Thank you everyone for the comments and the plus faves and watches – even if I don't get a chance to comment back to everyone, I really appreciate it. I'm sorry for the long delay! This chapter's been rough going but it's finally done and I'm hoping to pick up the pace after this. ^_^ Also, I feel I should mention: this fic is absolutely not DotM compliant (as it takes place immediately after RotF, but I'm not even going to try to make it fit with DotM). Also, apologies for the choppiness in this chapter, and for blatantly stealing G1's plot schtick. ^_^
Airplanes were never a terribly comfortable conveyance - fragile hulks of inert, inferior metals, with none of the living spark and mind of a shuttle framed Cybertronian or even the unsparked energon systems of a crewed ship. Piloted by humans using manual controls, their tech still generations away from true interface links, they were singularly disturbing to the Cybertronians rendered effectively blind, deaf, and immobile in the cargo holds that were cavernous by human standards but barely afforded the shortest of the Autobots room to stand up.
The Cybertronian reaction to planes varied from mild unease to Sideswipe's active loathing for the transport crafts which the young warrior had summed up in the local vernacular as "flying death traps". The low, unhappy growl of his engine just ahead of Optimus was a palpable counterpoint to the thrum of the plane engines through the deckplates, though Sideswipe was holding himself rigorously still. Ironhide, likewise, was hunkered down low on his axles, his own grumbling flickering in brief ghosts of glyphs through his field where the bare edge of it was pressed up against the larger Peterbilt, all of them overlapping in the close confines. Jolt, positioned at Ironhide's rear in the back of the plane, was rocking softly, minute nervous shifts of mass from one wheel to the other, kept as minimal as possible so as not to affect the balance of the aircraft.
Optimus, for himself, found it easiest to drown out his awareness of height and speed and flight systems that he couldn't control (and, as Sideswipe had gone on about at some length, the "appallingly primitive thrust technology" that was keeping them all in the air), not to mention his own soldiers' unease, by concentrating on other things. Tactics, he had found, could occupy a nicely centralized portion of his processor, and he could power down extraneous threads into something approximating a low level recharge that left him only mildly aware of the plane around him and his own inability to move within the cramped confines.
Five Decepticon IDs, dropping hot from orbit. They had guessed that the Decepticons either had a functioning ship in system or had staked a base of operations on one of the outer planets; the trajectories they had tracked from this drop only confirmed it.
Five IDs, none of them Megatron. There were too many possible conjectures to be drawn from that and Optimus wasn't sure which was even preferable to his own troops' standing. Incapacitation? Death? No - Optimus dismissed the later thought. He would, he was certain, have known if that was the case; while it held only a pale shadow of the vivid memory of his own death, he could still recall the spark deep burst of pain that Megatron's death in Mission City had caused him. He would know if the warrior were dead, and what he could recall of the battle in Egypt supported that. The blows he had struck might have put his former First down for a time, but the Lord Protector was far more difficult to kill than that.
Optimus vented softly, checking his chronometer and running calculations based on the last known intel before they had lifted off. A five unit squad, sacrificing stealth and secrecy for a fast, traceable, direct drop over the northwestern United States - the Decepticons would be on the ground well before NEST. Flawed tactics made by a rash processor, or desperation? On Megatron's orders, or a break in the Decepticon ranks? There were too many worrying options that wouldn't have an answer until they touched down.
Communications, in-flight, were reduced to satellite relay with a delay that inhibited real-time transfers. The packet, when it came through, was stamped in Ratchet's terse glyphs, abbreviated code that was a mix of military and medical shorthand encryptions. The medic, who had stayed behind to prep the medbay and relay from the monitors, kept the short burst as terse as possible. ::Hydroelectric, minimal damage, evacuation underway, standby.:: 'Hydroelectric', an English word, was underscored with the Cybertronian glyph for the grade of energon that could be produced from the kinetic energy, clear and light and hotter burning in the systems than what could be drawn from fossil fuels. 'Standby' was underscored with the glyph for 'ally' - the local armed forces must be already on hand, assisting the evacuation of civilian workers, but the standard military had orders to fall back and contain, not engage; that was NEST's job.
The deep, rumbling growl of Prime's engine made Sideswipe rock forward sharply on his wheels, the silver warrior's field flaring query and concern. Optimus hastily throttled the sound back, dampening the itching battle-ready rev of his systems. A hot, obvious drop, minimal damage - an energon raid, and he had seen enough of them during the war to slot the rest into place easily enough, the pattern unfolding like the calculated curves of a fractal. Desperation, then, and probably Megatron's orders; their targets would be ground bound for as long as it took to fill their tanks, and Decepticon raiders had large tanks.
