For HopeofDawn, who works too hard. ) Amazing, awesome beta by White_Aster!
...
Entombed under dark glacial grind, he dreamed.
Quiet dreams, flicker-arcing and tattered wraiths that stirred on a millennial cycle, trapped in a still, still shell.
These are the things he dreamed: the cold scent of wet-rust, in air too dense with oxygen. Occasional light, filtered to a flat blue haze. A medbot crumpled on its back, attenuated legs curled in towards its thorax, dead optic fallen open. A cracking groan, the thunder of vast layers of moving ice. A phantom breath of atmosphere stirring around sensors offline for centuries. Filaments of rhinefrost growing into crystals, lining every joint of discolored armor. The slow pulse of a spinning spark, sustained on the merest droplets of fuel. Sometimes there was more light, less groaning pressure, once the echo of a measured drip. And always, always… the humid, heavy cold.
Perhaps the others dreamed too – Prime warring in the fractured dreamscape of Primes, the rest lying with ghosts, as he did. Bumblebee could not say.
Time turned, ineluctable. Eons passed. Or moments. He could not be sure of that, either.
Change came slowly under the weight of thinning ice, and the next dream was the ping of a chemoreceptor, registering changes in airborne carbon. Sometimes, a little more energon was injected into his pinched-empty fuel lines – not enough to spin up memory banks or even the basal stacks of his CPU, but it was pleasant, in a way, to dream of deep internal status reports.
It grew lighter. Code old and clinical, wrapped carefully around his transmission stem, prevented bootup even as his reserve tanks filled. But the sensors in those empty tanks knew fuel when they felt it, and now he dreamed of fire spreading through his frame. He dreamed of the stirring of nanocytes, the quickening of fluxmetal. His spark, warming, rejoiced.
The dreams flickered faster now, the ghosts thick around him. His ramboot drive, long inert and cold, heated with overwritten data. He dreamed of the withdrawal of a mainline, wires sparking as they broke connection, the first bright charge that had passed through his frame in millennia. And then he dreamed dimly of moving, of cracked sheets of ice falling away like armor he'd outgrown. He dreamed of scarred and blasted plates, heavy as ordinance shells, the weight of them making his rotators groan in the cold.
And then more ice, breaking away from the Ark's loading racks. Behind the frozen curtain, missile tubes gaped dark and empty, waiting. Perhaps it should have been strange to him, this Prime-like lucid dreaming, and his spark roused in its ancient dormancy.
His next dream was of blackness once more, echoing tightly, stygian. His emotional protocols were offline, yet even still there was a gelid kind of… disappointment.
He knew – his spark knew – that he would not dream again.
...
A flash: pressure sensors detecting enormous acceleration, then rarefied atmosphere and the tank-churning disorientation of low gravity. Then a roar began, a molten sound that screamed of heat, shuddering through his very core.
Full bootup came just as he landed.
Too much motion, too much sound, a shattering, heavy frame-thudding jolt and battle protocols flared online, cracking through cabling that smoked as the dust of centuries burned away. Too tight, limbs folded close to frame, impossible to bring up his weapons. Battle reflexes disengaged the electromagnet locks across back and shoulders, and the huge shielding plates sheared away. Light, blinding. Bumblebee fought for footing, struggled to bring his weapons to bear, half-frozen gears grinding, slipping with the effort to form the barrel of his cannon. So much noise -
- and falling. Gravity. Quite a lot of it, too. A tangle of protoform limbs, Bumblebee hit the ground again, shearing through saplings, blasting snow into the air, carving a crater a meter deep. Battle systems forced his legs under him as he tumbled, fighting momentum. Something - organic, hostile - clipped his hip and he was airborne again, downhill, more hostiles streaking past on every side. His mass struck a shelf of brittle shale, scattering shards, nearly wrenching one limb from its many articulated sockets. A looming hostile reached for him, and he met it with a flash of his energon sting. The impact slammed him around, shook him to the core, deflected his mad trajectory. Bumblebee spun to a stop on his belly in a morass of semi-frozen wet organic sludge, the stuff oozing into every crevice of his body.
