estimations. "We simply don't know. Let's stick to the facts. What we do know is that we need to mount an assault, a big, cross-faction assault, a no-going-back assault that obliterates Megadeath and all his followers. We need to erase him and whatever it was that convinced our troops to defect. But for that, we need planning and for that we need the intelligence." All three nodded in agreement.

I could see where this was headed. "You want me to go there and find out what Megadeath is up to?" Razorclaw nodded. He added that I would be to continue where Thunderwing left off before he became another MIA statistic.

"We also need to confirm the shear weight of numbers Megadeath has on his side. We can estimate the number of Decepticon, and Autobot, defectors." he explained with a nod towards Ultra Magnus. "But we have no knowledge of Neutralists who have joined the faction, and it is upon them that we need intelligence."

"Remember, it is the Neutralists who are most likely to have agreed to the third party in this war." added Skywarp. "We need to know their combat status and readiness to fight. We need to know what positions they hold, how they train and who plans their defences."

"But most off all we need proof of Megadeath's plans. We need to know the ▒how▓s, why▓s and when▓s▓ his plans will take place." explained Ultra Magnus. "With that we will know what we are up against and how long we have to do something about it before it is too late." Surely that was a job for a spy, not a soldier? "Neither Optimus Prime nor Straxus seem to think it valuable to commit such resources. But with reliable intelligence, we might be able to persuade them of the threat Megadeath poses."

I was beginning to wonder why they had chosen me. I was a currently a regular soldier on the front line. I had experience of 'other' more 'special' operations before, but that was a long time ago, and was not in the field of intelligence gathering. "And if the opportunity arises," finished Snapdragon, "kill him." Bingo. I had been an assassin for many years during my time under Megatron's command many thousands of years ago, but it was not something I had practiced since my transfer to Scorponok's command.

"Why me? Why not any 'regular' assassin?" I asked.

"You're expendable." answered Razorclaw. Again, blunt but honest. I liked that. "We cannot use anyone that will be noticed by Shockwave, Megatron or Scorponok. And mercenaries cannot be trusted for such an important operation."

"And there are no Autobots that could be relied upon to be so...ruthless." added Ultra Magnus, careful of his words.

And if I should fail? "Plausible deniability." explained Snapdragon. "We cannot risk Megadeath learning the intelligence we have on him. We also cannot risk Straxus or anyone else knowing about this mission because he is so blind to the threat Megadeath poses and would have us executed for defying him. Primus only knows why, but he still thinks Megadeath is still sane. We can only deny all knowledge and leave you to make your own way out." That would mean another Walk. My most recent brush with death had resulted in the most painful Walk of my life. How would I fair against a brush with Megadeath? But I was an assassin. I had masqueraded as a soldier for too long on the Front Line. So yes, for a chance to return to the life I once knew, and the potential burden of a Walk that accompanied it, it was worth it. I accepted.

And with that the meeting was over. Ultra Magnus left as did Skywarp and Razorclaw who needed to return to their respective regions of Cybertron perhaps hundreds of thousands of miles away. I was left with Snapdragon, who as one of Scorponok's advisors, was based in this area and remained one of my commanding officers. It was he who was left to fill me in on the remaining details. And what of the Autobots and their involvement? "When you fly to the Stanix region, you will see that while close to Megadeath's control zone, there is still major combat taking place, mainly between Megatron's troops and that of Ultra Magnus. Magnus and Skywarp will see to it that you will not be harmed while making your way into the Megadeath-controlled zone at Taggon, and you will be able to use the ongoing battles in that area as cover and slip into his region without being noticed." Snapdragon's tone became even graver.

"Once Megadeath falls, our troops will be pleading to return." explained Snapdragon. "I've seen it before, and I will no doubt see it again. Perhaps this is why Straxus is ignoring him. Either way with Megadeath out of the frame, we will have no need to be in cahoots with those wretched Autobots again." he paused and leant further forward. "Be under no illusion." he continued, his voice somehow finding a lower octave, "your mission is to kill Megadeath." I nodded. "Forget the intelligence. Forget Skywarp. Forget Razorclaw. I only needed Razorclaw to get Skywarp onboard, and him to get the Autobots on our side to get you through to Stanix safely." He stood up tall and menacing. "Your mission is to kill Megadeath." he repeated. "Come back with his head or I'll have yours. You understand?" Yes. "Remember," he finished, a thumb pointing at his chest "you answer to me. You leave immediately."

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CHAPTER 3 The Autobot

It was not long into the war on Cybertron when I was transferred to Scorponok's command. Immediately I knew it was not for me; I was an assassin. I had been looking for a way out of the battlefields of the Front Line ever since. Finally, after over one hundred thousand years I had been offered a proper mission again, but when I arrived at the rendezvous point in Taggon, around six thousand miles south of Tarn, it was as if I had never left my own battlefield in Ricon. The same faceless corpses lay rusting in piles in all directions. Bodies of both factions dumped unceremoniously on the wayside. There was, apparently, the of city Taggon itself somewhere beneath the fallen soldiers, but with the ferocity of the fighting in this region for thousands of years and all the associated destruction it was hard to believe. It was true that the Autobots were advancing and making progress in Taggon, but by the time they might capture the city, it would be buried under solid block of bodies, a mile thick.

There was Blitzwing, one of my contacts. I understood he was the representative of Megatron's troops who had been ordered by Skywarp to escort me through the battlefield to the relative safety of the border zone of Megadeath's region. The other representative had not yet arrived. "So you know what this is all about?" he asked.

"That's classified." I replied. "All you need to know is how to get me from here, to there," I explained, pointing a long way into the distance, "without me needing a trip to the infirmary." My second contact arrived and Blitzwing's natural instinct was to leap up and point his weapon. The brave, others might say foolish, Autobot stood. He was quaking, visibly shaking. He was in Decepticon territory, here to meet a Decepticon, here to tell a Decepticon enough of the Autobots' battle plans to allow him passage across the battlefield. He was clearly one of Ultra Magnus's troops, but not nearly as sturdy as his commander who had looked at ease at being in consultation with three of the most feared Decepticons on Cybertron.

"Ultra Magnus sent me to deliver this to you." he answered. I did not know his name, nor did I ask for it. Instead I took the data cube from the Autobot's hand and listened to the instructions. All was silent, save for the perpetual battle-induced carnage all around us. "You know what this is about?" he asked nervously.

"Yeah!" insisted Blitzwing. "This is the third time we've had to do this. There is only so much sneaking I can do for Skywarp. If Megatron ever found out..."

"Third time?" I interrupted.

"And every time my orders are not to harm the Autobot." he growled, casting an ugly look at the Autobot.

He took a nervous step back. Clearly the Autobot-Decepticon relations on the Megadeath situation were delicate. If they were supposed to be co-operating on granting me safe passage through this war zone so that I could do my job for both factions, then clearly killing the Autobot messenger would not be viewed favourably by Ultra Magnus. If I were to fail and another assassin needed passage beyond the Taggon battlefield, then Ultra Magnus would think twice before committing one of his troops to helping my replacement.

I had no intention of failing.

I quickly produced my own weapon and aimed at the prone Autobot. Though about to return to my roots as an assassin, for the next few hours at least I was still a Decepticon soldier after all. Decepticon soldiers don't let Autobot soldiers live. It just didn't work like that. Failure was not an option for me. Assassinate Megadeath or die trying or be executed by Snapdragon for my failures. May as well make the most of it on the way. And if it made the Autobot-Decepticon relations on this matter worse then so be it; it did not matter to me because if they were of any consequence I would not be around to see it.

My weapon blew the Autobot's head clean off. "Get rid of the body." I ordered. "Throw it into the battlefield, it will appear he got caught in the crossfire." Blitzwing nodded, muttering something about Skywarp and him going to be angry. "As far as you know, we retrieved the information and let the Autobot go, just as you did the previous two times. Got that?"

He nodded again and taking data regarding both the Autobots' and the Decepticons' short-term battle plans and movements into consideration, I began to map a relatively safe route across Taggon. It would have been easy to think all I needed to do was transform into my jet mode and fly above the smouldering graveyard. It would have been easy to think all I needed to do was transform into my tank mode and bulldoze my through it too. But in my experience, that of Snapdragon and Ultra Magnus too, I needed to pick my way through to avoid mines and anti-aircraft guns as well as any Autobot regiments that patrolled the area.

Ultra Magnus had ensured that a squadron of heavy artilleries had been redirected. Skywarp had ensured that the opposing Decepticons would be moved to 'counter' this. I felt my best job would be to hook up with them as they moved around the outer flanks towards the border zone. I could then acquire a few ground troopers to help me on my way, to be my extra eyes and ears and to protect me from any of Megadeath's zealots.

With the corpse of the Autobot disposed of, Blitzwing returned. "Move out." I ordered, and transformed into my tank mode. Like Blitzwing I was a Mark 2 TCU, a triple changer with tank and aircraft modes. Unlike Blitzwing, I felt more comfortable and more stable in my tank mode, hence had long been in a ground regiment. I knew all too well from experience that flight posed more risks. You were more likely to be hit by a missile from an automated ground-to-air turret than to drive over a mine. But Blitzwing was brash and foolhardy. He preferred his aircraft mode in which he could grandstand more spectacularly. That was his mentality. That was why we two similar machines were of such a contrasting rank.

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CHAPTER 4 The Front Line

WE had marked a route along our mental maps through the Taggon ruins avoiding areas we suspected as having been mined by the Autobots, taking us around the outskirts of the dead territory and back into Decepticon held terrain. The road was tough, non-existent in places, but in our cumbersome yet well-equipped forms, we were able to bulldoze, albeit carefully, our way through whatever obstacles the war had thrown in our midst.

The journey was quiet. After thousands of years on the Front Line, noise had taken on nature and won. A new soldier thrust into hell itself experiences at first hand the noise. The noise is deafening and it is painful and it is always there. Even setting your audio levels down low, the persistent heavy bass of explosive thuds and shrieking whistles that cursed the air came across as if they were raging their own private war within your head alone. When you hear the sound, it is probably too late to do anything about it. All you can do is react and pray to Primus that you are nowhere near it. Unless you are on your Walk, of course.

As experience came, after you had survived a dozen or so Walks, the battle between noise and nature intensified. Noise began to defy nature. How did the slight tinkling of a loose grenade rolling down the elevated expressway boom louder than its impending detonation? Quite simply it had to. It had to be loud enough for you to hear it and to do something about it, else you would find yourself on its receiving end. The call of a comrade, weak and feeble though it was against a backdrop of ballistic screams, would become clearer and more distinctive than any of the missiles forming craters around you. The quieter the noise, the more unexpected the noise, the louder it felt. Some called an example of subliminal feedback using negative amplification logic gates. I called it experience.

I stumbled across a lowly Decepticon grunt that was charged with munitions distribution. It was not a nice job to have, and not someone I would normally want to get too close to. If identified, you would find yourself a prime target of the enemy for a number of reasons. Your first direct hit you take while carrying ten tons of explosives tends to be your last, and you would usually take a few comrades down with you. Furthermore, the enemy taking out your munitions distributor caused maximum damage with minimum use of their own arms, as well as denying you the opportunity to use your weapons on them. Not to mention the widespread panic and confusion fifty of your own fireworks going off in your camp might cause.

I kept a token 'safe' distance away, although in reality I would have still been blown sky high if he had been hit. "Where's Snarler?" I shouted above the unnaturally quiet din of the battle. He failed to hear me. Not only did he have one of the worst jobs on the battlefield, but he was still unable to make out my voice over the infernal screams bellowing around us; clearly a rookie. "Where's Snarler?" I repeated. He looked up, first to his left, then turning his head clockwise until we made eye contact. "Where's Snarler?"

"Who?" Primus!

"Snarler! The CO?" I explained.

"Oh, him." 'Him' - did they not teach soldiers to respect their superiors these days? Maybe this was why he was on munitions duty. "He's dead." he replied, quite matter-of-fact, before pausing then continuing to pile up missiles.

"No he ain't!" Objected another Decepticon, transformed as an artillery, which I had previously supposed was a drone, and not a Transformer. "They took him down to Infirm'ry Seven, you moron. Took a shot to the leg." The first Decepticon looked up for a moment as if he had something important to say. Then as if remembering that this could not possibly be the case, he shrugged and continued his work.

"And where is Infirmary Seven?" I asked, a missile flying overhead and exploding uncomfortably close-by, causing the Decepticon to drop his crate of missiles so that they bounced and rolled, precariously close to going off. I took another couple of token steps back; Blitzwing was nowhere to be seen. The munitions distributor picked up one of the missiles, apparently thinking it would be easier to direct me while his hands were full.

"Over there." He pointed with both his laden arms in coordinated misdirection. I shook my head in despair. The artillery fired another heavy payload before transforming.

"It's that way!" he bellowed over the whistles of shrapnel that were scything their paths through the sky, pointing in some direction or another. "About thirteen clicks." he estimated. "But I reckon he'll have been taken away before you reach him." Great. Who else is in charge around here? He thought for a moment, ducked as a lump of debris hurtled towards him, stood up again and thought some more. "It could be Onslaught, but I've not seen him for weeks. If he ain't around it's probably Hun-Grr,"

What a rabble. They did not even know what they were doing here. "Who is directly in charge of you?" I asked. The first Decepticon dropped a missile again. "For Primus' sake! Leave them while I talk to you!" He shrugged with a 'what was the question?' look about his face.

"I don't know." confessed the artillery. What? Who gave you your current orders? "That was Stalwart, but he's dead now." 'Dead'-dead or 'in Infirmary Seven'-dead? "Dead." he answered pointing at a semi-destroyed body just twenty paces to my left. "No-one gave us orders to stop. And while we still have shells to fire, we figured we should keep 'em coming."

"Okay." I paused. "You two come with me." I ordered. "What 'you two called anyway?" It turned out that the artillery was called Pounder and the rookie was Transit, a transportation vehicle. Now all that remained was finding Blitzwing. We transformed and headed out to find Onslaught, Hun-Grr or whoever was in charge of this joke of a Front Line.

We picked a path through the rusting scrap that lay all around us, taking cover from the plague of Autobot jets and missiles that passed overhead from time to time. There was Blitzwing, sitting in his tank mode firing the odd shell at the contrasting Autobot Front Line across the abyss. He told me he had established that Snarler had been put out of action and that Hun-Grr was in charge until Megatron, Skywarp or whoever had the final say, had time to find a replacement. And where was Hun-Grr? "Over there." he replied, turning his turret to point in the direction of the Hun-Grr, the heavy ground trooper. I told Blitzwing to follow me.

As an assassin I was used to working alone, but it was becoming more and more clear that I might need some cannon fodder just to get me across Taggon. I was already aware that Ultra Magnus had been true to his word. Strongly contested battles had rewarded them with a small advance in territory at the cost of a numerous Autobot casualties. However, as a 'tactical retreat' he had ordered his troops to fall back allowing a free Decepticon advance, and more specifically to allow me passage into Megadeath's Stanix region. I did not know whether to think of him as honourable or as a fool.

I explained to Hun-Grr that I needed troops to accompany me on a mission. He almost laughed at me. "What? You expect me," he stressed, with a thumb pointed at his chest, "to give you troops," he continued, reversing his point, "to take them on a mission you won't tell me about, when you aren't even under Megatron's command?" When he put it that way it sounded pretty far-fetched, but nevertheless I had what turned out be a diplomatic card with me in the form of a data cube from Skywarp extending his authority in the battlefield to me. Hun-Grr could scarcely believe it. He was outgunned and undermanned, losing ground to the supposedly weaker Autobots every day, yet Skywarp wanted to take troops away from him. He shook his head again. I explained that it was not all bad news. In return I had some intelligence for him to exploit. "Look," he bargained, "take Rawhide, Grimace," he paused looking around him for inspiration, "yeah, Runamuck," he continued to point, placing distant faces to names, "and Rupture." I looked at my two new companions. "Yeah, them too." he added.

"I want Blitzwing too." I added. The more cannon fodder the better.

Hun-Grr frowned. "I thought Blitzwing was dead?" he mused.

"In that case you won't miss him." I reasoned. "Come on, move out!" I called to my troops. I gathered the rest of my team together and pointed out the tank regiment we were about to join up with. The plan was to attach ourselves to the back of a hundred-strong Decepticon advance retaking the ground Ultra Magnus had sacrificed. There was a collapsed overpass about twenty miles along where we would leave them and begin our walk into the dead territory between Taggon and Stanix. I explained as much to Hun-Grr.

"What? You're taking my troops into Stanix? Why?" he puzzled. That was classified, besides they were my troops now. However, what I could tell him was that the Autobots could be guaranteed to be retreated giving the Decepticons free territory. "But why? How do you know this?" Intelligence. Hun-Grr was not buying it. He thought it was a conspiracy for him to lead all his troops in to a trap. I consulted Skywarp's data cube again. Hun-Grr shook his head. To heck with it. He'd lost so many soldiers already, what difference would another hundred make? And if the intelligence proved reliable, he would have captured Autobot territory without lifting a finger. "Get ready to move out." He ordered.

--

CHAPTER 5 The Sky Riser

The one hundred or so ground troops lined up in convoy, four or five abreast, their respective immediate superiors dotted alongside. Hun-Grr stood affront, calling his robots to attention. He made a speech. Nothing fancy, just the facts. Actually. it was more of a brief than a speech. Finished, he stepped aside, transformed into his vehicle form and the platoon rattled off. Amid the silent howl of missiles and explosions around us, the familiar noises of a tank regiment rolling forward returned to me. The individual creaks, squeaks and squeals merged into a continuous wane, like the banshee warning the Autobots of impending danger.

The banshee was wrong. There was no danger. The Autobots had withdrawn, pulled back, "chickened out" as Hun-Grr put it upon getting the news confirmed. Sure. Chickened out. If that's how he wanted to think of it then what did I care? To give them credit, the Autobots were not without courage. If they were half the cowards some of the troops I had worked with were, the Decepticons would have conquered Cybertron thousands of years ago. No, the Autobots were no cowards. Ultra Magnus, especially, was no coward. If he was willing to fall back it was because he felt my mission a top priority, not because he was weak. Honourable, certainly; foolish maybe, cowardly never. But if I could reach the one-time Sky Riser Hyperpass unhindered, I would never have to think about the Autobots in such a positive light again.

The Sky Riser was once one the busiest overpasses in this region of Cybertron. It formed the express ground link between Taggon, through Yuss and into the Stanix region, where the scientists once innovated that which put Cybertron on the industrial map, that which made traders sit up and notice. Cybertron had been going places; technologically enriched far beyond that which one might expect for a planet of its age. Stanix was once the second-largest breeding ground for this technology. If you couldn't get into the Iacon Institute of Higher Technology, then you came here to Stanix. Working in Stanix used to have some serious street-cred.

But as the years passed Stanix became tainted. More and more civil research became funded by the various Militaries and private security forces. Inventions were no longer novel, they were practical. Designs were no longer traded, they were kept secret. The scientists were no longer clerics, they were soldiers. Hidden behind a cloak of labrats, they would strive for the most perfect of weapons. It was they who invented the weaponry to bypass the complex shields that their counter-scientists had designed. All the while these modifications were being fitted to assault vehicles to do their bidding. These scientists were the real killers in war. As the Militaries began to merge and the prospect of a global war became ever more likely, it was no surprise that the majority of the Autobot scientists left the region and the Decepticons annexed Stanix.

