Title: In Search of a Cause
Author: Dragon of Dispair (dragonofdispair)
Continuity: Bayverse (crossover with Guardians of the Galaxy)
Rating: T
Characters/Pairing: (currently unrequited) Bluestreak / Prowl, Sixshot, Irani Rael
Warnings: Nothing as yet. Violence and plug'n'play and/or spark interfacing may come up in later chapters.
Summary: In which Prowl and Bluestreak save the galaxy from both Decepticons and Unicron. You'd think the galaxy would be grateful, but instead Nova Corps keeps trying to arrest them for war crimes. Go figure.
OR: A buddy-comedy version of Indiana Jones IN SPAAACE! but with two giant alien robot war criminals instead of a gainfully employed archaeologist-looter. Because Decepticons are totally the same as Nazis and Bluestreak is still a morality pet.
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INTERLUDE: Centurion Irani Rael
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"Sir." She saluted crisply. No hint of her true feelings about this meeting showed anywhere on her face or in her stiff, formal posture. It certainly wouldn't do for her to show Nova Prime of all people that she would rather be anywhere but here.
She'd had a plan, before this command phrased as a polite request had been relayed to her. That plan had been to stop at the nearest temple on her way home and light a block of incense in appreciation to whichever god had obviously intervened on her account, then go home and sleep (albeit with a alarm going off every hour to wake her) as the medics had commanded. That plan had not included a personal debriefing from Nova Prime, and she was not happy about the change.
She was incredibly lucky to be alive. Lucky the robot hadn't crushed her when it grabbed her. Lucky one of the other pilots had had the skill to catch her relatively gently on his wing. Lucky she hadn't fallen unconscious… lucky all around.
Anyone of a lower rank than her would not have survived, she'd been told over and over again, and she believed it. Her entire left side where she'd slammed against the wing of the ship that had caught her was one big bruise. The medics had declared that even for a Centurion it was a miracle that there weren't internal injuries, or more broken bones than just the cracked ribs, which they'd wrapped tightly enough that breathing was difficult. Then they told her to stop taking up room in their med bay, because there were patients that were less obviously favored by the gods that needed the space, and in the mean time, try not to breathe too deeply or she'd aggravate the cracked ribs. Not that she wanted to breathe too deeply. The bruising made it hurt like hell.
But she was not complaining. Not to Nova Prime. So she'd steeled herself, pulled her platinum blond hair into something approximating a neat ponytail, rather than a tangled heap, scrubbed the soot and dirt from as much of herself as she could, pulled on a new uniform, and reported to his office.
Keueitt returned the salute, then gestured for her to sit. "There is no need for you to aggravate your injuries on my account." His voice was as smooth as Atrian honey. "Please sit. Thank you for coming."
"Of course Prime." Any other time, Irani Rael would have declined such an offer from her commanding officer, but today she took the chair and sank into it gratefully.
He took the chair across his desk from her. "I would have preferred to allow you at least a few days to recover from your ordeal, but the Worldmind has decided that this is of the utmost urgency. You understand that none of this can leave this room"
"Of course Prime."
A spreadsheet flickered into the air between them. "Please, tell me what you see."
Leaning forward hurt too much, so she settled for scooting to the edge of her chair to get as close as she could to the hologram.
The Worldmind collected facts, figures, data and nothing it collected was ever forgotten. This was two thousand years worth of transformer activity. The first column seemed to contain what the Worldmind believed to be attempts by Transformers to hack the AI network on which the Nova Empire depended so heavily, within that timeframe. It seemed that one of the robots tried it once every five years or so on average. It sorted the attempts by how successful the hacking attempt was, and Prime's insistence on secrecy made sense. Nine times out of ten, when a transformer hacked into the Worldmind servers all but the innermost firewalls, the ones maintained around the core AI, were ineffective. Only physically cutting the connection seemed to deter them.
The second column correlated that data with the name of the culprit, in cases where the transformer in question was a known quantity. In the vast majority of the attempts, though, the Worldmind could only show the closest transformer activity to the place and time of the hack, resulting in multiple suspects for that incident. About half of that column was blank: no way to know or speculate as to which of the robots was responsible.
And if that weren't disturbing enough, of the dozen hacks the Worldmind classified as "most severe", the ones that breached even those innermost firewalls that protected the core AI, the transformer they'd caught and lost this week had been caught in the act three times. In seven of those most severe cases, Prowl had been involved in other transformer activity that placed it nearby at the time of the hack, though no transformer had been identified as the definitive culprit. The remaining three had blank spots, the transformer in question disappearing without a trace. Only a handful of times was it identified as being nearby in association with a less severe hack. Twelve times in two thousand years didn't seem like many to a Xandaran, whose lifespans ranged from 80 to 130 years, but for an event that before right this moment Irani had believed impossible… She understood the Prime's need for secrecy all too well. And for in ten of those twelve times the same individual to be identified nearby enough to be the culprit, with no other overlap
She could understand his urgency as well.
"I see it," she whispered. The Worldmind was sacrosanct. It protected them, and in turn they protected it. Here was evidence that there was a threat from which they had failed their duty to the Worldmind.
"Good," Prime rubbed the bridge of his nose with long graceful fingers. "The Worldmind has decided that the transformer Prowl is a priority Alpha target, and for the continued safety of Xandar and the Nova Empire, it must be eliminated. I'm assigning you to that mission." She straitened and nodded stiffly. "For you this takes priority above even the Kree. You will be given access to all the information we have on transformer activities since the rice of the Nova Empire, and any resources you require on your hunt, including personnel, will be given to you, to be overriden only by a direct and clear threat from the Kree."
"Yes, Sir." She stood and saluted, and he returned the gesture.
"Good," he smiled. "Now go home and get some sleep first. You're lucky to be alive."
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(tbc…)
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Mentioning now that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is all I know about the Marvel universe in general, and the Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) is all I know about Nova Corps, Xandar, the Kree and the rest of the universe beyond Earth… so there might be a lot of blank-filling going on, some of it from other sci-fi universes.
