Chapter 9-Fire on Fire
The planet Ys'Devian was on fire. Originally it was the homeworld of a race of bipedal insectoids that had revolutionized solar technology to its zenith. But over the past two years, wars had plagued its populace; the major powers of the two largest continents clawing and biting at each other, blissfully unaware of the superior force controlling things from behind the scenes.
The wars got wars, more people died. By the time the natives got it in their heads to stop and think about why they were fighting in the first place, the Decepticon cell hidden in the world broke cover and quickly decimated the war torn nations, having already subtly drained much of the planet's resources during the constant wars. Once they had everything they needed, the Cons left the planet and called their executioner to finish the dying race off.
Sixshot. A Decepticon who was over 40 feet tall, taller than Optimus Prime and Megatron, who was a mixture of sea green, purple and white armor and was a unique specimen of his mechanical race. Sixshot was a mech with six alt modes, all lethal in design and intent: a gun, a spacecraft, a tank, a lion, an armored carrier and his massive robot mode. He was a living weapon built for war, a mech feared by enemy and ally alike, but he swore an oath of loyalty to Megatron himself an oath he refused to turn his back on even after Megaton's disappearance.
"Ahh!"
Sixshot heard a scream only for a second before he crushed the armored hull of a tank, killing its pilots and destroying the vehicle. He looked around at the carnage and infernal hell his companions had brought to this world. Phase six, the endgame, also known as siege mode, wasn't as important or that special when you really think about it. In the words of fellow phase sixer Black Shadow, bots like him, Sixshot and Overlord were essentially glorified janitors-a cleanup crew wearing the badge of a death squad. Sixshot didn't care; he had long ago learned that he enjoyed having something to do in this war.
He transformed into his tank mode and rolled across the ground firing missiles at a battlement. There were proton missiles, and the battlement's thick armor could not withstand the penetrating power of the torpedoes as it was destroyed by the ignition. More tanks came at him and Sixshot's body reconfigured into that of a massive lion. He charged at the remaining tanks, which were now attacking en masse as their bunker and last line of defense was destroyed.
Sixshot grunted in annoyance and roared, smashing into the tanks like a bull, throwing the armored vehicles into the air like toys. He tore away at them with steel teeth and iron claws ripping apart the composite armor that was supposed to be the more sophisticated of their race. They fell quickly.
Then he was assaulted by particle beams from above and saw a fleet of fighter aircraft flying towards him. Sneering, Sixshot transformed into his spacecraft form that shot at the brigade and tore through them with pulse cannons and concussion bombs that lit up the smoke-filled sky.
Just a normal day for the Decepticon executioner.
XXXXXX
Contrary to what many thought, Decepticon space stations weren't always bustling cesspools of betrayal scheming and torture. Many were pretty docile, and mostly quiet. These stations, placed far away from the front lines in remote areas of the galaxy for their importance and/or primary function, were mainly places for Cons that weren't gun-toting maniacs and registered psychos who worked behind the scenes to keep the war effort running. Kujata, Sixshot's current home away from home, was one such station. Calm, quiet and static enough for the blood lust surging through his circuits to die down without getting into a fight with some dumb frag drunk off his aft. In fact, aside from the faint hustle and bustle of the workers there, the station was mostly silent.
Sixshot hated the silence.
Having been a designated harbinger of destruction and one of the most powerful Cybertronians of the modern age, it made sense that Sixshot found the stillness between each mission borderline torture. Time crawls when he's not active, and if it went on long enough, he'd call it hell.
In times like this, Sixshot would pass the time by staring out the window at the void beyond. It didn't help make things any faster, but it did alleviate his boredom somewhat. Still, for a weapon of mass destruction, standing around like a bump on a log was a bit embarrassing.
"Dude, what are you doing?" Someone whispered.
Sixshot looked at the two mechs whispering behind him through his reflection. One of them was the purple headmaster, Apeface, and the other was some cold constructed mech brought online just a few months ago.
"You have a death wish?" Apeface hissed.
"What? I was just going to ask him if he was up for a couple of drinks." The rookie said.
"That's Sixshot, you moron. The walking apocalypse himself. He doesn't drink, let along hang out with bots he could snuff out in two non-kliks."
"But…"
Despite the rookie's protests, Apeface dragged him away from Sixshot, who didn't turn away from his stellar canvas. It was nothing new to him; his fellow Decepticons walk on eggshells around him, shun him. Sixshot terrified many in the Decepticon ranks, mainly soldier class, as whenever he was turned loose on his enemies…collateral damage was a very real and common occurrence. And Sixshot was not the mech to pull his punches because his allies were dumb enough to still be in the line of fire.
