Author's Note: There are quite a few Easter eggs in this chapter, both for gamers, epic fantasy fans like myself, and other stuff. Thanks Eri for helping pick out the game Also the fact that I'm a computer science major shows in this chapter, so feel free to ignore the techno babble. Enjoy and please review! Don't just fave it or add it to story alerts (though that's also nice), but please tell me how I'm doing. Thanks!

Chapter 9

Flight

At the very least the humans had their own plane and a fairly comfortable one at that; leather seats, individual tables, big screen television, and all. There was even a fairly large bathroom with a shower that everyone took advantage of in turn as soon as the plane took off. It was very tempting to put the comfortable reclining seats to good use, especially for Cheetor, Rattrap, and Silverbolt who had not slept at all since their arrival on Earth more than a day ago, but Banachek, who was also on his way to D.C. on a later flight due to some last minute business he had to take care of, advised them all against it.

"It's about a four hour flight," he'd explained, "but there's a three hour time lag. By the time we get to D.C., it'll be past midnight. Better to suffer a little now and get back on a normal schedule when we land. We have accommodations for all of you."

Reluctantly, everyone agreed. Blackarachnia settled in to study the material that Cheetor had amazingly managed to get from the humans. The others had offered to help, but she just waved them away, saying something about knowing best how Tarantulas works and that they would all just get in the way. Rattrap and Nightscream were more than happy to leave her alone. The duo discovered what turned out to be an Xbox game console by the big screen TV as well as a stack games. Discarding the racing and simulation games, they finally decided on a disk labeled "Halo 3" and within moment everyone else knew they would be unreachable for the rest of the flight.

Silverbolt quietly sat beside Blackarachnia for a while as she read the various reports. Despite the mental brier still in place between them, both took comfort in each others' silent presence, but Blackarachnia could also tell that he was growing increasingly bored to the point where even she was starting to feel some of it. The words "mile-high club" floated through her thoughts as she glanced between him and the large shower in the far back of the plane, but she dismissed the idea with a smile. There was work to be done.

"You're not helping me by sitting here and fidgeting," she said and nodded at the cart of books near the door to the bathroom.

"Are you certain I cannot help?" he asked feeling slightly guilty about leaving her to do all the work.

"Yes," she gave him a slight push out of the seat. "Go find a good story, and you can tell me about it later."

He did find a few older books on the cart but was surprised to see that he'd actually read some of them before. Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton were all familiar to him, so Silverbolt picked up the first unfamiliar but particularly thick tome he could find. It had a silvery cover with the depiction of a throne that seemed to be made up of a collection of swords. Seems interesting, he thought, as he opened it and began to read.

While everyone had found a way to keep themselves occupied by more or less productive means, Cheetor was the only one who felt restless. It was the kind of feeling one got when he got past the point of total exhaustion. His mind was running as fast as his feet usually did, but he couldn't find anything to focus it on. In the end, all he could do was sit and occasionally glance out the window or at what the others were doing, and despite the human's advice, his thoughts drifted away from the waking world.

He saw Cybertron. He wished he could say he saw it as he remembered it before he left on the Axalon, but in truth it was the dark lifeless palace of the Technorganic War. Deeper and deeper into the planet he fell – or ran, he couldn't quite tell which – until the darkness exploded in a brilliant flash of light. A figure was approaching him, shifting between the numerous forms it had acquired over the years. It changed into a Technorganic gorilla before assuming a shape Cheetor had never seen before. A shape very-much human.

"You're doing fine, Cheetor," he couldn't quite see the specific features, but his mentor's voice sounded just like he remembered it; warm and reassuring. "Have faith in yourself, in your team, and you can pull through anything."

"Optimus..." he reached forward, but his hand was swallowed by the light.

Cheetor was yanked out of the dream with such ferocity, he gasped, and his right hand griped the arm of the leather chair in a death-grip that turned his knuckles white. He wasn't even sure what caused him to wake so suddenly. Rattrap and Nightscream were still preoccupied with the game, and Blackarachnia had an impressive pile of finished papers on the table at her right. Silverbolt had been the only one to look up though.

"Are you alright, Cheetor?"

