Chapter three: Black and White
Houston's Second Ward marched its warehouses and industrial architecture right up to the waterfront of the bayou. Huge complexes sprawled over the land, and what with the planet's economic problems, not all of them were in use. Not officially, anyway.
Unofficially, number twenty-two oh five B had been supporting an alien squatter for the past sixteen months. Warehouse twenty-two oh five B and a handful of other abandoned sheds, garages, overpasses, and old, abandoned farmsteads in and out of Houston and a few other neighboring cities and states kept Barricade out of sight of prying eyes, whether human or Autobot. He rotated between them on a random basis, and kept a careful watch on the dummy accounts that he used whenever he absolutely had to interact with suppliers – in a society of hostiles, he would leave no traces. No traces that led anywhere. He was an infiltrator; he knew the rules of this game.
Focus.
Barricade stood in the middle of the warehouse, surveying the oil-stains, then tapped the side of his head and the retinal holoprojectors flared to life, covering the floor of the warehouse. America. Canada. Mexico. China. The members of the OAS. Saudi Arabia. The EU. Turkey. Russia. All Africa's nations. The world spread out beneath his feet, and began to blossom with lights: red light – nuclear resources; green light – petroleum fields; orange light – refineries; purple – military bases. Black circles and lines marked major transportation sites – roads, railways, airports, harbors; white stars for major government sites.
And on the coast of California, in the northwestern corner, a symbol from another world: the Autobot sigil. Tranquility, and its base.
Three and a half years of research before any of his team had landed. Starscream and Blackout had dug in as deep as they could into the military nets, adding black ops sites, R&D, government safe sites to the list. He'd seen over three quarters of the American civilian sites, mapped them himself; Brawl and Bonecrusher had done the rest, checking the military sites, making notes, and the picture had slowly unfolded.
Focus.
Seventeen months since Mission City. Fifteen since he'd put himself back together enough to work. Fifteen months since he'd been able to think straight, to move straight... that damn divider, and Primus, Frenzy...!
Focus.
Lines of glyphs began to come up over certain of the targets as secondary projectors engaged – field reports: layout options, site security, weaknesses, priorities... gaps.
There were gaps in the records. Holes in the files saved on his personal databanks – glyphs were missing. Sites were likely missing. And over the entire map, save for a few, isolated instances, there was no trace of one particular mind's work – Frenzy's work was gone. Frenzy... Frenzy was gone.
Barricade's engine gave a strange, choking rev, but the image remained, blazing bright in all its damning incompleteness. It remained, because he was an infiltrator – he was Megatron's infiltrator, the best the Decepticons had to offer, and he knew the rules.
Rule one: do not lose control.
Something chittered, and the map seemed to swell and waver as something scurried across the floor, light reflecting off its plating. A familiar energy field touched the edges of his own as Scorponok swarmed about his legs, made the air seem to tremble and shiver in conjoint systems, empty the past seventeen months.
After a moment, Barricade, venting heat and the painful little thrill of that electrical tingle, let the holo-image die, and sank down to crouch on the stained, concrete floor. Scorponok clicked, lifting himself partially to tap his foremost pair of legs anxiously against Barricade's knees, sensing his mood, and Barricade could feel the subtle EM thrum and vibration of the symbiont's response that, were they joined, would have done much, no doubt, to calm him.
They couldn't join, though – of course not. They weren't made for each other – Scorponok was just shy of half his mass, and at full length, tail included, normally would be nearly as long as Barricade was tall. With the stub that remained of that appendage after Qatar, in his primary mode, he could just barely fit in Barricade's cab with the seats down. All their conjoint structures were just utterly dissimilar in nearly every respect, sized and located for completely different partners.
But lacking a spark chamber of his own to confine and keep a spark coherent and protected, Scorponok couldn't have survived a month without syncing with his carrier. Barricade, still in shock and mourning his own symbiont's loss, had suffered something close to panic when he'd realized he had to sync with Blackout's bereaved symbiont or lose him. Not only were they misfits for each other, but it had just been entirely too soon: he'd been injured still himself, struggling to recover, caught up in his own agonized sense of having lost himself, and the powerful protective habits of a long lifetime at war had left him totally unprepared to lay himself that open to anyone.
In the end, though, he'd done it – they were the only two of their kind left on Earth; it would have been foolish to throw away help. And killer though Barricade undeniably was, even he had his limits – Blackout had risked serious repercussions to reinterpret his orders and stop on that freeway to help him. He'd entrusted Barricade with what was dearest to him, because he knew Barricade understood that drive to protect the symbiont who was one's other self. Despite all their differences and disagreements, they had had that bond in common, being both carriers. He could not have allowed Scorponok, therefore, simply to spiral down into degenerative incoherency and expire.
