Chapter 3
"All the fragging stupid slag to do, you just had to use Hydrogen!" Ratchet ranted, hands busy rewiring a blackened arm. An equally soot covered rest-of-Wheeljack dared to make direct eye contact with the medic.
"I swear, the safety was on." WHACK.
"Shut up Wheeljack," Ratchet snarled. Skyfire sat on a nearby berth, deemed 'able to slagging wait'.
"It isn't as bad as it looks," Wheeljack said, catching the worried expression on the Jet's face. Really, Skyfire was worried that the explosion in Wheeljack's lab might have scared the alien, already trapped in the confines of the closet. 'But I couldn't just leave it to wander around, my lab isn't alien proof.' He would have to work on that.
"You, sit still, and try not to blow up something else while you're at it," Ratchet ordered. He jerked a thumb at Skyfire, "You, over here. What'd you do, demolish a building?"
"Something like that," Skyfire admitted.
Ratchet transformed his hand into a hammer. 'POUND' "So why didn't" 'BANG' "you come in here" 'POP' "as soon as you got back?" 'CLANG" Skyfire swiveled his head to look at the glaring CMO, who had to stand behind him on a berth to reach the dents in his wings.
"I, ah, found...something...that needed my attention at the moment. But it's fine now." He fervently hoped it was fine, though it was probably terrified. He vowed to let the alien out as soon as he got back.
"Oh? And what, if I might ask, is more important than following standard procedures regarding your health?" Skyfire pinched his nose, 'Damn it Ratchet', and said, "It's actually a ah, pet project of mine, that requires a lot of attention. It's um, a communications device of sorts." Ugh, that sounded lame even to his own audios. 'Please buy it.' Wheeljack piped up from where he was sitting, "Need any help?"
Skyfire dipped his helm, "Maybe later on, but I just got started."
"Don't," Ratchet interrupted. "I don't care Skyfire, but just don't. Let. Wheeljack help. He'll fragging demolish whatever it is." "
Hey!" Said mech yelled, offended.
"You're fine," Ratchet muttered at Skyfire, stepping down to admire his work. "Just for Pit's sake take a shower." Skyfire nodded.
Hunter sat in the closet, wondering in the dark if the alien would come back for him. He didn't have the energy to care too much. His suit was equipped with a waste recycling unit, Oxygen converter, and nutrient injections that could last up to a month in space. And that month was almost up. The air his suit supplied had already become noticeably thinner, and he knew that he had to take it off, soon, or he would suffocate. Every now and then a warning would pop up on the inside of his visor. Like he didn't notice. 'But how do I know if there's any air out there?'
He had two choices: suffocate in the suit or suffocate outside it. That stupid part of him that refused to believe he was doomed tried to find any way out. 'Maybe if the robots kept me alive this long, they set the air inside to accommodate me as well.' It was a long shot, but seeing as aliens existed, anything was possible. Sigh. What he was about to do was probably really stupid.
With shaky hands he unbuckled the hidden clasps on the outside of his helmet. 'Here goes nothing.' He held his breath before taking it off, sure he was about to die a horrible Total-Recall-esque death. Nothing happened. Hunter laughed out loud, incredulous that he wasn't dead. "Haha, Yeah!"
He immediately set about removing the rest of his space suit, giddy, and feeling confined in it now more than ever. He'd been 'trapped' in it for a month. The man stood up and stretched as far as the small room allowed. He wished he could see what he looked like. He felt along his face, but he had never been able to grow much facial hair, so it still felt relatively smooth. It felt good to be able to move freely again.
Skyfire did not go to the wash racks. Instead he made a beeline for the lab. Palming open the door he rushed to the closet, hoping his entrapment of the weaker being hadn't hurt their future prospects of communication. He stared, slack jawed, at the sight that greeted him when he unlocked the storage closet.
Curled up in an impossibly bent position on the floor was some… tan and green…thing. Its chest-plates rose and fell in steady cycles as it vented, and there was some kind of fuzzy material on top of its helm, which was buried in its arms. What the frag?
Skyfire must have made a noise, because the creature stirred and lifted its head. Its - 'were those optics? Yup, definitely optics' - widened, and it snapped to alertness, getting up with surprising speed.
'Amazing,' Skyfire revered, 'it even has face-plates that look like a Cybertronian's.' Like him, the alien had two optics, what was probably an olfactory sensor, and a mouth. He thought the two rounded things sticking out at an angle from its helm could have been audio-amplifiers. Without that weird armor on, its limbs were much narrower than he'd been led to believe.