"Yeah," he whipped a hand across his face, trying to focus, but the more he thought about it, the less he could remember. "Just a dream. How much longer do we have?"

"Approximately an hour before landing," Silverbolt replied, and looking out the window, Cheetor noted that the sun must have set quite a while ago. He turned his chair towards Blackarachnia, who had been rather conspicuously ignoring him the entire flight. "Any chance of filling the rest of us in on what you learned so far? I don't want to discuss this in front of the humans."

She looked up, regarding him with the same disdain she might have given a piece of slag on her shoe, but finally nodded. Rattrap and Nightscream grudgingly paused their game, and Silverbolt closed his book, though he diligently marked his place with a torn scrap of paper and left it in his seat instead of replacing it in the small self. Apparently he found something he liked. Blackarachnia spread out the papers on the table in front of her more for her own reference than for the others to look at.

"Alright, recap," she started, weariness apparent in her voice. "I don't know how much of this will actually sink in before we all get some sleep. Some of this is review, some confirmations, and some new information. Crazy as he is, Tarantulas is pretty good about keeping notes. A little disclaimer: I have no idea if he's lying or not, but at the moment I'm assuming 'not', because he really does hate the aliens and frankly we don't have anything better.

"According to him, the aliens – the Vok – are from a place called Nexus Zero. He doesn't know if it's another planet, another galaxy, or even another dimension, but he's leaning towards the last one."

"Because it sounds more impressive?" Rattrap ventured a guess.

"Because of the aliens' properties," she corrected. "It looks like they don't have any physical shape but are actually just made up of nothing more than pure energy."

"Sentient energy?" Silverbolt looked doubtful. "Is that even possible?"

"In a universe with out laws of physics? Probably not. Which lead him to believe that Nexus Zero is really another dimension, and I agree that that's the most likely explanation."

"But we've seen them here," Cheetor objected. "Both their structures and even them directly when Tigerhawk came."

"Their structures and the fact that they seeded the planet with Energon don't surprise me by themselves. I'm not sure how to explain it... Imagine you're writing a new program in a higher level language. You can manipulate the larger aspects of it – methods, attributes, global variables, etc – but unless you're the architect of the language, you have no control over every little zero and one."

"So who's the architect here?" Nightscream inquired.

"I don't know. Primus, Jesus, Buddha, the girl behind the keyboard, whatever," she waved him off, annoyed at the interruption. "That's not the point. I mean when you work with a program, first of all you don't have control of the lower lever details and second you don't work with it by walking into a computer, but rather through some sort of input-output device like a keyboard. They can reach into our world and manipulate large scale things, but they have no control over smaller pieces like individual people."

"What about their 'emissaries'?" Cheetor asked. "If they can't control individuals, how do you explain what they did to Tigertron and Airazor, and slag, even Tarantula."

"I'm getting to that," she gave him a dark look. "They can't manipulate anyone here, but it looks like it's easy for them to do it in Nexus Zero, especially with us, because are sparks are energy-based. The reason they were able to come here directly with Tigerhawk because they were literally within him. They hid in his spark, which I guess is a miniature version of their natural environ. It's sort of like a human diver taking a tank of oxygen with him when he goes under watter."

"So what's their deal with Earth or us for that matter?" Rattrap asked.

"No idea," she admitted. "All this is from observations of events in the Beast Wars and what Tarantulas saw directly, but the Vok are apparently not too keen on making their emissaries privy to their plans."

"And here I thought all self-respecting bad guys did that," Rattrap commented.

"So Tarantulas doesn't even know why he's here?" Cheetor double checked.

"No. He's under the impression that they sent him ahead of whatever their real plan is and assumes he won't know until they actually have a use for him."

"No wonder he's freaked out enough to want our help," the young commander realized. "He wants to finish with them before their program or whatever they put in to control him kicks in. Anything interesting on these new bodies of ours, by the way? You said they ran some tests on Nightscream."

"I can tell you we're still Technorganic," Blackarachnia replied. "The outside might look human, but inside there's just as many wires as nerves, just as many silicon strips as muscles. The scans also show that there are metallic platelets that form a sort of second skin but on the inside. I think they might be made up of a similar material as protoforms. They're malleable for now but should assume specific shapes and functions when we transform for the first time."