That was then. Over the past hundred thousand years or so, Megadeath had been in charge of Stanix. No-one really knew what was going on there, but I did not think that was an issue because no-one really knew what was going on anywhere. Stanix meant research, probably military. That was as much as I knew. But with the exodus of scientists from the region, either joining the Autobots, or sulking away into Neutralist obscurity, little had come from this once-active brain of Cybertron for many years. The Autobots, it seemed, had decided that if the Decepticons were no longer going to use its great resources, then they would. They had succeeded in half-circling Stanix, the rest of its borders, bar Taggon, not being in a state to negotiate safely. They made a push for Taggon, the final ground that lay between them and Stanix. They rest, as they say, is history.

Taggon was a ruin. A wreck of a city forming the gateway to Stanix. It was dead after thousands of years of conflict. Yet day after day and night after night, both sides battled for the land. For the moment, Taggon itself was mostly in Decepticon hands, despite the Autobot push. "So why can't we just march over there? Why do we have to go miles out of our way and go in through the Sky Riser?" Rupture had asked. He had a point. The Sky Riser, what was left of it, was completely in the wrong direction. Heading this way meant Ultra Magnus needed his troops to fall back to let us in that way. A huge cost considering we might just stroll over and climb the fence, had we taken Rupture's advice.

I stopped, calling my troops to a halt for a moment. I knew Hun-Grr would not be needing us as backup, even if he was less sure. "Why don't we just cut across here?" I asked pointing directly at Stanix across a five-mile plain of dead war-torn terrain. Rupture transformed and shrugged. Taggon may have been dead, but it had many ghosts. I gave a quick combined lesson in both modern and ancient ground warfare. "Stick to the paths." I told him, picking up a lump of rusted metal and hurled it into the decaying ground in the direction of Stanix.

One hundred thousand years of struggle for the ownership of Taggon came back to life as camouflaged automated pillboxes, missile launchers, anti-aircraft guns and submerged mines pulverised the chunk of debris I had offered it. "Battle plans and historical records of what is out there are either lost or don't go back far enough." I found the corpse of a long-dead robot and threw it another direction into the plain to emphasis my point. "We can't even be sure what we planted out there, or whether they can distinguish Autobots from Decepticons." I explained, watching the wreck erupt under the fire of more sleepy turrets, awoken from a thousand or so years' dormancy. "And only Primus knows what the Autobots planted when they had control of the region." I had made the point and transformed.

The dead regions either side of the path had Death written all over them for a good reason. It had taken both forces years to forge a relatively safe path clear of mines and the archaic, but deadly, drone weapons that littered the area for hundreds of miles in all directions. And for their efforts, all they that had risked death by defusing these hellish traps had produced was a much-contested haven that would be the death of the very troops their path had sought to protect. The air was saturated with the smoky stench of irony, lingering, unable to drift, another blemish on this rotting wilderness.

Hun-Grr had been leading his troops cautiously and we were soon able to catch up. Up ahead, we saw the looming tower that was once a support for the Sky Riser. The Sky Riser itself, importantly, lay scattered to my right, in the direction of Stanix. Just weeks before, this great section of engineering, designed to withstand sabotage, earthquakes and even nuclear explosions, had collapsed after thousands of years of abuse. The fact that this feat of 'indestructibility' had lasted half the time it had was a testament to those that had designed and constructed it. Designed for durability without ever the need for service or maintenance, the Sky Riser had stood typically proud, like the scientists that once used the overpass to travel to Stanix.

But in reality, nothing lasts forever. This section had been supported by two enormous towers, like all of the few remaining sections, and had dropped under the collapse of one of these towers. And buried under the thick, solid highway, lay the crushed booby-traps of yesteryear, now destined to remain harmless, cocooned for all eternity. It was a drawbridge over a moat of death and it was our way into Stanix.

As we scaled the chunks of broken materials that was once the Sky Riser and made our way over the minefield, a particularly close explosion caught our attentions. Some way behind us, a couple of members of Hun-Grr's convoy learnt the hard way that their path, though immeasurably safer than driving through the hidden weapons, was still hazardous. Beyond this collapsed section, lay several miles of a relatively undamaged highway. Access was in the form of a challenging gradient where this section hung reluctantly in the shadows of its elevated neighbour. The young, brash Runamuck was the first of the group to conquer the wall, and emerged victorious at its peak. Despite my repeated warnings and orders for him to stay put, he wandered casually across to the sides of the overpass to peer down in wondrous awe. The fool.

The drone surface-to-air missile launcher revealed itself from under the rubble. Clearly movement at this altitude constituted an aerial enemy threat to this machine's twisted circuitry. A brace of missiles were spat out with venom, threatening to send my ground trooper's limbs flying in all different directions. Staring Death in the face, he somehow dived back behind the crest of the Sky Riser, placing it between himself and the five incoming missiles. They thudded harmlessly into the immense bulk of the overpass, the merest of flakes of metal burning off as a result. This highway was indeed built to last, and the way Runamuck was behaving, it would be standing long after he was not.

I did not need to repeat the warning I made earlier about driving in single-file down the middle of the empty highway. At the front the group I led my platoon over the minefield via the relative safety of the elevated Sky Riser. With Taggon disappearing from our rearward radar and sensors, we approached Yuss, the city that once neighboured Taggon, but like Taggon, was now a wreck of its former self.

Ultra Magnus, Snapdragon and the others were correct. The city was deserted; deserted even for a city that was smashed almost beyond repair. Most Decepticon-occupied cities, though neglected and wasted, would usually be home to a large number of civilian Neutralists who would undertake their business according to whatever measure of 'freedom' the ruling Decepticon commander imposed upon them. As an army, the Decepticons were immense, several times greater than that of their only opposition, the Autobots. As a potential, the Neutralists could have dwarfed even the Decepticons. Of course, had the Neutralists simply taken up weapons and fought, they would have been next to useless. There were no recognised Neutralist Military Academies or private security agencies. They were neither skilled and educated nor physically equipped for warfare; they were simply vast in number. They lived their lives as if the war was not happening, as much as it were possible, and for the most part they seemed happy with their existence be it under the Decepticons, or Autobots. But despite their failings as potential war machines, their sheer numbers meant it unwise to provoke them too much. For the most part they were happy; best to keep them that way.

Though it had not happened yet, Snapdragon's fear was a Neutralist uprising. Someone would emerge and train these civilians and produce an army of such overwhelming volume, against which neither the Autobots nor Decepticons could compete. Such leaders were very few and far between and this is why Snapdragon wanted them stamped out before their word spread. A thousand untrained troops were incomparably weaker than one thousand trained troops with a glorious leader. Megadeath was one such potential leader. But how long had they known about Megadeath? Years, certainly, but quite how long, I didn't know. All I knew from my first impressions of Yuss and its emptiness was that he must have recruited a good ninety percent of the population. An army that size, regardless of their skills, could be devastating. Perhaps we were already too late.

Considering the decimation of the neighbourhood and its own state just a handful miles behind us, the Sky Riser in this area was remarkably intact, and negotiating the sliproad down to street level posed no problems. We moved out to explore Yuss, a city that none of us had visited before. Historically, it formed the sprawling suburbia to Stanix's huge sprawling research centres. This was where just the civilian workers lived until the Military takeovers forced more and more of them out of jobs as scientists and assistants. As the research centres became more isolated from the rest of suburban populous within the Stanix region, places like Yuss emerged as cities in their own right. But to see it now, you would never have believed so.

Up ahead was a light; a haven. Quite what the bar was doing, apparently fully functioning, in this quiet region of a quiet region of Cybertron I neither knew nor cared to know. I knew my troops would be as glad of the break as much as I. In our vehicle forms, the group ground to a halt with a succession of hydraulic sighs, and transforming into our respective robot forms we each made our way inside.

--

CHAPTER 6 The Bar

"Kill, destroy, ravage!" read the poster. It was propaganda, but not of the same vein as other propaganda I had witnessed before. Neutralist regions that were considered of some worth, those that had not been left to the dead and dying for thousands of years like Taggon, were filled with the stuff. But this was more of an advert, a public awareness announcement regarding an impending bit of fun. Most of the conventional Autobot recruitment messages had been long since torn down in this region, and a handful of the usual Decepticon posters promising victory remained scattered throughout the town. But this was different and very eye-catching.

"Kill, destroy, ravage!...Steal, maul, violate!" I read. Amidst the text were pictures of desecrated houses, factories, and Autobots. "Pillage, maim, indulge!" It read like a thesaurus for "pleasure", like a dream, like the reminder of an existence many years ago. I did something I had not done for some time; I smiled.

For too long this war had been just that, a war. Back in the days way back, it was not so much a war, but martial rule, survival of the fittest followed by global anarchy. If you wanted a new data entertainment chip you did not go and buy it, you stole it. You found someone weaker than yourself and you took it. If you wanted a fight to relieve your boredom, you did not ask your commanding officer who to attack, you found a wretch on the street and you smashed his face in. That was what being a Decepticon was all about. That was why Decepticons were known colloquially as "Evil". Nowadays it was all regimented war. War with tactics. War with orders. War without fun. "Ransack, maraud, hurt!" In the good old days you certainly did not queue at a bar waiting for an energon drink. He looked up. What the heck was Runamuck doing? Where was my drink? I took one last scan of the poster and added it to my memory banks.

I turned to see Runamuck carrying a trayful of oils, energon drinks and lubes as well as other recharging snacks and hits. He sat at the table to a chorus of cheers by my other troops. The bar was big, but dingy and in the same sort of condition as the rest of Yuss and this region of Cybertron. There was little music playing, unlike bars of old where there would be hundreds of information and entertainment channels vying for bandwidth across the radio spectra that these bars would have typically broadcast upon. This was not a first class leisure complex.

In the good old days you did not queue for an energon drink, but this place was different. There were a mix of mainly Neutralists, but also a few forgotten Autobots and Decepticons. There was no need for door-mechs. The clientele kept the riff-raff out themselves. Granted there was the odd Empty begging outside, but that was to be expected at this oasis in a desert of pain and suffering. Most of the Autobots and Decepticons in the room had apparently little or no affiliation remaining with their respective factions. Almost all were scarred and weary, but it was clear that their insignias were mainly scratched off in a deliberate act of defection rather than through battle damage.

There were simply too many robots here to risk uproar. As demeaning as it was, these drinks needed to be paid for so reluctantly, Runamuck was dispatched to do the honours. It was not good stuff either, it was cheap imitation rubbish that left you with a sore head and aching joints. I could not see the attraction of Stanix.

For years I had spent my life serving the Decepticon army. Going into battle and coming out again in some way, shape or form, either victorious, in a tactical retreat, or through Walking, or on a couple of occasions Crawling. It was as relentless a process as the war itself. Disillusionment was high, morale was low, and there was no way out. I would have been doing more of the same until I died, had it not been for Snapdragon appreciating my past as an assassin. "We should do this sort of mission more often!" laughed Grimace, taking a hit of pure energon. His state of euphoria was surpassed with this once-outlawed, now unregulated form of energon replenishment. "Oh yeah, that's the stuff." he muttered to himself, an audible "Woo-hoo!" accompanying a high five with Rawhide, before drifting off into a world of his own, somewhere a long way away. Clearly my troops did not feel the same level of disgust at the place. Like I said, they were soldiers, I was not. For them, this was a rare treat. Led away from the conventional Front Line and into a strange territory and to the strange beacon of comparative prosperity in this area of blackened decay.

The odd shot or explosion some distance away reminded us all that we were indeed still close to the Front Line, but for some reason, Stanix itself had, so far, been dismissed by both warring factions and was left to Megadeath, the Neutralists and defectors. In between sips I looked around the bar at all the faces. Of course I recognised none, but I was intrigued to see who had defected. Who were they with? Were they in groups? Were they alone? Despite what Snapdragon had said about intelligence, I thought it might be useful to keep a mental record of their weight in numbers.

"Hey!" called Rupture, taking to his feet. I looked around. Another Decepticon had walked over to my table. I looked at him with distrust, a natural reaction in this pit of deceit and disloyalty. He was fairly tall, quite tough looking. His rugged and battle-worn exterior suggested he was a Front Liner of sorts, his Decepticon insignia faded yet visible. "What do you want?" demanded Rupture.

The mechanoid took a step back and with his hands raised slightly, in respect more than in cowardice, introduced himself as Aftershock. "You guys ain't from around here are you?" And what of Aftershock? "I served Megatron for a while. I worked my shifts in Taggon, but when me and my platoon stumbled into Yuss," he paused swaying a casual arm in the direction of a few other robots sitting at a distant table, "we sort of got hooked."

I looked around and nodded. "Yeah, I can see that." I replied this a hint of irony. "It's a nice place." I commented, appreciating it was better than the hospitality one might expect on the Front Line, if only by a little.

"Yeah!" laughed Rawhide, "It kind of makes me want to smash something too!" Runamuck and Grimace echoed Rawhide's laughter. Aftershock was less amused. "Aww, com on!" continued Rawhide. "You ain't getting soft are you?" He stood up and deepened his voice. "You ain't soft are you?" he repeated looking into Aftershock's eyes that were quietly fuming. It was clear that he felt the Decepticon to be ignorant of something.

However instead of starting a confrontation he turned back to me, recognising I was the leader of our group. "Like I said," he continued, while I flicked a nod at first to Rupture and then in Rawhide's direction inviting them to return to their seats while I listened. "we like this place." He leant closer. "We want to keep liking it too." What was this guy talking about?

"What's there to like?" I asked. "Aside from this place here, Yuss is a dump. A ruin." Aftershock merely said it was a way of life to like rather than something tangible. "A way of life? You mean desertion?" I asked sternly, with a glare at Aftershock's faded insignia.

Aftershock straightened himself up proudly. "I am still a Decepticon. I just no longer take my orders from Megatron."

"So you work for Megadeath now?" I asked. Some of my troops looked at each other. Pounder shrugged at the silent question that Transit had asked.

"It doesn't matter who I 'work' for." he replied. "The point is that controlling Yuss is as important for the Decepticons as any other city - more-so, in fact - and that is why I am stationed here."

"So Megadeath stationed you here?" I asked.

"I told you..." he began before I interrupted.

"So you decided you would rather cower off into Stanix and live the life with Megadeath rather than get your hands dirty on the battlefield." I spat. "You make me sick."

Aftershock had been civil for the most part. But the moment I had suggested he was a coward, his clearly pent-up rage surfaced. "And what would you know? You spent your time on the 'field, shooting shells at each other? You don't know the half of what▓s going down here." I did not, but I expected to find out soon enough. Aftershock leant forward, his immense bulk now being supported by our table, the imbalance knocking a few cans of oil over. I got the feeling this was about to get ugly.

Aftershock's associates stood up and walked across to our table. By now all of us were standing and looking eye-to-eye. There was an uneasy silence, as if what little music there was knew to respect our dispute. One of his group caught Grimace's attention particularly. "What are you looking at?" he demanded. The Autobot shrugged. He turned his attention to Aftershock. "You chicken out of battle with the Autobots so you can come here and hang out with them?"

"He isn't an Autobot." chirped one of the other robots. "Not any more." He walked over to Grimace. "You think you are so smart, don't you? You come in here, onto our turf and start preaching about the war, when you don't even know who the enemy is." He seemed defiant.

"And who is the enemy, if it isn't this wretch here?" I despised, glancing disapprovingly of the Autobot defector. The Autobot looked at Aftershock and shook his head.

"They really have no idea, do they?" he mocked. "We aren't at war with you," he explained, patronisingly poking a finger at my chest. "And if you knew what was happening here in Stanix, you wouldn't be at war with me." he continued emphasising his contemptuous tone with another couple of pokes.

"So you are at war with Megadeath?" I asked. Silence. More silence. Then laughter. Laughter in my face. I was not laughing.

"Nobody fights Megadeath! Not even a fool fights Megadeath!" mocked one of the Decepticons. I fumed silently. This was getting us nowhere.

Aftershock waited until the sniggering was over. "Look, tell me, what are you doing here?" he asked genuinely. "Tell me you are not here to take on Megadeath, because if you are, you will be dead before you get half way to Scyk." He seemed sincere. I could not tell if this was a threat, or merely free advice. "But if you are here to see him, to listen to him, or to see some of his 'troops' well then that's different."

And what could that psycho Megadeath tell us? And what made Aftershock think we would want to listen?

"Who's Megadeath?" asked Transit finally, having lost patience with his lack of knowledge on the subject.

Aftershock smiled at Transit. "Go find him. Go and talk to him. Then you will know." He turned his attention back to me. "Without meeting Megadeath, you never really know anything."

I shrugged. "I killed an Autobot today." I replied, quite matter-of-fact, casting an ugly glance at Optimus Prime's traitor standing next to Aftershock. "That much I do know."

Aftershock and the Decepticons laughed; the Autobot was less enthusiastic. "Go and talk to him." he repeated. "Go and listen to him and you will understand." Understand what? Aftershock paused and looked around the room melodramatically. "You'll realise that none of this matters. It doesn't matter who you are, who you take your orders from, who you kill and who you let live, When you see the bigger picture, you will realise that none of this matters."

"Come on, this guy's giving me the creeps." confessed Blitzwing. Runamuck nodded, casting a quick glance over his shoulder.

"And what if I don't agree with Megadeath? What if his 'bigger picture' doesn't appeal to me?" I asked with a slight air of arrogance.

Aftershock smiled again for a moment and stood up straight again, his arms high in the air. "In which case, sure, fine, disagree. Go home. Go back to your mundane existence. Shoot, Walk, shoot, Walk, shoot, Walk, shoot, Walk." He had clearly been on the Front Line himself some time ago. "And don't come back!" he spat, sternly. He took another half-step towards me "But let me tell you, living here in Stanix has its perks." he laughed, eyeing up the bar again. "Tell me, where in Taggon can you find somewhere like this?" he mocked. He was right. This place was a haven alright. "I can tell you are a mech of action, and you get your fair share of it around here, believe me. Work by day, party by night." he smiled. But what was this 'bigger picture' of Megadeath's?

He gave me a firm, slap on the shoulder that told me he didn't want to fight, but for me to remember he was in charge around here. "Look, go and find Megadeath. He'll change your mind." He nodded towards another discarded poster on the floor, similar to the one that had caught my attention before. "Like I said, it has its perks." he sniggered, before he and his team walked back to their table.

There was an uneasy silence. "What the heck was that all about?" asked Rawhide finally.

"Who's Megadeath?" persisted Transit.

I walked around the table and sat down so that I could face Aftershock and his group. I really didn't want him sneaking up on me while my back was turned. "He's scum." I answered. The others retook their seats, salvaging whatever drinks had not been knocked over. They wanted more. "He's a General, the top brass in Stanix." I recalled the data cubes that Snapdragon had prepared for me. "Once he was a good soldier. Loyal, strong, intelligent. Always aware of new technologies and wanting to exploit them. When he was promoted it seems this power went to his head. Either that or he just went insane," I paused and took a sip, my troops turning to look at each other for a second. I continued: "Apparently he's been stepping on too many toes, taking as many troops as liberties. Straxus and Megatron have no idea what he is doing. He doesn't report in, he takes it upon himself to embark on his own campaigns and journeys of scientific discovery or whatever it is he does here. He's not so much a General anymore, more mad scientist."