Its remarkably expressionate face-plate took on a wary, pissed glare. Yeah, if someone locked him in a closet, Skyfire would probably look at them like that too.
"I am sorry," he regretfully informed it. "I did not want to put you in there. But the chance someone would accidentally discover you while I was gone was too great." It barked something at him, then raised the middle digit of its servos at him. 'I can't wait to learn what that means!' Skyfire thought excitedly, thrilled at the communication attempt. Though he kept his face serious.
He backed up to give the creature space, feeling that his proximity was intimidating it to remain in the closet. It shuffled out, still glaring daggers at him. The mech frowned. 'What to try first? Perhaps reintroductions are in order...' At a loss, he gestured himself. "Skyfire." Again, "Skyfire." He then pointed at it, and tilted his head like it had done earlier, as if to say through body language, "And you are…?" The fuzzy lines above its optics furrowed for a second, then rose in what must have been comprehension, because it answered - 'It answered!' - "Uh-'err."
The foreign sounds made no sense to the Cybertronian, who click-whirred a confused, "What?" A few seconds of silence elapsed before it repeated the noise, this time slower and with more pronouncement. "Unnnn-'urrrrrr." Then looked at him expectantly.
Skyfire felt silly. There was no way he would be able to say that. He gave it a shot. "Unnnn" The alien bared its denta at him. In aggression? Was that a sign he should stop? He fumbled the word again, "unnnEr." The smaller being shook his head, and said it himself. Skyfire tested the foreign word a few more times. "Unn'der." 'Unn'der' bobbed his helm at that last one, baring his denta even more. But he otherwise didn't appear angry. 'The denta thing could have a nonaggressive meaning. Maybe a positive one?'
Unfortunately that was the moment the lab door opened behind them, halting their progress and silhouetting a fresh-from-the-wash-racks Wheeljack. Skyfire hastily scrambled to his peds to put himself between the alien and inventor and to hopefully block the latter's view. "So I was thinking about what you said in the med-bay about working on a new comm device, and get this, we could add a-HOLY SLAG WHAT IS THAT?!"
'Frag it all.' Skyfire twisted to see that Unn'der had peered around his waist to get a better look at the newcomer. 'You are an idiot, Alien,' Skyfire thought darkly at him. At Wheeljack's shriek and subsequent rifle aiming the smaller biped whipped back behind him with a yelp.
"NO, don't shoot it. Don't shoot mech. I can explain. It can't hurt you, Wheeljack. Lower your gun. You're scaring him, and for frag's sake, close that door."
Wheeljack looked like Prowl right before a crash, but nonetheless stepped just inside the door, allowing it to close. He lowered his gun-arm slightly but didn't retransform it. "Right…." Skyfire said, lowering the arm he had put up at Wheeljack. He hesitated before stepping to the side, once more revealing the alien.
Wheeljack didn't react for a moment. Then he crowed at an nearly unholy volume, "YOU'VE BEEN KEEPING THAT IN YOUR LAB? FOR HOW LONG? WHAT IS IT?" "Wheeljack, quite down!" Snapped Skyfire, grabbing one of the alien's wrists as it tried to bolt from the engineer's hysterics. The inventor looked slightly abashed, but the admonishment didn't slow his progress or enthusiasm as he crossed the room to find out for himself.
"What. The frag." he breathed, volume a bit more appropriate. The flyer hissed distractedly, "Get rid of that," pointing out Wheeljack's still transformed hand. Internally he marveled at how warm and soft the arm he had grabbed was. 'What kind of material is its frame made of?'
As soon as the weapon was gone the creature slowed its frenzied attempt at reclaiming its arm. "I didn't have you pegged as a mech that liked pets, Skyfire. Does the commander know you have this...thing...in here? Does Red Alert?" Wheeljack babbled.
"No. Not yet anyway. I imagine nobody else knows I have it. And I'd like to keep it that way a little while longer, if you don't mind." Wheeljack looked like he was listening, but he never stopped staring at Unn'der.
"So who built it, or did you? And what…," Wheeljack reached out and poked the creature's middle, "is this material?" The alien screamed and slapped the hand away, leaning as far away from the grey mech as Skyfire's hold on it allowed. Skyfire scowled at his friend, annoyed.
