(Disclaimers in Part 1)
Soundwave sent word that it was time. The base was quiet; more important, Optimus Prime, both sets of spark-split twins, and the Wreckers had all been seen to go off-base, and satellite coverage placed none of them within 20 minutes' travel time; the Wreckers and the younger set of twins were in fact a good four hours away.
All the better. The first three were in a human place called "Las Vegas," too far away to arrive in time for the fun…if the raiding party could complete their tasks in twenty or fewer minutes from go, that is.
Lugnut parked himself along one of the human roads that ran near the enemy's base. Not the closest; no point in making things easy for the slaggers. The empty rented trailer was unhitched, unlocked, and left to wait for their return.
Soundwave sent, "And…go!"
-Sidhe Chronicles-
Amaranth and Annabelle were having a gigantically good time. Barricade's quarters held the two femmelings, one more little girl, a fourth in the person of Skysong, Johnny Parker, and Skimmer-and-Stormy. The two next-to-youngest Epps kids had been there for a while, but had left when Barricade judged it too dark and cold out to play soccer.
They were having a Christmas Eve party, and it was tremendous fun. The ex-Decepticon had volunteered to watch the kids so that their parents could perpetrate some well-intentioned fraud involving a fat old bearded man and his even-toed ungulates, one of which seemed to be Cybertronian, or else a very odd mutant. One or the other left gifts for the children, or this was what he gathered from several excited retellings of the story perpetrated by the company at hand, none of whom were more than five Earth years old.
No one had ever bothered to tell Amaranth about this holiday, and she was in consequence one of two humans present to retain some semblance of sanity, the other being Evanon, presently on snack patrol.
Barricade, who completely lacked any instructions to the contrary about not running in the house, lived in, from a human sparkling's viewpoint, an extremely large playground. A playground whose climbing apparatus/furniture was enormous. And enormous fun, too.
The children who had not tired themselves out yet were playing hide-and-seek. Amaranth was hiding; she was always the second to do so. The kids never chose her to go first after they'd found out how good she was at hiding, though she was equally adept at seeking. Presently, the eight-foot jumble of large opened boxes Barricade kept under the kitchen table provided great cover, and Sara would have smiled to see Amaranth cover her mouth to keep in the giggles as the other children thundered past within two feet of her.
-Sidhe Chronicles-
The two seekers took flight. Soundwave let pass the precise length of time needed for them to cover 85.7% of the distance to the base, and sent, "Go!" to Warp.
The humans, clutched in his servos, were not entirely comfortable. One of them had his own servos over his optics, but then Warp warped, and they were outside the back of the building the med bay occupied. It was dark there, and the sentries were, as Soundwave promised, elsewhere. Warp put the humans down, gently enough, he thought, though one of them staggered and the other went to his hands and knees and ejected the contents of his fuel tank.
Warp didn't stop; he had an appointment with the antenna farm, Soundwave had promised them all a cube upon completion of the raid, and he was as hungry as any other teenage male during a growth spurt.
Warp found he could wreck four antenna mounts at once, with very little noise, in a couple of hundred nanoclicks for each set of four. Less than two clicks later, he left what had been a standard antenna farm and now looked like a sixties pop-art installation, and warped back to the trailer, where he clutched Flatline to himself and warped to the base's motor pool.
The burden was almost too much for the young warper. He and Flatline landed in the dust, sprawling, and Flatline got up first, planting a ped in the youngling's rib struts.
"Get up, kid! Get to work!"
The sentries at the motor pool the youngling simply warped elsewhere, too far away to be a nuisance: nearly at the end of Warp's range. He would not harm them unless he had to.
Flatline had no such inhibitions. He laid the last one in the dirt, and might have been disgusted, later, to find that he had not even permanently injured the human, let alone killed him.
Warp had too little experience of the creatures to know if this one was alive or dead. He warped it out of the way, and set to throwing the vehicles between themselves and the energon cubes out of the way.
By that time a thunderous din from the main hangar area told them that Lugnut and Blitzwing were making themselves known. The two at the motor pool kept up their own cacophony.