With a snapping, creaking groan, the huge organic began to topple down upon him, its base cut half-through. Emitting a muffled, static-laced squawk, Bumblebee scrambled to get his feet under him in the paste, to dive aside. There was no traction for his claws, and he rolled, slid, firing up into the underside of the organic.
The thing emitted a horrible, echoing moan as it cracked apart and crashed into the muck, the impact rumbling through the organic-sodden surface. Some of its branching limbs and fingers danced with fire. Hissing in fury, Bumblebee turned his cannon in warning on the rest of the organics, staggering to taloned pedes, concealing his disorientation as best he could. The point of his stinger blade glowed with energon.
The tall organics did not appear intimidated. They also - once Bumblebee's gyros stabilised - did not seem to move much.
Lignin, his chemoreceptors helpfully supplied, sampling the stuff that clung in chips to his own battered armor. Oxygen, hydrogen, carbon - much of it in benzene rings - and cellulotic polysaccharide, sandwiched with dihydrogen oxide and simple sugars. Trace elements: potassium, nitrogen, sulphur...
His chilled CPU glitched over that data for nearly a full astrosecond.
Coal, it concluded, finally. Upright surface veins of low-grade coal. For primitive combustion.
Coal rods? Bumblebee rebooted his optics. But the vertical veins persisted, their branched tips swaying and flexing just slightly, clawing against a sky full of stars. A low energy warning flickered in the corner of his HUD, and he turned to scan his surroundings. The strange coal veins stood in an undulating, broken expanse of dihydrogen oxide, solidified by the cold and then broken down into tiny shards and flakes that glittered in the light of a single moon. The stuff was knee-deep and mainly pure - contaminated just a little by particulate and small debris from the coal rods, but even a hand-held filter could remove that. The field stretched beyond his scanning range. This much fresh water... was worth more than a few credits on almost any market.
Several chunks of metal laying at rest some three kilometers away set him on edge for a moment, before he recognized them as segments of protoform plating, meant to protect a mech - or explosive artillery - during orbital entry. It had been hundreds of vorn since he'd fragged up a planetary landing this badly. Even an unsparked bot knew better than to disengage its plating immediately after the first bounce! But at least that explained why he felt as if he'd been dragged down one side of the Pit and up the other. Bumblebee vented quietly.
Beneath the blanket of crystallized water lay more organic matter - some of it even lower-grade coal than the veins around him, some of it nothing but short, useless chains of sugars. The air was heavy with water, a great deal of dinitrogen, carbon dioxide, and... dioxygen, so dense that it was a wonder all this coal did not combust where it stood. Perhaps the bizarre abundance of water had something to do with that? The rod which Bumblebee had shot still smoldered in chunks, but the flames seemed to be dying out. With a swift glance at his surroundings, Bumblebee initiated the stop sequence for his energon punch and downcycled his lightweight cannon. Both weapons pulled too much power to maintain - not on fuel tanks only 37.8% full. Then he hailed Teletraan.
There was no response over entangled particle transmission. While he waited for a lowbeam reply, Bumblebee pulled one leg free of the powdered water, adapting his foot from talons to a broad, flanged pede that might keep him from sinking entirely through with each step. The coal rods were quite large - a few of them bigger than Bumblebee could wrap his arms around - and solid, if slightly spongy to the touch. By Primus, where was he?
The most recent part of his archives were ragged and grainy, as if he'd offlined before managing to write all his short-term data to quantum drive. They'd been approaching a planet in search of a trace of the Allspark, though, he recalled that much. The globe had been largely blue, its atmosphere thick with water, similar to this place. But there were more products of combustion here - carbon dioxide and ash, and... Teletraan should have answered by now.
Jaws tight, Bumblebee broadened his reception spectrum.
