In Defense of the Judas
That treacherous spider. Or spiders, now, really. Megatron is always spouting some garbage about those two. And if it's not about THEIR treachery, it's about mine. That slagging flyer is what he usually says, and he means me, because Waspi doesn't have the brains to betray and Inferno wouldn't understand the concept if you explained it to him with graphs and colored pictures.
I will admit that honestly, though. I am treacherous, and every minute I am awake and my mind is free to wander, I am plotting another way to dispose of Megatron. I almost did, once, but the sheer shock of it made me stupid. That kind of power...it's intoxicating. It's insane. And uncontrollable. I haven't had another chance like that since.
Everyone in the ship knows the spiders are traitors at times, and I am too. What everyone doesn't know is that I was betrayed first. I was lied to first. Turnabout's fair play.
It starts, like nearly all things for our race, with Cybertron. After the Autobot-Decepticon Great War ended, after the Maximals and Predacons duked it out for another century, or more, finally a firm government was set up, and since then there have been no further civil wars. Not on such a scale as grand as that, at least.
The problem with the government is that it was and still is known as Maximal High Command. Do you see the word Predacon in there anywhere? Me neither. Because it was a government by the Maximals and FOR the Maximals, and the Predacons, well, too bad, so sad, we didn't really lose the war, but we didn't win it either. There was a truce, but it was our side that lost.
The fact remains...and remained, I suppose, that we Predacons became, nearly overnight, second-class citizens. In some sectors of Cybertron, if you wore your faction symbol, it was enough to land you in an R tank. And Primus forbid the police came by, because they worked for the government and over ninety percent of them were Maximals. Any Predacons on that force were manual laborers, fixing small problems with intercoms and the like, being gofers for hardly any income in return. The majority of Predacons could not keep their occupations, and it was not uncommon to see lines and lines of my faction, even those too young to have ever fought in the war or remember a time when the government was equal and balanced, waiting for spare energon and energy from a welfare office. They almost always ran out before a quarter of the line dissipated. But things were better than during the war. Said the Maximals.
Things were bad. And when things are bad, of course, you get rebellion, you get revolution. So Predacons fought back. Had minor civil street riots, attacking stores and homefronts, attacking Maximals...which brought the police forces en masse. A lot of people were killed in those riots, and the free-for-alls were always blamed on the Predacons. That "unruly, undisciplined mob who thinks weapons solve EVERY conflict," that was us.
You get the general idea. I myself had been an aviator in one of the last wars, and with the Predacon army disbanded, there was no place for me to go. There were no job openings, no training courses offered, and any Predacon who had been in the army, no matter for how grand or menial a task, was forced to undergo Maximal "post-war therapy," where we were sat in vast rooms and shown images of the new lovely world that Cybertron would be under Maximal control. A booming economy, exploratory teams, new advances in medical technology and technology in general, everything.
The images failed to explain that unless Maximal High Command thought you were reformed enough, none of those choices applied to a Predacon.
Bias? Yes. Bad? Worse. Predacons were sometimes shot for 'assembling with intent of destruction of property of others.' Loitering, in other words, in very Maximal areas of the city. There were never investigations to find the shooters. Second rate citizens, remember?
And then one day it all changed, because that was the day I met Megatron, and from the start I was impressed with him. One, his stature, his pure belief that the Predacons had been terribly wronged, and two, because he had the Decepticon leader's name, and he lived up to it. Two meetings after our initial one, in a Maximal post-war therapy slag, he told me his plan to steal the Golden Disk, to find an energy-laden planet, and use its resources to help bring the Predacons back to power.
It sounded like a good idea, at least at the time. So there was myself, Megatron, Tarantulas, Scorpinok, Waspinator, and Dinobot. All of us had grudges against High Command, and finding a planet so rich in energy that could save us and perhaps bring about another civil war, which MIGHT have lead to a more balanced government, sounded good to all of us. As things went, we got the Disk, made a break for it...and High Command sent the Axalon after us. We crashed, we landed, you know the rest of the story.
Dinobot was the first one who discovered Megatron had lied to us. Seems Megatron was not looking for any planet, he was looking for ancient Earth. Now, I don't know much about Earth, but I know that ANCIENT Earth had NO energy we could use, unless we wanted to harness the power of the tar pit or had enough converters to stockpile. But our ship didn't.
Of course, we found the energon pits...not only were we NOT on a planet we could get away from, we were lost in time and space since Megatron destroyed our transwarp drive in fleeing Cybertron. So maybe this IS ancient Earth...just not the one from our past. From another parallax universe, maybe. But not ours.
Anyway, Dinobot found out this news first. Megatron was not looking for any energy-laden planet, only ancient Earth. I wasn't looking for any place for anything BUT energy to change our status on Cybertron...Megatron was looking to alter some great destiny, in his words. I remember he said that right before Dinobot walked...I also remember how Waspinator and Tarantulas exchanged glances, this was news to them as well. Dinobot and Scorpinok looked both confused and slightly mad. And myself? After being promised a chance to help save my faction and friends, only to be dragged off on some madman's quest for personal glory? Wanting to rebuild the Deception Empire, as he said?
Not happy, no. I never signed on for some psycho's self-esteem trip, that he wanted to make himself feel as great and powerful as the first Megatron. I never intended to get lost in ANYTHING like these damn BeastWars, I intended to get some energy back to Cybertron, or at least find a refuge we could stay at to start the rebellion from High Command.
But no. Instead, here we are, and here I am.
And Megatron wonders why nearly everyone plots treason against him? Could it be because he deceived us first, that he asked for equals and truly desired slaves and subordinates?
So yes, the spiders betray him for their own reasons...Tarantulas wants off this lost planet, and Blackarachnia with him...Dinobot betrayed Megatron because of the lies with the Disk...and myself? I betray him, or at least try to, time and time again, not for personal reasons, not for the deceit, but for Cybertron and all the Predacons left on the homeworld, dying slowly, being starved out from their rightful places as citizens, for all that I've left behind and surely will never see again. I betray Megatron because he has betrayed me, and Predacons everywhere suffer for it now.