Chapter 10
Disclaimers in Chapter 1
Lennox transmitted the day's reports to Colonel Morshower and stood up from his chair, stretching until his back popped. It was that last fight with Starscream rather than age catching up with him - wasn't it? It had to be - but too much time in an office chair had started to give him a backache.
Optimus' audials caught the tell-tale crack. "Are you all right?"
"Ah, yeah, it's nothing. Whoever thought it would be a good idea for me to fly a desk—!"
"I see." And he did. "I am sure somewhere on base, datapads have a hidden nursery where they create hordes of tiny datapad-lings. Nothing else explains their limitless numbers."
"Hah. Yeah, that's gotta be it. Heard there was a crisis in medbay today," Will said.
"Yes. Skysong woke up from sedation unexpectedly, clawed Jolt's optic out, attempted to fly, and crashed. No sparkling should ever know such despair."
Sam rotated his chair to look at the two of them. "Bee told me about grounded seekers. Isn't there anything we can do?"
Optimus said, "There has to be something, but I confess that I have no idea what it would be. The thing, Sam, is that permanent disability, to the point of hopelessness, is rare in our species. No one wants to contemplate reformat, but if an injury is such that a new frame is the lesser evil, the option exists to build one. However, right now, we cannot build Skysong a new sparkling frame. We do not have the materials or the tools, and only Wheeljack has the skill set. In general, we have few examples of others who have made new lives after such a disability. I find myself drawing upon English in an attempt to comfort and reassure her, using a complex vocabulary which I cannot communicate to a sparkling."
Lennox said, "We do have the experience. I might have an idea. Let me talk to Doc Parker and make a few phone calls."
Among the casualties from Chicago were a few troops who had survived, but were injured too badly to return to their former duties. He kept in touch with them routinely to make sure they were getting all the help they needed from the VA—and to raise unholy hell if they weren't.
Carlos DeSantos was recovering from third degree burns, and had been blinded. He probably wouldn't get out of the hospital for a year or more, what with all the skin grafts and everything. Derek Poynter had a head injury—some days he could carry on a perfectly normal conversation, and others, the personality changes were enough to scare the crap out of his mother and sister.
Tech Sgt. Charles "Chip" Chase was paralyzed from the mid-chest down. The information systems specialist had been injured in NEST's conflict with Shockwave and four other 'Cons. He'd had to relearn to breathe, for crying out loud. But sitting around watching daytime TV and feeling sorry for himself had never been Chip's style. He had been involved with an experimental program in which a few wounded vets were designing a neuro-interface control for powered wheelchairs, using conductive pads above the damage to the spinal cord to pick up signals that once would have controlled walking, and using them to control the chair. They hoped it would eliminate the need to keep one hand—usually the patient's dominant hand, at that—on a joystick at all times, and make control of the chair as effortless as walking from point A to point B.
Chip being Chip, however, in their last phone call he had admitted to recently getting into some hot water with his nurses for souping up his chair so it would go twenty miles an hour, and racing it up and down the hospital corridors. Just to test the controls, of course.
That hospital was rapidly going to turn into a prison for Chip. The last thing he needed was to have people holding him back for his own good.
The thing was, Chip hadn't healed enough to be out of the hospital yet.
Will figured that getting Ratchet and Wheeljack involved in two projects would be no bad thing: getting Skysong airborne again, and getting Chip not just a marvelous wheelchair, but back on his feet entirely. That last could help a lot of people. And it wouldn't hurt a damn thing to have Skysong see Chip pulling some of his crazy stunts. In this case, someone usually considered a bad influence (a definition Will knew would make Chip grin) on a young person could turn out to be a lifesaving one.
After cornering Dr. Parker and making sure they could provide the care that Chip needed, he gave the Tech Sgt. a call as he walked back over to Ops.
It sounded like World War III was going on when Chip answered the phone. "Hey, guys, turn that down some! Sorry, Colonel, the guys are playing video games."
"No problem. How ya doin', Sarge?" He held the phone to his ear as he climbed the stairs to the platform.
