Note: You know, it dawned on me that I should say something about one thing regarding this story. I'm aware that there's a four-part comic movie prequel miniseries lurking around out there somewhere. You, the reader of this story, should know that I have not read said sequel, nor do I have any real intention of ever reading it because, to be perfectly frank, I don't like comic books. I've read the novel prequel and the movie novelization, and that's it.
But, since I'm doing pre-movie stuff here, I'm going to go out on a limb and wildly guess that what I'm writing might not mesh entirely well with the "official" comic prequel, if you've read it. So…sorry:) Consider this an AU if you're a comic fan and it makes you feel better…
Anyway, more of the Great Adventures of Barricade coming right up... But first! I offer my thanks to Wyntir Rose for giving my cute but ultimately unfortunate little Oklahoma Highway Trooper a name. I so suck at names…
Thursday, December 14th, 2006, 2:17AM
The northeastern corner of Oklahoma was almost unbelievably flat on top of being largely unpopulated. It was, in fact, one of the few undisturbed stretches of tallgrass prairie that still existed in the United States, a fact that signs scattered along the highway loved to point out ad nauseum. Most of the area was ranchland; the cattle population greatly outnumbered the human population.
In short, the area hadn't changed much in a century. Or more.
The area was also, in the not-so-humble opinion of one Oklahoma Highway Patrol Trooper named Michael Richmond, deadly dull. Hardly anything ever happened, it seemed, in his assigned patrol area, which made for long overnight shifts of complete and unremitting boredom. At the moment, he was sitting in his cruiser at the intersection of Highway 60 and one of the many small, unpaved county roads that criss-crossed the highway at odd intervals. He was hoping and praying that someone would go zooming by him at some exorbitant speed, thus relieving his boredom for just a little while.
It was, he knew, a faint hope. At best.
During the summer, Bluestem Lake, just a quarter mile behind him up the dirt road, drew many weekend campers from the Tulsa area, folks seeking a small rural respite from their hectic urban and suburban lives. More people in the area meant more things going on from a police point-of-view, of course…but camping wasn't exactly a popular pastime in December. Way too cold. Occasionally at this time of year someone would drink themselves blind, go speeding down Highway 60, and then wrap themselves around a telephone pole. Other than routine traffic stops, that was about the extent of the "action" that happened in the good ol' Pawhuska area in the middle of the night in December. And even that sort of thing didn't happen all that often.
So, Richmond was definitely looking forward to his reassignment to Tulsa come the new year. Two years of Pawhuska patrol went, in his opinion, way above and beyond the call of duty. Besides, much more interesting things more regularly happened in Tulsa than here in a sleepy little county mostly taken up by a huge and largely-unpopulated Osage Indian reservation. He considered his reassignment a reward for enduring two years of mostly-boredom; he didn't want to know what his offense had been that had earned him that two years of boredom.
Still, there were consolations, certain aspects of his designated patrol area that Richmond didn't really mind at all. It was certainly not stressful, for one thing; unlike many of his comrades, he'd never been in serious mortal danger during his time spent patrolling the Pawhuska area. And then…Oh, then there was his cruiser, one of the two-dozen-or-so special-edition Mustangs that the state had recently purchased. Since his patrol area was entirely rural – basically open prairie – Richmond was occasionally obliged to engage in very high-speed highway chases. So, just a few weeks ago, he had taken possession of one of the new cruisers, and since then he'd even twice or thrice had the opportunity to stretch its proverbial legs on a couple of chases. The car was a definite plus, the epitome of a sweet ride…and Richmond didn't at all look forward to having to relinquish it to his successor in a few weeks' time. In fact, for the cruiser alone, he envied his replacement, some newbie kid, so he'd heard, fresh out of the Academy.
Figures, he thought sourly and not for the first time. He'd been with the OHP for almost twenty years before he'd gotten the Mustang and then only six weeks after receiving it, he'd have to give it up. This new kid got one right away…Ah, the cruiser gods did not smile on Michael Richmond, no siree….
But besides even the cruiser, for all of the area's inherent boredom otherwise, out here in the middle of nowhere the air was at least clear and unpolluted. The stars sparkled, like scattered diamonds in the sky, their brilliance unimpeded by overwhelmingly-bright city lights. And tonight…Well, tonight he was being treated to a meteor shower and a fairly spectacular one at that. The Leonids back in August had been somewhat unspectacular as far as he was concerned, but now the Geminids were more than making up for it. Falling stars streaked here and there across the clear, cloudless sky more or less every minute or so, and sometimes there were many of them in the sky at the same time. Richmond had always been something of a closet space geek, a secret that he vigilantly concealed from his more macho comrades, and in the absence of anything else to keep an eye on, he was enjoying the show immensely. Nature's fireworks, they were. He would miss things like this, indeed, once he was stationed in the big city…
He was leaning back in the cruiser's driver seat, contemplating the differences between rural patrol and urban patrol when he saw something strange. It was, he knew, just another meteor…but something about it caught his attention. He wasn't sure what the "something" was, but he noticed the meteor almost at the very moment that it entered Earth's atmosphere. It shone like a beacon up there, flaring a brilliant, angry orange against the blackness of the night sky where the rest of the meteors glowed with an almost serene and far less intense blue-white light. A long tail of flame trailed along behind it, making it look almost more like a comet than a meteor. It had to have been much bigger, Richmond idly reflected as he watched the object fall, than all of the other meteorites he had seen so far.