It wasn't that he was some adrenaline junkie that detested sleeping or something; even he valued the importance of relaxation between battles. No, he hated the lulls because there was nothing to distract him from that void in his being. That gaping hole in his Spark he could never hope to fill. Sixshot couldn't explain it as anything more than being bored by all the constant, repetitive killing and destruction his job entailed.
'No rage. No duty. No sense of self.' Sixshot thought as he stared at his reflection. 'It's not me staring into the abyss. I am the abyss!'
There was only one group that he could count as "company" and they were a group of Cons most Decepticons avoided if they could-the Terrorcons.
The Terrorcons – consisting of Hun-Grrr, Cutthroat, Blot, Rippersnapper, and Sinnertwin-were vicious and savage even by beast former standards. They were dangerous and ruthless Cons, mechs who gave into their bestial nature and shamelessly aspire to the sheer, unremitting level of carnage set by Sixshot himself. Something about Sixshot had attracted them to him, acting as if he were their teacher in all things destructive. Their partner in carnage. Sixshot tried to distance himself from them, but they always cling tighter. Granted, they were a hoot to hang out with during downtime, and Hun-Grrr especially was an all right mech to drink with.
But now it appears they had deserted him. And he wanted to know why.
"Squawkbox!"
The purple and green combiner jumped at Sixshot's yelling of his name and spun around in his seat. "S-Sixshot! What's the problem?"
Sixshot loomed over Squawkbox like a mountain. "The Terrorcons. Where are they?"
"Huh? Oh, you mean Hun-Grrr's crew. I don't, ah, let me see what I c-can find out." Squawkbox quickly got to work in locating the last known coordinates of the Terrorcons. He usually wasn't this quick on the job, but you don't keep someone like Sixshot waiting. "Found it! Oh…that's why. Mumu-Obscura."
"Mumu-Obscura?" Sixshot looked at the holo-image of the planet in question. It looked like it was made of a mixture of rock and metal, a lesser form of Cybertron with a quarter of its mantle missing.
"A planet in the Eigerson-48 system-strategically important, the dominant species in need of pacification." Squawkbox explained. "The, ah, Terrorcons went in. they never came out. Since then, all fact-finding missions have been savagely repulsed. Word is, Mumu-Obscura has fallen to some group called the Reapers."
That caught Sixshot's attention. The Reapers. He heard very little of such a group, and the data files on them were next to nothing. Anything that does pertain to them amounts to myths and scary stories that make them out to be interstellar boogeymen created by frightened beings to control other frightened beings. But within every myth and legend is a nub of hard fact. And Sixshot set out to separate truth from fiction.
XXXXXX
Mumu-Obscura looked like hell. The planet was a small planetoid, probably a dwarf class, and much of its surface was covered in visible machinery, though the yell tale orange glows on its surface hinted at its unstable formation.
Sixshot's flight here from the station was reasonably quick thanks to his built in fold generator. He barely used any energon in the flight into the star system. But the minute he entered Mumu-Obscura's orbit, his sensors picked up multiple heat signatures coming his way-surface to air seeker warheads.
"Here comes the welcome mat," Sixshot said. There was a hint of a grin in his voice. "Well, bring it on!"
He increased his speed and flew straight into the missiles, the combined detonation of it all forming a large sphere of flames in the planet's upper atmosphere. A lesser bot or a starship would've been completely destroyed by that amount of firepower, but Sixshot's body armor diffused most of the explosion to reasonable levels against his body. His spacecraft mode flew out of the dying flames and down towards the planet unscathed. But as he passed through an asteroid field, Sixshot was suddenly assaulted by a wall of cloaked proton cannons hidden among the space debris.
'These guys must really like their personal space.' Sixshot observed. The thought made him laugh as he switched to his space gun configuration and began shooting down the invisible cannons. 'Kind of like me.'
With the annoying defenses gone and his path of entry clear, Sixshot made planet fall on the ravaged world. As he felt into its orbit and towards the surface, he noted how thorough the destruction the Reapers caused was. The ground was like a jigsaw puzzle with magma seeping through the surface like blood, buildings little more than skinny metal frames twisted and bent beyond its original construction.
'I love scorching a planet as much as the next bot, but this is a bit much.' Sixshot thought. 'Why do all this? All this devastation and for what?'
Sixshot flew in low and shifted into his beast mode upon landing, his immense weight leaving huge paw prints in the ground. His feline head scanned the area, sniffing the air for any scent other than that of burning corpses and smoldering metal. He tried to wrap his mind around why the Reapers did this in the first place; whatever tactical worth or other exploited attributes Mumu-Obscura did or didn't have is all gone. The Reapers seemed to go out of their way to leave behind a dead world in every aspect.
He sniffed the air. Little or no atmosphere, the base elements of its geological sub-structure contaminated, any and all infrastructure stripped away. Mum-Obscura was just another addition to a long chain of planet-sized mausoleums.