"Great. We got one of the guys' little sister to test out the control system, she was fine with it. I think we're really onto something."
"Are you at a point where you have to be right there to keep working on the project?"
"Uh, well, no, I guess not. We can do a lot of it online, since my contribution's mostly going to be programming now."
Will eschewed the hated office chair to sit on the corner of his desk. "How would you like to come out to Mission City?"
"Mission City? You mean I can stay in? How?"
"I don't know about that, but we can sure hire you as a civilian contractor. Look, I don't want to lose your skills, and besides that, if you can get Wheeljack and Ratchet involved in your project, who knows what the three of you could come up with?"
"Hell, yes, when do I ship out?"
"As soon as I can put the paperwork through. The CMO says she can probably handle everything fine, so there shouldn't be a medical hangup. What we need from you is to clear records release to her, ASAP."
"Holy shit! I'll get that done today! They've had me lookin' at brochures from assisted living places. I can't believe this. Thank you, Colonel!"
"No problem, Sarge, it'll be great to have you back."
Lennox was still grinning when he hung up the phone.
Optimus asked, "What was all that about?"
Lennox replied, "Y'know how I said I might have an idea? Well, do you remember Tech Sgt. Chase?" When Optimus nodded, the NEST leader outlined his plan.
Wheeljack, Jazz, and now Chase working in such close proximity to one another had to be nearing some sort of intelligence/engineering/sense of humor critical mass. But if Chase could inspire an injury-grounded seekerling to fight though her sky-hunger, Optimus would deal with all the rest of it.
-Sidhe Chronicles-
Once Sam and Carly spoke to Will about having their ceremony on base, everything femme or female went into full-out Wedding Mode. Cybertronians didn't have a concept of legal marriage, but moving in together was an occasion for a party, and there were religious rituals to bless new sparkbonds. The bots were all curious about the human customs.
Optimus asked Diarwen, "Why do they throw birdseed at the couple?"
A truckload of supplies that Ratchet had ordered had got as far as Las Vegas when the truck broke down. Prime had decided the simplest thing was to go up there and get it himself. Diarwen was riding along. She explained, "It is an old Pagan fertility custom that has carried over to modern times, though originally whatever grain grew locally was used, and later rice became traditional. It wishes the young couple many healthy children. People switched to birdseed because it was found that birds would eat the uncooked rice and be harmed by it."
"Are other traditions from your youth still practiced?"
"Well, many pagans choose to be handfasted rather than married by Christian customs, and those ceremonies are very similar. But among Christians? Let me think. We have wedding rings, and so do they. But then so do many human cultures which did not have contact with the Sidhe. I believe that the ring is a symbol of eternity that many cultures have in common, of which mine is only one. They do not have the handfasting cords. Jumping the broom is a custom adopted by modern pagans, which originated in African practices and is often used in African-American Christian weddings, but it has nothing to do with the Sidhe. We have the wedding cup, and some Christian services have Holy Communion as part of the ceremony, but I don't know if the two are related. In any case, it has a totally different significance now. What are your customs surrounding blessing a sparkbond?"
"It is not the same as marriage. From what I have been able to determine, marriage is a statement that a new family has begun, and a pledge by the new couple to remain together for life."
"Yes."
"We do not need such a ceremony, because there is no need for a couple who have already bonded to pledge to remain in the relationship. A bond cannot be broken, it is evidence in and of itself that a lifelong commitment already exists. The blessings call for Primus' special protection for the couple, because if one is deactivated, the other soon follows. It is a serious time, though one of great joy also."
Diarwen nodded. "That sounds similar to a ritual which my people have for blessing soulmates. It is the same for siblings or friends as for lovers. Handfastings are another thing, and take place generally at Beltane."
Optimus slowed down as they neared a construction zone. "What about the festival that will be occurring soon? Lughnasadh?"