Syncing had its side-effects, however incompatible they otherwise were, the most evident one being a greater sensitivity to each other's moods and minds, a more thorough coordination with each other. And though sometimes it felt like being burned from within, Scorponok filled an absence that could not but ache to shattering. Hence even though they weren't joined, Barricade found his frustration and grief subsiding to more bearable levels, and he berated himself: neither he nor Scorponok could afford this sort of episode if they wanted to survive.
"Damn you, Starscream," he growled nevertheless. Scorponok chirruped, transmuting it into a low, threatening hum, echoing his sentiment. Blackout, too, had never been fond of Starscream, had never been able to trust a loyalty less personal than his own – border planet provincials were often like that, given how small colony populations often were. And though it was not quite fair to say that symbionts followed their carriers in everything, it was true that it was rare for a symbiont to have a radically different opinion of a person than his carrier.
Barricade wasn't hampered by the need for loyalty such as Blackout's – he and Starscream had that in common – but he had his own problems with Megatron's lieutenant. His attitude towards symbionts and their carriers aside, Starscream tended to take a fine-grained approach to tactics and strategy. While detail and nuance had their worth, once the picture had been sufficiently complicated, he tended then to overthink the solution – either he went for wholly unnecessary layers of subtlety, or else he struck with overwhelming force to eliminate the complexity he'd just introduced.
He could be brilliant – sometimes more so even than Megatron. And he could also sink an operation under more layers of whim and complexity than anyone Barricade had ever known, just because he wanted something and wouldn't hesitate to reach for it, unless someone or something grounded him hard. He just wasn't a fully reliable tactician, and was too enamored of intrigue and complicated revenge. Kill the 'bot and be done with it, was Barricade's philosophy – or use him well, but choose your time and don't make an unrelated vengeance a turning point of crucial operations against outsiders!
Still, Starscream was eloquent and powerful, and if he were at the head of the approaching invading army that the Autobot alert had warned of, then Barricade was betting on a straightforward investment of overwhelming force against this planet and its people, and the Autobots they harbored. He wouldn't waste subtlety on them, not after the Allspark. In principle, Barricade had no particular problem with that, but he knew the Autobots and humanity were unlikely to be the only targets – his icon hadn't gone dark during Mission City. Starscream knew he'd been alive seventeen months ago, and Barricade did not expect his absence from that battle would be subject to forgiveness. And in Decepticon ranks, one learned not to mourn those designated "traitors."
If it were Starscream, then, he was most likely going to die on this sponge of a back-burn rock, and Scorponok with him, and he needed to decide how to face that. Barricade vented gently.
Focus.
He had two choices, so far as he could see, neither of them very good: he could remain an independent agent, avoid conflict where he could, kill where he had to, and try to stay underground until Decepticon firepower stripped the planet bare. Or he could try to find allies in the locals... and so inevitably in their protectors.
Unfortunately, the former plan was unlikely to work, once the Autobots lost – assuming they did. He had no way off this planet, and even he couldn't hide forever, not when Starscream would set every 'bot Barricade had ever worked with in the field the task of hunting him. Besides, Barricade had never aspired to any form of "neutrality": it just was not in his nature.
But the latter plan made every coil in him clench in protest – surely he could not countenance allying himself with those who had accepted the genocide, Samuel Witwicky! Did he care so much for his own life after so often hazarding it, that he could contemplate such an association, with so little chance of it actually succeeding and allowing him to live?
Did he have no self-respect?
No, he had self-respect, he thought bleakly. He had pride. But the aftermath of Mission City and the months of hiding and isolation had not been without effect. He was a member of a dying species, and he'd been cut off from all help, left to manage on his own by a wing commander who could at least have radioed to demand an explanation before abandoning him, but hadn't.
Barricade did not like to think that his own horizons were so narrow as to let what happened in his own cohort blind him to the larger picture, to the needs of the cause. Yet objectively speaking, that was a line that couldn't truly be drawn – not now that Megatron was gone. The very fact that he had to think that way – that the problem, the main problem, was that Megatron was gone, when his entire species had just been handed a death sentence – was proof of that. Any right-thinking mind ought to be preoccupied with the question of how settle the war, so they could at least stretch their time in this universe as long as they could. No one had seen every star in this galaxy, let alone the others – they should be looking for the origin of the Cube, to see whether there were any chance of second chances. They should be drawing borders, negotiating a settlement into two Cybertronian states: Autobot and Decepticon.
Instead, Barricade greatly feared that with Megatron gone, the factional tendencies of the Decepticon ranks – tendencies that had grown up early among the militant wings of the old underground as a part and parcel of their resistance to the notion that one had a right to tell them their place by reading it off of their model instead of by proving it, and which was deeply embedded in them all – would result in a meltdown that would claim just as many lives to halt as to maintain.