Much, much bigger, Richmond amended just moments later, as the meteor continued to fall lower and lower into Earth's atmosphere. The central mass appeared to grow larger as it descended instead of smaller; it didn't appear to be burning away any of its mass at all as it descended. Short moments later, Richmond mused that it seemed to be heading directly towards him, although he figured that it was only a strange optical illusion of some sort. The odds against the thing really heading straight for him were astronomical, after all...
Only seconds after that thought crossed his mind, though, Richmond fully accepted as fact the preposterous notion that: A) the meteor was indeed heading straight for him, B) it was still flaming malevolently, and C) there was now a faint roar that was half rumble and half whine echoing through the air around him. The racket was growing louder by the millisecond, and it could only have been emanating from the oncoming hunk of space rock. It sounded oddly like the roar of an approaching and unimaginably large freight train engine.
Alarmed, adrenaline suddenly pumping full-force into his system, Richmond threw the cruiser into gear and peeled out for the highway. He turned east, toward town, and fled the immediate area for thirty seconds or so before abruptly slowing and turning the cruiser around, hardly noticing that its tires squealed in protest and that its entire frame slewed dangerously as he executed the sharp, high speed one-eighty. From his new vantage point, Richmond had an excellent view of what happened next.
He watched as the meteor barreled toward the exact spot where he had been sitting just moments ago, realizing with a sort of hollow awe that if he'd stayed in that spot he and his cruiser would have been charred to cinders; the thing had to have passed fifty feet, tops, above where he'd been sitting, and it was still flaming, albeit a bit less intensely since it had cooled somewhat since initial reentry. It was still flaming enough, however, to light up the entire surrounding area and to leave motes of flickering flame in its wake that fed on the dried grass, threatening to grow into a raging inferno. As it was, the thing was still uncomfortably close, almost close enough that Richmond could feel the lingering heat of its atmospheric reentry through the cruiser's slightly open window.
It was, in fact, close enough that Richmond noticed that the meteor looked…weird. Granted, he'd never seen such a large one so up close and personal, but still this one didn't look anything like what he imagined a large meteor would look like. It didn't look like a rock at all, for one thing. It looked, instead, almost like some kind of roughly egg-shaped machine, a shape too precise to be natural. Its surface was a patchwork of evenly-sized and evenly-spaced – and therefore wholly unnatural – plates. Had he been required to guess, Richmond would have supposed that the thing was metal, not rock. He didn't want to think about the implications of that, though. Knowing his luck, he'd now be tied up in government debriefings for the next few months, if he really was witnessing one of their little secret pet projects…
Richmond watched as the thing, whatever it was, smashed relentlessly through a section of the sparse copse of trees that surrounded the lake. Since it had been abnormally dry in the area lately, the trees, like the grass, almost immediately ignited into leaping flames. The impact with the trees had slowed the thing down a bit…but not by very much. Half a second later, it plowed into the frozen surface of Bluestem Lake, smashing easily through the veneer of ice that covered it. A wall of water and instantly-sublimated steam rose around the impact point, visible in the light generated by the fires behind it, and then the thing – whatever it had really been – sank out of sight. The lake, Richmond knew, was at least thirty feet deep at the impact point; given that and the thing's apparent size, it would take some doing to fish whatever was left of it, whatever it had been, out of the lake.
Richmond sat there for a moment, dumbfounded. Then, hastily radioing for back-up and for the fire department to control what might soon be a large brush fire, he crammed the cruiser into gear again and retraced his path to the lake. Lights flashing and sirens wailing this time, he again approached the county road where he had previously been sitting. He noticed that the immediate area was, indeed, charred. The tall dried grass along the meteor-thing's incoming trajectory had ignited, and it was burning fitfully here and there. The incipient brush fire was noticeably gaining strength even as he drove heedlessly by, fixated on his target.
So much, he thought as he approached the lake, for nothing ever happening here…
Earth, Barricade moodily reflected as he hauled himself out of the icy depths of Bluestem Lake, has far too much water on it.
He hadn't intended to land in the lake. In fact, he hadn't intended to land in this general area at all; he was well aware that his quarry was somewhere in California, not Oklahoma. But reentry is a tricky thing; one little miscalculation, one little random, unforeseen impact with a meteorite, and you end up hundreds of miles from where you intended to be.
