Chapter 1: Fight of the Bumblebee

When there weren't any Decepticons around, Bumblebee's favorite part of his job was reconnaissance. Far and away, the most common form of life in the galaxy was biological. Most of it was nonsentient. On the occasions it was sentient, machines almost always followed, and thus Cybertronians were able to successfully disguise themselves whenever it was necessary.

If the war had never happened – if Bumblebee had only been created a few vorns earlier – he figured he might have been a colonizer for the Cybertronian Empire. Meeting and observing indigenous life was just fascinating.

The neighborhood the Witwicky's had made their home in was upscale middle class suburbia. The family consisted of two parental units, who were the Creator of their single child. They kept a domesticated pet, a Chihuahua, which bore resemblance to nothing so much as a large rodent although it was classified as a type of dog. Ronald Witwicky spent much of his free time caring for the short green vegetation known as grass that covered his lawn and adding decorations of his own; his job was located in a building 13.63 miles away via the roadways. The mother added her own vegetation in a variety of brillant colors around the sides of the home or lay on a reclining chair in the sun, reading books. The boy left early in the morning for school and returned in the mid-afternoon, only to leave for a variety of activities shortly thereafter.

School was a particularly interesting concept to Bumblebee. Cybertronians had no need for such an institution. Certainly there had been – before the war – institutions of learning, but those had been dedicated to discovery, not teaching what was already known. Knowledge that was needed was instilled shortly after creation in the form of downloads; societal functions were determined by form rather than choice, although such things could be outmoded. (Bumblebee, less than a vorn old when the fracture between Optimus Prime and Megatron had become public knowledge, had certainly not been created with missile launchers in his shoulders or a pulse cannon in his arm; those had come later.) Maturity was considered to come when a Cybertronian had completed its programming sequences and was able to transform out of protoform. But humans, short though their lives were, spent a longer percentage of their life reaching full maturity and approximately one-fourth to one-third of their average lifespan attending school, where the collective human knowledge of the world was passed down verbally and visually to the younger generations. Humans had imperfect processors as well; repetition was necessary to cement a concept in the human mind, and concepts could be later forgotten with no external stimuli causing damage. Humans were graded on their ability to retain passed-down knowledge, and those somewhat subjective marking systems determined how much more learning a human could participate in and dictated future societal functions (careers; jobs) almost as much as personal choice.

Concepts that were in danger of being forgotten were recorded in written format on paper: flammable, susceptible to external damage, and bulky compared to a microchip. Bumblebee couldn't figure out why humans did not simply convert all books to electronic format, but instead dedicated entire websites to places where books could be purchased. Perhaps there was some sort of external pleasure derived from book reading? The youngest Witwicky, 'Sam', did not seem to find anything about the books his school provided interesting; Bumblebee had heard the young human complaining loudly about how much reading he had to do on several occasions.

But his paternal unit placed a high value on the grade concept 'A'. This was apparently the necessary mark (in triplicate) for Sam to acquire his first automobile, along with two thousand US dollars, the common form of currency. Sam was very concerned with this matter, and when he was home he spent much of his time in his room, the only sound turning pages and occasionally phone calls to his friend Miles.

Sam's other great concern in life was his ability to attract members of the opposite sex.

Many biological life forms had a diametric split in their functionality (both biological and to some degree societal), and humans were no exception. Males and females had to work together to procreate, whereupon the female would incubate the unborn progeny for a period of close to a year. In a basic family unit, the male and female would then care for their tiny sparkling (no, baby) for about the same amount of time as the child spent being schooled. Upon reaching maturity, the child would be expected to then repeat the process with another mate, and so on.

Acquiring a mate – and the act of procreation, known as sex – was a great concern of both male and female humans alike. A disproportionately large portion of the Internet was dedicated to the subject. It was hard to say if the act hurt or pleasured, but it seemed more likely to be pleasurable. Subjects such as beauty, personal hygiene, and even vehicular choice, careers, and income were all tied back to the chance of successfully landing a mate and/or mating. Sam was no different from any other human in his obsession with 'dating' and 'hot chicks', which from his point view depended equally on his physical attractiveness and how 'sweet' his 'ride' was. ('Hot' referring, of course, to attractiveness, and 'sweet ride' to the functionality and appearance of his vehicle.)