"And this is the guy who's supposed to be the key to enlightenment?" asked Runamuck, confused by his own take on Aftershock's ramblings.

The expression on Rupture's face changed markedly as if something finally came clear. "You haven't told us why we are here." he asked solemnly. "It's to do with Megadeath, isn't it?"

"You are here to look out for me. You are here to be my eyes and ears." I reminded them. "You are not here to think or speak for me. So shut up and finish your drinks." The mood was gone. There was no need to hang around in this den of iniquity any longer than necessary. I slammed my empty can on the table. "Right, come with me."

--

CHAPTER 7 The Report

"Who's Megadeath?" "Where is Scyk?" "What are we doing here?" I ignored these questions and led my soldiers through Yuss until we found a deserted warehouse where we could rest. I organised a rota for guard duty and was met by protests from all. "Who's going to attack us? This is Decepticon-held territory, there isn't an Autobot for miles!" objected Grimace, his body beginning to suffer the after-effects of the narcotics he took in the bar.

"It's not the Autobots I▓m concerned about." I answered, starting to tire of my troops' collective attitude. They knew what they liked and they liked what they knew. Here they neither liked nor knew the situation. Their whole lives they had been soldiers fighting on the Front Line. Except for Transit and maybe Runamuck, each of them had made their fair share of Walks before. They were comfortable with routine orders. Move, shell, move, shell, move, shell, Walk if necessary. Taking watch was new to them.

"You think Aftershock and the others are coming after us?" asked Pounder, looking a little nervous.

"That guy freaked me out." confessed Rupture. "He's a psycho. The Decepticons are better off without him."

"Yeah," echoed Grimace. "Teaming up with 'Bots. We should have executed him on the spot." My troops nodded and muttered in agreement.

Transit was quiet. "What is this place?" he asked, almost innocently. "How can somewhere so calm be so close to the Front Line?" His head had been facing the floor, but now lifted itself up to face me. "Where's the fighting? Where is everyone? Why are there Decepticons hanging out in bars? Who's Megadeath? Where is Scyk? What are we doing here?"

"We are here to kill a General." I chose not to answer. How could I tell them that? They would have left me here, not wanting to be a part of such an underhand conspiracy, and who could blame them? The truth was, they were just my escort. It was my job to kill Megadeath, not theirs. Aftershock had really spooked a couple of my troops and I have to admit, there was something about them that bothered me too. There was something they were not letting on, that much was clear, something they seemed reluctant to discuss, or dare I say it, scared to discuss? They were scared of Megadeath. He could probably have them killed anytime he wanted, just like Megatron could do to my troops or Scorponok could do to me. We did not live in fear of our respective commanders; reason told us we were not about to be executed. But Megadeath was a renegade General, a real nutball by all accounts, and might kill on a whim. "Set up watch. I have to make a report." I ordered, ignoring the questions again.

I walked over to the far side of the warehouse and flipped open the hinged compartment on my shoulder which had been housing the remote communication device I was carrying. Something else caught my attention. It was attached to my shoulder. For a millisecond I thought it might be a bug, or a tracking device, but upon closer inspection it turned out to be a covert data cell, like a sticky data cube, almost unnoticeable, but there. Clearly designed to be found, later rather than sooner, but to be found nevertheless.

I scanned the data and it was a calling card. It gave an address and a time. And the name Aftershock. His departing playful slap on the back must have had a separate agenda. "If you are serious and want to meet Megadeath, meet me and discuss terms." It read, "Or leave Stanix tonight." Blunt. What did they know? I pondered this for a moment. Maybe Aftershock knew too much. Maybe he was onto the plot to kill Megadeath. Maybe he had killed Thunderwing. Or maybe he was another assassin, perhaps summoned to do the same job as me. They had sent Thunderwing before me to do a difficult, covert, unofficial hit, why should they have not sent someone else too? Maybe, maybe not.

I fired up the communication equipment and was able to contact Snapdragon. I told him about the status of Yuss and that a huge population must have been recruited by Megadeath given the apparent exodus of its inhabitants. I explained that we would continue deeper into Stanix in the morning. "Who else have you sent to do this job?" I asked. Pause. What did I mean? "You sent Thunderwing before me." I answered. "Anybody else?" Pause. That was classified. "Don't give me that classified nonsense!" I demanded.

"If you fail," by which he meant 'get captured', "we can't have you divulging that sort of information!" replied Snapdragon. I had no intention of failing; the dead Autobot was a testament to that. But I did not tell Snapdragon; Skywarp could find out about that one later. Besides, no matter what twisted tortures Megadeath might or might not have had for Thunderwing and might have in store for me, I was no squealer.

"Who's Aftershock?" I asked. Pause. I guess Snapdragon did not know. "I mean, I don't know who he is." I continued. "That's why I asked. I met him in..." a bar? "...Yuss, I met him here in Yuss. He seems edgy on the whole Megadeath subject and told me to meet him later if I was 'serious' about him." I could almost see Snapdragon nodding in deliberation some quarter of a million miles away. "He and his troops talked about Megadeath like he was a god, even the Autobot." I explained that the only inhabitants of Yuss seemed to be nomadic, battle-worn troops of both factions passing through on their almost religious pilgrimage into Stanix.

We talked a little more and agreed perhaps I could hook up with Aftershock and get him to take me to Megadeath himself. I told Snapdragon I would tell my troops to return to Hun-Grr in Taggon. With that our communication ended. I returned to my soldiers. I explained I was going to meet with a contact tomorrow and that if all went well then their mission would be over and they could return to the Front Line.

After a successful night's rest we left for the location Aftershock had given for the meeting. I told my troops to be on the look out and to remain vigilant, but not to get too trigger happy. When we arrived, Aftershock was already waiting. A couple of my soldiers stopped in their tracks. I transformed to my robot form and gestured for my team to follow, which reluctantly, they did.

"I thought you weren't going to show!" laughed Aftershock as he walked up to me, his troops wandering over to mine. "Look," he began, "I'm sorry it had to be this way, but I can't just have us discussing our business in a bar, can I?" he laughed, almost friendly. Almost, but not quite. "Let's cut to the chase." he suggested, which was fine by me. "You see, I've got this problem. I like to make friends. Friends today are hard to come by." I shrugged. "So I have to make sure I pick them carefully," he sighed, "because there are a lot of people out here who don't get our way of life. It takes a little getting used to, but I think we can work something out." He paused. "You are here to see Megadeath, yes?" In a way, that much was true. I nodded. "I was once like you." he explained. "I was a soldier fighting on the Front Line, until..." he faded.

"Until Megadeath changed all that?" I asked.

Aftershock smiled. "Where is the fun in the Front Line?" he asked. "Where is the fun in attacking faceless targets only to fall foul of some underlying trap?" That much was true. The majority of my Walks had come about because of exploding mines. Rarely had my injuries been as honourable as from a face-to-face fight. There was nothing fun about our war anymore. Aftershock explained he worked for Megadeath, and that he was always looking for more people of his and my calibre to take on more of his work. "He needs killers." he explained, bluntly. "And what can I say? And I'm a killer!" he stated in all honesty, his arms raised a little.

"So you are a merc?" I asked.

He shook his head and smiled. "No, not really." he answered. "I mean, we don't get cooped up on the Front Line anymore. It gives us a chance to mingle with the locals." he laughed, referring to the bar we met in last night. "If you call that 'payment' then, yes, I guess we are mercs." He looked more serious for a moment. "However, I like to think it is more than that." he stood up tall and proud. "It's a reckoning." For a second, once I realised he really was serious, it was hard not to burst into laughter of my own, but I resisted the urge.

"It, er, all sounds pretty cool." I replied. Aftershock smiled again. I allowed my distrustful gaze to focus over his shoulder for a moment, checking up on my troops. They stood, disorderly yet obligingly in a huddle, checking out Aftershock's own team. Clearly that air was saturated with suspicion. "So, where's Megadeath?" I asked to break the silence, my focus returning to Aftershock. "I want to talk to him."

"Look, I▓ll level with you. I ain▓t supposed to tell you this, but I reckon I can trust you." Aftershock reasoned. The fool. "I can▓t tell you where he is, heck, I don▓t even know. But I reckon you might be able to find out in Parranite." He explained. "Last I heard, they were recruiting there."

"And that's what we are here for." I lied. "I just wanted to make sure of the rumours first." I paused for a second and we hunched closer. "So is it true?" I asked. "The rumours, the speculation?" Aftershock looked at me for a moment and was about to say something out loud. "Because if it is, then I want to be on the winning side." He nodded. "It's just that my troops don't know yet." I continued, hushing my voice a little. "I mean, I wouldn't want to end up on the wrong side of a court martial. I just need to be sure."

Aftershock asked me what I meant. I told him I knew Megadeath was stockpiling troops, absorbing them from both factions and from the Neutralist areas too. Aftershock sniggered, then apologised, explaining that I 'couldn't possibly understand just yet'. "He's not stockpiling troops," he explained, "he's liberating them."

"But surely people just don't up sticks and recruit for no reason." I continued.

"'Kill, destroy, ravage!'" quoted Aftershock, smiling.

"It's got a kind of ring to it, I admit." I remarked. Who was I kidding? That was what being a Decepticon was all about.

Aftershock laughed. He explained that his job was to wander the ruins of Stanix and to spread Megadeath's word. "He is my commander." he explained. "But without the respect of everyone, he is nothing." His face became more serious. "And if I thought there was someone in Stanix that didn't respect him," he supposed, "then I'd have to kill him." The look in his eyes told me he was not kidding. "Kill. Destroy." he repeated coldly. "Ravage!" he laughed, his eyes widening.

I nodded. "So by 'respect' you mean get them to join his new faction?" I asked.

Aftershock looked at me sternly. "Megadeath is not a new faction, he is a Decepticon, with a rational new way of thinking." he corrected me. "Straxus is old, his methods weak. Megadeath is..." he paused, his face and mind visibly arguing with each other, trying to extract the correct word. "He is horrific." He nodded, content he had chosen well. "Yet only through him can we all be saved." What did he mean by that? "He is the complete Decepticon. Anyone could end this war, but he could do so by choice." he continued. "Megadeath is the ultimate war hero." he admired.

Aftershock stood up straight again and called his troops to attention, an arm resting respectfully on my shoulder. "Welcome to the fold." he gestured, his hand outstretched. I kept straight-faced, but I knew inside I was smiling. The fool. He was going to unwittingly guide me to Megadeath's feet. All I needed to do was accept. "Do you swear allegiance to Megadeath?"

My troops, having not heard our conversation, were looking a little bewildered. It did not matter. I was about to cut them loose. Having made it into Stanix safely and having hooked up with Megadeath's zealots, I had no need for their protection any more. Or so I thought.

"I ain't jumping through hoops for some two-bit power junkie!" spat Runamuck. His objection clearly struck a nerve with Aftershock and it was not simply the ironic parallel he had drawn with his own commander, Megatron. Slowly, the reality must have sunk into Aftershock and those around us. He had no-doubt seen others deny Megadeath his 'respect', and seeing as Aftershock was still standing, there can only have been one outcome. This was about to get ugly.

With the rapid rattle of weapon-priming clicks, as one, we each raised and pointed our arms at a potential foe. "You think you can trick me?" said Aftershock's silent eyes, but it was also clear he was angry at being duped. There would be no talking our way out of this one now.

We stood in the deserted street, each one of us silent in concentration. The rush of fuel to the head amplified my focus on the situation. I had subconsciously released the additional backup supplies of harder, purer energon into my fuel-lines and my pumps were working overtime to maintain this status of utmost alert. My eyes were able to more rapidly assess the vision before me, my processors observing every last detail. I had to react at the precise moment anyone else made a move, or indeed assess the precise moment for me to instigate the proceedings. Timing was crucial if I was to come out of this one alive.

In these situations time simply stops and the rest of the world simply disappears. In these situations, you have to ignore the inner warmth of your overheating body unable to cope with the additional strains your sudden injection of fuel has burdening your systems with. You have to ignore the excess coolant fluid that secretes from your joints, trickling down your face. Concentrate. Concentrate. Concentrate. I scanned each and every barrel. What weapon was it? How powerful is its burst? Where was it pointing? If I took a shot, who would react first? My weapon had been targeting a soldier just beyond Aftershock, while his weapon was pointed at my troops. I was aware that one of Aftershock's troops had a weapon pointed at me. Could I react fast enough to get out of his line of fire? If not, how much damage would it really cause me?

I oh-so-slowly, perhaps over the course of a micro-second, pressed my finger close to the trigger. Next came the squeeze. This was an equally crucial part. Too much and its shot takes you by surprise. You had to get it just right, just on the limit, just the fraction of a degree from going off. This preparation gives the minutest advantage in time, compensating for your minutest delay in reaction. Something was going to set us off, it was a matter of waiting for someone to make the first move.

"What happens now?" chirped a voice. It was Transit. His ignorance, or perhaps his innocent hopefulness, was crystal clear. Maybe he was trying to deny the inevitable. Maybe he thought we might be able to work his way out of this mess. Maybe. At the time I had no such thoughts in my head. He was the trigger and it began.

I knew I could not take out Aftershock with a single shot; I would not have the time to readjust my aim by twenty or thirty degrees to blow his head away. My gun, while aimed at the head of another adversary, was, however, just a degree or two from Aftershock's outstretched arm. That I could hit. I don't know who fired first, but in an instant I made the decision to switch my target by those critical degrees. I pulled the trigger and my weapon blew away Aftershock's hand from the mid forearm.

I believe he had already fired his pistol, perhaps hitting Transit in the body. Someone did, certainly, and he collapsed backwards. In the split second from start to finish there were perhaps ten or fifteen all-but simultaneous shots. And then it was over.

A minor burst had hit me in the side, but not nearly close enough to penetrate my armour. Perhaps they were rusty. My troops were straight off the Front Line, after all, and Aftershock and his soldiers had been wandering Yuss for some time, indulging in its concentration-sapping vices. If this was the way Megadeath trained his troops, then there was no need to worry about his forthcoming invasion. They were all dead and my soldiers had barely a scratch between them. Except for Transit, whose ignorance had cost him his life. Pounder shook his head. I got the impression that despite Transit's failings, they had been close.

Aftershock had taken a second shot by another of my troops to the body. The damage was not severe, but he was prone. Oil spurted from his gashed arm, his only weapon lying dormant on the floor so distance away. He had collapsed on one knee, gripping his wound with his left hand. He looked up at me.

I shook my head. It didn't have to be this way. Why did Runamuck have to open his big mouth? Now we were going to have to find Megadeath the hard way. I could not longer allow my soldiers to return to the Front Line as I might need them for protection again. I cast an stern glare in his direction. He clearly felt the piercing eyes of his other comrades too as the reality of blame set in.

The fuel in my lines became to subside. My core temperature began to reduce, the cooling fluids no longer overflowed my body. The silent peace returned. I looked at Aftershock again and was about to say something when, in an instant the silence was shattered and over once more. I turned my head to the source of the noise. A straggler, who had been clinging to life, was apparently about to attempt a final shot on Rupture. It was Rawhide who reacted first and blew away the wretched traitor before he could take his final vengeance. Rupture was stunned for a second before offering a nod of life-saving appreciation to Rawhide and his alertness.

He was not the only one to try to take advantage of the situation. I turned back to see Aftershock, his functioning hand groping for his gun on the floor. In return his prone face took a hefty kick in the chin, sending him sprawling backwards. I walked over to him and his sorry eyes looked up at me. I shook my head.

"Is this really the best Megadeath has to offer?" I asked, mockingly. Aftershock shamefully looked down to the floor again. This one-time soldier has weakened through lack of Front Line action. He was proud. He was not about to ask for mercy. But with his bravado gone, he was nothing more than a weary veteran without the means or conviction to do his job. Aftershock was a poor excuse for a soldier.

"So you aren't here to join Megadeath." he smiled, raising his head to face me. "That much I do see." His face revealed damage from a third shot I had not noticed. Perhaps just a glancing ricochet, but a significant degree of damage now exposed itself on the face side of his neck. "So I guess you are here to kill him?" he supposed. I did not answer him. I did not want to indulge my troops in more speculation, even if it was the truth.

"If you really want to take on Megadeath," he continued "then I suggest you go to Devan first." he advised. "Your destiny lies there." he cast a nod in its direction. "See what's there and then maybe you will see there is more to Megadeath than poor, old soldiers like you and me." Devan was the next town along from Yuss, slightly out of the way from the direction of Scyk. "You should see the consequences before you make them." I asked him what he meant, but instead he just laughed. I hit him across the face. He laughed again and I had had enough of him. My angry hands went for his throat.

"You traitor!" I cursed. "You leave the Decepticons so you can round them up and shoot them? Then you have the gall to call yourself a Decepticon when you don't have the fight in you to act like one? Give me one reason why I shouldn't just kill you now?"

"I don't want to die," said Aftershock, quite matter-of-fact rather than as a coward, "but killing me makes no difference; if you do take on Megadeath you will lose. You will all lose." My grip around his neck tightened and his eyes revealed more. In that briefest of moments, his eyes almost smiled at me, almost thanked me for ending some encumbering burden, like I was his Angel. Something had been troubling him and now I was liberating him. He had been playing for time and delaying the inevitable and now it was over. He had had his fun, and now for his sins he was now being sentenced. He must have reckoned me to be one of Megatron's troops out to avenge their treachery. I was right, he was a traitor after all. Fed up of Walking, he came to Stanix for one last fling before accepting his End. The coward; real warriors die on the Front Line. I told him as much. He choked. "Everyone has a weakness; there is no shame in fear." he stammered as his neck began to crack under my pressure.

"So what's my weakness?" I asked, humouring him for a moment.

"Fear," he replied, "like everyone else. You just don't know it yet." I felt a few hydraulic pumps in his throat snap and his lower body fell limp, no longer struggling. "There is no shame in fear." he repeated. "Everyone fears the wrath of God." This paralytic traitor was about to be judged by Primus Himself, someone he claimed to fear, yet he smiled at his pending immortal damnation on account of his lifetime of torment other mortals, if indeed such a fate awaited us all. "One day he is going to do what needs to be done. even if nobody else has the heart for it." Aftershock laughed. He laughed until his voice reverted to a familiarly blank slur as the pressure on his neck began to crush his voice definition circuits, rendering him as verbally charismatic as all the other monotonous drones on Cybertron. "You think you can put out his light?" Aftershock choked, philosophically and blandly. "His light succeeds even the darkest eclipse." he sniggered, barely able to release the words from his damaged circuitry. I did not understand the joke, but I'd had enough of this hypocrite trying to drag me down to his level. I clamped down heavier on his neck until his head finally became detached from his body. As I calmed I stood up and looked at the decapitation. Stained upon Aftershock's head was the face of relief.