They did not hear Jazz' comm, but every other Autobot did, Jazz' voice stoic and steady as he sent, ::We have at least two Decepticons inside the base. I repeat, we have two Decepticons inside base perimeter. Presently they are attacking the hangar. I say again, they are presently attacking the hangar.::
A deafening crash of rending metal ended Jazz' transmission, and very nearly ended his life. Lugnut found himself facing a Prowl who was not going to allow the big Decepticon offline his partner when they had so recently been reunited, and Lugnut swiftly rued his choice of targets.
Ironhide and Blitzwing had old scores to settle, and set about this.
The noise roused Cybertronians living in the main hangar building, and Chip Chase, Mikaela Barnes, and Jack Binns raised their heads from contemplation of poker hands.
Chip threw in a winning hand, or so he'd hoped. "Kaela," he said, Jack being off duty at the time, "would you put my sports chair over here? Sounds like we might have some fun in the offin'."
Jack, however, stood: being off duty be damned. "I'll do that if you'll get our jackets."
-Sidhe Chronicles-
Barricade had been reading "The Night Before Christmas" aloud to a fascinated audience, four of whom had piled into his lap, two of his three sparklings among them.
The balance of the human sparklings, less one, sped through his apartment, giggling with Christmas-Eve nerves.
Stormy completed this group. They were, the seekerling explained to Barricade, playing hide-and-go-seek. This game crossed species barriers; Barricade had played it too when he was a sparkling. (It translated out of Cybertronian, though, as "run-and-scream-and-seek," a much more appropriate name, he thought.)
Now, Jazz' comm ringing in his processor, he said quietly to his audience, "I need to take a break here. Let me talk to Evanon for a moment, okay?"
"You come back and finish?" said the non-Cybertronian sparkling, hope shining in her big optics.
Barricade smiled at her. "I will, but maybe Evanon will read to you while I'm gone for a few minutes, all right?"
"'K." She scrambled down, Skimmer courteously giving her a hand.
Barricade rose in a fashion he made sure was leisurely and approached Evanon, who was constructing snacks in the kitchen. Had he not been distracted, he might have noted that the run-and-scream-and-seek group was short one member. Amaranth, however, did not give herself away from her position under the table.
The big ex-Decepticon stopped next to Evanon, who was carefully assembling snacks for the children, human variety, already having assembled oil cakes and a highly flavored carbonated (a bad habit the humans had taught them) mid-grade for the sparklings. He said very quietly, "I've just gotten a comm that the base is under attack. I'm going outside to guard the sparklings. Will you take over?"
Evanon, hands frozen in his task by this news, said, "Yes. If I need to evacuate them, how can you let me know?"
Barricade sent a pulse which turned the TV on, and set it to Las Vegas' PBS channel, playing a seven-hour-long Yule log program. "I'll use the TV to talk to you." He hesitated a moment, and Evanon, prosaically finishing his tasks, looked at him curiously. "I'd be surprised if I needed to tell you this, Evanon, but don't show the kids fear or excitement, all right?"
"No, you need not have told me that, but it is as well to make sure, is it not?" The larger human sparkling smiled at him. "Be well, and we shall see you shortly."
Barricade touched his shoulder lightly in thanks, and stepped out into the cold, clear night.
Amaranth, who had heard every word of this conversation, left the kitchen and went inside the adult-human-height thermal reciprocal channel that did the work of heating and cooling the bots' quarters, which she and other sparklings were not supposed to know about: it was hidden behind the two-story-high sofa. She ran down the long channel which lead to the outside, and clambered under the opening which was too small for an adult.
There was a strange certainty within her. This was what she needed to be doing. This was what she was born for: battle.
Amaranth Lennox, four years old, followed the noises of combat to her destiny.
-Sidhe Chronicles-
In Las Vegas, Optimus, who with Diarwen had chosen to attend a function the press would later describe as "glittering," stiffened, and bent to her. "The base is under attack. Will you make our excuses?"
Diarwen smiled at him as if he had just said something witty, and found the wife of the local police chief: the nearest quasi-big wig. She would understand, Diarwen hoped, and she did: while by no means the hostess of the event, she knew that when duty called, you left. She went to find the organizer, and let him know what had happened to call two of the most glittering guests away.
Although that woman…had she no idea that one dressed up for these things? Really, a tunic and leggings, even velvet tunic and leggings worn with delicate high heels…and that braid! Well, if one were so uncivilized as to never cut one's hair, no matter how dramatically silver it was…she huffed off to find the organizer, carefully ignoring that she wished she had the courage, and the figure, to dress like that.