"A Celtic festival in honor of the god Lugh. He held funeral games in honor of His Mother, Tailtiu, and the custom continued. It became to the Celts what the early Olympics were in Ancient Greece. Also, at that time, there were first-fruits harvest festivals. Lugh is especially honored at this time because He is a storm god. We call upon Him to protect the crops still ripening in the fields from storm damage. Lughnasadh is the first of the three harvest festivals, the others being Mabon and Samhain."
"So, it has nothing to do with weddings." They jounced over the reason for the construction zone.
"On the contrary, it is second only to Beltane as a popular time to be handfast or wed. Again, the association is between ripening grain and fertility. Also, through much of human history, once a woman was wed, she almost immediately became pregnant. If she was wed at Lughnasadh, the baby was born around Beltane, when there was sufficient food available to support a lactating woman. But the main emphasis of Lughnasadh itself is on the coming sacrifice of the God, and His rebirth at Yule."
"Sacrifice? That is a figurative thing, isn't it?"
"In this day and age, yes, since the first of the blueberries or blackberries stand in for the King himself, it is symbolic. The sacrifice of creatures or of people was never a practice among my people, not that I know of—perhaps long, long ago such was true, but it predates written or oral records, if so. I can remember a time when it was not unknown for the Celts to sacrifice people. To the best of my knowledge it was done willingly; an aging king or high priest who felt that his life had reached its destined end might choose such a death for the benefit of the people. You know of the bog bodies? They were often such. It was not our people's way, but we did not judge them for it. The humans have not carried out such a sacrifice for many generations. Now, sometimes a figure of the corn god is made of bread, then symbolically sacrificed to the gods. It is left on the altar for the length of the rite, by which time the gods have had their fill, and then eaten by the humans. That was a necessity for a long time; no food could be wasted. Now it is seen as a way to share with the gods."
Optimus negotiated a flagman's permission to cross the working area and said, "I thought that being Prime was complex!"
Diarwen laughed, and waved as they passed the flagman. "And so being Prime may be, but no less so than being human or Sidhe! We are mindful that our lives depend on the sacrifice of our crops, and of the animals that we raise, or hunt. It is impossible for agricultural societies to separate themselves from the knowledge that, for life to continue, other things must die. That is why there are so many harvest festivals. Even in modern America, where city people often seem unaware of where their food comes from, there remains a harvest festival on Thanksgiving Day."
"But by 'harvest,' you always mean 'kill to eat.'"
She paused for a moment, the silver eyes reaching to the horizon for the right words. "Optimus, this is the reality of organic life, and even vegetarians cannot escape it entirely. Plants do live and die. But we know that there are no endings, only beginnings, on that unending spiral. That is the lesson of Lughnasadh, and of Mabon and Samhain. Beyond death, is life, for us no less than John Barleycorn, or the hart taken in the chase."
"You accept the necessity of death, yet you will fight as hard for life as anyone I have ever known," Optimus rumbled, and she wasn't sure he was not laughing.
"I see no contradiction. This is the life that I have been given. It is my duty to live it as well as I can, since others sacrifice their own lives that I may endure, and to learn everything possible from it. Just because I know that this road comes to an end, does not mean I see any need to rush things. Not now that I have reasons to stay," she smiled.
"I am glad that you have found reasons," he said, and they rolled on in amicable silence.
-Sidhe Chronicles-
A medical helo came to a landing in front of the largest of the three Quonset huts at the NEST Base. The faces of the crew in the back nearly matched the ginger patient's hair, and they were laughing so hard it took them an extra thirty seconds to get him off the helo. Two of them pushed his gurney, while the third unloaded his gear.
Bobby Epps came running. "Chase! Welcome home, man!"
The redhead pulled him into a surprisingly strong bear hug and back-slap. "Great to be here, Epps! Did my wheels get here yet?"
"Got a couple of crates back in medbay, might be in one of them."
Chase grinned. Epps stepped back to give the medics room, and they continued on inside.
One of the flight nurses was new to the base. She made the mistake of taking her eyes off Chase to scan for Cybertronians, and Chase was not slow to take advantage of her inattention.