--

CHAPTER 8 The Eclipse

Decepticons are unemotive killers. They bicker, brawl and beat each other senseless. Decepticons are unintelligent brutes incapable of rational thought. Hatred pumps around their bodies fuelling their compelling desire for overwhelming terror. They have no time for friendship. They have no time for comradeship. They have no time for anyone but themselves, and this is where their loyalty begins and ends. They vindicate, their lives dictated by vengeance and cruel oppression. Decepticons live to inflict pain and suffering upon all. They murder and maim in the name of fun, willing to destroy their comrades and friends over the most trivial matters. And no matter the number of sparks they steal from the lives of the just, the dark void within their minds and bodies will never be lit.

Decepticons are Evil.

I have never met a stereotypical Decepticon. Sure, they have a passion about what they do. I am the first to admit I have alleviated my boredom on several helpless victims, but as the leader of a small platoon of troops it aggrieved me to see Transit fall. Yes, he was next-to-useless and yes, I had selected him as cannon fodder, and yes, I'm glad he bought it rather than me. But I had no personal grudge against him and had no desire for him to die.

That's not to say I'd give him some sort of ceremonial send-off like so many Autobots did to their fallen soldiers. A huge waste of time, effort and energon if you ask me. I cared more for Transit than I did for Aftershock, but not much more. I led my soldiers from this derelict district of Yuss and towards Devan, leaving the corpses of Transit, Aftershock and the others by the wayside.

Transformed into our vehicle modes, we made our way onto the Sky Riser once more. The highway was more or less intact and again provided elevated salvation from the squalor below. It was difficult to see where Yuss ended and Devan started. The city below never changed from the monotonous dilapidation slowly eroding the Sky Riser's great supports. The skeletons of gutted skyscrapers stood mournfully on both sides of the road, their charred remains a reminder of this one-time civilian enclave. Now they were deserted and the despite nearing Devan, the same inhabitations presented themselves. There was no-one here, just like in Yuss. The obvious relics of war torn corpses lay smashed. about the lower-level streets, or deactivated in the decrepit remnants of the high-rise towers, serving as a constant reminder of its history, a parallel to the war raging in Taggon and further afield. But there was no welcoming committee and certainly no Megadeath.

I radioed Snapdragon, giving an update on my progress. I told him about Aftershock and Devan.

"Aftershock said I should come to Devan and meet my 'destiny', which I reckoned to be Megadeath." I explained. Snapdragon told me I should look around Devan for signs of Megadeath for a short while, but Aftershock's intelligence had not been verified, so I was not to waste much time in Devan. Whatever Aftershock may or may not have meant by that comment was probably irrelevant. It was clear by Snapdragon's voice that he did not approve of my diversion Devan; I should have continued to Scyk as planned. "Signs?" I thought to myself, glancing around at the deserted wilderness again that was once home to a number of civilian scientists. He had been here alright. Something had instigated the cull of those not involved in the exodus of Stanix. "It seems to me everyone has left Devan and headed with Megadeath to Scyk." I informed Snapdragon of my observations.

"Then prepare to leave also." concluded Snapdragon, closing his end of the communication channel. I called my troops to attention and explained we would be leaving soon. That seemed to go down quite nicely with most of us, myself included. I did not revel in this kind of place. Devan, several hundred miles from Yuss and its border with Taggon and the Front Line, was quiet. Yuss was deserted, but seemed a bustling metropolis compared to Devan. We set off mack to the Sky Riser in a different direction, to complete a circle we had half-walked. We continued to look for more useful signs of Megadeath, although I did not really expect to find anything new. The same old signs were there alright, the dead sat where the living once did. But for our efforts we could not find Megadeath, or anyone alive for that matter. Our detour into Devan was fruitless; we should have taken a turn off the Sky Riser some way back and continued onto Scyk as planned.

Runamuck and Blitzwing kept muttering to each other. This town had really got to them. Quite simply, it was spooky, like an eerie surprise or joke that no-one had let us in on. There were several bodies underfoot, but the further we walked into Stanix, the more corpses lay scattered by the roadside. Maybe Megadeath's troops had already gutted Yuss and Devan and moved on, but to overcome two cities' worth of Neutralists would have needed an enormous army. Razorclaw was right. They would be unstoppable in a matter of years.

I downloaded another section of Megadeath's file from the datacube Skywarp had prepared for me. Megadeath had been in Stanix a long time. He was patient with himself. He never rushed his ideas. He was calm, placid in his thoughts. Every moment of his time was planned in detail. His plans, when working, would never be deviated from. When not, he would accept his self-assessed criticism and rework his plans and schedule to continue. He had joined the Decepticon Military as an officer, gifted in areas of scientific research and invention. He was thorough, undeterred and complete. He had extended his personal temprement from the lab to the field as an outstanding ranking officer. He successfully led several high profile missions and campaigns, often leading from the front.

While ultimately patient and meticulate with himself, Megadeath had no time for anyone else or their ignorant ramblings. A tactical conversation with Megadeath would be possible only if you were on a mental par with him. His consultations, therefore, were more lectures than discussions. He had plans; they were to be carried out. No-one could fault them technically. Megadeath was uninterested by questions; questions implied ignorance and he had no time for the ignorant. Indeed the only real acknowledgement of anyone else would be in his unnecessary, yet altogether personally-satisfying torture of some of his captives and deserters. That was his recreation. He would enjoy toying with their lives, revelling in his domination in both power and stature. He was many things: a genuinely evil and twisted thug, yet a great and highly intelligent leader.

"What on Cybertron is that?" called Pounder, who was standing and pointing up ahead, drawing my attention away from the datacube.

We stopped and stared at the structure. It was odd, the like of which I had not seen around for years, thousands of years, since before the war began. We trampled our way over the corpses between us and the old scaffold-like frame until we were close enough to see more clearly. It was a crucifixion tower, a public execution post used for an agonising torture. It was strange to see one being used. Traitors, cowards and opposition captives were more commonly executed on the spot these days.

There was a time when those accused of the most fickle of crimes would be strung up, starved, and abused. Unlawful fighting, theft, even unsavoury arguments in bars might have resulted in the perpetrators being pelted or shocked to death, pinned to a tower like this. But as this behaviour became more and more accepted (amongst us Decepticons at least), such executions became reserved for bigger crimes like murder. But even they became more widespread and the last time I heard of such a public sentence was given for a plot to kill Lord Straxus himself. High treason still warranted this demeaning death. But since the war began the Neutralists had grown tiresome of public executions. They saw them every day on the battlefields that bordered their cities. They had no wish to see any more than absolutely necessary and the warring factions had not the time to organise such things themselves.

Everyone else in Devan seemed to be dead on the floor, laying where they were shot. This victim must have done something pretty uncouth to end up dying this way. Strung upside down, his torso and most of his limbs had had their respective outer plates wrenched off, leaving his skeletal remnants exposed to the elements. There was evidence of acid burns, fried circuitry, hack marks, and deep, penetrating bites that had left gaping holes in his rusting body. Torrents of oil and other fluids had clearly once free-flowed down his body over his face before collecting below in a dried up sticky mess. Huge, razor-sharp bolts pierced more than a dozen points on his body, pinning him to the frame, including a couple pinning his left forearm, even though someone had since severed it completely from the rest of his limp body with some sort of rough saw cut. Quite what warranted such a suffering such a death was hard to fathom, but he had been pinned here and left for a long time as a warning to others who knew him. Grotesque did not go far enough. I'd seen many slaughtered wretches on the Front Line, and had survived a few nasty Walks with a mangled body, but nothing compared.

There was a plaque pinned to his face. I stepped up. "Daylight Succeeds Every Eclipse." I read, a para-quote of Aftershock's dying words. With one hand I held his head fast and with the other I began to wrestle with the plaque, bending it first left, then right and so forth until it began to give a little. As I levered, it finally worked free from his face, the pins having been securely hammered deep into his eye sockets. A couple of small oily geysers squirted from the heavy piercings for a few seconds. I took a step back. and rotated my head a little to help me picture him stood upright, and not with his shattered legs high in to air and his face in line with my mid-thigh.

I tried to form an image and when it clicked I took another step back. It was indeed Eclipse. Eclipse was an assassin of yesteryear. During my 'training' as an assassin, I had heard the name before and seen the odd picture of him here or there. He had 'graduated' a short while before me. I had never spoken to him; I'd never even met him, but he was hyped as being one tough mercenary, who, like me, had joined the Decepticons. It spooked me to see him strung here. Clearly Aftershock reckoned me to be another Eclipse, here to what he had, apparently, failed to do.

"Kill..." he gasped slowly. It startled me and I almost literally leapt backwards. A few of my troops grunted, surprised by my spontaneous shudder. I looked at the mangled face of Eclipse. "Kill..." he whispered again. I was still in a small stake of shock. How could this be? He must have been here for months, years maybe. He should have deactivated through lack of energy by now? For a moment, I almost forget there was someone here suffering quite possibly the most pain I had ever seen anyone suffer as instead I struggled to comprehend how he was alive. He muttered something again but I was more interested in understanding how he could function. The more likely explanation was that I was imagining it and I needed to ascertain his status.

Then I saw the cord. I suppose I had thought previously it was some sort of shock cable used to torture him, but it struck me it was a power cable there only to provide him with minimal power to function and to prolong his suffering indefinitely. Razorclaw was right; Megadeath was one twisted individual. But at least it confirmed my suspicions that others (aside from myself and Thunderwing) had been dispatched on the same mission. I quickly looked around, half-expecting to see Thunderwing strung up too. "Kill..." Eclipse repeated, grabbing my attention again.

"Is it alive?" asked Runamuck, audibly sickened by the putrid sight in front of us, yet compelled to take a step forward through curiosity. I turned to face him and nodded. This public ornament had drawn the rest my troops a few steps closer too, their eyes squinting with wondrous awe, each turning their heads a little, as I had done, trying to figure out who it was, trying make sense of this archaic torture. Never mind the thirty or so bodies they walked upon or the thirty thousand they had walked upon previously or the thirty million they had seen paving the way from Taggon to Devan. Eclipse was a bigger warning than the surrounding massacre.

"Kill..." he said again. Kill? Kill Megadeath? Yeah, I'd kill Megadeath, the psychotic three-eyed freak. I'd stuff a power cable into his brain and wrench his head from his neck and see how he likes a lifetime of eternal pain and suffering. Even Autobots don't deserve to die like this. Yeah, I'd kill Megadeath alright. I asked him where he was. "No." he spat. "Kill...me." he was finally able to finish.

I nodded. "But first, tell me where Megadeath is. He's going to pay for this." I retorted.

"No." he gasped again. "Kill...me."

No? Don't kill Megadeath? I did not understand. What did he care? What loyalty did he have to Megadeath? It was like Aftershock all over again. If this was me then I'd want Megadeath to pay. But I looked into the smashed eyes of the failed assassin and saw he was in no state to answer my questions. Unemotive killers? I don't think so. I put my gun to his face and took no time in ridding Eclipse of whatever hideously painful functionality he was enduring.

--

CHAPTER 9 The Army

We made our way back to the Sky Riser in silence. This place was too much for any of us. I was aware of my troops' blank expression of incomprehension. They were my escort and for the most part had been so without cause for complaint. Sure, they got a little mouthy from time to time, and Runamuck had really put his foot in in when I was that close to hooking up with Aftershock's unit, but they got on with their job. But this continued walk through a quiet city devoid of life was clearly having an effect on them. Since Transit died no-one had asked anymore questions regarding my mission but I think deep down they knew without ever hearing the words come out of my mouth.

When the familiar sight of the elevated highway came into our foregrounds we were happy to transform and double back to the fork in the road some fifty miles or so back. As we neared Yuss once more I felt myself glad to be leaving Devan and all its haunts behind us. A further fifty miles beyond the junction in the direction of Scyk we all felt the uneasy presence of the dead lift for a welcome respite. We entered the district of Parranite and for the first time since Eclipse we saw the signs of life, and real life at that, not just someone strung to a crucifixion tower in the middle of town.

Historically Parranite was another civilian populous that once served to house the great scientists of Stanix but, like Yuss, had drawn so many to its hubs of its thriving communities, had grown outright to be a small city of its own. For the first time since entering Stanix we had found somewhere where Neutralists still lived, going about their daily businesses. There were the odd piles of bodies still to be found by the side of the road, but nowhere near as daunting as the mass grave that was once the city of Devan.

Parranite was still fairly quiet though, nothing like the overcrowded cities found all over Cybertron before the breakout of the war. Parranite was once home to perhaps ten or twenty million civilian scientists and other general workers. I estimated its population would now not exceed a hundred thousand. Of course, our entry been spotted. From our very descent of the sliproad and down to street-level I was sure we were being watched. I felt the cold eyes of distrust piercing my armour from behind darkened panes. I could almost hear the whispers of intrigue at our uninvited presence. We not exactly equipped to blend into our surroundings. We were all Front Line brutes, machines of bulk and strength, not casual scientists, slim and absent of efficiency-sapping unnecessities like weaponry and toughened hides.

I led my six along the wide street, unsure of where I was taking them. But there was something drawing me, like a subliminal voice beckoning me on. I took a left here, a right there, down below through the tunnel, up over the overpass. We were never lost, just that we did not know where we were going. Someone here was going to know where Megadeath was. It was just a question of finding him.

He found us. Shackle was apparently part of an unofficial vigilante militia, a self-appointed police force or security agency or something. Either way, his presence demanded respect. I duly obliged. He was big, bigger than me certainly. He rolled over to my small convoy and we each spent a moment to check each other out. This was the robot I was looking for, he just didn't know it yet.

"You from the Front Line?" he posed after all of us had transformed into our respective robot forms. It was painfully obvious. Our rough, battle-worn exteriors had no place in this urban retreat and as such stood out in the crowd. "I see a lot of you roughnecks here, mostly just passing through." He explained, nodding at my faded purple insignia. "Don't think I ever saw any come back, though." he added. Was he trying to scare me? It wasn't working. I indulged him in a little more small talk.

The more we spoke, the more he reminded me of Aftershock, to a degree. He clearly wanted to know what we were doing here and where we were going. He was never going to ask me though. "We're here to see Megadeath." I told him. I saw the outline of Shackle's eyes widen beneath his semi-translucent visor that covered his upper face. They glanced slowly to his left then to his right, sizing up my troops.

"What, all of you?" he asked, somewhat surprised. I shrugged, then nodded. "Well he ain't here." I didn't expect him to be; nothing ever seemed to be as simple as that. "But I guess he'd be happy to welcome you into the fold." he smiled. Runamuck took a step back and looked at Blitzwing, who looked back. I cast them an ugly glance which told him to keep quiet. "Tell me, what brought you here."

I looked at Runamuck again. "We heard the rumours in Yuss. We wanted to see if it was true, to see if he was for real."

Shackle nodded. So you know, then?" he asked. I nodded in falsehood. It seemed Shackle was my best bet for extracting a little information. His change in posture invited me to walk with him. I indicated for my troops to follow, a few steps behind. "Like I said, I see a lot of people pass through here." he repeated. "Mostly they used to head up to Scyk." Used to? "But now they tend to stay here." We continued to walk, rounding a corner here or there.

"So you're in charge around here?" I asked rather presumptuously. His dead rocked side to side.

"Not in charge, so as to speak, but there is a reason why Parranite hasn't gone the same way as Devan, and I like to think we're a part of it." he answered proudly.

"You and who else?" I asked. He explained his 'associates' patrol the city flushing out the troublemakers. He cast a suspicious eye over me. I raised my hands briefly out of respect and assured him we were not here for trouble, just to find Megadeath. "We just want to talk to him." I explained.

"Why?" snapped Shackle. "You know why you are here. Why bother speaking to Megadeath? He can't tell you anything you don't already know." he assumed. I nodded, although I was fairly unsure what he meant. I was gunning for information. I wanted to know what was going on here in Stanix. There was clearly much more than met the eye. But I didn't want to let Shackle know I was completely clueless. He seemed to think I was already one of 'them', whoever 'they' were, or about ready to defect to them at any rate. We walked in silence for a little more time and I considered the situation. Perhaps 'defecting', or apparently defecting might give me the bargaining tool I needed to get close to Megadeath and cap him? It wasn't an altogether ludicrous idea. It was the same plan I had with Aftershock, but here in the very real heart of Stanix, it seemed far more intimidating. But all I would need to do is figure a way out. I could give Rawhide, Grimace and the others a head start by cutting them loose as soon as I had eeked myself into this circle of trust. I was an expert at getting out of hostile situations alive. I mean, the sheer number of Walks I had successfully completed was testament to that.

During my thoughts I took the opportunity to scan our surroundings once more. I saw a few Parranite inhabitants. But for the first time I got to see them close up as they walked past us in the street. They were scared. It was written all over their faces. Shackle and his friends must rule this town with an iron fist. Whatever happens though, they couldn't scare me, I was sure of that. I'd been neck deep in everything the war could throw at me and survived. These guys were pathetic Neutralists, not used to life in conscription, if that was what was going on here.

"Hey!" called Rawhide from behind me, grabbing my attention by the scruff of the neck. We stopped and looked back. "Where exactly are we going?" he asked. He stood there confidently alongside Grimace. Pounder and Rupture shrugged, unsure what to make of the situation. But it was Blitzwing and Runamuck that really caught my attention. They were flicking their eyes from side to side, their necks twitching as if nervously embracing their surroundings, trying to take in as much as they could, like they didn't just want to know what was going, but needed to. It looked like they scared too.

"Don't worry." answered Shackle, calmly. "It's just around the next block." I cast a stern look at Rawhide for daring to interrupt. Shackle started to walk again and taking a couple of quick catch-up steps I walked alongside him once more. We stepped around a few bodies and he began to talk again. "It won't come as much of a surprise that we have a few..." he paused, "non-believers." he continued carefully. "But we are turning the tide slowly." he smiled. It seemed a little odd to me that Aftershock had implied Megadeath's 'regime' as a voluntry subscription, whereas Shackle's talk suggested it was a religious compulsion.

We turned the corner. "Behold." he beamed, his hands raised aloft. "The new Decepticon Army!"

--

CHAPTER 10 The Deception

When the Great War began, many predicted a swift diplomatic end. Neither side was going to lay down their weapons and surrender, there were simply too many troops on each side for one side to win outright. And once the initial skirmishes were over and the dust settled, the only real casualties would be the Neutralists. No-one really cared about them. That was the plan, so people thought. But people soon realised that when the war was not stopped diplomatically within a year or so then perhaps it would be time to take note and think seriously about where this war was heading. Years passed and still the war ravaged Cybertron, intensifying by the day, contrary to the diplomatic relations that diminished daily. More years passed and soon diplomacy was just a distant memory. Just how had things become so out of hand? The ruling Decepticons like Lord Straxus, Megatron and Shockwave revelled in their powerful Military occupations and campaigns. It was fine for them; they didn't have to get their hands dirty. For people on the Front Line, like me, it was a disease that might kill you at any time.

But by now there was no going back. No-one was going to be able to talk their way out of this. The Decepticons would not stop until the Autobots were crushed. That was how it was going to end. Razorclaw was right. It was going to take millions of years. The Autobots' dreams of peace were just that; dreams that would never be fulfilled. I can't even remember exactly what triggered the war. All I remember is the daily cycle of chance you dared to play on the Front Line. Armies rushed at each other so fuelled with hatred for the enemy without ever really knowing who they were fighting or why. No-one really cared though. By now it was a way of life; there were two sides to this war and until one of them had been defeated, that was the way things were.