Ironhide's field was a heavy press of rumbling heat against his rear wheels, Sideswipe a bright burst flare against his front, systems running hot and fast with anticipation that he could feel deep in his struts, mixing with his own. Optimus ground down onto his axels, letting the heat primed from sparring circulate tight and fast through his weapons systems, and ran endless calculations of airspeed versus mass and lift in the vain hope that mathematics might prove the human built aircraft could go just that little bit faster.
Ratchet was at the comms, monitoring what they could see of the battle from satellite imagery, when the message came through. Carried on human telecommunication waves, it turned Major Lennox's sharp, breathless voice into something distant and faint - ::Man down! Base, we need a hot evac, plus four - I repeat, man down!::
'Plus' had become the human comm chatter slang for anything mech sized, with a gradated scale applied to each of them based on height and mass which conveyed how large of a thing was needed. Which was how Ratchet knew, even before Ironhide's voice cut through Lennox's on a deep, strident note, that his worst fear was happening. Again. ::Plus seven, slag you, I can't leave him! Ratchet!::
One of the technicians waved sharply - 'live', it meant, 'line cleared' - and Ratchet cycled a deep ventilation and reached out, pressing the tips of his fingers directly to the relay; satellite data feed was slow, but better than purely vocalized. ::Ratchet here. Status?::
The response came back in a infuriatingly lagging flurry of glyphs and data snaps, heavy with combat indicators from Ironhide's still buzzing systems. Ratchet filtered them swiftly, discarding everything extra, and cycled another circuit of air. The NEST technician nearest him was waiting, the man's eyes wide and heart rate elevated, and Ratchet didn't bother to reassure. "Get them back here," he growled aloud, the rumble of his engine underscoring the words. "Fast as you can."
They hit the ground hot, engines roaring. The roads between landing strip and target had already been cleared, local authorities standing clear. There was no one unauthorized to witness the top speed of a heavy semi whose engine had never been cleared as street legal in that or any other country, or of the bizarre assortment of vehicles that followed close behind in the unearthly convoy.
There was water in the air, thick and heavy with it, when they cleared the rise that lead to the dam. Water and ozone, an electric tang, and the scent sensation of raw power and half refined energon prickling at their sensors.
Two rotaries, three jets, large and lumbering on the ground, but it had been the proud, black glyphs of an Air Commander on upswept wings that had drawn Optimus like a magnetic pull. Ironhide had growled, the deep rumbling rev of his engine shivering through Prime's armor plates, echoed in a lighter tenor by both of the younger warriors that strained at their bumpers. Spurred on by the heated enthusiasm of his squad, Optimus' voice had sunk deep into the vibrating roar of combat, glyphs slipping quicksilver through his field in barely throttled notes of eagerness and primed systems.
"Autobots… attack!"
Ratchet was the first on the tarmac when the plane touched down at Nellis, the strident wail of his sirens cutting through even the strut vibrating roar of the jet engines before the carrier plane taxied to a stop. He had folded himself upright before the hangar bay finished opening, catching the ramp as it lowered to optic level and vaulting up into the bay, his weight making the plane shudder on its wheels.
It was the glow of Ironhide's optics that met his own; the scar that left one unshielded, wider than the other, as distinctive as a spark frequency in the dimmed cargo interior. "Starscream," he said, before Ratchet could even send the query. "It was that pitslagger, Starscream. Got in a lucky shot. I've spliced Prime on my fuel line, he was draining out…"
Ratchet hushed the warrior with a sharp glyph burst, his own optics flickering through a range of scans as he knelt beside the black plated mech and the figure stretched out, limp and unmoving, on the deck. It was, he ascertained after a moment, neither worse or better than he had expected; the system shorts, some of them still sparking, that were run rampant through their Prime's internals were distinctive to one class of weapon and he could have laid that blame on the Decepticon Air commander even without Ironhide's testimony. Made to incapacitate, one shot alone wouldn't kill unless it was shoved through armor and clear into a spark core. It had, by the look of it, been exactly what Ironhide said - a lucky shot, most likely wild, and blunted by the Prime's plating.
More worrisome was the low pressure in Prime's lines and the abysmal state of his fuel tank, which pinged at over half empty and edging into the red. Ratchet cast a secondary sharp scan at Ironhide - Prime's tank was nearly twice again the volume of the warrior's - but the weapons specialist had done exactly as he should for emergency triage and the splice was a slow drip feed, enough to keep a system active but not to drain the donor.