She got pretty good elevation on the jump to get herself out of butt-pinch range. The squeak was high-quality, too, turning a few optics her way. But the scowl afterwards took the ex-Tech Sargeant aback.
"What the fuck, asshole?" she said, her hands on her hips. "Elise, can you cope with this jerk?"
Elise, who was twenty years older than either of them, said calmly, "Yeah, no problem."
Chase felt the gurney shudder, then stabilize. "Why did a butt-pinch make me a jerk?" he said to Elise, hoping for an answer.
Probably not the one he got, though. "It don't make you a jerk," the middle-aged, slender black woman said calmly. "It makes you somebody who's gotta prove he ain't a jerk."
"I don't understand. In Louisville -"
"This ain't Louisville, son. That what they do in the south, by way of sayin' hello to a girl?"
"Some of 'em."
"Well, here, those guys'd be up on charges in a week. And they'd be up on separate charges for each girl they pinched. That's not something you get away with if you're in the Army, and not if you're a contractor, either, son. This's the north, not the south, so you better leave them low-down ways behind you, and behave respectfully toward the women you meet."
Chip laughed. It had a bitter ring to it. "From a wheelchair, that ain't hard."
"Met my husband when he was in a wheelchair," Ellie said. "We had twenty good years together. Still in a wheelchair when he died. Makes some things harder, some easier. Which ones? That's sort of up to you."
By the time two orderlies came over to help transfer Chase from the helo's gurney to a hospital bed, he had a lot to think about.
Being paralyzed, and having more or less come to terms with it as quickly as he could, Chip let them move him, and ignored the whole process. One of the men moved to the head of his bed and raised it.
Chip saw Parker heading his way, with a young man he had never seen before.
"Hey, Doc. I hear I got you to thank that I lived long enough to get to the hospital. And here I thought you didn't like me."
"Just doing my job," she shot back, with a reluctant grin that was nonetheless ear-to-ear. "Walter Reed get fed up with you already?"
"It was mutual."
"I'll bet. Chip Chase, this is your caregiver, Jack Binns. Jack, I have a patient in Exam 3. When you get Chip settled, turn his light on and I'll get his entrance exam as soon as I can. Chip, I need those crates in your quarters or wherever you need them ASAP."
"Yes, sir."
Binns pulled the door shut behind her to take care of Chase's personal needs after the long trip from the East Coast. "Do you need to rest, sir?"
"I'm tired, but it can wait till I check out my gear and get a bite to eat. You Army?"
"No, sir, they weren't letting people like me serve openly when I got out of school. I'm a civilian contractor, a home-care assistant. I'm gonna wait until after the election before I decide whether to enlist."
Chase grinned. "Don't call me 'sir,' I work for a living. Guess that makes sense. For what it's worth, whether you volunteer or not, I don't give a crap if you are straight as long as you can shoot straight. Let's get this show on the road. Got my manual chair somewhere?"
Binns brought it out and whistled. "That's one nice set of wheels." The chair had knobby wheels designed for traction, a heavy frame and much larger, sturdier-than-normal front casters.
"That's exercise equipment," Chip explained. "There are faster, more maneuverable chairs, but this one goes places you wouldn't believe." He pulled on a pair of fingerless gloves. Jack helped him transfer, and Chip fastened his restraints.
The crates were waiting by the outer door. The two men got them open, and Chip had Jack put his computer in his quarters. He'd set it up and check it out after he got settled. In his experience a computer setup never went without a hitch.
The other crate contained his powered chair and two tool boxes. "Where do you want these?"
"Don't know, where's my work space going to be? I need a bench I can reach and that's about it."
"I don't know either," Jack said. "I was assigned here from Nellis."
"We'll find out. They can go in my quarters until I get a work space. Let's get me transferred to my power chair." They did that, then Chip leaned forward, carefully supporting himself on his arms, while he instructed Jack in attaching a set of leads to his back. He hit the power button, then the chair rolled back and forth and rotated in place, seemingly without any direction.
"Looks good. I'll run a diagnostic when I get my rig set up, but I don't think it was damaged in transit. Let's find the mess, I could eat a horse."