So when Shackle and I turned the corner and saw the 'new Decepticon Army' I was unimpressed. There were possibly twenty thousand or so troops in a large colloseum that had once been the arena for gladiatorial bouts many years ago. They stood or sat with mindlessly blank expressions upon their faces watching some visual public address display at the far end. But they were bedraggled, like rebels without a cause. Some seemed uninterested with the broadcast, preferring to sit in silence, staring at the floor, almost lethargic. The others stood attentively with a glazed look of horror and fear. This was hardly the force that was about to recapture Cybertron. I said as much to Shackle.

He looked blankly at me for a second, then laughed. I laughed a little uneasily too. It looked like he was about to say something when someone else spoke.

"Hey!" called a voice behind me. It was Rawhide again. "Isn't that..." he began, pointing at the face on the screen. I looked up at the screen myself, taking my eyes from the legions of rogue soldiers. I don't really know what I was expecting. Megadeath, I suppose, but quite what he would be doing or saying I couldn't begin to imagine. I was wrong; Rawhide was right. "Isn't that Thunderwing?"

My first impressions were that this must have been an old broadcast, but as I viewed the distant screen I was able to recognise the location of the speaker. He was indeed within the very walls of the colloseum. I was fairly uninterested with his words, I was more concerned with verifying his location and determining whether or not the broadcast was genuine. I scanned the ledges of the upper tiers of the colloseum, the tell-tale signs of the screen directing me to a balcony. He was there.

I activated my visor and zoomed in on the tiny figure on the far wall of the colloseum. It was him alright; I'd recognise his fearsome shape anywhere. It was like he was the leader of this strange cult. Where was Megadeath? I reset my visor and took a few impulsive steps forward into the crowd straining to hear him through my re-adjusting audio sensors. I picked out words like "common enemy" and "invasion" amongst others. A small wave of relief passed over me. Perhaps Thunderwing had not failed in his mission. Perhaps he had convinced this rabble that he needed their assistance to break past Megadeath's army and to get close to him. If that was his plan then good luck to him. Snapdragon and Razorclaw had not been able to persuade Scorponok and Shockwave such action was necessary, so quite how he expected his 'new army' to fight, I wasn't quite sure.

But they had fought already, so it seemed. There were plenty of bodies lying around to justify that notion. Aftershock was part of a dying breed, his kind being replaced by this new order of Thunderwing's. It seemed odd, but I reasoned that a crazed cult with Thunderwing in charge was surely less dangerous than one with Megadeath at the helm, especially if this riff-raff was all they had to offer. I pushed passed a few of his less interested followers and closed in to hear a little more of what he was saying. But it was no good. I looked back, but there was no sign of Shackle following me. I shrugged and looked around at the faces in the crowd, trying to identify an easy target. Instinct told me to talk to someone who seemed disinterested with the speech. The others were so attentive, prising their audio sensors away from their leader was going to be hard work. No, the older ones surely knew it all already.

"What's the big plan?" I asked, walking over to someone half sat on the floor, staring at his gun. He looked up at me with disgust. It was the look I had given Transit on the Front Line before. No doubt about it, he was a veteran of this game and resented a newcomer like me. However, he duly stood up and looked me in the eye. For the first time I saw he had once been an Autobot, his faded red symbol barely visible under savagely self-inflicted scratches of defection.

He gave me a 'you really don't know, do you?' look. "The same thing we do every day," he answered calmly, yet disdainfully, "prepare for the invasion." I took a gamble. Which invasion? He looked blank, as if I couldn't seriously be asking him that question. "Stanix." he snapped, "Megadeath." he continued, a little more respectfully. I nodded and asked him when we would invade Megadeath. The old Autobot stood for a while, perhaps delaying the inevitable. He looked like he was about to say something, but didn't. Instead, he backed off into the crowd, a dirty look upon his face. Clearly the very mention of his name was enough to upset him. Not surprising, really, given the shocking state of Stanix.

I turned back and made for where I had left the others at the entrance to the colloseum. But with so many robots all around me, it soon became disorientating and took me some time to find them. Or most of them, "Where's Blitzwing?" I asked. "And Runamuck?" I continued, glancing around at the faces of my soldiers and the others around me. Rupture and Pounder glanced at each other for a moment, but said nothing. Neither did Rawhide or Grimace. "Did they follow me?" I asked above the din of the ambient cheer that had erupted. I looked up at the screen. Thunderwing was waving and then left the stage. The noise from the crowd was deafening. "Well, did they?" I repeated trying to make myself heard over the chants. Rupture shook his head and pointed outside the arena. I nodded and as I left the crowd my troops followed.

Outside it was quieter and we could hear each other speak. I asked them once again where my missing soldiers were. Rupture and Pounder looked at each other again, but it was Rawhide who spoke. "They left." he answered coldly. What did he mean by that? "They split. They've gone. They've had enough." he answered.

"They said they weren't going to hang around to get drawn into some cult." continued Grimace. "And frankly I don't blame them." he dared to continue. "It's not our job to..."

"It's your job to do exactly as I say!" I spat my interruption with a fierce reminder, getting a few looks from those around me for a moment.

"But you haven't told us what that is yet, have you?" objected Rawhide. The truth was I did not know. "You keep giving us that 'classified' slag." I instinctively looked up at those onlookers who were starting to gather. This was neither the time nor the place, but I was going to risk a mutiny here unless I gave them something to be going on with. I'd already lost Transit, and apparently another two deserters and I was no closer to finding Megadeath. My platoon was tearing itself apart and I wanted to restore some of the morale this desolate waste ground had sapped from them by the barrel-load. But in the grand scheme of things Transit was expendable; so too Runamuck and Blitzwing if they were to get caught. Come to think of it, they were all expendable so long as I reached my target. I told my troops to remain where they were and that I was about to call my superiors, who, perhaps, might permit me to indulge my restless soldiers in a little information. They were tired of exploring a living graveyard so far from the logical insanity of the Front Line.

They lived the life of the Front Line. It was simple. It was kill or be killed. It was to murder anything with a red insignia. It was to obey your orders without question, which I've sure they would have done under normal circumstances. But here it was far from normal. Everywhere we looked we saw Autobots and Decepticons mixing comfortably, alongside rebel Neutralists. This was indeed an uprising of sorts, but against Megadeath and not with Megadeath. I needed a safe place to set up a communication with Snapdragon. I wanted to explain that Thunderwing was not dead, but that he had taken it upon himself to lead an assault against Megadeath using leftover garbage troops. But first I needed to know more about this assault.

With the Decepticons behind Thunderwing, the assault Skywarp and Razorclaw, and indeed Ultra Magnus, wanted, might just be feasible. So why had Thunderwing chosen not to kill Megadeath alone, but to start a 'civil' war in this desolate region of chaos? Surely Thunderwing knew this was suicide? Megadeath had clearly put an end to thousands, perhaps millions of robots in Stanix already. What good would twenty or even thirty thousand do against him, especially considering that half of them seemed far from interested in his rally. What we really needed was someone alone (Thunderwing or me) to slip into the regions of Stanix that Megadeath still controlled, like Scyk, to find him and to kill him. The Megadeath uprising would be gone without the need for a lengthy guerrilla battle between equally inappropriately equipped troops which might give Megadeath the opportunity to escape. I had to find Thunderwing.

Like Shackle, he found me. It was Shackle who spoke first, singling me out of the small crowd that had gathered. Thunderwing nodded and walked forward. My troops respectfully took a step or two backwards leaving me face to face with Thunderwing. This was not what I had in mind when I thought I wanted to speak to him. I wanted to talk some sense into him, not belittle him in front of his followers. "I know you." announced. He seemed sincere. "I saw you enter Stanix, walk to Devan and walk back again." he continued. "You have seen what he does to those that oppose him." he supposed, with an apparent reference to Eclipse. "Do you wish to fall, empty, by the wayside, or do you wish to join us and lead with the glorious?"

I was a little taken aback. He was so self-righteous, so blunt, so short and to the point. I looked at my troops, staring sternly, willing them to remain quiet. Grimace muttered something out of my audio-shot, but Thunderwing and Shackle must have heard him because they both cast him ugly glances for a moment. Thunderwing continued. "You saw what happened to Eclipse, yes?" I was quite sure his opinion was more fact-based than speculative. "We cannot allow talent to be wasted so." he remarked. Talent? He was flattering indeed. Grimace said something again, another sarcastic comment about talent.

Thunderwing sighed and looked at Shackle. He nodded, aimed his weapon and blew a hole straight through Grimace's chest. The sparks and flames flew for a second or two and the shocked trooper clasped his hand to the gaping void. He collapsed to one knee, still groping for reassurance he had imagined the episode. He looked up at Rawhide who stood with equal disbelief. It was a further second or two before his composure returned. The point-blank shot had maimed, but not killed. A little excessive I thought, but it would teach him to keep his mouth shut. Or so I thought. He opened his mouth to say something. The second shot was lethal, and the decapitated head landed on the feet of Rawhide.

Thunderwing shook his head. "We appreciate talent," he continued, casting a piercing glare at Rawhide, "not insubordinates." Short and to the point. He turned to face me. "So are you in?" I looked at Thunderwing and his followers. There must have been something in the oil around here. None of them seemed to possess the decency amongst them to know that this was wrong, pure and simple. I killed. I murdered. But I was a Decepticon. I was allowed to do this. But the Autobots here at best shrugged at the frivolous execution, but generally just turned their backs or heads.

Rawhide was not ready for this. He had seen his long-time companion shot dead in front of his own eyes, by a Decepticon no less. It was hard to believe that within this torrid pit of futility that was the planet of Cybertron that anyone could find the time to build up any form of camaraderie, let alone friendship. Rawhide had found the time, yet within the space of a few seconds, it had been shattered. He howled a scream of rage and charged at Thunderwing. Shackle intercepted him, restraining his flailing arms.

Thunderwing was clearly a few bits short of a set, but I shrugged. What the heck? I didn't understand why Thunderwing had taken it upon himself to personally engage in all of Megadeath's troops when his job was simply to find and kill Megadeath himself. He stepped a little closer and placed a strong arm around me, ushering me to turn my back on my troops. I obliged; I had no desire to go out like Grimace.

I spoke quietly. my eyes echoing my humble request for permission to talk. "This," I began, casting a nod towards the arena that was slowly emptying itself of all its soldiers, "why?" I asked. "Why send an army to do one robot's job?"

Thunderwing smiled. "Do you have any idea how big the threat is?" he asked. He knew I didn't.

"Well in that case, when is the invasion taking place? And why don't we get assistance from the Decepticons? Shockwave or even Razorclaw, perhaps?" I asked, referring to the plans Thunderwing's immediate superiors had implied to me back in the compound near Ricon. Thunderwing remained expressionless. "You are still preparing for the invasion, aren't you?" I asked nervously. I was beginning to think I had got the wrong end of the stick.

Pause. "Of sorts." laughed Thunderwing. That was not really the reassurance I craved. What I really needed to was to get Thunderwing to talk to Snapdragon. I was getting in way over my head. I had planned to use Thunderwing to get close to Megadeath, but his cryptic logic was offering me no explanations. Yes, I'd love to be the one to pull the trigger and end the mad General's miserable life. I felt I owed that much to Eclipse. But Thunderwing had some other crazy scheme involving the charge of twenty thousand or so troops, all running to their deaths, and I really didn't want to be a part of it. If Snapdragon, or Razorclaw, were to give the go ahead for this invasion and my orders were cancelled, then sure, I could turn my back and walk away. Megadeath would be one of the ones that got away. As an assassin, you have to learn to live with such wrigglers escaping else you risk personal vendettas against those you have, by rights, no reason to kill.

Like I said, my job was to kill Megadeath, not joining Thunderwing in some crazy, suicidal assault. I wanted out, or at least some time to consider our positions. "Before I can commit to a part of this invasion of Megadeath I have to talk to Razorclaw." I told Thunderwing. I waited for his reaction.

He looked serious for a moment before laughing out loud again. "You still don't get it, do you?" he smirked. His eyes were burning with the arrogance of his knowledge. "We aren't invading anyone!" he retorted. Huh? "It's you who's invading us!" he laughed, pointing a finger at my chest. "Look around you!" he invited. "We aren't going anywhere. It's you who came to us!"

I was speechless. "But," I stammered, "but Eclipse? Megadeath?" I managed to utter. He shook his head, smiling an inanely perpetual smile. It hit me. Hard. "Megadeath is not the common foe you talked about, is he?" He shook his head, still smiling. "It's Shockwave who is the common foe, yeah?" I asked. He nodded, the glint in his mouth shining brighter. "And Megatron? And Straxus?" he continued to nod, each cycle of his movement firing a shiny reflection my way that hit me hard, each with a cruel wave of humiliation at my naivety. I had been duped. What an idiot. "And Optimus Prime?" He nodded one more time.

He shrugged, confessing he was once like me too. "An errand bot, taking orders." He sighed. "But all we seek is to protect what is ours." I looked around the smashed wilderness. Who was going to invade Stanix? There was nothing here. He must have read the silent questions in my mind. "Our lives!" he answered. Their lives. just as Aftershock had said.

So that was it then. Thunderwing had gone insane. He had been brainwashed, as Razorclaw had put it. Not dead, evidently, but he had no desire to kill Megadeath. I shook my head at my own stupidity. So now what? Was he going to kill me? He had clearly been toying with me. I looked up as Shackle walked over to us, with an equally large grin upon his face. "I believe you two have met?" he asked, nodding towards another figure. It was the veteran Autobot from the arena. The dirty squealer.

So he had led me unwittingly to Thunderwing and into his trap, but perhaps he would do the same for me? He would still lead me to Megadeath so I could do the job he became to cowardly to execute. But I would I need to escape first, perhaps by trying to convince him my intentions were honourable, that Grimace was rogue and that he could trust me and that I was ready to join his cult. But even before escaping, I needed to just stay alive.

--

CHAPTER 11 The Transfer

At first I felt foolish for allowing myself to be tricked by Thunderwing, even more so for being turned in by an Autobot. Now I knew how Aftershock had felt. But in my holding cell it gave me all the time in the world to consider the scenarios, ranging from the plausible to the down-right insane. But the most likely of all these scenarios was that Razorclaw was wrong about Thunderwing. Perhaps he was not that strong and he, along with rest of them, had been brainwashed by Megadeath, and that the two of them were now colluding. But I felt sure Razorclaw along with Ultra Magnus and the others were right about Megadeath though. They were planning an invasion to retake Cybertron (despite what Thunderwing had said), perhaps led jointly, but more likely by Megadeath. I was painfully aware of my own misinterpretation of the situation. With the obvious benefit of hindsight it was now clear that Thunderwing never had any intention of invading Scyk because (through Megadeath) already ruled Scyk.

A day later I was transferred. Securely bonded I was taken along with a few others to a large transportation vehicle. I saw Rawhide out of the corner of my eye. He was resisting and being beaten for it. He was still angry at Grimace's murder. The rest of us knew better than that though and stayed quiet. Now was not the time to try to escape. I wanted to avenge Eclipse, not end up like him. Isolated in my own small transport cell, my steed began to haul itself off. The small magnetic field induced by my electro-bonds interfered with my gyro-sensors, but it seemed logical to assume we were headed towards Megadeath in Scyk, deeper into Stanix. After a few hours I was dumped, unrestrained into another holding cell in the middle of a makeshift camp surrounded by the familiar scenes of death that had welcomed us oh-so-sickeningly into Devan.

My new cell was cramped, almost uncomfortably so, but realistically I could have broken out any time I wanted; a quick transformation to my tank mode and I could have rammed right though the thin door. However I would have been recaptured quickly, I am sure, and probably held more securely and in even less comfort, or worse. It was almost like they wanted me to try to leave though, to test them. Those free to roam would pass our cells and sneer or smile like they knew something we didn't. At the same time, others looked burdened by what they knew, like they were the ones that were scared. Weren't we the ones being held captive? The fuel we were offered was weak and greasy, like Autobots, as Skullcruncher used to say, one of my old buddies still fighting on the Front Line under Scorponok, so far as I knew. Maybe the stares, the bad fuel and the sense of anxiety felt by those on both sides of the bars were was having an adverse effect on my mental health. It was safer to just do as they ordered and stay put for now and see what unfolded next.

But my detention and anxiety did little to alleviate my painful curiosity. What did they know? Where was everyone? For the epicentre of immigration of so many into Stanix, there were not many troops here. Maybe Megadeath's big push had already begun. Maybe his troops were already out there, attacking both Autobots and Decepticons alike, perhaps hoarding another batch of troops for his cause, whatever it was. Maybe this handful of soldiers remaining here at Scyk was anxious to know how their new comrades were progressing on the battlefield for Megadeath; maybe they were anxious for their one-time friends against whom these comrades would now be fighting. Maybe.

But I could not help thinking it did not quite add up. Why? Why join Megadeath? Why live here? Who would choose to live like this? The Front Line is no walk in the park, but at least you get leave, R'n'R, a chance to clean the spilt oil of dead comrades from yourself from time to time. Aftershock had told me they work by day and party by night. So they managed to slum it in some seedy bar in a run-down ghetto at night, but if the price to pay for such a life was living with a mind-warping cult surrounded by the remnants of those who chose not to, then I also would choose not to. Scyk and the rest of Stanix stank. It was desolate filth incarnated physically like the aftermath of anarchic apathy. I remember looking out of my cell at the stacks of rusting bodies, only for one of these dormant robots to stand up and walk off. In this graveyard, it came as no surprise to me that the living and the dead and dying lay together in an indiscriminate ingestion of inferiority. There were no quarters as such, just a pool of bodies, either functioning or not, upon which floated a foul film of contaminated oil.

Thunderwing had his own reasons for staying. He didn't care what anyone else did. Thunderwing was disinterested with his troops. I observed that his speech was just about morale. He wanted his troops to feel prepared, but on a personal level he was different. He treated them differently, ignoring them mostly or literally pushing them aside if they were to obstruct his path. He never spoke to his troops face to face. He spoke to me, though, and to some of my troops, and I could vaguely hear him talking to a few of the other captives that must have wandered into Scyk over the past few days.

I mentally prepared myself for torture. But it never happened. Not to me anyway. I heard the screams from others some short distance away. I could make out one for definite; it was Rawhide. But day after day I remained in my cage and day after day Thunderwing would come and talk to me, as if trying to break my spirit. But there was nothing he could say to wear me down though. I had taken on board all the evidence Snapdragon had collated before. I was going to march up to Megadeath and kill the freak just as soon as I could find a safe way out. Maybe I'd write off Thunderwing too, and Shackle and that treacherous Autobot back in Parranite while I was at it? No. Like I said, there is no room to satisfy the thirst of personal vendettas in the life of an assassin. Thunderwing was still spouting drivel, still trying to wear me down. I was resilient, but I obliged his cheap talk anyway.