There was, Ratchet realized as his scans came back, precise information filtering automatically through medical protocols, only a spattering of energon across the deck plates, leaked in drips and drabs from minor wounds that autonomic systems were already sealing shut. Nothing like the volume drained from Optimus' tanks, or the outpouring of a ripped main line.
Ironhide, as though he knew precisely what Ratchet was thinking - and the mech had probably been dwelling on nothing else the entire trip back to base - had an answer already queued up in his vocalizer. "Must be inside somewhere, I checked him over but I can't find the slagging leak. If that fragging 'Con got his claws hooked under a plate-"
"Yes," Ratchet said sharply, mostly to cut off the flow of amateur diagnostics. If that was the case then it was bad but not terrible by any means. Another scan, however, didn't bring up the expected dark shadow of energon pooled into endomass anywhere beneath Prime's plates, and he clicked sharply in frustration. "Here," he said aloud, reaching for the downed mech's shoulder. "Help me…"
A black hand closed sharply around his own, blocking his grasp. Ironhide, who had half reared up onto his knees at Ratchet's move, hissed a ventilation, his armor flaring with an agitated warning rattle. Ratchet froze, staring for a nanoklik. After a moment Ironhide seemed to realize what he had done and eased his grip, armor settling back down. "Sorry… still running hot…"
Ratchet narrowed his optics to hard, shielded slits. "I do not have time for this," he snapped. Shaking off Ironhide's hand, he thrust a tight beam burst at the other mech, his field cutting through the other's like a scalpel. Ironhide flinched back from the heavy flood of glyphs, medical override supreme command during triage underscored with third in command authority and the whole counterpointed with the deep, ringing thrum of the medic's base vibration that demanded deference within his jurisdiction. "Throttle that slag down and help me get him to medbay, soldier."
Ironhide burst a short, reflexive agreement and between them they shouldered the limp weight of the Autobot leader.
Starscream fought nothing like Megatron, his motions the quick, erratic movements of a flier brought to ground and made awkward by close quarters. It made the long reach of his arms and sharp talons no less deadly, however, and Optimus hit hard and fast, trying to minimize the advantage that reach and mass gave to the other.
The Air Commander may have had none of the sheer headlong love of the brawl that the Lord Protector had brought to countless battles, but he fought with a sharp, vicious tenacity that kept Optimus moving and - he realized quickly, for all the good that it did - kept him away from where he might have leant a hand to the others. One of the rotary 'Cons was already in the air, escape covered by the jets that were laying into a deadly game of near and far with Jolt and Sideswipe. Optimus could hear Ironhide's deep roar somewhere to his right, counterpointed by the ring of metal on metal as the weapon specialist traded blows with the remaining rotary 'Con. The Decepticons had been refining raw energon directly into their tanks; the air was rife with the scent of the unstable conversion and neither his own mechs or the enemy had risked open weapons fire yet. Lennox and the human NEST members had been left on the ridge to await orders; body armor could protect organic flesh from many things but explosive fire and chemical burns weren't some of them.
Starscream feinted, a darting slash and retreat, and countless vorns of combat lessons written into code and then drilled into the sense memory of endomass and struts had Optimus in motion before he had even finished tracking the move. The jet's wings made a tempting target, wide and easily grabbed, but he already knew that it left too many limbs free for retaliation and Starscream was not above raking his pede talons across armor and joints, striking out with all the strength of a lift off coiled in the impact of his kick.
Too far, and the jet had the advantage of speed and mobility coupled with an easy out in one effortless leap into the air. Too near, and there was greater mass and razor talons to be dealt with, but close enough and the flier's width slowed his ability to dodge. Strike, feint, block; the Seeker was impossible to catch, impossible to shake.
He was venting hot and hard when he finally took the chance and caught the edge of one wing, swinging the flier bodily around by it with a sharp, static laced cry from the Seeker. Starscream's talons were on him almost instantly, the other's armor shifting in half transformations to try to shake his grip while claws screeched across his own plates and hooked into gaps, ripping and tearing, external damage readouts flaring in bursts across Optimus' HUD. The struggle knocked them both off-balance and Optimus threw his weight to the side, dragging the other with him in a wrenching tug. Starscream's back took the brunt of the impact as they crashed into the solid concrete of a wall, his wingspan wide enough to disperse the force and dig metal edges into stone without breaking through it.
Combat routines queued energon blades and blaster both, with angle and force required for blows that would piece armor, rip through processor, or burn through spark. Two nanokliks, his systems insisted. Two nanokliks, and he could put an end to the Seeker right then and there.
