Starscream felt glad to get back into the air again. He was already wondering what the roly polies were up to, and whether the lakes had melted in Polyhex Patch. Spring had changed the world. On southern slopes the snow had thinned, exposing patches of brown on the sun-warmed faces of rocks. The air was growing humid under his wings, and the winds had changed course as the landscape adjusted to the new season.
The roly polies seemed surprised to see him. Starscream sat down on a water-polished shelf at the far end of beach and waited for them to come over. When an audience of curious whiskered faces had gathered, he began, "You'll never guess what happened to me."
He related his tale.
The calves had grown in his absence. He rested a hand palm up on the ground and waited patiently till an inquisitive female climbed on. Lifting her briefly, he took her weight.
"Calves have gained about 50 pounds. Length has increased by half a foot. Coloration is brightening. Juveniles continue to nurse."
The calf squirmed off his palm and retreated to the far edge of the circle. If he was going to tame them, he would have to spend more time at the colony. But that, he thought reluctantly, was simply not possible if he wanted to finish surveying the arctic by winter.
He was surprised at how much it cheered him up to be around the seals again. Even if they couldn't talk, they were good listeners and familiar faces. He liked the bustling life of the colony; the constant cacophony of grunts and barks; the pounding of the tide; and the screeches of the seabirds circling overhead. And most of all he liked being recognized and remembered. It was impossible to feel lonely when he was with the roly polies.
Over the course of the morning he visited all the familiar landmarks. He blasted a new hole in Shrieker Mountain and was pleased when it triggered a small avalanche that cascaded down the mountain in a white plume. Polyhex Patch's network of angular lakes was still frozen. He landed on one of them and tried to skate on the edges of his feet, but without success.
"There's too much snow," he complained, scraping it away to make a little clear spot. He balanced there on tip-toe and attempted a pirouette, which landed him flat on his rear.
"Ever graceful, the Seeker picked himself and returned to his rightful element," Starscream said. He leapt back into the sky.
Satisfied that he was up to date on the local business, he made his way to the far northeastern corner of the continent. At Search Grid Unit 1-1, he slowed and began to fly back and forth, back and forth, scanning the ground for a familiar hollow metal signature.
The weeks passed, and spring arrived for real. Now the hours of daylight stretched on and on. The snow clouds were replaced by inky rainclouds, and Starscream enjoyed the sensation of water droplets lashing over his fuselage.
As the snow vanished, he could see at last the true colors of the landscape. Streaks of brown and green appeared; the icy lakes filled with brilliant blue water. Lichen crusted rocks began to poke up, revealing the outlines of snowy ridges and slopes. Only the aloof mountains still kept their white distance, forming a brilliant white line across the landscape.
The sky swarmed with birds. They hopped and waddled across the ground, piping and kreeling and chirping and cawing and honking. They came in every color and size, from tiny insect-sized things to giant seabirds with wings half the breadth of his own. The latter group made him nervous that he might hit one by mistake, but they were distinctive with their bright red bills, black heads, and long blue-grey wings, and as long as the sky was clear he could watch for them.
As the ground cleared, it exploded with new green. Ragged shoots of grass popped up amongst the dead, sodden tangle of last year's growth. Fuzzy grey buds appeared on the willows that lined the streams and meadows. Finally tiny flowers had erupted from the greening landscape in clumps of purple, yellow and white.
Each pond and puddle filled with squirming larvae. Insects appeared as if from nowhere, and soon the air was full of flies, moths, gnats, orange-winged butterflies, whining mosquitoes, dragonflies and bees. As soon as darkness began to fall, it seemed as though all of the insects in the world headed straight for his optics. The gnats in particular thronged him so thickly that when he tried to brush them away, it left black smears on his vision. He quickly learned to dim his optics when the light vanished.
And then, when the ground was almost bare of snow, the most wonderful thing of all happened: the trees leafed out. It came slowly, as a barely visible mist of pale green. Then the green thickened, and all at once the world became intensely and completely green. Gone was the endless, blank whiteness, gone was the sterile, dead landscape. Everything was alive and growing. Starscream's spirits soared. He was going to find Skyfire this summer, he could feel it. The days fled by as he raced back and forth across the grid.