"'The Regent Squadron have taken Tapra.'" he quoted from a news report he had downloaded earlier that day, before continuing, mentioning names glorified and honoured by this small victory: Backdraft, Quake and Napalm, amongst others. I'd be willing to bet he didn't even know who they were, or even which side the Regent Squadron were on, or that he even cared. Sure, he would have known, once, but now his mind was preoccupied with whatever it was that was plaguing Stanix. I didn't even bother looking at him today. I sat in my cell staring at the floor just listening passively to his voice and the snappy comments made by the troops who would flock around him as he spoke of the news from the Front Line. They were always the more recent converts, perhaps eager to hear of their former regiments' respective advances, be they either Decepticons or indeed Autobots of yesterday. The older zealots were not interested. They maintained the same sense of indifference as Thunderwing had. His talk of news was certainly not for his own benefit, amusement or entertainment.

I heard a voice that I recognised. Not Rawhide's familiar wails from his torture some distance away. That was so persistent it was as quiet as the deafening roar of the Front Line. It was Rupture. I tossed aside the disposable cap from my energon canister that I had been subconsciously spinning in my fingers, stood up and looked outside. He was mingling, almost clinging to Thunderwing and listening to him talk. He made no eye contact. It was as if I wasn't there. It was as if nothing was there, like he was on another planet somewhere, a billion light years from Cybertron. He had become one of them.

Thunderwing stepped back into my view and passed a small canister of fuel into my cell. He motioned for the handful of troops hanging around him to make themselves scarce. Rupture left with them. Thunderwing leant against my door and tapped gently, perhaps subconsciously, on one of the bars. I looked into his eyes but said nothing. It was always Thunderwing who initiated the conversations. He muttered something about the Front Line and about Ricon too.

"What makes you think I care?" I asked, speaking for the first time in two days. Yesterday the simple talk had been one-way traffic. I had been in no mood to talk. I was in no mood to talk now, but maybe seeing Rupture outside with the others had weakened me somewhat after all. Thunderwing silently asked me to explain my question with a change in stance and a slightly surprised look on his face. Perhaps I could play him at his own game. "What makes you think I care about the Decepticons, the Autobots, Ricon?" I asked, my head dancing, almost twitching, left and right, looking for inspiration to add to my list. I wanted to sound like Aftershock, to make Thunderwing believe I had converted to whatever it was he was quite literally cultivating. I wanted him to believe that he had won and that I was weakening.

"I have two words for you:" smiled Thunderwing, "neutron bombs." With that he turned and left.

--

CHAPTER 12 The Accident

Neutron technology was dirty; the very words archived as eternal taboos ever since The Accident. I had little or no knowledge or experience of neutron bombs, but like everyone on Cybertron, I had calmed my curiosity with self-satisfying speculation connecting a smattering of both fact and fiction. I knew they were the most devastating weapon any robotic-based civilisation could fear. Unequivocal and indiscriminate, the principle of neutron bombs was straightforward, everyone at least understood that. Like the most powerful electromagnetic pulse bomb, these super-critical chain reaction weapons, once triggered, could rid the whole of Cybertron of life as we knew it. Bang. An electromagnetic wave would flow, undeterred around Cybertron attacking each and every microchip-based life-form, drone or appliance with an instant, yet terminal blow. Powered by Cybertron's naturally varying magnetic flux and atmospheric energies, the EMP wave would accelerate, seemingly unstoppable.

It was estimated that the wave, if triggered with enough energy, in the right direction and corresponding to specific anomalies within these fluxes and energies, could blanket Cybertron's surface in less than a week, subject to the estimated pressure wave propagation in all directions. That spelt death to all on the surface. Every microchip, transistor and relay would become permanently disabled. As well as terminating all life on Cybertron, it would sap the life around the planet, absorbing all the energy within its lush atmosphere. But the death of its entire population and the loss of its surface and atmospheric energies, were the least of Cybertron's problems. Upon circumnavigation, the reaction of these EMP's colliding, relatively, at the nearly twice the speed of sound, would cause The End.

Blasting in all directions a diverging cone of wanton devastation would dissipate into the universe. Without the energy found naturally amid Cybertron's atmosphere to power the wave, it would, according to the minutest hydrogen-based frictional and viscous forces, slow and die. Slowly being over perhaps the course of one hundred thousand million billion years. It was speculated that a mutation of a neutron explosion, whether intentional or having occurred naturally, may have spawned the legendary, yet super powerful underbase, wherever that was now, if indeed it had ever existed.

But in the reverse direction would lie Cybertron itself, powerless to prevent the impending explosion from penetrating first its surface, then its crust and beyond. With all Cybertron's atmospheric energies absorbed and then concentrated into the planet's very core, a nuclear meltdown on a planetary scale would be inevitable, rendering the cataclysmic annihilation of its surface community tame by comparison.

It was all very technical. It was all very confusing. It was all too much to comprehend. The End of Cybertron, with no-one around to see it because we would all be dead within a week. It was all very daunting. But, thankfully, it was ultimately all very theoretical. Apparently, the scientists in Stanix, and Iacon too, had determined the exact global atmospheric conditions required for The End to be triggered by a deliberate super-critical neutron bomb explosion, and it could never be put into practice.

It would take thousands, perhaps millions of years to calibrate the machinery correctly to launch a terminal neutron bomb designed to bring forward The End. It would take a very patient mechanoid to do that. And even then, he would have to wait for these correct atmospherics.

However, the launch of a conventional neutron bomb would not be so dependant on atmospherics. A bomb would still send a devastating electromagnetic pulse, regardless of the conditions, but providing it was unable to hit super-critical status, it would die out over a comparatively short distance, perhaps the size of a small city. Still devastating in anyone's language.

Anyone, but some scientists'. They believed neutron bombs could be countered in several ways, the most obvious being shielding, but more complex methods involving counter waves that stop the impending EMP dead in its tracks. By this time, Cybertron's Militaries were each vying for both neutron and counter-neutron bombs. This is where Stanix, for one, prospered. Out went the Autobot pacifists, and in came Decepticons and hardened Neutralist scientists, each working within Stanix's great resources to answer the neutron technology questions.

Like Stanix and Iacon, Grat had grown to have one of the greatest research institutes on Cybertron, but unlike Stanix and Iacon, Grat had grown almost overnight. A gold rush of greedy scientists spurred by wads of cash offered by wealthy Militaries rushed through the neutron program, they would make it rich quick or die trying. They launched what they had claimed to be the conclusive test, the last word on neutron bomb counter measures.

It was just that.

The Accident was by far the single, biggest disaster Cybertron had endured prior to the start of the war. In attempting to disprove their exaggerated worth, or to test developed counter-neutron bombs, or whatever their current theories were, the scientists triggered a small chain of neutron bombs. The results were catastrophic. Millions died, mostly scientists in Grat. Moreover, other scientists in Iacon and Stanix had observed the explosion had been dangerously close to starting the super-critical reaction that would have taken out the rest of Cybertron. It was down to the grace of Primus that Cybertron's atmospherics, key to a continual chain reaction, were favourable, rendering the chain non-self-sustainable, the pulse wave fading out over the course of perhaps just two or three thousand radial miles. Ironically, it was the scientists' electronic records of their achievements, secret files documenting their pitfalls, progress and pursuits, that had been the primary casualties of The Accident. Countless years of detailed theoretical overviews and partially conclusive experiments had fallen foul to the electromagnetic pulse's scourge. History erased for eternity, the muses of a million powerful minds lost in the peaceful ambience of a quiet holocaust. Grat itself still lay dead, even more lifeless than Taggon or Ricon.

The Accident occurred shortly before the outbreak of the war, but between times, all Militaries and scientist research groups were made to conform to the Grat Pact, which forbade any neutron bomb research or detonation. The instability of the neutron bomb projects undertaken in Grat, as well as the other countless near-misses in both Stanix and Iacon prompted all parties to accept it was their collective responsibility to ensure such an accident would never happen again. The Military parties also conceded neutron bombs would never be used on Cybertron, even in times of conflict, because the potential chain-reaction and other side-effects were completely unknown. It was simply too much to risk.

With the EMP over, there was nothing to stop Grat being rebuilt. The infrastructure was there; buildings still stood, oblivious to the deadly wave that had passed over it. Roads, foundations, homes and offices remaining fully intact. But the ghosts of the scientists remained, both mentally and physically in the form of a million gleaming corpses, not a scratch upon them, but dead to the world. To rebuild Grat there would be the need to replace every last electrical chip in the city. Furthermore, every electronic door remained in its fail-safe position, usually locked shut in these highly secure areas, entombing the victims. Drilling open the doors would be arduous because the power grid was, of course, dead, requiring a complete replacement. Then there was the matter of clearing a million dead scientists. It would have been easier to build a new city from scratch, leaving Grat as a stark reminder of The Accident.

--

CHAPTER 13 The Threat

For the next few days Thunderwing did not return. I remained there, silent, unmoving, like the forgotten victim dying on a battlefield, unable to Walk or Crawl. It gave me more time than ever to think. At first I had thought that Megadeath had possibly taken his hoards of their troops out onto the Front Line and began his revolution. But those two words of Thunderwing changed all that. And the more I thought about it, the more I was convinced Thunderwing had already killed Megadeath. It made sense. Back in Parranite there was no talk of Megadeath by his troops, but here in the hub of Scyk, Megadeath's one-time nerve centre he was idolised; they had spoken of him like he was a God. But where was he? Perhaps the temptation to play God was too great for Thunderwing to resist. Killing Megadeath would have left a power vacuum for him to fill; there would be troops to lead and Megadeath's neutron bombs to use if they figured in his plans.

A few questions remained. Where was the mass of Autobot, Decepticon and Neutralist troops he had annexed from Megadeath? Not here in Scyk and certainly not back in Parranite or Devan, that was for sure. It was like the whole population of Stanix had been slaughtered slowly over the course of the last hundred thousand years or so. Not in some big battle, but one-by-one like Grimace by those like Aftershock 'working' for Thunderwing. Given the number of corpses around this was indeed plausible, but what about the invasion? Despite what Thunderwing said I still could not believe an invasion by the Decepticons and/or the Autobots would take place. All he needed to do was tell Snapdragon that Megadeath was dead and he would probably leave Stanix and its depressing nightmares alone. Unless Snapdragon knew of Megadeath's neutron bombs, in which case if Thunderwing just destroyed them, and any associated threat, Stanix would be rendered harmless and, again, not worth invading. So how many neutron bombs did Megadeath make before he was killed, if indeed he did? Did Thunderwing make more? Does he have enough to be taken seriously? If so, where are they all? It seemed plausible he may have a number of them hidden somewhere, but enough to count as a full-on global deterrent? Probably not. No. Thunderwing remained in Stanix because he was both power-hungry and deranged.

After six days he returned. I knew today was going to be different because after supplying me with a ration of fuel he talked about my assignment, something he had avoided since our arrival at Fort Scyk. "I know why they want to kill him." he told me, referring to Snapdragon, Skywarp and Razorclaw, and possibly Ultra Magnus too. "But do you want to kill him?" asked Thunderwing. "Do you disapprove of our methods?" he asked, calmly.

"I don't see any method." I confessed. "It seems you just wait until they come to you. They either surrender to you or you execute them on the spot." I observed, based both on my capture and the death of Grimace.

"So have you surrendered, or do I have to execute you too?" Thunderwing smiled facetiously. "What is wrong with these methods?" he asked, turning his face slightly to glance gesticulatively around the holding camp.

I shrugged. "I don't understand why he picks us off one at a time, when all the while he could push the Button and end it all." I humoured Thunderwing with the use of 'he' and not 'you'.

"So why doesn't he 'push the Button and end it all'?" he posed, showing no other visible reaction to my assumption that his 'neutron technology' remark meant he had produced an arsenal of such weaponry, or talking about Thunderwing as if he were a third-person incarnation of Megadeath, complete with his reproduced dreams of insanity.

"I don't know." I answered truthfully. "Maybe he doesn't have enough for serious damage, and maybe he is scared of retaliation by those he was unable to target? Maybe he doesn't want to die."

Thunderwing nodded slowly at first, then quicker as if to agree. "Maybe that's it. After all, nobody wants to die." He sighed audibly. "And yet they charge at each other in their droves. We have both witnessed this carnage." As a Front Line veteran, I had. I nodded. "Where did you receive your orders?" I explained I was from the Front Line at Ricon. Thunderwing nodded and explained he was once in Ricon too. "Rubble." he sighed. "He once asked me 'Why do we contest rubble?' and I did not know. What is there to be gained from capturing another square mile of rusting booby traps?"

I gave the textbook reply he wanted to hear. "We gain a mile on our target." Which is? "The next city."

Thunderwing's animated hands clasped together with mock praise. "Yes! A city! A beautiful gleaming functioning beacon!" He leant closer, palms open and upturned before clasping the bars that separated us. "And what will be left of this piece of engineering elegance by the time you advance that far?" Nothing. It may as well be Ricon. He was right. We were not gaining anything by fighting in this primitive manner. All we succeeded in doing was to rip up Cybertron leaving it unusable and dangerous to develop. There would be no winners in our victory.

"So you want to stop the war?" I asked.

"What are our goals? Why are we at war?" he asked, not answering my question. I did not even know anymore, and, in turn, I shrugged and did not answer his question. Instead I waited for his own response. "To make Cybertron to become the most powerful planet in the galaxy and then the universe. And for us to control it." He pointed a thumb at his Decepticon insignia. I had not noticed that unlike most of Megadeath's troops, he still wore his badge with pride. "The Autobots are just in the way. Killing them was never really our goal, just a means to an end."

"And a bit of fun too." I replied, somehow making a quip of the situation. Thunderwing laughed and nodded.

"But a means to an end, nevertheless." he reiterated, seriously. "Yes. We need the war to stop so we can retake our rightful position in the galaxy. We, as a planet, want to be powerful again."

I nodded. But how were we going to do this with the wretched Autobots still fighting? They weren't just going to give up now. "Razorclaw said it would take millions of years to defeat them." I divulged. "And I for one believe him." I chose not to remind Thunderwing this estimation was based on the billions of Decepticons fighting the Autobots and not by the hundred thousand or so rogue Decepticons, defected Autobots and disgruntled Neutralised Thunderwing had annexed. "There is no quick fix solution to our dilemma."

Thunderwing smiled the same 'I know something you don't know' smile that so many of the smirking soldiers in Scyk flashed to the outsiders. After too long being kept in the dark, he began to expose the big secret. He explained to me that Megadeath had been conducting research into neutron technology. The Grat Pact forbade such neutron experimentation, but it stood to reason that some black market scientists still meddled in its mysticism, so why not Megadeath? I shrugged, almost indifferent to the news that my speculation on the subject had been confirmed.

"What makes you so sure the Autobots don't have neutron bombs of their own to act as a counter threat?" I asked. "Surely he's not the only one researching outlawed technology?" Thunderwing shook his head and concurred the problem with neutron bombs is that you could never rule out retaliation.

"And it would not take much retaliation to finish off this place." he sighed, looking around his Fort. That was one of the understatements of the year. "Besides, even if there was no retaliation, EMPs would cause a terrible inconvenience in terms of reactivating all the electronics." he continued. "Less inconvenience than removing all the unexploded bombs and mines from a shattered Ricon or Taggon to make the land usable, granted, but an inconvenience nevertheless. What we need is to remove the Autobots while keeping their cities in one piece, but without the inconvenience of potential EMP-induced electronic malfunctionality, or any of its other possible lethal side-effects." I agreed, but was taken aback slightly by his casual remark about the 'potentially lethal side-effects', to which he actually referred the cataclysmic meltdown of the entire planet. The understatement of the year just got beat. But how could this be done? "Make them surrender and give up their cities without giving them the option of using their own EMP neutron bombs, if indeed they have any."

A tall order.

I laughed. I could not help it. That was his plan? To ask nicely? I laughed again. Thunderwing was not laughing. Thunderwing was deadly serious. "Make them surrender? How? If we could do that we would have ended the war years ago!" I remarked. If that was all his plan was, this threat was nothing more than a joke. When he killed Megadeath, he should have returned to Razorclaw as a hero, rather than remain here, AWOL, with the desperately low and insane perusing that psychotic pipe-dream. "You said so yourself, you can't rule out retaliation by the enemy using their neutron bombs!" I reminded him.

"It's not the bombs, as such, that he's been researching." Calmly he stood up straight. "Come on. I'll take you to him." He unlocked the door and my cell opened.

A cold wave of seriousness splashed my face. "Megadeath is real?" I asked, looking into his eyes. He looked almost offended, like I was blaspheming his beliefs.

"Oh, he's real." he replied. "I believe in him. You have to believe in him too." he continued, somewhat bizarrely, as if quoting a phrase unknown to me. "I, for one, believe he is strong and courageous enough. I believe in him." he repeated. "Follow me." I stepped out of my cell for the first time since I arrived in Scyk and followed him.

--

CHAPTER 14 The Chosen

Fort Scyk was, quite paradoxically, both unsuitably and aptly named. There were no fortifications here. They had long since decayed into squalid disrepair. Malfunctioning doors dared to remain locked to their doorframes, intersecting walls of crumbling rubble. Buttons remained unpressed, more likely to cause another part of this one-time Military research centre to collapse than to do the job intended. Yet Scyk was indeed sick. The grotesque legions of dead robots formed an uneasy surface covering. Limbs, torsos, heads and other unrecognisable components littered the region like the remnants of a victorious virus or disease.

The troops here were both disturbed and disturbing. Some walked around aimlessly, with blank expression, as if deep in a perplexing thought. They would look around, as I was doing, and survey this bleak, grim underworld. I could almost see their minds whirring, slowly coming around to thinking that this morbid landscape was indeed the answer to whatever questions they were asking themselves. Others looked like they had long since accepted this answer. Those ones never spoke to each other, they did not even look at each other. Perhaps shell-shocked into submission, it was clear that no-one here enjoyed living in Scyk, but it was equally clear no-one had any intention of leaving.

"You have to appreciate what we know and how we live and the shadow we live under." explained Thunderwing, casting a nod towards the troops sitting blankly on piles of other troops. "It's called empathy."

"It's called apathy." I dared to correct him.

Thunderwing reminded me of Aftershock. When I suggested he was a coward, or just trying to protect his own life as Thunderwing had just put it, Aftershock had become ugly. He clearly felt he was still a soldier doing a soldier's job, just not on the Front Line. Thunderwing smiled. This was not new to him. Others must surely have questioned him before and he knew instinctively how to answer my thoughts. "We are not cowards, and we are certainly not traitors." We remained stationary in the desperate slum. "We have been chosen." he stood up tall and proud. "And when all this is over, we will be remembered." he beamed.

Chosen? Thunderwing was insane. Just like Megadeath, if indeed he was still alive. We started walking again, but not far. We drew to a halt by where a robot lay clamped to archaic machinery, being probed, prodded and tortured by all manner of implements and inflictors. Aside from the newly-converted and the veterans of Megadeath's realm, there was a third kind of robot here. They were the ones with triumphal smirks. They smiled, constantly, each a wicked smile. They would arrive with captives, like me, and would throw them into the holding cells. They were the ones wielding electro-whips, thermo-shackles, mind probes and the like. They were the scourge of the cult. They took the captives and tortured them, as they had been doing to Rawhide. I looked at the victim. I took a step back, almost unsure who it was. Almost unrecognisably, it was Rawhide. Furthermore, almost recognisably, his torturer was Rupture. I knew better than to intervene.