'Maybe there was a reason for this. A plan of some kind that had nothing to do with this planet' Sixshot's eyes widened as a possible answer came to him. 'No…was this all a plan to lure…'
A shadow fell over him and Sixshot spun around, baring his teeth. Three figures stood at the edge of the crater. They were cybertronians, but Sixshot couldn't recall seeing them before. The femme in the lead was orange-red, with bright golden wings folded on her back and parts of a beast alt mode on her slender frame, with had glowing orange eyes and a face that looked like it could've been sculpted from marble. Her companions were definitely twins, bulky mechanoids with similar frames, only one was red and the other was blue. Sixshot noted the red bot's cannon and the blue bot's odd shield array.
"At long last, we meet." The red femme said, smiling. Her voice reminded Sixshot of the Decepticon Copperhead, calm but ready to strike at a moment's notice. "My name is Ember, and these are my associates Mercurius and Vayeate. Welcome to our world, Sixshot."
"Well, that's mighty accommodating of you." Sixshot said, changing into his bipedal form. "Care to go one stage further and tell me if the Terrorcons are still alive?"
"They are, I assure you that." Ember said, smiling peacefully. "All you have to do is claim them…from us!"
'So they did lure me here. Explains the welcoming party.' Sixshot drew his sonic barrage pistols and charged them up. 'Fine by me.'
The red mech, Mercurius, leapt forward just as Sixshot fired his pistols, at them. The eight panels on his back flew around him to form a shield, generating a powerful magnetic field that allowed the condensed sonic blasts to bounce right off it. Sixshot didn't wait for his attack to end before he switched tactics, switching to gun mode and shooting twin plasma blasts at their feet. The trio scattered in different directions, and to Sixshot, that made his job easier.
He focused on Ember first, firing another twin blast at her. Ember leapt away and shot a large fireball at him that slammed against his underside, which didn't do too much damage, but it blinded him to Mercurius also flying up to him. The red mech commanded his panels to form into a long lance and slammed it into Sixshot's alt mode, hitting him with enough force that it caused him to spin upward, exposing his underside for Ember to attack once more.
"Ngh!" Sixshot grunted as another fire blast actually blew him out of the sky and sent him crashing to the ground. These freaks were powerful, and were actually dealing some solid damage off him. Considering they had laid waste to this world in the time it took for him to get there, they were clearly professionals at what they do. "That's it. No more games. Let's get this done!"
He switched to tank mode and began firing his laser cannons at Ember and Mercurius. Vayeate, who had stayed hidden until now, flanked Sixshot and fired her long beam cannon, hitting the rear of his tank mode. Sixshot spun back around to attack her, but Mercurius leapt in front of her and blocked the laser blasts he shot at them. Vayeate stepped from behind her brother's protection and fired her cannon again, this time hitting one of Sixshot's treads. Ember joined in on the fun by raining down a stream of intensely hot flames from above in her beast mode.
The earth trembled from their increasingly destructive battle, the battlefield literally coming apart at the seams from their power. Sixshot, as strong as he was, knew that their combined assault would wear away at even his defenses and was forced to back off.
Ember changed to bipedal mode and landed on the ground, slamming her fists into the ground and summoning large geysers of flame to burst from the earth. Sixshot was grazed by one of the flaming spouts, hissing as he felt his armor warp from the immense heat and reconfigured into his gunship mode. He flew high above the molten landscape and awaited another assault…but it never came.
"That's enough. I think he's learned by now." Ember said. Mercurius and Vayeate stood down, holstering their weapons and standing beside their leader. Sixshot sighed inwardly, happy that it was over. They were starting to do some seriously damage.
'Wait, they were toying with me!' He angrily thought. If that was just them doing a warm up, then if they were really serious…they could have seriously injured him. Maybe even killed him given enough time!
Ember took out a dark red crystal and dropped it to the ground, crushing it under her foot. Energy burst from the shattered crystal and formed a dome. Five figures materialized inside the dome-the Terrorcons.
"Your friends are safe." Ember said. "Disoriented, but not harmed in any way."
Sixshot hesitated, but transformed back to robot mode. "And we can just go on our merry way, no hard feelings? Is that it? C'mon, what do you really want?"
"You." She answered. "Sixshot, we've kept a close eye on you over the past deca-cycles. Harbinger of destruction you are, I know constantly fighting and destroying has become dull to you. You are locked in an endless cycle of destruction, isolation, desperation and-almost inevitably-madness."
"Whose we?" He asked.
"My organization. We're a group of mechs and femmes who were like you, trapped by our unnatural instincts, locked in a self-destructive cycle of killing, fighting, and more killing. What we seek is to break that cycle and redirect out murderous proclivities."