Ratchet would have been fascinated to know that humans did not use pheromones – or rather, did not sense pheromone output – to attract one another. Indeed, the entire matter seemed to be almost completely psychological, culminating in feeling and declaring love. Sex itself was actually referred to as 'making love'. (Although actually, it made babies. Bumblebee did not mind admitting the concept of sex was so beyond foreign to him that he found it unnerving. Even diametrically divided species were only a case study to Cybertronians, after all; the Allspark was their only source of life.)

Even their songs were often dedicated to the subject of love and attraction, and since the radio was Bumblebee's primary form of speech now, he found himself listening to them quite a lot.

But all this was a minor side pursuit in his overarching mission: find some hint of the Allspark. Bumblebee had been observing the Witwicky's for two weeks by human reckoning, and they seemed unlikely to know anything about the Allspark. Given that the country's military apparently had the Allspark in their control, Bumblebee had expected the father to work for the military, but Ronald Witwicky held down an unremarkable, unrelated job. Archibald Witwicky had never been a subject of conversation to Bumblebee's hearing. He had gradually moved in closer and closer, pretending to be a car parked two streets down, periodically driving by their residence, and following the various family members to external destinations, but none of them had noticed him. They were an unremarkable suburban family that contained descendants of an ordinary man who had discovered something extraordinary, and they didn't even seem to know he had done so.

Bumblebee was facing the prospect of sitting on yet another dead end. Even more disheartening was that he was one descendant away from exhausting his leads and being forced to find some way to directly hardwire to places that would have military information. That level of infiltration would leave him forced to kill humans (not an option), severely injured (and easy for a Decepticon to pick off), or captured (likely with Megatron, if Megatron was deep frozen and with the humans, and just the thought of that made Bumblebee's processors overload).

Slaggit! Bumblebee found some angry, unintelligible hard rock on his radio and let that play. Human music was far from Cybertronian music, but the beat and digitized 'electric guitar' output was not dissimilar. Harsh chords filled his interior and made Bumblebee wish harder for a voice to curse with.

In front of him, Sam Witwicky disembarked from the bus that took him back and forth from his school and jogged across the lawn into his house. Bumblebee turned down the radio, did a u-turn and parked himself behind their fence, out of sight. "Sam, you know your father hates it when you walk on the grass," his mother admonished, although Bumblebee could not detect even exasperation in her voice.

"It's grass, it's meant to be walked on," Sam grumbled as he opened the sunroom door. "He lets Mojo piss on it, so why can't I walk on it?"

"I don't know, honey, but—"

"Yeah, yeah, his house, his rules," Sam answered, the sound of his feet on the stairs and his backpack slapping against his spine audible. "Is it okay if Miles comes over later?"

"As long as your homework is done," his mother said agreeably.

For a while all was quiet; Sam mumbled to himself about a few things; his mother ran the cleaning device known as a vacuum cleaner over the rugs (and figuring out what that sound was while only having the sound to identify it with had been an interesting pursuit).

Sam's friend Miles appeared 106 minutes after Sam had asked if he could come over. The adolescent wore his pale hair long (even when a human had finished reaching maturity, certain parts of their body continued to grow; their fingernails and toenails, their hair, and oddly, their ears and nose. Humans would shear off their hair and trim their nails at regular intervals to curb their growth. Bumblebee could not imagine how such a thing could not cause indescribable pain) and his preferred mode of transportation was via 'skateboarding', a board on wheels that could be steered by shifting one's center of gravity. Miles rolled into the driveway of the Witwicky home, kicked up the board into his waiting hands, and jogged up to the same sunroom door Sam had entered through. "Hi, Mrs. Witwicky!"

"Hi, Miles," Judy Witwicky said mildly. "Sam's upstairs. Are you staying for dinner?"