A few minutes later, crates disposed of, Binns and Chase headed for the mess.
Parker saw them leaving and yelled, "Hey, you're not going anywhere till I get your intake exam done!"
"I'm starvin', Doc!" Chip complained.
"The sooner you get this done, the sooner you can go hit on the cooks," she replied. "Over here in two. This won't take long if you cooperate. So this is the Mighty Miracle Chair, huh?"
That got Chip started showing it off. Parker listened with one ear while she looked over his chart. "Partial, temporary C4, complete T7."
"You can pretty much scratch all the C4 stuff. They moved the respirator out of my room a week ago," Chip said.
"All right," she said, pulling a chair to face him. "Do you need assistance in removing your shirt?"
"No, do you?"
Parker rolled her eyes, and deliberately plopped an icy stethoscope where she knew he had sensation.
After that, Chip settled down, more because he wanted to get out of there and get something to eat than to please Parker. The CMO, happy with the results of the exam, said, "Tomorrow we'll get you set up with O'Callaghan for your PT and specialist appointments."
"That's the VA hospital here?"
"Federal Medical Center. It's an Air Force hospital, serves Nellis and all the other Air Force facilities around here in addition to the Veterans' Administration. Technically this is a triage center for O'Callaghan. If you need more than urgent care, more than a night or two in a bed, you'll end up there."
"Great, I'm going to be on the road the whole damn time," he griped.
"It's Interstate most of the way, it isn't that bad, and if you ask the right mech to take you, the trip isn't that long either," she replied. "Gets you off base for a while, anyway."
"There's that."
She flipped his chart shut, and turned off the "Doctor inside" light by the door. "The mess is about halfway down the commons to your left. Were you here before?"
"Nope, just Diego and New York."
"It's laid out pretty much the same as New York, except that some of the bots have quarters in Building C, and Building A is all human quarters."
"Thanks, Doc."
After getting some food and a cup of coffee, Chip decided he wasn't so tired after all, and he might as well find out where he could set up his work bench. "Jack, what's your schedule?"
"I'm permanently assigned as your assistant, so we can work it out as we go. Five eight-hour days or four tens, whatever works for you. I'm not authorized to work overtime. The medbay staff will work with you when I'm not here."
"OK. I guess when we find out what my doctor's appointment schedule's going to be, we can work out yours," Chip said.
"Works for me." They headed over to the bot side of medbay. Chip knocked, then opened the door and rolled in, with Jack right behind him.
Chip greeted Jolt and Ratchet, then Jolt called Que in and they admired the ingenious control system for Chip's wheelchair. Que asked permission, then attached a hardline to the chair to look at its programming.
Optimus had given Ratchet a helms-up that Chase was coming, and told him about Lennox' plan. Ratchet had said nothing to Skysong, but he had put off her latest round of language upgrades until Chip arrived. He attached a small datapad to a port on the back of her neck, taped it in place, then put her down on the medbay floor under Arcee's watchful gaze—near where Chip extolled the chair's myriad virtues to Jolt and Que.
Ratchet sent, ::Watch where you put your peds. I put Skysong on the floor, I hope she'll get curious about Sgt. Chase while she's waiting for her upgrades to install.::
Que took a nonchalant step to the right, so the sparkling could have an unobstructed view.
Unaware that he was putting on a show, Chase demonstrated that the chair could spin in its own length, and the seat height adjusted to allow working at different heights or even reaching into kitchen cabinets. "The chair can climb curbs and steps, but I have to use the hand controls for that. Still working on those programming modules."
The sound of the chair's motors attracted Skysong's attention, and she watched the chair's funny antics. It wasn't a bot. It wasn't even a drone. What was it? Then she realized there was a human sitting in it. She crawled forward, her ruined wings rustling in the supporting braces that Que had made for them.
Chip looked over there. "Well, who have we here? Who's the cute little bluejay?"
Arcee followed. "This is Skysong."
"Hi, Skysong. I'm Chip."