-Sidhe Chronicles-
Sideswipe and Sunstreaker were at a gallery celebration across town for a local Dineh artist; they made similar excuses. Sunstreaker was quite puzzled when one of the non-artists said, "Godspeed, and be safe," but he had no time to look that up.
At the more glittering of the gatherings, Optimus transformed, sent word to the troopers of the Nevada Highway Patrol and Las Vegas Metropolitan Police of what had happened, asking that the road to the base be closed to all but emergency traffic as Diarwen leapt into his cab.
Then he said, very politely, "And if you can give me escort at 260 mph, I would be very grateful."
He was kicked up through several levels of bureaucracy before he got a definitive answer to that one ("We'd love to but we don't have anything that fast"), and by that time he had not yet escaped the clutches of Las Vegas entirely. It was late enough on Christmas Eve for the roads to be almost deserted anywhere else, but Las Vegas never closes.
Diarwen sat tensely at his wheel, her silver sandals in a tangle on his seat and her boots firmly back on her feet.
The Big Twins were far behind them, swearing at urban traffic, and sometimes using said traffic's radios to tell the drivers to get out of the fraggin' way,
Warp at this point had tossed his own way through a traffic jam and arrived at the trailer most of the cubes sat on. He set about frantically sealing them, then storing as many as he could in his subspace. Flatline helped him gather a double armful, and then the youngling warped to the trailer, kicked the door open, threw the cubes inside, unsubspacing those he'd carried and piling them in too. Then he closed the door again before he warped back.
On arrival he could tell that battle had been joined at the hangar. Ironhide, from the sound of it, was taking on Blitzwing; Chromia, perhaps, contesting with Lugnut?
He was right, but he had no time to stop to verify this insight.
Nor did Ratchet. Prowl's frantic comm that Jazz was down had sent him scrambling out of med bay, and he charged the obstreperous Lugnut with his saw upraised and running.
Lugnut dropped Jazz, whose limp body he had been pounding unmercifully, and Prowl was tooth-and-talon at him, needing no weapons at all to make Lugnut's life very interesting, despite their difference in size.
Sam got out of Bee as Bee slid to a stop to the side of the main hangar, just as Warp left for the second time; Sam saw the flash of warp but didn't interpret it correctly. Skywarp, after all, had been offlined.
He dropped his duffel as Graham threw a Carl Gustav recoilless rifle to him, followed by a bag of Ironhide's special rounds, and went back for a second for himself. Sam hefted the weapon and its ammo, and turned in the direction of the nearest battle sounds—they were under attack not just here but—toward the motor pool?
Mikaela, Chip, and Jack were almost at the armory at this point. The NEST troops' leader deployed his men with hand signs, saw the three, got them armed, and deployed them as well, with Chip, the only one among who knew the gestures, translating.
Parker's beautiful little ultra did a seven-twenty out of the hangar and fell a hundred feet onto the airstrip, impelled by Blitzwing. Sam noted it and felt a pang of regret for Skysong, but didn't stop to mourn. A group from NEST swept him up with them, and they all sprinted in the direction of the battle at the hangar.
Amaranth was perhaps fifty feet behind them, and losing ground to her short legs. She saw someone she did not know race past her, then do a neck-wrenching about-face. But Blitzwing took that moment to throw a heavy piece of wreckage in his direction, and he went down, out of the rest of the battle.
Amaranth ran to him and took his rocket launcher. The Carl Gustav was almost as tall as she was, and very heavy. She didn't let that stop her, and continued on her way.
-Sidhe Chronicles-
In the motor pool area, Warp subspaced the last of the cubes he could carry and covered a few more, tearing down a nearby camo net to tote them in.
NEST troops, Flatline discovered, were not discouraged by having vehicles thrown at them. Nonetheless the tiny soft things could be taken out by that, thought it left him open to their projectile weapons. He had no other options, however, and continued to toss Humvees.
Blitzwing looked beyond Chromia, whom he had just given a pretty good clip, to note that three fleshbags – or so he thought of Mikaela, Jack, and Chip— were firing their pesky weapons at him. One of them had the effrontery to be sitting down to do battle with him! Blitzwing roared, and charged.