But as he soon discovered, spring had an ugly side too. Not all the snow had melted. Sheltered behind rocks or on the sloping sides of high hills, it stayed on, stubbornly resisting the efforts of the sun. Whenever Starscream saw a lingering white patch, his mind said, Skyfire! and an involuntary jolt of hope flashed through him. He rebuked himself every time, yet he could not help it. He wanted the blobs of snow to be Skyfire. Even though he knew they were snow, he looked at them anyway. They formed shapes like "Skyfire with his legs torn off," or "Skyfire broken into two halves with his arms clenched around his midsection in agony." Starscream could not stop himself from envisioning the gruesome scenes. He fretted at the slowness of his progress.
It was not until he started the systematic mile by mile survey that he truly began to comprehend the scale of the task he had undertaken. He would be covering over a million square miles, documenting potentially tens of thousands of hazards and false positives. His wings would take him over billions of trees and untold ocean waves. There would be mountain ranges with thousands of peaks that he would search one by one. There would be an uncountable multitude of islands. And somehow, somehow, he had to accomplish it in a single summer—though he was becoming more and more doubtful that it was possible.
His other projects advanced more quickly. With the help of the microfactory, he constructed thirteen solar-powered satellites, each no bigger than his hand, and placed them in orbit around the planet. He reviewed the data they relayed on a daily basis, searching for a distinctive white-red patch, or better yet, a hard, metallic radar blip. There were a disheartening amount of white patches, but no red ones. He investigated a few of the more promising radar blips, but as he had feared, they were merely iron or copper rich boulders. Glumly he added them to his map.
He also followed through on his resolution to examine the planet scientifically. Since there was little to do on his search besides study the ground, he took advantage of the time to research. He noted where the birds had their colonies and studied the migration patterns of the whales. Once he observed a sabertoothed cat stalking a three-horned deer. More mundane yet more challenging were his geological studies. His maps filled with symbols and dashed, dotted and toothed lines. He marked faults, unconformities, synclines, anticlines, plate boundaries, stratigraphic layers, strike/dips, volcanic sills, dikes, and more. Nor did he limit his studies to rocks. He coded vegetal density maps, recorded precipitation and took readings on temperature, humidity and dew point.
Yet though he studied everything, he did so in only a cursory fashion. No matter how interesting a feature was, he could neither stop to investigate it nor deviate from his survey line. He watched what appeared before him on the horizon and followed it until it disappeared behind his tailspine. It was like having a continuous banquet of knowledge, yet being allowed to taste only a single sip from each cube.
Summer came swifly upon the heels of spring, and with it endless daylight. Though the sun disappeared below the horizon at "night," the sky remained blue and the stars were nowhere to be seen. The moon was a pale spectre of its former self. It shared the sky with the sun, and Starscream often flew with the sun at one wingtip and the moon at the other.
He moved his solarsheets up from the plains to take advantage of the constant light and found himself collecting far more energy than he needed. Remembering his dilemma on the whale, he decided to place strategic caches of energon around the places he frequented. Then, even if he ended up stranded without his survival rations, he would still be able to reach a supply of cubes. But he had been careful since the incident never to be caught shorthanded again.
The young roly polies grew plump on their mother's milk. The urgency of Starscream's mission prevented him from visiting the colony as often as he would have liked, but when he passed overhead he would dip his wings to say hello. Sometimes he thought how pleasant it would be to turn himself into a seal and lie there amongst the closely packed mass of bodies, sunning himself and enjoying the loud companionship of his friends. They have such easy lives, he thought.
The endless days and constant buzz and thrum of life were like a drug. Where before it had been panic that drove Starscream on, now it was the season of life itself. All the creatures that shared the planet with him were eating, mating, fighting and calving. It was the season of now, and it demanded to be taken advantage of before the sunlight slipped away and the cold night fell once again.
Starscream had been certain that he would find Skyfire during the summer, and as the bright months flowed by he forced himself to keep up his hopes. Though he was not done with the first range of mountains, and though he had only managed to survey half of the ground he had set out to cover, he knew that somehow he must find Skyfire before the snow set in. It was unthinkable to spend another winter alone in his tent while Skyfire lay broken somewhere.
He raced down the search lines, trying to catch up with the goals that had slipped away from him. Or was it the summer that slipped away from him? He would have to hurry now, he told himself, have to wrap it all up fast. Skyfire would appear any day, any week. How glad Starscream would be to care for his wounds. He would spread out a tent to protect his friend from wind and rain, and they would be together again, the big white cargo jet and the small silver Seeker. They would talk and talk, and Starscream would relate all his adventures. Skyfire would listen, and laugh, and perhaps chide him gently for taking so long to find him.
Yes, he would find Skyfire any day now. The summer would last. He was making up for lost time.
The leaves began to turn yellow.