Perhaps, Barricade reflected, calculatedly arriving on Earth under the cover of one of its periodic meteor showers wasn't the most brilliant idea after all, given the "traffic hazards"… Still, it could have been worse; had the incidental impacts with meteoroids skewed his trajectory in the other direction, he could have found himself at the bottom of one of Earth's oceans rather than at the bottom of a much-shallower freshwater lake.
Thus, Barricade found himself, so his navigational systems told him, in the area that the humans had named Oklahoma. He was in the middle of nowhere in Oklahoma, to be exact. To be even more exact, he was in the middle of the deepest part of a cold lake in the middle of nowhere in Oklahoma.
It was not, he thought, an ideal way to begin his mission.
As Barricade finally freed himself from the embrace of the lake, water pouring off of his body in small, squishing floods, finally sluicing away the last bits of monumentally irritating Martian grit that remained wedged in his armor joints and systems, Barricade took the opportunity to look around himself, taking stock of his situation.
His scanners detected nothing in the immediate area except the half-frozen lake into which he had unceremoniously crashed. The landscape was flat, mostly empty, and distressingly, messily, organic. He'd known that the latter would be true, but it was still rather a shock to the system to experience it first-hand. A thin strand of trees followed the outside contours of the lake into which he had crashed, but beyond the trees there was just flat grassland. Except for the light generated by flames dancing around in the trees – ignited, he supposed, when he had smashed through them – It was utterly dark. He could detect no human habitations of any size or sort in the immediate vicinity. Which was a blessing.
Or, perhaps, it was a curse. He was still in his protoform. On Earth, this would not do. He knew that there was some unknown number of humans who were well aware of the existence of his kind; he was not sanguine about the prospect of having to deal with them on top of trying to complete his mission successfully. No, at the moment he was far too conspicuous. He needed to do something about that. Quickly.
As if on cue, Barricade detected a faint, distant, but steadily-approaching sound, one that, upon drawing on his pre-mission research, he recognized as the alert siren of a human emergency vehicle of some sort. In the middle of nowhere he very well might be, but his arrival had nevertheless been noticed and was, apparently, to be investigated. It wasn't surprising; the humans, he had learned, were inherently curious creatures with a knack for suddenly showing up in places they had no business being. But this, Barricade reflected, was a good thing, at least for him in this one isolated case. He turned toward the direction from which the ever-louder siren was approaching and simply waited there on the shore of the lake. The last remaining waves generated by his violent plunge into and subsequent emergence from the lake lapped over his feet as he stood there. He paid it no mind.
Barricade didn't have to wait long. He heard the rumble of what was for Earth a high-powered engine before he could see anything of the vehicle itself. He saw the bright, flashing, red and blue lights mounted on its roof and within its front grill even before he could clearly delineate the sleek outlines of the mostly-black vehicle itself. Barricade simply stood there, his head cocked almost curiously to one side, his arms folded calmly across his chest, waiting patiently as the small human vehicle warily approached his position. And then he decided to speed up the process a bit by meeting the vehicle half way, his feet making sucking noises as he pulled them over and over again out of the cloying mud on the shore of the lake. If neither altered course, they would meet, Barricade saw in the dim light cast from the growing fires behind him, in a large, open, but paved area.
A parking lot, Barricade's database of Earth information carefully gathered during his years on Mars, helpfully informed him out of nowhere.
When Barricade and the human vehicle were no more than thirty feet apart in the parking lot, the human vehicle stopped abruptly, its driver, Barricade surmised, losing its nerve once it got a good look at him. After a few seconds, the siren whined down to silence, but the red and blue lights continued to flash on and off, alternating colors that danced off of the matte grey finish of Barricade's much-larger protoform body. Nothing happened for long moments, so Barricade took the opportunity to size up the vehicle in front of him, accessing information about the type of vehicle that it was and about the word "Police," which was emblazoned on both of its two white doors. The results amused him greatly.
Law enforcement, indeed…
This amused his so greatly, in fact, that Barricade chuckled as he surveyed the vehicle in front of him and pondered its implications as an alternate form.