"Unfortunately some of those who are chosen neglect their responsibilities." Thunderwing remarked solemnly, glancing at Rawhide. I took another look. He was dead. He placed a hand on Rupture's shoulder, calming the primitive rage he was inflicting on his former comrade. After regaining his composure, he picked up some of the more intact parts of Rawhide's torso and threw them at another robot waiting for his turn. As the blackened metallic scraps struck him in the face, the robot, formerly an Autobot, swore an allegiance to Thunderwing and Megadeath, cursing Primus in fear of his death. Thunderwing walked over to Rupture and the quaking Autobot and placed an arm around each other in a gesture of genuine friendliness. "Whereas others embrace them." he smiled.

Rupture lead the Autobot away, not as if he were about to be executed, but as if he were a rookie on his first training day, like he was going to be shown the ropes. Thunderwing turned back to face me. "Megadeath will be pleased." he smiled. "Our mutual defence has had another loyal soldier added to the ranks." his face darkened. "So, what about you?" he asked.

I had no plans to go down the same way Rawhide and Grimace did. So far I understood his plan was to wait in a far-from-fortified Stanix surrounded by death, waiting for either the Autobots to relinquish control of Iacon to Megadeath under the threat of a neutron bomb or two, or for Stanix to get invaded by an advancing army. It stood to reason that if Megadeath had neutron bombs, this threat could be countered by a couple of bombs poised to strike Polyhex, Vos or some other Decepticon city, or even the battered wastelands of Stanix. I could not swallow this version of events. An advancing army might be made up of Autobots keen on annexing Stanix's once-great resources, but they would probably turn away once they reached Yuss and saw the decimated state of the region. All they, and the Decepticons, wanted was to see Megadeath and his zealots dead. And if they collaborated as Ultra Magnus and Skywarp wanted, then these 'chosen' few would defend their 'way of life' to the hilt. Why? None of it made sense to me. I had no wish to join Thunderwing's crazy cult but if he was going to lead me to Megadeath then I was going to have to remain on his side. I nodded slowly, probing for more information.

We started walking again. He told me as a more ranking and intelligent Decepticon I deserved more than that of the Autobot grunt that had just subscribed to an eternity at Scyk. "You're lucky. Not just anyone gets the chance to meet Megadeath personally." he smirked. In the midst of this chaos, I had almost forgotten that was where we were heading. He began talking about Megadeath and the threat of his neutron bombs again. "The Autobots will surrender." he explained, confidently. "They will give up their cities, their lives if necessary, but they will surrender for their beliefs."

"Peace?" I asked.

Thunderwing laughed. "Primus!" he blasphemed, apparently at my ignorance of the situation. "What if I were to tell you Megadeath isn't interested neutron bombs?" he asked. "'Yesterday's technology.'" he quoted, explaining that they were useful only for 'smaller' scale operations; and such triviality did not figure in Megadeath's bigger picture. I'm no scientist, but I do know that EMP's can knock out half a city and kill millions. How does that constitute small scale?

He went on to explain that Megadeath's research was purely into the side-effects and not the bombs themselves. He had been in Stanix where all its scientific resources were available to him. While the Autobots were pushing to take Stanix, assuming these resources were left idle because there had been no publicly recognised technological progress had been made there for such a long time, the truth was he had been wasting neither his time nor Stanix's resources. He had been busy and finally proclaimed to his troops his ability to create a neutron explosion conforming to the precise requirements for the super-critical planetary meltdown Grat had so very nearly caused. "And furthermore, the atmospheric anomalies those scientists back in Grat spoke about are also no longer an issue." he smiled, respectfully. "He could destroy Cybertron any time he wants." he explained coolly. "He just doesn't want to die, himself, just yet." Thunderwing smiled with clear admiration for Megadeath, as if proud to serve under the psychopath. I shook my head in awe. That was just make-believe, a fantasy. Nobody could do that, could they?

The look on my face was enough to ask the question, and the look on his was enough to answer it. It was a picture of belief alright, as well as respect and understanding. But there was something else. Something I could not have expected in the eyes of this ruthless killer. As we casually discussed the very real prospect of the end of Cybertron, I saw fear.

Thunderwing was fearful. Not scared and shaking, but fearful nonetheless. His face told me he was fearful of being wrong. There was the fear that it was all a hoax and this mad scientist was no more powerful than any other warring robot on Cybertron. If Megadeath were to be exposed as a fraud, then Thunderwing would be arrested, possibly court-martialled and executed for desertion and the insubordinate violation of his duties. He feared he was being taken for a fool and a coward.

But more than that, much more, he was fearful of being right. He was fearful of Megadeath. How could someone be so cold? So Evil? The concept of conventional neutron bomb technology research was comprehendible. Granted, there was the small chance of a cataclysmic accident that might wipe out Cybertron, but it was highly unlikely and worth the risk to develop electromagnetic pulse bombs for greedy Militaries that might want to threaten the odd city here or there. But surely no-one was twisted enough to ignore the fruits of a conventional neutron bomb and to concentrate fully on this devastating 'side-effect'? But if there was one mind both intelligent and psychotic enough to pursue this almighty power, it was Megadeath.

--

CHAPTER 15 THE HIT

I approached the facility slowly as Thunderwing ordered. Each step was deliberate, testing both the ground and those around me for a reaction. It was a ruin, reminding me in a way of my entry to Yuss. Such a wreck of its former self, a parallel of Megadeath's mind; powerful and intelligent yet fierce and twisted.

Like the malfunctioning portion of his deranged CPU, the portion that once said "reason" now said "apathy". Bodies adorned the route, laying either side my path, or directly in my way. They were dead; they could not help by lie there. They were dead; so Megadeath did not care. They were fallen, perhaps comrades, perhaps enemies, now they were neither. Autobots lay stacked upon Decepticons. Decepticons lay stacked upon Autobots. Neutralists and those who were worthy only of 'other' filled the remaining gaps.

Crunch. Another step. Another body underfoot gave way. Like a forgotten Walk from Hell leading not to sanctuary, but to Megadeath. The fallen soldiers were a warning to others. Defy Megadeath and your forgotten Walk would too end here, regardless of the insignia that burdened your conscience. Another step, someone moved. He made a motion to shove me aside, unimpressed that I had not differentiated him from the other dormant scum that rotted around me. I ignored him and continued to walk towards the shaky structure that glowed like a temple. Thunderwing maintained his pace, two steps ahead.

"He's in there." he informed me, stopping and pointing into the building up ahead. In there? That dump? I knew we were getting closer, but I was expecting something grander, something more befitting, something guarded at least. But it was probably the only building within a three mile radius with more than half of its walls intact and I felt it was unlikely that Thunderwing would be lying, so shrugged and made my way to the doorframe.

So this was it. This was Megadeath's 'fortress'; and these wretches lying dead and dying were his army. Those countless troops he had hoarded were, in the main, dead, and, in the minority, lying in greasy cesspits. I shook my head at the stark reality. There was no big plan for these troops. Quite why they were here, I still did not fully understand, but Thunderwing was right, there was certainly not about to be some mass invasion by them on the rest of Cybertron. I managed a snigger; if only Snapdragon and Ultra Magnus could see me now and the truth about their defected troops. I had been led right to Megadeath. This was going to be the easiest hit ever; the hard part was going to be escaping.

I walked along the reasonably well-lit, but roofless corridor, following the only path that could still be identified even vaguely. There were a couple of mechs on the floor with varying degrees of missing limbs. Just like outside, there was no way to determine whether they were alive or not. There was a room at the end of the corridor, its doorway unhindered by anything as practical as a door. He was in there. He had to be. I looked all around me for a second. The dead mechs were still dead. Never in the years as an assassin had I ever questioned a hit. As a killer you had to leave your conscience and questions at home. Right now there were just too many, but I had to put them to one side.

The room was dark, almost black, with the only roof for miles left intact. What little illumination there was came from lights in the two adjoining corridors. I stepped inside and he was there. His unmistakable form appeared in front of me, the faintest glow from his face and chest overwhelmed by the stark contrast between his shadows and the bright light from the other doorway behind him. He was hunched over a little, as if in thought. We stood there for a few minutes while I sized up his silhouette. Seeing him here, alive and real, made me question my own thoughts; killing Megadeath would not be as trivial as I had ignorantly thought. I was not sure what he was doing, but I felt obliged to wait for him to finish. I dared not interupt.

"I am here to kill you." I told him finally, quite matter-of-fact. He would probably have killed me himself if I had lied; he would surely not tolerate anything so flippant. But there was a definite movement of his head. His look up at me exposed by the roll of his blackened outline and his powerful, central red eye coming into view for the first time.

"Why?" He asked. His voice was strong, not fierce, but commanded respect. The rest of him, however, was fierce. Against the bright backdrop of the doorway, I saw the sharp shadows of armoured spines, heavy cladding and other shields. Faint glows reminded me of his forearm-mounted weapons that could be called upon at any time. His aura was awesome. He was captivating.

"They are my orders." I explained. I had a plan. All the while I walked down the corridor and up to the room I had told myself not to allow Megadeath into my head. He had corrupted Thunderwing and countless more both before and since. He was not going to do the same to me. I was going to kill him in cold blood. If his neutron threat was for real then I was going to stop him before he had a chance to deploy it. I had a plan.

"You take orders?" he interpreted. "So you are a soldier?" I could not help it. I could not help but answer him. I felt compelled to understand his insane intelligence, his logical lunacy and his psychotic cynicism. If he had truly defied the scientists and developed the neutron bombs Thunderwing claimed he had, then I was standing before possibly the greatest living mind, albeit warped, on Cybertron. And I was here to terminate it.

"I am an assassin." I replied, as much to serve as my own reminder as to inform him.

Pause. He laughed. "For an assassin, you make a remarkable entrance!" His head shifted slightly. "Tell me, assassin, where are your weapons?" He laughed quietly to himself again. He placed whatever it was he was working on down on the desk to his right. I had his attention now. "So, are you going to kill me?" he asked, undisturbed by my honesty.

I did not know. "I don't know." I replied. If I was going to get a reaction from him before he got bored and killed me I was going to have to say something. I had read his files; Megadeath was not tolerant of grunts like me. "But I do know about the neutron bombs." I stated, probing for a response.

In the gloom it appeared that he shook his head. "You know nothing about neutron bombs." He laughed quietly. "No," he changed his mind, "tell me, assassin, if you know about the neutron bombs, what did you think about The Accident?" he posed.

I paused, trying to find the right word. "Horrific." was my honest reply. He nodded.

"Once the war is over, Taggon could never be rebuilt." he continued, the subject of his thoughts changing once more. "It is beyond repair. It is dead." I resisted the urge to shrug and just nodded instead. His head tipped to one side as if one side of his schizophrenia was faltering. "Perhaps parts of Stanix could be salvaged. Parranite, perhaps?" His head tipped back. Perhaps not. "Scyk and Yuss are gone. Devan too." he sighed. "But outside of Stanix, Iacon, certainly, and others all over Cybertron could all be saved from this horror, could they not?" he posed, nodding with a parallelled reference to the word 'horror' I used to describe The Accident.

"We want to rule Cybertron and for it to be the most powerful planet in the universe." I replied, paraphrasing Thunderwing. "For that we need powerful cities to remain intact, and not to collapse like Taggon, Ricon, Tapra and all the others."

The glint from his razor-sharp teeth exposed his smile, impressed with my reasoned logic. When his slow nod stopped, he looked around the room, but as if his mind was focused far away. "This place is run-down, yet Grat gleams in the sun. Do you know why that is, assassin?" he asked, quite unexpectedly. Grat was half a world away on the far side of Cybertron. As far as I knew, it had never been contested. It was a deserted graveyard, an entombed city, a pristine palace for the dead, the like of which had been reserved only for great leaders of age. "It is untouched by war, unspoilt. It remains as pure as the days when it lived." Like Iacon, as I presumed he was inferring. "Have you ever been to Grat? Seen the place with your own eyes?" I shook my head. "I went once. I saw something that I will never forget." he reminisced. "I found it horrific," he agreed, smiling again at the repeated use of the word. "yet strangely beautiful."

I understood. "If they are not your own troops, I suppose the swift death of a million is an awesome sight." Not especially for me, though. Somewhere between the odd kill here or there, and the crushing a thousand-strong Autobot platoon was enough for me. Being a General, he was used to heavier numbers. And if he found marvel in one death, then he would do so a million.

He was unimpressed by my trivial assumption. "I was there." he continued, his voice sterner. "I had been working in Iacon at the time." His head buried itself in his thoughtful shadows. "It was just a short time after The Accident, perhaps just a few weeks. That is unimportant, what is important is what I saw and what I felt. I was the scientific representative of my Military sponsors, there to discuss The Accident, our failures and what we could learn from it. There was much to be learned, but there was one thing to be learned that slipped by everyone.

"They talked of botched contingency plans and faulty fail-safe methodology. They talked of mistakes and blame and hindsight. They talked and talked and talked!" he cussed in disgust at his very memory. "They talked a lot, argued a little, but were in general agreement that this must never happen again. Never again can they allow such a mistake to bring us to the brink of The End. We were that close," he continued, raising up a spined hand, his thumb and forefinger barely apart, "we were that close to The End, The End of us all, The End of Cybertron and the essence of Primus Himself." He stared at me and I could almost feel the icy penetration of his three eyes eeking away at my face, trying to find a way inside. "We almost killed a god!" he bellowed. "Do you have any idea how that feels?"

Horrific? He sighed for a moment, returning his hand to his side. "Have you ever felt fear, assassin?" he asked, without looking up. I gave no reply. I knew he knew what answer I might give, and he knew I knew that was not the answer he was looking for. "I have." he nodded in thought, his face lowering finally. "We almost killed a god." he repeated. "I felt fear. For one fleeting moment. It was primal, it was within the very room. An intangible, yet unstoppable reality held them all by their throats and each and every one of them vowed never to let this fear back ever again. They banished this fear from their minds and their thoughts and from the very room."

He lifted his head to face me again. "We had found the one thing we fear above all else; complete and utter annihilation. The one thing that if controlled would offer nothing but victory in its purest, most effortless form. The war would have been over before it started. Millions, perhaps billions would have been spared and all Cybertron's cities would still gleam." He paused, remembering his thoughts once more. "And they were willing to bury this opportunity away in a pact dictated by the aftermath of Grat and The Accident." He boomed, pausing and allowing his logic time to sink through my cerebral circuits, his voice softening again. "I almost died!" he continued. "And I thought: 'Primus! The insanity of that!'" Thunderwing was right. He was psychotic enough to pursue this deadly scientific goal.

"'Horrific'?" he quoted of me, almost reading my mind. "Have you seen horror?" It was the same question he asked of me regarding fear, but this time I understood the answer I never gave. "Horror has always had a face." he boasted, looking up at me and smiling. "In a war such as ours, horror and terror are allies to fight alongside. They are tools to be used, not ignored. If horror is not your friend then horror is your enemy. If you don't allow yourself to be seduced by horror then someone else will and then it will torment you for eternity. Tell me, assassin, do you find beauty in horror?"

My face twitched for a second, trying to shake his hypnotic voices out my head. "So it's true? You spent your time here continuing your research into neutron bombs?" I asked, ignoring his question for now. "You risked another Accident to strive for the perfect weapon?" He was insane. He looked surprised, or at least disappointed, like I could not see the logical progression of his train of thought. Disappointed that I did not revel in the thought of a weapon that could destroy everyone, destroy a planet or that could even kill a god. "Then where are they? I don't see any such weapons here." I demanded. I had had enough of the questions, the metaphors, the perpetual use of the word 'horror'. "You're insane!" I spat. He was bluffing and I had got him by the throat. He had me going for a moment, but I had seen through him, hadn't I? I thought to give him five seconds to answer, or I would extend my hidden pile drivers mounted on my forearms and smash them straight into the face of this treacherous coward.

I was about to expose him as a fraud, a cheat, a charlatan, or if not, then I'd kill him before he had a chance to launch his neutron bombs. I could see him for what he was. An insane General in an insane world fighting for insane ideals with insane methods. Insane, perhaps, but not God, and that is what he had been caught playing. He could not destroy Cybertron. No-one could do that. No-one could make such a bluff. I was no scientist, but it made sense to me to assume such a chain reaction would require an immense number of bombs, or certainly as many as one might need to pose a credible conventional neutron threat. There were bodies as far as the eye could see, but not a single neutron bomb anywhere.

But Megadeath was unimpressed. This was clearly a threat he had witnessed before. He needed not to answer, but to allow horror to expose itself. His face changed and my world changed. It more than changed; it Ended. In that single moment when Megadeath looked at me, his eyes charged with all the burning emotions of The End, I felt my mind become ripped apart. Transfixed by this mesmorisingly dark artistry, I saw the face of horror itself. In my paralytic cower I knew he knew something I did not. Something that if I knew, would have prevented me daring to asking such a blasphemous question. I saw true horror for the first time, and felt the same fear that Thunderwing had felt as the devil Himself appeared before me. His face told me this was no bluff.

A single finger of a single hand tapped his chest. The burning heart of a maniacal mechanoid. I understood the joke now. Nobody else has the heart for it, as Aftershock had jested. There were no bombs here. Stanix was not stacked high with missiles primed to release powerful EMP's across Cybertron. Actually I was wrong, there was but one neutron bomb. Just one single bomb, but that was, apparently, all he needed. He was the neutron bomb. Had he augmented himself with his own creation, his death would release the bomb from within his body. His death would trigger a super-critical electromagnetic pulse wave from within his body that would kill everyone aboard the planet, then the planet itself and, with it, Megadeath's death would be a Megadeath for all. Primus! He was serious; deadly serious. I had been told it would take millions of years to develop such a weapon; Megadeath had done so in a tenth of that time, and integrated it into his very spark while he was at it.

I looked at Megadeath and stared hard. I was hit by a million questions of doubt, but were countered by two million answers of reason. It was practically possible and possibly practical. He was still playing god, but now he was winning. It was a powerful game and there was no-one to stop him, certainly not me. How could I? By killing him, or risking killing him, I too would be playing god. I would be potentially sentencing the whole planet to an early grave. A handful of Autobot deaths here and there were enough for me. I had no right to seal the fate of a billion billion lives and the whole Transformer race itself. I was not God. Nobody had that right; there was nobody who could pull that trigger. He had won; he was God.

For years, forever, we had lived under Primus. We had grown complacent. We had grown disrespectful. We had grown unfaithful. As Decepticons, we believed though we were all Primus' children, we had the right to kill and maim in the name of fun. We had no need for the Autobots' god, to whom they still prayed. The biggest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist. Wrong. The biggest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he was God himself. And he had done just that. No, he was more than God, he was even more powerful. It was time to choose, so commanded his seductive eyes. Time to befriend horror and Megadeath.

"So, tell me, assassin, are you going to kill me?" he asked again, knowing full well my answer had changed from my previous indecision. His arms lifted high with a shrug, almost asking what else there was left to discuss. "You are free to leave." concluded Megadeath, almost like he was reminding rather than releasing me. He turned and left. I could leave. That much was true, but he knew I wasn't going anywhere. My freedom was caged by my knowledge of the consequences of leaving. How could I ever really be free? How could I ever escape that which could unleash its powerful divinity upon me and crush me without warning? My very essence, my life spark had been shattered.