Optimus caught one of the flier's wrists, ripping talons out of his own shoulder in a spray of sparks and fresh energon where the Seeker had hooked beneath the plates. He shut the sensors down ruthlessly, trapped wrist and wing alike against the wall, and shoved his own mass up against the Seeker to pin him there. That close, he could feel the pure, wild vibration of the other's field whipping all around him as Starscream's combat systems tried to get a lock.
"Surrender," Optimus growled. He expected refusal, and he couldn't have said why he did it. The war had dragged on for too long, worn down mercy and compromise. Something - the Matrix, maybe, burning so close to his own spark - needed to at least make the attempt, a gesture at something, some remnant of what they had once been capable of. He ground the jet into the wall, glass and metal shrieking protest, his engine a roaring thunder in his own audials. "Surrender!"
He expected refusal. He didn't expect the wide flare of Starscream's optics or the sheer, raw, desperation that flared through the other's field.
Ironhide was still outside medbay when Ratchet emerged, the warrior cutting off abruptly from the orders he was relaying to one of the humans when he caught sight of the medic. "Ratch'! Is he…"
"He'll live," Ratchet said sharply, and then had cause to regret his choice of words at the other's startled jerk, black armor clamping down. The events surrounding Egypt were still too close to the forefront of all of their processors and it made the medic gentle his tone a little when he continued. "He's stable. He should be fine."
Ironhide relaxed a little, shoulders dropping. "Good… good. The others are on their way back, ETA in forty minutes, one hour. Jolt took a hit when the 'Cons turned tail, but he says it's nothing so serious it can't wait." The weapon specialist vented harshly, fingers curling into fists, the transformations for his cannons rippling in fits and aborted starts through his arm plates. "If I get my hands on that Pit spawned Seeker…"
The human was still waiting; Ratchet dismissed him with a wave and a nod and waited until the man had saluted and jogged away before switching to Cybertronian. "Ironhide," he said firmly, underscoring the warrior's name with the glyphs for need-to-know and medical-report, "what the slag happened?"
The warrior cut a slice through the air with one hand, his field sharp with combat routines and too many conflicting glyphs for Ratchet to catch. "Told you," he replied in kind. "Couldn't bring out the big guns - Prime's orders and plain common sense, we'd have blown each other into scrap metal. I had my hands full with Grindor, the slagger, and Optimus barreled into Starscream like… well, you know how he does. Figured he'd be fine, the Seeker's a lightweight compared to Megatron." Frustration, guilt and fear peaked in rapid succession through the weapon specialist's field, pinging against Ratchet's in sharp spikes. "Next thing I know, I look over and Starscream's gone fragging berserk. Optimus had him good to sights and the slagger must've just panicked - fired into Prime point blank and to the Pit with common fragging sense. Took off like Unicron was chasing his contrail, screaming retreat."
The words were backed by a quick comm burst, the packet unfolding into battle analysis that confirmed what Ironhide said. Ratchet huffed, settling back onto his pedes as he reviewed it. "Starscream's shot fragged Optimus' sensor array," he sighed. "He took minor damage to his upper joints, anywhere the fragger could get a claw under his plates." Ironhide made a half startled noise, as though to protest, and Ratchet held up one hand to cut him off. "What happened before that? Your code marker was on him from earlier this rotation."
Static burst through the warrior's field for a nanoklik before he throttled it back, the sudden lack as telling as the spike had been. "Had to patch his combat systems," Ironhide said gruffly, and it might have been just another form of concern but the warrior wasn't meeting Ratchet's optics and his field was furled tight and silent. "That ancient Seeker slagged it all to the Pit; half of it wasn't compiling right and it was scrapping his response timing."
Ratchet narrowed his optics, fingers drumming a sharp rhythm against his own plates. "You flagged it all?"
Ironhide was already nodding, a weak pulse of assent underscored with indignation at the insinuation he might not have floating across his field. "Of course." He hesitated, mandible plates grinding slightly. "I had to restore some of it from the last backup of his routines that I have on file - there were some sections just missing. Chunks of code that weren't even there any more."
Ratchet vented in a low hiss. "What else?" he demanded and, when Ironhide hesitated, he pushed with another burst of medical command underscored with an imperative.
The weapon specialist flinched, armor plates twitching. "He… it's nothing. We were sparring, I was just running him too hard. You need to take a look at his code, Ratchet, see what else is fragged up…"
"Believe me," Ratchet ground out, "I will. Later. What happened when you were sparring?"
Optimus came online to the unfamiliar sensation of a hard surface against his backstruts. It took him a moment to orient floor and ceiling and himself as somewhere inbetween; a berth, he realized, and that was a pleasant surprise after so many rotations spent recharging in alt form to economize on space and security.