Starscream certainly believed so – and so he'd abandoned Barricade, though in point of fact, what could he truly have hoped to accomplish, other than to tear whatever fragile peace might have been attained in his absence to shreds by pushing his own claim? A lag time of ten, twenty years was nothing to build on, yet that hadn't stopped Starscream. Only Megatron had power and prestige enough to have stopped him cold.
And Megatron was dead.
Clearly, though, if an army were already on its way, already poised to arrive, then the situation was not quite as anticipated. Yet that brought him no joy, nor relieved any of his fears, for Barricade was betting he could interpret this sign, and he cursed his own compatriots, then, and even Megatron for having failed to find some other way for Decepticon-kind. For putting him in this position.
Because he was betting that the Autobots didn't have this problem: whoever had survived to be commander-general in Prime's absence – Prowl, or Silverbolt, or Ultarax, or any of the other regional commanders – probably wasn't busy putting down rebellion in his own ranks. He didn't think that Prime was particularly concerned that the Autobots would never come for his stranded squad, or that if they did, it would be only to eliminate the lot of them. He wasn't so naïve as to think the Autobots had no dissent within their ranks, but they didn't have the drive to push it to the end as a matter of course that one found among Decepticons – which meant they probably were trying to decide how best to survive in the days to come.
That gave him something in common with them – it gave him more in common than he wanted to admit, but there it was. He had everything he needed – information they could use and his own insider's familiarity with Decepticon protocols and comm encryption – to make a bid to join them, but he couldn't do it. Not yet – not after so long at war against them, and there was the Witwicky boy – he'd pulled that much off of the American military radio chatter. And dammit, he was Decepticon! He owed them something – the benefit of the doubt, perhaps. Or perhaps he owed it to himself – to what serving that cause had let him become – to do this thing right.
Focus.
He needed to discover whether he was right about what was happening within the Decepticon ranks; whether he was right to fear for his life, whether he was right to fear for the future in their hands. But how to do that? In case he was right to fear for his life, he didn't dare simply send up a signal for them to try to trace. He needed a meeting, and not one preordained and planned out by whoever was in control of this... 'exercise.' How to get that time and face to face if he couldn't ask for it?
He thought of all the targets they'd identified in the world – any competent commander would be planning an attack that would hit nuclear facilities, energy resources, and military bases. But Barricade wasn't looking to make contact in the middle of a pitched battle; and he didn't want to meet with an occupational force that could take him out as easily as storm the next town.
An isolated 'bot was what he needed – somebody he could hold his own with, and he needed to deal with that someone before the heavy guns came out and the real shooting began. How to do it? Where would Decepticon command, whoever held that position, send its infiltrators?
Where would he send infiltrators, were it up to him?
Any of the government sites would be good bets, but not certain, and cities were large. He couldn't afford to lose time in an extravagant search.
Scorponok whined softly, mandibular grapples clicking against each other, adding to the little vocal pops he made. Though not made for speech, Scorponok could manage a few words, and the whine, plus the strategic clicks formed a familiar, if alien, pattern: "Oueeeee-tkt-oueee-k!t-iiiiiiiii."
Barricade revved softly. Samuel Witwicky. Bane of his existence and of his entire kind. There would certainly be an assassin on his trail. But he didn't want to be seen as getting in the way of that by disrupting the agent's plans; if he did find reason to rejoin his Decepticon comrades, he didn't want his own participation in the hit (which would certainly be required as proof of commitment) to seem contingent, or it would undoubtedly gain him nothing with command.
But Scorponok was right in a way – he had to get close to Witwicky, which meant getting close to the Autobots. That meant Tranquility, where the Autobots had settled just because it was close to their genocidal ally. For any Decepticon commander would want to try to get a read on the base they'd built up in the seventeen months since Mission City before attacking it. And that meant sending infiltrators.
Venting gently, Barricade settled onto the floor and transformed one hand into his gun.
Focus.
He would go over every inch of his armaments today and tonight, and Scorponok's as well, and give himself another day to repair any damages or imperfections to the best of his ability. He would have exactly one shot at this, and then either he was in and committed to the Decepticon objective, or he would have to kill his source. Either way, he needed to make certain he could rely on his weaponry. Rule one: do not lose control.
Focus.
Two short-range, three-shot missile tubes. Two sets of plasma launchers. One energy cannon. Two flails.
He had the maps. He was familiar with Tranquility. He had an objective; he knew his options and so he had his checklists. He even had help – Scorponok hummed softly, having positioned himself to watch the entry to the warehouse, his antennae up and listening. Tomorrow night, he promised himself.
Tomorrow night, it would begin.