I had deplored troops like Transit for their frailty and weaknesses that someone might have misinterpreted for cowardice. I demand respect for my experience and ability to educate the ignorant and innocent. The truth was, it was me (along with the rest of the planet) who was innocent. Most of my Military life I had been fighting on the Front Line. Before that, however, I had been a freelance assassin, a mercenary, working for the highest bidder. As a triplechanger I had both air and ground mobility. I could reach places others could only dream of reaching. I was prime for the job. With the outbreak of the war, I worked under Megatron, but with public figures and other targets becoming more and more inaccessible even for veterans like me, I was transferred to Scorponok for Front Line duty.

But it was different to making hits. There were rules; rules that I did not make up, but to which I had to adhere. There was a chain of command; a chain that I could not question. There was experience; experience that I did not have. As a hardened assassin, I was innocent to the world of the Front Line with its stark reality and blanket futility. I had to learn from scratch. I had to made Walks. I had to shatter my innocence to the world of warfare on Cybertron and stand up and fight. I did this for years. But anyone could spend their years fighting, killing, being killed. But that provided no end to your innocence. It served to mask the real innocence that could only be exposed by absolute Fear. With experience on the Front Line came routine. You knew every time you strayed from the beaten track you ran the risk of triggering a mine. You knew every time you flew across the Front Line you were exposed to surface-to-air missiles. You knew every time you poked your head over the wall you were a target for snipers. You were fearful, but your fear was not absolute. It could be controlled, given time and experience. The fact that your judgement became more rational and routine told you that today you were not going to fall foul of such traps gave you confidence. And every time you were forced to Walk a shard of confidence would be chipped from your aching body, but each time you would return fighting fitter and stronger and more hungry than before.

I rose through the ranks. My experience had given me the right to make the rules. It gave me the right to question the chain of command, or to be a part of that chain. I was experienced. But this experience was fake. It made me feel invulnerable. It made me feel I knew all about the Front Line, which I did. It made me feel experienced, but all that had served to do was expose my innocence to the real war.

I never saw Megadeath again. But I felt him. He was everywhere. He had wrenched my innocence from my war-torn hands that were shrouded with the placebo of experience I had earned on the Front Line. His work was done; I was converted. Heck, he did not need the ability to destroy Cybertron, or even a few conventional neutron bombs; all he had needed to break me was the illusion that he had. And he did.

I had been fighting for nothing. War was futile. Not in some gut-wrenchingly mushy Autobot pacifist sort of way, but in an acceptance that everything I done was worthless. No matter how many Autobots I had killed, or how many Walks I had done, there was nothing I could do to escape Megadeath. That was the real war, the Front Line was just a front. There was no way of winning.

He had won already. Crushed me and those around me. Killing Megadeath would have been pointless. Plunging myself and the rest of Cybertron into a holocaust would serve no purpose. He had won because my insignia carried no weight around here. It was within the spark of a Decepticon to revel in the torment of others and perhaps I could amuse myself with the casual murder of an Autobot or two, but it would never be the same knowing Megadeath could do the same to me anytime he wanted. "He just doesn't want to die, himself, just yet."

Or I could turn my back on Stanix and return. I could return, shell some Autobots, make a couple of Walks. I could embrace the security of routine and try to rebuild my shattered innocence. Perhaps I could put the nightmare of Megadeath's Armageddon to the back of my mind by occupying myself with the insipid naivety that was life on the Front Line. Perhaps I could convince myself it could and would never happen. Perhaps I could convince Snapdragon I had killed Megadeath. But all the time I would be living under his shadow, fearful of the day someone actually did.

--

CHAPTER 16 The Fear

Years passed. Tens of years passed. Hundreds of years passed. I remained AWOL and self-stationed at Fort Scyk. What had happened to Snapdragon, and what might happen to me should Snapdragon ever get hold of me no longer figured in my thoughts. I was with Megadeath now. Megadeath looked after His own and destroyed those opposed to me. I felt safe with Megadeath.

To have heard Him was to have heard the voice of a god. No mere mortal could dare to blaspheme against Primus so. No mere mortal could possess that which instilled Fear within the mighty Straxus and Optimus Prime. He had the unique, divine power to live and let live, or to die and let die. It was Skywarp and Ultra Magnus who were the fools. Going behind their commanders' backs, enlisting the help of a killer to do the job they were to afraid to do themselves. Perhaps Straxus and Optimus Prime knew the threat of Megadeath. Perhaps they Feared Him, but they chose to ignore it because they were powerless to stop Him.

Perhaps they did not dismiss Megadeath as a fanatic, or as incapable of destroying Cybertron. Yes, Megadeath could destroy Cybertron, but not just by starting a neutronic EMP explosion. Megadeath was more powerful than that. He could destroy Cybertron through Fear. He took pacifism to a higher level, a level so high that it was supported by hypocrisy alone. Fear Him. There was no alternative. Fear Him. Teaching a pacifist not to fight posed no problem; but teaching a warrior to down his weapon and accept his fighting principles were futile took time, effort and skill. And Fear. But it happened to Thunderwing and it happened to me and given time it could have happened to every Transformer on Cybertron regardless of his insignia. His Fear could have brought the end of the Cybertronian War forever. Fight him and Cybertron would die. So Fear Him.

Instead those fools took me to one side and briefed me to kill Megadeath, as they had briefed Thunderwing and Eclipse before me and would continue to do so. Every year another assassin was sent in to destroy Megadeath, and every year he would be intercepted, converted or, more commonly, killed. Most were ignorant of the Fear. Almost none had seen Him with their own eyes. And in these early days before His Fear was so widespread, conversion was more difficult. Rawhide and Grimace were the not-so-living proof. At this time our troops were limited, and under a dual attack by Straxus and Optimus Prime, we, Megadeath's troops, would have been crushed. This was the information Skywarp, Razorclaw and Ultra Magnus had craved.

I now understood the soldiers under Megadeath. Once shattered, broken warriors exposed to the futile reality of their conflict. Now strong, with a common cause. Megadeath's survival was the key to their own longevity. They were no longer cannon fodder. Under Megadeath's appointment, they were the guardians of Cybertron itself. "We have been chosen." Thunderwing had told me. If that meant sitting around doing nothing for the vast majority of their putrid lives then so be it. It was not in their interests to be at war the Autobots. It was not in their interests to be at war the Decepticons. They posed no threat, not in the way Megadeath did. It was, however, in their interests to be at war with anyone opposed to Megadeath. Megadeath held their Fear, Fear for the death of Cybertron and themselves. Megadeath needed not to be opposed; moreover, He needed to be protected, else the threat of extinction became every closer to being a reality. So they were at war with anyone and everyone opposed to Megadeath. He was the great leader Snapdragon had feared. It was the logical Fear of Him, His death and subsequent Fear of annihilation that had produced ranks of soldiers, led by Thunderwing, of unquestioning loyalty, loyalty that could never be equalled by the troops of Straxus or Optimus Prime. It was psychotic. It was insane. It was tactical genius.

In a way my failure and their ignorance was a win-win situation. In my failure I found salvation in Megadeath, but to their advantage, Skywarp and Ultra Magnus remained ignorant to the otherwise apparent weakness in terms of our once-unimpressively small weight in number. For had the full-scale assault ever reached Megadeath Himself, He would have acted accordingly the war would end, taking the Autobots, the Decepticons and Primus with Him. Blissful knowledge for me; blissful ignorance for them. Win-win.

As the hundreds of years became thousands of years I remained within Megadeath's circle of safety. How little the outside world knew of our existence. However, my forced pacifism came at a price. My world had become mundane. There were battles in Stanix, I was just not a part of them, I was no longer a Front Line soldier. In fact, the official line was that Stanix still belonged to the Decepticons, and specifically Megatron, who had emerged to topple Straxus. ("A coup, a revolution, an uprising, call it was you like, would not be looked upon favourably by the High Command." Skywarp had said about Megadeath. The hypocrite seemed to have no qualms in letting Megatron walk all over Straxus.) In reality though, Autobots had long since taken Taggon, and wave upon wave of Autobots had been advancing, slowly but surely, into Stanix. I was still confident that upon realising the scale of Stanix's disrepair, the Autobots would turn back. But for now, there were areas held by the Autobots, the token areas held by the dead and areas held by the Decepticons, including amongst others Scyk and Yuss. I knew better than the 'official line' though; I knew Stanix, like all the rest of Cybertron, belonged to Megadeath.

But Megadeath was not the picture of a power-mad psychopath I may have painted for you. If He had wanted to stop the war, he could have sent a thousand troops, filled with His Fear into the battlegrounds throughout Cybertron, and the Fear in their eyes would have been as effective as a neutron bomb itself. But the truth was it was easier to convert those in and around Stanix where His devastating technology was more plausible. If needs be, those still unconvinced might meet Him Himself, which would do the trick. The majority of those on the Front Line were ignorant or unable to grasp the magnitude of respect He deserved. So He let them come to Him. Those who were ignorant of His Fear were executed. But patience is a virtue and with his numbers growing, albeit slowly, He could afford to bide His time.

Besides, Megadeath was a Decepticon. He was fuelled by the very slogans I had read in that bar in Yuss so many years ago. Havoc was a good thing. It was entertaining. He liked to hear of Autobots being killed in the mayhem of war. He liked to hear that with every day that passed, another region of dead territory was being taken for the Decepticons. Megadeath felt He would be the beneficiary of the Decepticons' conquests. He felt He was higher than Megatron, or Straxus, or as high as anyone had been before. He had more power than all the rest of the Transformers put together. No, his way was to let time run its course and for His Fear to spread slowly-but-surely. He could probably annex absolute power whenever he wanted, so why rush things when there are Autobots to killed by Megatron? Some of the gleaming cities he had once sought to save were now mostly smouldering ruins like Taggon and Ricon, but there were still plenty of jewelled cities in Cybertron's crown that could be surrendered to Him at a later date. Stanix and half of Cybertron may have belonged to Megatron, but Megatron belonged to Him.

Did I like Him? That was another matter. He was insane, so my opinion of Him changed on a daily basis. But no-one could question His motives, only His methods. "Peace through tyranny." Megatron had once said. Megatron did not know the meaning of the word tyranny. Megatron's troops feared Megatron. They feared crossing him and being held accountable. Fear, yes, but fear in the way I had for Snapdragon. You only had to meet Megatron to fear him. But I could run and hide from Megatron's fear, I could close my eyes and make it all go away. I did. I ran and hid. What I could no longer see I could no longer fear. But I could never hide from Megadeath's Fear. Yet how many of Megadeath's troops had ever met Him? I did, briefly, but to most he was almost a myth, almost a legend. But deep down, they all saw the Fear in the eyes of their new-found comrades and knew that He was real. Now that was tyranny at an apocalyptic level, something Megatron could only dream about. Did I like him? I was grateful of Him saving me from an eternity of falsehood on the Front Line. I understood Him and what drove him to his methods. But above all I Feared Him.

But why Fear him? Why did I believe the threat was so real? Perhaps you had to meet him to understand fully, or see the Fear in the eyes of someone who had. Megadeath was more than mentally capable of destroying Cybertron. He was both intelligent and psychologically deranged enough. He had the technology buried deep within his body and CPU, or so he claimed. Yet no-one had ever seen His experiments. So why Fear Him? Where was the evidence? It was written in the eyes of all under Megadeath's appointment, yet nothing tangible existed. But how was I supposed to verify this? Ask him to prove it? What if he did just that?

Maybe it was all a big bluff. A bluff from a lazy mechanoid who would rather let the rest of Cybertron get on with fighting while he sat in the ruins of a deserted region of Cybertron, home to the desperately low and pathologically insane. Maybe it was a bluff that Megatron and Optimus Prime had no interest in calling. Let the psycho sit in his self-fortified asylum of lunacy. Let him dwell in his decrepit pit of disillusionment, poverty and despair. Let the cowards he had converted rot on this abandoned, unprosperous, dark side of Cybertron. I must admit, the thought regularly crossed my mind. What if?

So Megadeath had a weakness. I was Fearful of The End, but in His deity, Megadeath was fearful of one overriding factor that above all, could bring his reign crashing down to ground, quite literally. What if someone, especially someone in my position, sent specifically to kill Him felt no Fear? Or what if he were simply ignorant? Then He had nothing. He was nothing more than a Mark II triplechanger unit like me. Older, wiser, unquestioningly stronger, but mortal; the only thing He feared was His own mortality. He was afraid to perceive himself in any way other than immortal. No-one could kill him, no-one was allowed to kill him. He was the almighty. He commanded the Fear of a god. He was God.

But the fact remained; only the very brave or the very foolish could ever look into the eyes of a living god and call His bluff.

--

CHAPTER 16 The Angels

Reveille. Dawn broke over Fort Scyk and the rest of Cyberton▓s Stanix region. The whirring mechanisms within my body and that of my troops returned to life. Their semi-disabled powered-down states reactivated. Batteries charged, mental alertness returned to its peak performance and I was ready to face a new day. It was pretty much like any other day within Megadeath's flock. As usual, I was able to sneak to the tech centre for an unofficial once over and service. Maybe I took an unprescribed high-octane energon hit like I sometimes did, I don't really recall.

Word had it that overnight perhaps three or four separate groups of nomadic robots, be they Autobots, Decepticons or Neutralists (I didn't care), had been intercepted. One group had become converted. They had looked into the abyss and seen the reality. They could not turn to leave because they were under our guard, but these guards were for show; they were no longer necessary. They could not turn to leave now because they had the Fear that haunted all of Megadeath's family.

What became of the other two or three groups, I did not know, but I had had plenty of experience to allow me to imagine. Firstly they would be assessed. Did they pose an immediate threat? If not then they would be detained, either on the field, or brought into custody. Could they see the Fear? Could they comprehend Megadeath and His plan? Did they now live to protect Megadeath to ensure the survival of their planet and their own lives? Did they now have the Fear?

Even after thousands of years of the Fear, it was still not a formality. These robots who had perhaps seen the same advertisement I had seen so long ago, or had become detached from their regiment, or had gone AWOL with their dreams clutched tightly in their metallic fists, had denied the Fear. They had been offered a seat at the Devil's table and instead had laughed in His face. They had to be punished. Surely the graves of the unconverted that littered the Stanix ruins were a testament to those who denied Megadeath? Surely the time would come where the Fear would win over all those who tried to deny Him? One day, I believed, but not just now.

Tortured, possibly, executed certainly, these doubters, these traitors would have been killed where they stood, their bodies left to rust to add to the Fear. All around Stanix lay such bodies. For the unconverted thousands, perhaps millions, of troops Snapdragon and Ultra Magnus feared were being hoarded for a mass invasion, it was over. The reality was that these isolated groups could be dealt with in this way. The odd group here and the odd group there could be persuaded or would perish. But had they come in their droves, our small numbers would have been overthrown and Megadeath would have been tested. Would He have had the guts to purge his neutronic soul? I for one believed so. But clearly the two or three groups that had been killed last night did not.

"I've got a job for you." the Duty Sergeant told me. I was pleasantly surprised. I had not been called upon for some time. I was beginning to feel redundant. There was, apparently, a trio of Neutralists who had been discovered back in Yuss. It appeared, there was something of an uprising brewing and this could never be allowed to happen, urging the citizens to stand up against Megadeath, and also the Autobots invading Stanix. I was needed to return the Fear to their lives and prevent these activists from reconverting the rest of the townspeople. My troops and I had been out of action for some time, but the drills had kept us feeling as sharp as ever.

These potential uprisings, now happening more and more often, were beginning to get Megadeath annoyed. Not for the first time, His Fear was being tested. The rumour was that Megadeath had had enough. He had ordered the construction of a few 'regular' neutron bombs (the sort that might knock out about a third of a small city or so) and he was contemplating using them in Stanix to kill all the Neutralists, the incoming Autobots and to act as a sign to bolster His Fear. Thermo-nuclear neutron bombs would be sufficient for Stanix though; surely he was not ready to End it all with His own death? Or perhaps he was finally ready to expose himself to the rest of Cybertron and deliver his ultimatum.

We arrived in Yuss with a bang. My ground troops, Pounder, Claw, Ripsnorter and Switchblade bustled into this decimated area of Yuss that now served as a meeting point, while I flew in overhead. There was a gathering, small but significant, listening to the vile preachings of these Neutralist traitors. I dropped a cluster bomb as much to catch their attentions as to maim. "Kill, destroy, ravage!" It had been a long time.

I transformed into my robot form and landed on the slightly elevated platform, causing it to shudder then collapse under my weight. Neutralists fled in all directions. Pounder let a shell rip overhead and scored a direct hit on a group of ten or more that would be in a position to ingest the words of the preachers no longer. Now in their robot forms too, two of my other soldiers began shooting into the crowd too, taking out a Neutralist here or there. The three cowards curled beneath my feet quaked with Fear. It had already come back to haunt them. But I was not finished. This was too easy. I had to make examples of them.

I extended my forearm pile drivers that had been reluctantly retracted and unused for too long. They struck the floor with ferocity, sending ripples of shockwaves across the metallic plain. Shards of alloys splintered into the air along with the bodies of all those that moments ago were on their feet. I was the only robot in the vicinity with the anti-shock gyro-sensors required to maintain stability. I laughed. I laughed at the pathetic faces of the Neutralist preachers pleading for mercy. I laughed as my troops gunned down those who had dared to defy Megadeath and listen to these wretched machines. I even laughed as my own soldiers wobbled on the shaking ground.

Then I reverted to my tank form, choosing to detonate the building that stood precariously in front of me, sending debris in all directions, covering their bodies with great hulks of the structure. By now most of the Neutralists had fled. Let them go, let them spread the Fear once more. They were of more value alive than dead. The three ringleaders though, they were the real targets. They were not going to get away so easily.

Claw rolled over to where I waited, thinking of a thousand punishments, each more sick and tortuous than the last. He transformed and grabbed one of them by the neck. He picked him up and held him high into the air. He toyed with the terrified traitor, caressing his face with the spines that protruded from his other hand. Prolonging and absorbing his Fear, feeling his terror, he deserved mere scratches for now, so Claw delayed the satisfaction of plunging his claws deep into his face.

The Neutralist was shaking with Fear. Just who did this crusader think he was to call the Megadeath's bluff? Well, he was about find out the hard way that He was not to be underestimated. Claw injected a claw into the Neutralist's head, not far, just enough for his oil and other essential fluids to begin to spurt. He begin to increase the vice-like grip on the coward's neck and I could hear the twists of metal straining and contorting. I shared my comrade's pleasure. "Ripping time!" he revelled, and then his head disappeared in a ball of flame.

The six Angels would have been welcome at any time during any one of my Walks. During any one of my cycles operating on the Front Line I could have not have been happier to be met by someone to end it all, to inflict the final Pain to end all pains. But not now. Not now while I was having fun. For the first time since my final Walk I had allowed complacency to set in. As then when I was under the illusion that no Autobot would have been foolhardy enough to brave a Decepticon onslaught into the dead territory, let alone a legion of them, I was now so taken in by the immortality of Megadeath and his loyal troops that the thought of an Autobot ambush never entered my head. Quite how it happened, or who inflicted it, I did not see. But it had been administered; the final Pain to end all pains. I fell clutching the sparking, smoking wound in my chest, and I thought: "This isn't supposed to happen!" And died.

THE END