It took him longer to place the only berth he could think of as being in medbay, and at that point he belatedly identified the lag in his own processor as the remnant of cyclic medical codes on their last countdown.
"You're awake? Good."
Another moment to bring his optics online and a moment after that to bring the data into focus as Ratchet leaned over him, the medic's eyes overbright as he ran scans. "How do you feel?"
Optimus gave this some serious consideration. The medical codes pinged his HUD, signaling their end, and without their suppression a host of errors popped up. He dismissed the non-critical ones habitually, then had to pause as his tank level no longer registered as non-critical, the level flashing a baleful 30.3% full at him.
Ratchet was still waiting, optics narrowed. Optimus hastily reset his vocalizer. "Like Starscream shot me."
The medic vented sharply. "Current temporary memory partition is fine, then. Good." He vanished from Optimus' range of vision, but the larger mech could hear him, the sound tracking to the worktable on the other side of the small medbay. "They evac-ed you back in - Ironhide had you spliced on his tank to keep you from draining out. I've got you on a drip right now, which is why your side sensors are disabled - I didn't want you ripping it out when you came online."
That data, along with others, was what Prime was studying as it scrolled in neat tiers through his HUD. The one piece he was looking for, however, was conspicuous in its absence. "Where was I hit?" His side was an obvious guess - with his sensors disabled, he could have been missing plates and mass alike and not feel it, wound gaping and already clamped off by the medic's skillfull work.
Ratchet came back into view, a cube of energon in one hand, and offered the other to help Optimus sit up, steadying him when the numbed sensors along his far side failed to compensate for the motion. His armor plates were gratifyingly intact except for the minor one removed to feed in the drip line. "Here," Ratchet said gruffly, thrusting the cube into Optimus' hands. "You'll process it better from your intakes than you will from me pouring it straight into your tanks."
They had taken the time, during the period they had been stationed at the base, to rig a small solar refinery to supplement the fossil fuels they had been dependent upon at first. The cube reflected that in the pale rose-gold coloring and the memory of the light, almost sweet taste - a thousand times removed from the contaminated energon on Diego Garcia - made Optimus eagerly lift it, spurred by the warning errors of his near-empty tank.
The cloying, raw taste, when it hit him, was so unexpected that he spat it out before he could stop himself, intakes back-cycling in a choking cough.
Ratchet rescued the cube from his grasp without comment, steadying him as he coughed. When he was finished the medic took a step back and pointedly took a mouthful from the same cube, swallowing it without a flinch. "One hundred percent solar, clear filtered," he told Optimus, setting the cube down at the end of the berth. His optics, when he looked up, were narrowed and far too sharp. "You want to tell me how long you haven't been able to drink it and why in the Pit you didn't come see me the klik it started?"
Having the undivided focus of Ratchet's - righteous - temper was a little like having artificial gravity abruptly cut out underneath one's pedes. Optimus cycled a steadying intake, rapidly resorting information and suppressed a flinch at the new picture that the reformed data created. "I thought it was a bad filter," he sighed - not a defense, no, not in retrospect, but the only excuse he could offer.
"And none of the rest of us said anything?" Ratchet snorted, the sound half ventilation, half the grind of gears. "We're not all that slagging stoic, you glitch." He leaned his hands on the edge of the berth, surveying his patient with a sharp optic. "I've reviewed your error log and pulled a secondary scan of your code."
Optimus pressed a hand to his side. The plates held a residual charge that sparked against his fingertips, but the internal sensors were blissfully numb. He had been shot, he remembered, his hands full of frantic, defiant, enraged Seeker, but the shot hadn't pierced his armor. He wasn't, as far as he could tell, wounded in any major fashion.
Errors and codes and a fuel tank dropping into the warning zone merely from a single brief battle. Variable outcomes, none of them good, flashed through his processor. Optimus cycled another ventilation, willing himself still in the depths of mass and struts. "What is it?"
Ratchet cocked his head. "You're not dying," he said bluntly, and it took a nanoklik for Optimus to realize that the words did, in fact, release a knot of tension inside of him. "I have a question for you, though." The medic leaned forward, optics bright and intent.
"Where is your Lord Protector?"
The question was so unexpected that Optimus had no answer, vocalizer stuttering to a static laden halt. Ratchet's optics narrowed, the medic's voice dropping, his words short and sharp. "Unless Megatron's left the solar system - which I highly doubt - then you should be able to track a location ping." He paused, drawing in a ventilation, and when he spoke again his voice was firm but soft, threaded through with with a deep, rich vibration that sank straight through the larger mech's struts. "So I ask again, my Prime - where is your Lord Protector?"