And tonight for your drive we have - ev-ery-body wang chung tonight! - oui, les escaliers - only seven percent if you hurry now - video gone viral - this has been the BBC world news - oh yeah baby, give it to me - dialogue with the soviet era industries - tilipobe kuno, ndi - until that accident gets cleared - seriously concerned about the spread of avian flu in south - Haiti crisis damages - yesterday on the Young and the Restless -
Sounds and images and movement and a thousand, thousand other transmissions on long and shortwave EM frequencies, like listening to the background chatter of a full three battalions on simultaneous riotous leave. That was more Autobots than even still functioned, to Bumblebee's knowledge. And why did so many of the transmissions feature small biped organics, slender as sparklings and hauntingly mechlike? If there'd been signs of sentience during approach, he would have remembered. Prime probably wouldn't even have permitted a ground force, and...
Optimus.
Orders, he had to have orders, there had to be a mission - he couldn't have been marooned on a dirtball, even if he was so useless as to drop his armor in the middle of orbital entry. In Bumblebee's sudden panic, his battle protocols stalled, slipped offline, and *there!* The packet of code and data wasn't located anyplace normal, like in his archives, but rather had been written directly onto his ramboot drive. It was a bizarre location for sensitive information, albeit a very, very secure one. He would have detected the packet immediately upon bootup, if the battle protocols hadn't come online first and swamped higher processing with their demands.
And... someone would've had to mainline him, to implant so much code so deeply. Not just a hardline hack, and Primus knew those were invasive enough. Ratchet maybe, or Teletraan. Or Prime. And none of those made sense, because where were they?
His confusion only grew as he set about decompressing the packet. Some of his sectors were bad, as if he hadn't properly repaired nor defragged in ages, and the rest might as well have been, for all the sense they made. Oh, the actual order was simple enough: Disperse mechabots at target sites. Stealth level alpha-twelve. Wait for further contact.
The accompanying dataset contained a list of coordinates, arranged into an order of priority. The few jotted notations were cryptic at best - 'mainframe only' or 'central generators' or 'both satellite collectors and powerline.' And the level of secrecy required by this 'mission' was the second-highest for which he was configured. Only limited and necessary contact with local species was permitted; otherwise he was to integrate physically and maintain field dampeners and comm silence. There was nothing at all in the packet regarding what the mechabots were programmed to actually do. A crude map - topographical only, slaggit - depicted a thousand or so square miles in insultingly low resolution, betraying no hint at all as to Bumblebee's present location. The whole thing looked like nothing so much as a saboteur's checklist.
A Decepticon trap? Gingerly, Bumblebee reached one talon under a chink in his chassis armor, and was met by the sharp, irritable pinpricks of at least half a dozen mechabots' spidery legs as they tried to shove organic debris and his finger away. With care, he teased one of the creatures out of its internal niche. The unsparked bot was a third the length of one of his talons, muddy, and clearly outraged, to judge by its angrily constricted optic. Most of its systems had been removed in order to house a comparatively huge uplink energy transmitter - such devices were normally tiny. It waved several thin legs at him threateningly.
Pincering it between his talontips, Bumblebee turned the bot upside down, ignoring its furious squeak. The Autobot insignia brand was clear on its underside, despite the mud and wriggling legs. /Access code Tyger Pax twelve-nine-six-point-one one?/ he inquired in a smooth stream of glyphs, and the bot spat back the correct numerical relay in response. Which probably meant very little, if Bumblebee had indeed been mainlined by the enemy. Thoughtfully, he let the bot clamber upright. The thing stormed its way up his arm and back into his chassis, where it continued flinging dirty, melting snow out of its niche, chittering quietly to itself.
His chromatophores had been offline for a long, long time, he realized, studying his own hand. His armor was nearly gray.
Tanks at 37.7%, now. Bumblebee was strikingly fuel-efficient, yes, but with the mechabots to maintain as well, a third of a full charge wouldn't last a millivorn. Pushing himself upright from the branching coal rod, Bumblebee chose a spot on the map which somewhat resembled his present location, then calculated the nearest target coordinates. And started walking.