"Stop that! Wheeljack, I don't think you understand. This isn't a pet, it's not even Cybertronian. I didn't build it; I have no idea what it's made of. I'm pretty sure it's an extraterrestrial lifeform of some kind."
Wheeljack jerked his gaze away from the alien to look at Skyfire disbelievingly. "What?! On Cybertron?"
Skyfire smirked, "I believe so. For one thing, it dug me out of some rubble I created when I was shot down in that last mission to Kaon. The Decepticons must have captured it or something, I don't know. Maybe it escaped when we disabled the prison. But I doubt they knew what they had. At first I thought it was either a tall cassette or a short minibot because of the suit it was wearing. Then again, just scan it. Tell me you've ever scanned anything like it." At the prompt, Wheeljack did indeed initiate a scan. The wave of light made Unn'der flinch.
"Whoa…." The engineer ignored the cries Skyfire's alien made when he excitedly reached out to test his scans. But this time Skyfire was the one to slap his hand away. "I said STOP it, Wheeljack. You don't just go around poking people, you're freaking him out!"
At his friend's confused look, Skyfire said, "I just told you it came in a suit. A suit it, or its kind I suppose, must have designed. The metals in it aren't indigenous to our planet or its moons, and making a suit for an alien seems like a lot of effort to go through when you can just put it in a containment unit. I'm telling you, It's intelligent." Wheeljack thought about the statement for a moment.
"You mean to tell me," he began, "that you've been hiding an intelligent alien life-form in your lab for two orns? Why haven't you told anyone? This is huge, Skyfire! This may well be Cybertronian civilization's First Contact with intelligent life among the stars! You should hand it over to the science cast elites. They might be better equipped to study it. You're gonna be famous!
"Wheeljack."
The grey scientist paused at the white's tone. "What?"
"I'm can't just announce this thing to the world." Said 'thing' observed the conversing mechs intently, clearly not understanding a word. "We're at war incase you didn't notice. We don't need such a big distraction in our ranks. People, especially on base, would want to come see it. The Decepticons would want to 'come see it', and I doubt they would leave a good impression. I know Shockwave certainly wouldn't."
Skyfire could just imagine what Shockwave would do to Unn'der if the sadistic scientist got a hold of him. "Plus, It's scared of you, and you're just one mech. A whole base knocking at the door might give it a spark attack, or at the very least make it nervous and hinder communication attempts."
Wheeljack perked up, interested in the idea of talking with a real live alien. "Ooh, have you figured out how to communicate yet?"
"Er, no, I haven't. The sounds it makes are completely foreign to me. I don't even know if our languages are mutually speakable."
"You could get Blaster to help you. The new the new Chief Communications Expert. And I know for a fact that he's on base."
Skyfire let out an exasperated vent. "Wheeljack, I can't just let any mech interact with it."
Wheeljack shrugged. "It's not like there's a First Contact protocol for this kind of slag and besides, nobody else knows it's here, so what does it matter?" He gave Skyfire a flat look.
"This kind of thing would be right up Blaster's his alley. Trust me, I know the guy. Just swear him to secrecy or something. You're gonna need more people in on this if you want to be able to talk to it any time soon." The 'if we want to talk to it anytime soon' went unsaid.
Skyfire was about to remind Wheeljack that he didn't have that kind of authority when his comm line crackled to life. 'Not again.' Inferno, a security mech Skyfire had once met briefly, could be heard on the other end.
-"Skyfire, come in Skyfire."-
His spark nearly stopped. How did security know about the alien?! But then Inferno's bored voice droned, -"You're scheduled for this shift. Why aren't you at your post?"-
"Who is it?" Wheeljack whispered, worried.
"Ahhh, I never checked Prowl's base roster after I got back from the Kaon mission with him." Skyfire gently tugged the arm he held for emphasis. "Apparently I'm supposed to be on duty right now." Wheeljack brightened.
"I could watch him for you!" Skyfire frowned, causing the other to wave a hand.
"You look like you think I'm gonna dissect it or something. I swear I'll just keep an optic on him."
'It's not like I have a better option.' Skyfire had to reluctantly agree. "If you have to leave or let someone in just hide it in that closet with the suit." With that, Skyfire finally let go of the alien, who promptly ran off to put a work table between itself and Wheeljack.
"The suit?" Wheeljack echoed.
"You'll see what I mean." Heading for the door, Skyfire commed, "Copy that Inferno, I was unaware. I am on my way now."