This will do, he thought as he circled the police cruiser, giving it a wide berth but not wide enough that he couldn't easily note and scan its details. This will do nicely…
Barricade's thoughts were interrupted when one of the vehicle's white doors suddenly opened, and its black-uniformed driver stepped brazenly out. Barricade had never seen a human in person before. His kind had encountered humans once before, of course – indeed, it had been that very encounter that had led the Decepticons to believe that the humans' planet harbored both Megatron and the Allspark – but he had never actually seen one. He had researched humans thoroughly, though, since there hadn't been much else to do on Mars. He could speak most of their languages, he understood their various regional cultures, and he knew that they were marginally intelligent on the Cybertronian scale of reckoning such things. He knew, too, that they were stubborn and arrogant, thinking themselves the center of the universe. But for all of his research, Barricade was still struck by how odd and pathetic an individual human was in person. It was small and covered in layers of weak, vulnerable flesh that would be so very easy to rend into unrecognizable tatters…
This one, at least, made an effort to be brave, however. Although it cowered behind its vehicle's door for cover, it clutched in its hands a piece of metal that Barricade realized was a weapon. It was pointed up and directly at his head, but this did not alarm him at all. Instead, curious, he scanned the weapon. Not unexpectedly, it was a primitive weapon; It fired small pieces of metal propelled by the force of a contained chemical explosion. It could not possibly do him any harm even in his somewhat weaker protoform. Pathetic, indeed… Commendably, though, the human kept the weapon aimed steadily up at Barricade's head. Its hands did not shake. It was uncertain and afraid, Barricade knew from idly scanning its bodily functions, but it was holding its ground. And then suddenly, the thing spoke to him.
"Hold it right there!" it loudly demanded.
Demanded! Of him! Barricade's amusement with the situation grew significantly. He had thought to merely crush the human, scan its vehicle in order to use its likeness as his own alternate form for the duration of his time on Earth, and then be gone. But now…?
Well, now the human in its pathetic bravery had earned itself a few more moments of life. Barricade could hear other sirens in the distance – No doubt, the human before him had called for back-up as it had approached Barricade's crash site – but he estimated that he still had a few minutes or so before that back-up would arrive. In the meantime, a sort of scientific curiosity had Barricade in its grip, as it often did.
So, it was time, he decided, for a little bit of fun messing with primitive minds.
Barricade did as the human had requested, deliberately halting his slow pacing toward the police cruiser. He stood there, arms hanging non-threateningly at his sides, just watching the human, waiting to see what it would do next. This, apparently, surprised the creature. No doubt, it had likely expected more of a fight.
"What…What are you?" was the human's next question. Whether it stammered out of fear or confusion Barricade couldn't determine.
Regardless, Barricade resumed his slow approach toward the human. This had the effect of alarming it. It fired its weapon twice. Three times. The small projectiles plinked ineffectually off of Barricade's armor, not slowing him down in the slightest; he hardly felt the tiny impacts at all. He just kept striding relentlessly toward the human. This had the effect of making the human gape, freezing it in place. Its lower jaw dropped in an expression of what Barricade could only assume was shock. Barricade, still highly amused, paced toward it until he was no more than two steps away, staring down at the puny wad of weak flesh below, red optics flaring in the dimness.
"I," he intoned, "am a Martian, and I'm here to conquer your planet." It wasn't really all that far from the truth, and that amused Barricade even more…
Now that he was close enough to the creature, Barricade could see the minute facial expressions that crossed its face in response to his words. He saw its eyes, white globs of goo, widen, saw a muscle in its cheek twitch, saw the tip of a pink tongue involuntarily poke out of the thing's mouth and swipe nervously at its upper lip with its overhanging fur of mustache...
And then, as much "fun" as this was, the sirens were getting closer and Barricade knew that he needed to leave. It wasn't that he feared the arrival of more humans, of course. They could not hurt him, he knew. It was more that the success of his mission – and he was determined that it would succeed, if only to annoy Starscream – rather depended on him staying incognito for the time being. It was best not to cross paths with the humans who were aware of his kind's existence until the time was right to confront them. So, with almost genuine reluctance, Barricade refocused his attention on the still-dumbfounded human law enforcement official below and in front of him.
"It is quite a pity for you, human," he said with mock regret, "that you are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time."
The humans, Barricade discovered, were eminently fragile creatures. He'd known this already, in an abstract way, from the information that he had gathered about them prior to his arrival on Earth. Flesh and bone could never be as strong as metal armor overlying metal base construction. Abstract knowledge was one thing; actually witnessing the result of a mere mild swat, like waving aside an annoying insect, was quite another. The human splattered rather messily against the side of a nearby outbuilding, and this cemented in Barricade's mind the fact that the humans were no threat to him or to any of his fellow Decepticons. At all.
Barricade sneered distastefully at the broken lump of flesh, blood, and bone that had been an Oklahoma Highway Trooper before turning away and focusing his attention on the erstwhile trooper's cruiser. It still sat with the engine rumbling in idle, lights flashing, and one white door ajar. Nodding in satisfaction, Barricade scanned the vehicle and assimilated the resulting information. Moments later, just as the other human vehicles were nearing the entrance of the parking lot, Barricade transformed and headed for the county road that would lead him to the highway. He passed the other vehicles heading toward the lake – more police vehicles vaguely similar to the one that he emulated and a large truck that he knew was used to extinguish fires – but they paid him no mind as he headed toward the highway.
Now, he had only to find his partner…and then his quarry.