"Sounds painful," Nightscream winced as he vividly imagined countless tiny pieces of metal cutting through his organic skin. "And our new forms?"

"I don't know. I don't even know how we're supposed to transform, though I guess it's a similar mind-body thing as it was with our original Technorganic forms. There's no need for any special activation code, but something to focus on would help. We can try it once we're alone and not a couple thousand feet up in the air."

Something in the small airplane window to his right caught Silverbolt's attention. He had given up on trying to get some glimpse of the outside world since the altitude had been too great to see anything but clouds in the earlier leg of the trip and when they began to descend it was already dark. Though none of them bothered to find out their exact location, the fact that the plane was making its way over Virginia farmlands accounted for the lack of city lights, but now he could see something bellow; a symbol clearly alien in origins was carved into the ground bellow, and he wouldn't have even seen it if it hadn't suddenly begun to glow.

The expression on his face, which was just short of an actual verbal curse, did not go unnoticed by the others. Everyone went to the closest window to see just what had elicited such a reaction. Nightscream only frowned, but to the rest, strange alien markings were an all-to familiar sight. Unlike Silverbolt, Rattrap had no trouble cursing.

"Slag me. I was hoping more for a "Welcome to Earth. Enjoy your stay" not a "Welcome to Earth. Enjoy your scrap-heap." 'Cause I'm pretty sure that's what that thing says."

The others' inexorable silence echoed their agreement, before Cheetor's eyes widened in white horror.

"Is that thing powering up?"

Sure enough the symbol on the ground bellow which up until now had simply glowed evenly began to pulsate and emit brighter bursts of light, as if it was a heart that had suddenly began to beat faster. With every pulse, it gathered more and more energy to itself until it looked like it was about to burst. Which, everyone realized almost simultaneously, was exactly what was going to happen.

"The cockpit!" Silverbolt shouted to Rattrap who was closest to the door. "Tell the human pilot, evasive maneuvers immediately!"

The rodent was already at the sealed door, banging on it, but the reply didn't come before the plane was rocked by the bang of displaced air somewhere right outside its hull. Rattrap was knocked against the door to the cockpit. Blackarachnia and Nightscream fell back into the seats behind them, while Cheetor held on to the overhead handle. Used to turbulence in the air, Silverbolt managed to keep his footing.

"Are there parachutes in this thing?" Rattrap scrambled under the nearest seat. "Man, I shoulda listened t' that in-flight instructional video."

No one had a chance to respond before a second shock was felt, this time sending everyone to the floor then suddenly up and against the ceiling before bringing them down again. Cheetor only had a second to look up and see the entire tail of the plane violently ripped away and air rushed into the fuselage.

"Oh Primus..."

Everything fell away.

Silverbolt had inadvertently inherited his namesake's determination, unwavering loyalty to teammates and friends, and strong sense of right and wrong. He had not, however, inherited the Aerialbot commander's acrophobia. High altitudes didn't bring about paralyzing panic attacks. Quite the opposite, in fact. Flying was second nature to him. He took to the air whenever he needed to clear his head the same way Cheetor took to any open stretches of land he could run in to clear his.

It was exactly this ability that was about to save his life.

In his mind, he saw himself as he was supposed to be, not as the carrion-eating grim aerial of the Technorganic War, but as the pure noble warrior that only came from his wolf-eagle fuzzor form. Perhaps it would be darker, he thought. Darker, but still the same.

It happened then.

There was no pain as Nightscream had predicted, at least not for him. Internal systems, both organic and technological shifted to accommodate the his new shape, but all he felt was the rush of air from the fall against his skin and then the cool feeling of metal sliding over his organic flesh. His back arched, shoulder blades tensed, then broke as newly formed wings erupted from his back.

Silverbolt soared.

Author's End Note: Well, there you have it; they're finally transforming... some anyway. Just to get an idea of what the new forms are like, Silverbolt's for instance is a lot like his original fuzzor form, only with smoother lines for the Technorganic nature and with his Beast Machines darker colors. I got the idea from the TF: Universe Silverbolt design, and I think it makes sense since he's very much a blend of the two now: still good and noble but with the darker undertone from his experiences in the Technorganic War.