"And now?"
"Now instead of waging war….we seek to end it forever."
"End war?" Sixshot snorted and motioned to the apocalyptic landscape around them. "And this is how you go about it, eh? I gotta tell you, this grand plan of yours-whatever it is-still has a few…rough edges."
"You do not understand. How can you, when all you see is what others tell you to see? What we have done here is merely to cauterize one of the universes many bleeding wounds." Ember took a step forward, not taking her gaze off the six changer. ""This world has been fought over for eons, costing billions of lives. Better surely to take it out of the equation entirely than let it continue to be the spur for perpetual bloodshed and carnage. All this…is a mercy."
Sixshot had no response for that. This was nothing new to him or any combatant in the war. Worlds burn, some are destroyed, others live, yet he death toll still rises. Occasionally a strategically important planet would pop up, but those went by quickly. In the end, despite who occupied that planet, the world would still drag on ceaselessly. Sixshot could count the number of times that's happened with the amount of stars in the galaxy.
"I know you feel it too. That's void that eats away at your soul between every battle. You are a powerful warrior, Sixshot, but you have no proper cause, no reason to fight. That loneness and emptiness you're feeling was a product of your people's war. And the longer you fight, the more agonizing it will be." She continued. "Which is why I want to extend an invitation to you, Sixshot. Join us. We offer you a case, a focus. We offer you a home. All you have to do, to prove you have truly cast off the shackles of your previous life…is eradicate these five."
"Who? Us?" Rippersnapper exclaimed. "The hell man?"
Sixshot looked at the Reapers, then to the Terrorcons, and back again, rubbing his chin. His indecision made the Terrorcons very nervous.
"No…you wouldn't!" Hun-Gurr said. "Sixshot, c'mon! we…have a bond. You don't need these misfits. You already got…er…"
"Us misfits." Cutthroat said.
"Yeah, right!" Hun-Gurr nodded. "Right?"
Sixshot made his decision. He leapt up and transformed into his ship mode, and aimed his guns on the Terrorcons.
"Sixshot, wait!"
Rippersnapper's cries were drowned out by the sound of Sixshot's cannons firing on them. He fired his cannons three times, blasting apart the ground before switching to tank mode and firing his particle cannons on top of that. Smoke and dust filled the area, but when it cleared, it revealed the totally unscathed Terrorcons standing in a ring of holes, looking absolutely terrified.
"Ha!" Sixshot laughed. "Got ya good, didn't I?"
Ember's expression was unreadable at his blatant refusal to join them. She snapped her fingers and her two subordinates vanished in a flash of light. Before she left, Ember gave Sixshot some parting words.
"When the ties that bind finally, irrevocably snap, we will find you again." She promised. "And on that day, you will see just how grand our plan to bring true unity to the universe will be!"
Ember vanished in a pillar of fire, leaving behind a smoking crater in her wake. The Terrorcons let out a collective sigh of relief, but Sixshot felt anything but. He felt a part of him leave with them and it sent a pang of emotions all the way down to his Spark.
But, looking down at the Terrorcons, Sixshot's pain was somewhat elated with the knowledge that he wasn't a lost cause. The badge he wore still meant something, and these odd bots who seemed to be glued to him stir empathy of a sort.
"Sixshot, let's call in a ship and head home." Rippersnapper said. "I think I lost a few cycles of my life."
"Yes, let's." Sixshot agreed.
Yes. It's enough…for now.
XXXXXX
"So he refused the offer, huh?" Kopesh sighed. "I thought you said he would accept. That his insecurities would leave him vulnerable to outside manipulation."
Ember twirled a piece of hardened lava in her red fingers as she gazed out at Charr's lava fields. "He is, and your meeting with him has planted the seeds of doubt within his mind. Give him some time and he will be a crucial pawn in our game."
Kopesh nodded, his ebony black head glistening in the bright sunlight on the world he was settling on. "Things are doing well on my end. I still have Ultra Magnus hounding me, but recently there has been a new…development that might grant us some more time."
"Should I be worried?"
"Nothing of the sort. She's an uncontrollable asset but useful if directed on the right people." He assured her. After a moment of silence, he asked, "May I speak freely, Ember?"
"You may."
"The Expansion. Can you guarantee it will work? We're dealing with powerful forces here."
"I understand you hesitation, but it's unfounded and uneeded. Mem Aleph will handle the more life threatening aspects of the Expansion. We just need to set the process up and eliminate wild cards who might destroy everything we've worked for." Ember said. "If this goes right, we'll have an endless source of energy to call upon. We will have the power to remake the universe for our people and find the paradise we've all sought for."
"And the universe will finally know peace."
"Yes, but first, we must wipe away the old slate and send everything…into the void."