"Chee-ip?"
He laughed, "Close enough." He took out his phone, pulled up an app, and tapped something in. The phone whistle-clicked the Cybertronian word for "data chip." Her optics brightened and she stared up at him, then repeated the sounds.
She made her slow way over to the chair. Chip let her explore until she started to bite the tire. "Don't put that in your mouth, kid, you don't know where it's been. Wanna ride?"
She turned her head sideways and looked at him. He held out his hands, and she reached for him. Chip said, "Somebody give her a boost. I don't know how to pick her up without hurting her."
Arcee obliged. "Be careful, Chip, she has sharp talons. She knows she can hurt humans, but if she thinks she might fall, she'll latch on without thinking."
"I got her," Chip assured them. Very carefully, he turned her around so she was facing forward.
"Can I get a couple of rolled-up towels? That might cushion her wings a bit," he said. She wasn't heavy, even with her attached framing, but the weight of her wings made her a bit unsteady on his lap.
Ratchet obliged, for once without the frown of worry all of them were used to seeing on his faceplates when he worked with the shattered sparkling.
Chip showed her that the chair went in the direction he told it to through the joystick (briefly shutting down his contact plates to do so). Then he put her little servo on the chair's joystick.
Arcee said, "Are you sure that's a good idea?"
Chip said, "I can override the hand control if I have to. She's fine."
There is quite a long stretch of human childhood during which "agency," the ability to affect the outside world, is the sole subject under discussion. It encompasses both shoving one's applesauce off the high-chair tray to watch it fall, and learning to drive. Agency is magic: and Skysong needed that magic.
She looked up at Chip, gave him a smile that came very close to breaking his heart, and began to find her way into driving the chair. Chip intervened only when she nearly drove them underneath a storage unit; the edge of it would neatly have removed his head from his shoulders. But once they were out of danger, she looked up at him and said, "Again?"
He smiled down at her. "Go ahead, sweetheart."
But her upgrade chose that moment to drop her into recharge when it began to integrate. Ratchet took her, gently removed the datalink without waking her, and settled her on her berth.
Chip asked, "What happened to her?"
Arcee explained, "She was outside playing with her brothers when she saw her reflection in the windshield of a truck. She dived right into it and crashed through the windshield. She almost died, and damaged her wings beyond repair."
"There's nothing that can be done?"
"Not until she's ready to upgrade to her youngling frame, and that's going to be two years at the earliest," Ratchet said. "And she isn't capable yet of understanding that she won't be like this for the rest of her life. Seekers' programming is different from ours. There's...well, you can't call it a glitch because it's an interaction of several things that have to be the way they are. But they need to be in the air. The glyphs translate sky-hunger. If they can't fly, they don't want to live."
"That's why she's in that box—she's on suicide watch?"
Ratchet nodded. "But that won't help in the long run. If somebot really wants to deactivate, eventually they will. I've seen it too many times with civilian refugees back on Cybertron."
"Look, I can't walk, but I've got this chair. Why in the hell can't you build her something she can fly around on?"
Ratchet, Wheeljack and Jolt just stared at him, long enough to make him really nervous. "Hey! I don't give a shit if it is some kind of taboo, she's a baby! Whatever it takes!"
Jolt shook himself hastily, and glanced at Ratchet before he explained, "It isn't like that, Chip. It's—we reformat if something is irreparable. We don't have wheelchairs or anything like that. No one thought of that. But...it might work!"
Wheeljack said, "She certainly showed an interest in your chair, and she caught on to the controls quickly enough. Let me see what I can do with the technology that I have available here. Anti-gravity simply would not be possible..." The inventor's voice trailed off behind him as he headed for his lab.
Chip rolled over to the berth, and raised the wheelchair seat until he could see over the edge. From the outside, the holoscreens were nearly transparent, and he could see Skysong lying in her nest of blankets, which protected her injured wings from the hard surface of the berth. "Hang in there, kiddo," he said, running a pensive finger along the screen. "We'll figure something out."
End Chapter 10