"Is'zat an invitation?" Miles asked. "Sure!" He was going up the stairs now, the same direction Sam had gone. "Thanks!"

"We're having spaghetti and salad! Tell Sam!" Judy called after him.

Sam and Miles exchanged greetings, Sam considerably less enthusiastic than Miles. But then the subject matter turned to something that made Bumblebee sit up on his axles.

"Dude … what is this stuff?" There was the sound of objects being pushed around a cardboard box.

"It's my great-grandfather's expedition stuff," Sam said in a disinterested tone.

Captain Archibald Witwicky's expedition articles! This was exactly what Bumblebee wanted to hear about! Maybe the Allspark – or at the very least, Megatron – would come up in conversation. Perhaps the family knew about the fate of the so-called 'Ice Man' after all!

"You mean the crazy granddad, right?" Miles asked.

"Great-granddad. Yeah."

"Cool … it's one of those navigation things."

"Sextant," Sam corrected absently, drawing a snicker from his friend. "Dude, what are you, five!?" That just made Miles snicker harder, and Sam groaned. "You want it? It's for sale."

Miles didn't answer directly, the sound of rummaging still audible. "Why'd you get all this stuff out?"

"Genealogy project for class." There was the sound of a book slamming shut. "I figured they'd be good props. My grade's riding on it."

"You really gonna get up and talk about your crazy granddad in class? In front of Mikaela?" Miles drawled out the final word, a name Bumblebee recognized from previous conversations. Apparently she was a female of particular interest to Sam due to her physical attractiveness.

"I'm not gonna talk about that part," Sam snapped. "I mean, look, the expedition itself was a really big deal. My great-grandfather was the first guy to make it into the Arctic Circle ever. And this stuff is really ancient so it's pretty valuable."

"But the Ice Man is the best part of the story," Miles protested.

Sam's voice conveyed how very unimpressed with Miles' enthusiasm he was. "I wish I'd never told you about that," he grumbled. There was a moment of silence while Bumblebee eagerly hoped that Sam would detail the story again. Surely he knew more than the urban legend and official records on the Internet.

"Check it out! Glasses were tiny back then," Miles exclaimed.

Suddenly all of Bumblebee's sensors drew to complete attention. His EM sensors were picking up an odd signal from Sam's room. His data banks brought up the last time the signature had been felt with little difficulty; at the time, Bumblebee had been having his vocal capacitors crushed by the leader of the Decepticon army.

It was like someone in Sam's room was holding a miniature, severely reduced replica of Megatron's optics.

"Don't break them! I'm putting those up on Ebay," Sam protested abruptly.

"Nobody on Ebay is gonna want a pair of really old broken glasses."

"How do you know? I only need a hundred bucks before I can get my car. People like old stuff, right?"

The signature disappeared abruptly. An EM signal that weak could have been easily shielded by a bit of encasing metal, but Bumblebee's curiosity was piqued. It was faint and almost non-directional; he would have never detected it from a distance of more than perhaps sixty feet from the home, and certainly not at all if his sensors had not all been tuned towards Samuel Witwicky's room.

It was easy to deduct the EM signal came from the aforementioned glasses (after discarding several colloquial uses of the word 'glasses', Bumblebee determined they were likely the ocular correctional variety, external instruments placed across the nose and ears to correct focus errors in human optics), since the EM signal came and went with the subject. Somehow, Captain Witwicky's eyeglasses had become imprinted with Megatron's EMS.

Bumblebee needed to get a scan of those eyeglasses.

"Sure your dad's not gonna be angry you're selling your great-granddad's stuff?" Miles was asking.

"Well, don't tell him." Sam's bed squeaked. "You staying for dinner?"

"Yeah, your mom asked. Whaddaya wanna do 'til then?" Their conversation drifted off to topics irrelavant as Bumblebee considered the information he had just gained.

Sam Witwicky was planning on selling those valuable glasses? That couldn't be allowed! Although how he could prevent such a thing from happening was a mystery. Bumblebee accessed the Internet and looked up the website Ebay.

Ebay functioned as a large-scale miscellaneous commodity advertisement, allowing members to sell and purchase items at individually assigned prices with relative privacy. Those willing to sell at the lowest price and those willing to buy at the highest price usually moved the most merchandise. A search for 'eyeglasses' led to an assortment of items, but the glasses of Archibald Witwicky was not amongst them. He tried several other searches: 'antiques', 'glasses', 'personal effects', et cetera, but although a few of Archibald Witwicky's other possessions were available (Sam selling them under the moniker 'Ladiesman217' – pseudonym practice was common on the Internet), the glasses were not amongst them. Bumblebee's fan turbines whirred with relief; for the time being they would remain in their current abode, well hidden and unnoticed. Then Bumblebee realized that if the Decepticons knew about Archibald Witwicky – and Bumblebee could not know for sure that they didn't – then they, too, would be interested in these artifacts, which were now displayed publicly for the world to see. Concern for the boy's well being flooded Bumblebee's capacitors. The Decepticons would not be so subtle about the information they wanted.

Later that night Bumblebee learned, through a conversation at the dinner table between Sam and Ronald ('Ron') Witwicky, that the genealogy project upon which Sam's grade depended was due on Friday, the sixth day out of seven in a human week. The upcoming Friday was three days away. Bumblebee made note of it as a day when the EMS-marked glasses would leave the house for an extended period of time.

In the meantime, he would wait for the glasses to be removed from their case so he could obtain a scan. He settled on his chassis, ready, he liked to believe, for anything.

&

'Anything' came the following night.

Sam Witwicky had put the eyeglasses up for sale. Bumblebee uploaded the webpage, then saved it to his processors and added it to the data package he intended to send in the hours preceding the rising of Earth's sun. Perhaps Jazz could get more out of the picture of the eyeglasses than Bumblebee could: he did not have the processors to analyze the low-resolution photograph provided. (Humans regarded the resolution as high, but their optics were far inferior through no fault of their own; they were clearly well enough equipped for their own needs.)

At 2:03 AM local time, Bumblebee's audio receivers and EM sensors picked up an unusual signature 328 feet south-southwest from the Witwicky home. Specifically, he heard the rumble of a particularly large and unmuffled engine, while at the same time registering nothing on his EM radials. An incongruity, since anything with electrical components gave off some kind of electromagnetic radiation.

The sort of incongruity that came with Cybertronians equipped with dampening fields.

Barricade was never this subtle. The last time he had attempted anything that resembled a sneak attack, it had been to ram a recharging Bumblebee across a parking lot and attempt to take out his innards with his blades. No, this was someone else: possibly a friend, but more likely a foe. The Autobot quietly started his engine and pulled out onto the road, following the sound and not-signal in a path that would take him past the Witwicky home.

The other Cybertronian was clearly advancing on the house. The not-signal hesitated when Bumblebee passed in front of the Witwicky residence; Bumblebee picked up his speed a little, determined to intercept before the other got too close to the home. When he finally turned the corner that put the potential opponent in his optic range, Bumblebee paused, somewhat shocked by the sheer lack of subtlety.

The other Cybertronian was currently alt-moded as a dune buggy, mounted with a considerable anti-tank weapon and swathed in desert-camouflage coloring. And he was rolling around suburban Nevada like this! The holographic driver flickered as the Cybertronian hesitated under a lamppost, no doubt trying to assess Bumblebee as friend or foe.

"Who are you?" The Cybertronian asked at length.

Bumblebee couldn't answer for obvious reasons, and since this Cybertronian, whether Autobot or Decepticon, was not part of his particular Ark fleet, he couldn't directly uplink to transmit information. He settled for switching on the radio and playing a clip from 'Flight of the Bumblebee'. It was unlikely the Cybertronian would get the joke, even if he had learned the local language.

He was right; the Cybertronian revved his engine. "Don't play games! Do you serve our Lord Megatron or are you one of the Autobots?"

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Bumblebee revved his engine high and aggressively; a human equivalent might have been a snort of disgust.

"I should have known. Your lot always picks the most pathetic alt-modes." The Decepticon began to roll forward. "Get out of my way or get wasted, Autobot." Infrared sensors lit up as the Decepticon began to load his front cannon.

If he expected that to intimidate Bumblebee, he was sorely mistaken. He didn't move, but nor did he transform for the moment.

The Decepticon had to be here regarding the Witwicky family. The only other possibility, that he had been hunting Bumblebee, had been discarded by his lack of knowledge of the Autobot's presence. And as long as the glasses were in the Witwicky home – and as long as he acknowledged Optimus Prime as his leader – Bumblebee would die in defense of the indigenous life forms. He needed to distract the Decepticon so completely that he would not return – or slag him. It would have been a lie to say Bumblebee wasn't ready to waste one of the enemy after two years of just running from Barricade.

"What, are your processors damaged? I said, get out of my way," the Decepticon snarled. "You should count yourself lucky I'm not after you. Move and I'll spare your pathetic life, for now."

He did not want to transform here. It was foolish, exposing, and invited the Decepticon to do the same – they were never ones to back down from a show of aggression. But as Bumblebee desperately surfed the radio waves for something appropriately insulting to distract the Decepticon he found only Hispanic salsa, infomercials, and static.

Well. Static he could work with.

Maxing out his speakers, Bumblebee shut down his audio receivers and pumped out a low-frequency hertz at an extreme decibel level, one that actually threatened to shake his own circuits out of whack. Even directed at the Decepticon, the ground seemed to tremble with the frequency.

The Decepticon roared, an electronic shriek, and reversed for a moment in agony; his audio sensors had received the full assault, and he would likely be temporarily 'deaf'. Suitable – a mute Autobot versus a deaf Decepticon. The quietest Cybertronian fight in history! As Bumblebee switched his audio receivers back on, though, he was assaulted with infuriated cursing in Cybertronian at the same time as the Decepticon made his best attempt to run Bumblebee over.

Bumblebee reversed and squealed backwards around the corner before downshifting and accelerating down the residential street. The Decepticon, still shrieking curses and threats, took off after him. The Autobot did not drive too fast, since the point was to keep the Decepticon distracted, but also did his best to stay out of range of the ballistic cannon mounted on the Decepticon's alt-mode; he raised a map of Tranquility off the World Wide Web.

Tranquility had a quarry, a junkyard, and a chemical plant all not far from its borders, and humans rarely occupied any of them at this hour. The quarry, however, was closest. Bumblebee tracked out a path and drifted around a turn, accelerating long enough to knock a chainlink fence bearing signs saying things like "KEEP OUT" and "AUTHORIZED ENTRANCE ONLY" open.

The Decepticon reliably followed him. Bumblebee followed the authorized road until it turned to gravel and veered off in front of the considerable pit of a limestone quarry; here, he blithely picked up speed until his wheels pounded into air over the sheer drop.

He transformed in midair, flattened his sensors to his back, and landed sixty feet below with a ground-cushioning roll. He came to his feet already retracting the fingers of his right arm and drawing his pulse cannon to bear.

The Decepticon launched himself off the edge of the quarry already in protoform, and before Bumblebee could clear a shot, he fired off an anti-tank cannon round.

Bumblebee dodged; the resulting explosion of rock and dust propelled him several feet through the air to skid on his feet across gravel and dust. He returned fire, and by sheer lucky coincidence managed to explode an incoming round in midair, resulting in a brilliant plasma ball that briefly washed out his optics.

The Decepticon dove through the fallout and wrapped massive hands around Bumblebee's head, using his mass to throw the slightly smaller Autobot to the ground. Bumblebee used their combined momentum to slam both feet into the Decepticon's torso, launching the other off him; he rolled back to his feet, firing into the dust cloud raised by the 'Con's impact with the quarry wall.

He was caught unaware by the return round; which at such close range only registered as a flare of infrared light before appearing out of the dust cloud and clipping Bumblebee's shoulder. It was still enough to spin the Autobot halfway around, struggling to equalize his center of gravity, and the Decepticon fell on him, sending him crashing to the ground and grinding his faceplates into the rock. "I think I recognize your protoform," The Decepticon sneered, holding down Bumblebee despite his struggles. "Should've guessed when you wouldn't say a thing up there in alt-mode. Bumblebee, right? It's been a few vorns! Miss me?"

Now that the Decepticon wasn't masking his EM field and he'd gained a glance or two at his protoform, Bumblebee did recognize him: Hardtop. The Decepticon rode in a ship that flanked the Nemesis from time to time, and favored big explosions over subtlety on top of being a crack sniper with his finer weaponry.

The feel of Hardtop's cannon loading against the backplates that covered Bumblebee's spark galvanized the smaller 'Bot. "Dodge this," Hardtop sneered.

Bumblebee loaded his own cannon and fired at the ground under them.

The plasma-load superheated the rock and exploded it, launching Bumblebee and Hardtop in opposite directions. Damage warnings across his chestplates were all extraneous; there was a minor coolant leak that would reseal itself within minutes and superficial denting. But Hardtop was generally more dangerous at greater distances, so Bumblebee charged towards the Decepticon, coming in low before the other Cybertronian could recover. He caught Hardtop across the legs with his shoulder, wrapped his arms around Hardtop's knees, somersaulted over him, and flung the Decepticon as hard as he could towards the opposing quarry wall.

Hardtop flipped in midair, protecting himself by landing with one foot on the wall and the other on the ground, but he fell regardless and clouds of dust rose again. Bumblebee ran forward and slightly to the right; the following sniper fire of mini-plasma rounds fell where Bumblebee had stood a moment before, proving that the earlier assault on his audio receptors was affecting him. But as Hardtop charged clear of the dust his aim proved true again. Bumblebee folded down to alt-mode in an effort to avoid the incoming bullets and rammed himself into Hardtop's legs again.

Hardtop landed on top of him. Bumblebee's broken voice processors produced an involuntary squeaking noise that might have once translated as 'Slag it!', if only Bumblebee remembered how to say it. As it was he bucked his chassis to slide Hardtop halfway off himself. Hardtop grabbed at his undercarriage with one hand, then howled in pain at the same time as Bumblebee squeaked again in severe discomfort. Hardtop's fingers became trapped – and snapped off – into Bumblebee's interior by the Autobot's sudden transformation, crippling Hardtop's hand and locking Bumblebee's knee to only half its usual movement range.

Bumblebee scrambled, still trapped halfway under Hardtop, and fired his pulse cannon at point-blank range, sending the Decepticon skidding twelve feet across the ground.

The Decepticon was cursing and now visibly fritzing a little, superheated plasma having taken its toll on his chest armor. Bumblebee attempted to get to his feet but found Hardtop's fingers had jammed his gears; he staggered back to his knees. He was a waiting rust pile if he couldn't present a moving target to someone like Hardtop. "I thought I'd just disable you and get back to business," Hardtop was gasping, his cooling turbines overclocking in response to the damage. "But now I think I'll take your head off first!"

Bumblebee prepped and mounted his shoulder launchers, setting his aim thirty feet high; he launched his remaining three missiles. Hardtop ducked in automatic response, then laughed when the missiles struck the rock overhead. "Did I break your trajectory programming!?"

Bumblebee followed up with his pulse cannon, slagging and exploding the fault created by the last of his missile silo. As expected, the rock wall began to crumble.

Hardtop realized the purpose a moment too late. He twisted, and Bumblebee could see all his limbs lock in surprise before the incoming hail of rocks and dust obscured him from Bumblebee's optics. By the time the dust settled, the Decepticon was buried under an estimated seventy-two tons of granite and limestone. If the weight wasn't enough to crush his damaged armor, than he was almost certainly trapped in stasis lock. Score, he thought smugly, and finally found a station on XM Radio playing an appropriate song.

"When you get what's yours … I got mine!"

&

Bumblebee spent the next 74 minutes taking off his own leg from the knee down, picking Hardtop's fingers out of the gears, and replacing the limb. The damage to the gears was not significant enough to warrant immediate replacement, but as Bumblebee climbed the quarry wall to return to the Witwicky's he thought longingly of Ratchet; the occasional slipping of one partially stripped cog was enough to irritate.

By the time he arrived at an appropriately dark and quiet place to open a long wave radio communication, he was running 118 minutes late on the promised time. As a result, the moment he opened the channel he was assaulted by Jazz' voice. "Where the frag've you been, 'Bee!? You got our processors all on the fritz!"

Sorry. I had to deal with some trouble, Bumblebee wrote in response. The data package is ready. I've had a breakthrough.

"Send it on up." Bumblebee could picture how Jazz sat at the Ark's computer, his legs thrown up on the dash and his arms crossed.

Bumblebee obediently transmitted the information. I think the ocular correctional facilitators are the key, he wrote – the closest he could get to 'eyeglasses' in Cybertronian. Perhaps you can determine more with the Ark's computer.

"Well, lessee." There was 90 seconds of silence before Jazz continued, "Can you hold the channel a little longer? Or should we get back to you on this next check-in?"

Bumblebee took a moment, trying to make an honest assessment. I think the information is important to how I proceed. I can hold the channel for 10 more minutes safely before we risk an encryption hack or detection.

"Then hang tight, little 'Bot," Jazz ordered, ignoring that he barely cleared Bumblebee's mass. Bumblebee waited patiently.

When the channel spat back to life, it was Optimus Prime that answered. "Bumblebee, your assessment is correct. We have determined that the ocular lenses bear Cybertronian navigational codes, although we cannot decipher them. The lenses themselves will be required."

Bumblebee boggled at the thought, his processors overloading as he tried to guess just how such a thing had occurred. If Megatron was awake enough to imprint anything – never mind how he did it – how is it that Archibald Witwicky escaped with his life!? … Not that I am questioning you, sir.

Optimus Prime chuckled as he read the response. "That, we cannot be sure of. But we can be reasonably certain the coordinates on those lenses will lead to the Allspark. You say they are in the possession of a young human boy?"

Yes, Samuel James Witwicky. He is the third generation direct descendant of Archibald Witwicky. As you can see, he has put up the glasses for purchase on a public website, so it is only a matter of time until the Decepticons realize the value of the lenses as well.

"Then I have a new task for you, my old friend." Optimus Prime transmitted relevant information as he gave the verbal order. "You are to guard Samuel Witwicky from all Decepticon attention until such time as we can make landfall. Seventy-two hours from now we will be in descent. Beacon your location at that time so we do not miss our target. I believe we have entered a race for the Allspark, Bumblebee; I hope you are ready."

As ever, Captain, Bumblebee wrote in response.

"Then go, and do your best," Prime ordered, and closed the radio link.

To be continued

Music credits go to Kevin Rudolf (Let It Rock) and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (Flight of the Bumblebee). Contents of this chapter can be credited to Hasbro's tie-in toy HardTop - an army buggy alt-moded Decepticon, his little biography indicates that he was the first Decepticon to find the Witwickys. Unfortunately for him, Bumblebee buried him under a ton of rock before he could do anything about it In another version of his story Hardtop is credited with destroying Bumblebee's voice capacitors. Needless to say I prefer the drama of having Megatron take credit for that one.

Thank you to those who reviewed the first chapter:

Lone Wolf (I'll do my best to address the question!)

Geekgirl (yes, 'Satan's Camaro' was pretty hilarious! From 'Bee's point of view it will be exceptionally frustrating.)

Whitedino (well, I hope you enjoyed!)

Hellfirefanatic (thank you! 'Bee is awesome.)

And Anita H (I will do my level best to finish this. Having the whole plot already written for me will make it much easier. Glad you enjoyed!)

Please review!