Amaranth gasped. That – Decepticon – was attacking her Chip! She fired twice. The first shot missed Blitzwing but provided a severe inconvenience to Lugnut, who caught it in the shoulder and was spun into Ironhide's grasp by the momentum it imparted to him, though it didn't do him any direct damage.
Ironhide happily set about remedying this state of affairs, to his surprise receiving a comm from Barricade that Lugnut favored his left servo and was slower with the right. He put this information to good use.
Amaranth's second shot took out Blitzwing's left optic, and he roared and grabbed at the wound with one servo, then flew over the melee below, and out of the main doors at the front of the building.
Lugnut got in a very lucky shot and got space from Ironhide just as Warp commed them that he was leaving the medbay area with two humans and a protoform.
Flareup let out a sudden, infuriated shriek and transformed, roaring down the access road with Arcee in hot pursuit.
Lugnut blasted off too, and the engagement was over.
Will Lennox did not know this when he spotted his baby girl with a Carl Gustav on her shoulder, standing foursquare and unafraid in the middle of a battle against the Decepticons. "Amaranth!" he shouted, his heart squeezing painfully. "See if you can get that man to cover and stay with him! That's an order, young lady!"
Obediently, she raced to the injured soldier. He had recovered consciousness and was trying to drag a body whose left arm and leg had both been fractured to cover. She helped him, as much as a forty-pound child can help a grown man in battle gear, and they got there.
A small Cybertronian Will had never seen before whizzed past him, and he took aim at it, but Ratchet's voice said, "Colonel, it's Ratchet! This is my remote! You have some troops trapped under a flatbed in the motor pool. Excuse me, please!"
It zipped away. Will would later find that Ratchet had handed off to Jolt immediately upon Jazz' becoming stable, Parker having radioed him of her inability to get to her patients.
The main hangar was a mess. In what was left of the aircraft parking, Ironhide and Chromia were wrapped in one another's arms, Ironhide on his knees to accommodate their difference in height. He nodded to his Charge, and Will saluted him.
There was not a great deal of damage to the balance of the building, he noted, grateful for small favors.
Out of the corner of one eye, he saw the wounded soldier being loaded into an ambulance, Amaranth scrambling after. Guilt and relief flooded him.
The motor pool, when he got there, reminded him far too much of Chicago.
Parker at this point had her patients in front of her. Ratchet's remote, which was no taller than Lennox himself, left rooster tails of dust behind it on its way back to medbay.
"Who's on in medbay?" he said to her in surprise.
"Henderson," she said, not taking her hands away from what she was doing. She was dressed in pale-blue pajamas with yellow duckies on them under a pink robe, but she'd put her boots on. "The entire medical staff responded, and Boggs is there too. But when I left, Colonel, these two and your man in the hangar were the only major casualties. We got lucky."
He surveyed several million dollars' worth of damage in two distinct areas, unaware as yet of the theft of the protoform. He thought of his daughters, the one safe in Medbay, the other asleep, he hoped, in their quarters. "Yeah," he said. "We did."
Flareup and Arcee came back to the motor pool area from the high ground to the southeast. Flareup was very agitated, and Arcee was attempting to calm her twin. The two of them stopped to check on the situation at the motor pool.
"What's going on here?" said a deep, authoritative voice, and Optimus Prime rolled to a stop, transforming as Diarwen jumped down from his cab. The Big Twins rolled up, transformed as well, and came to stand behind him.
Will Lennox straightened. "Nothing now, Optimus. We got raided by two separate squads of Decepticons, it looks like. There's damage here and in the main hangar. I haven't been told what your casualties are yet."
"They're pretty minor, outside of Jazz: Lugnut took him down. He'll recover fully in an orn," Ratchet said, arriving in alt form.
The night was more or less over, except for the reports and the paperwork.
Will pulled out his cell, but got no signal—of course, the cell tower had been hit along with everything else at the antenna farm. He cursed. "Ratchet, could you please call the landline at my apartment and make sure everything's OK there? And tell Sarah I'm fine."
He did so immediately, then relayed, "Sarah says that she is fine, but she and Barricade cannot find Amaranth."
"Tell her Amaranth's fine, she's on the human side of medbay with an injured man, but she wasn't hurt. Tell her to stay put for a little while."
Ratchet passed the information along, and reassured Sarah that no one had been killed before he disconnected.
Parker said, "Ratchet, we'll be transporting Hemmings to O'Callaghan. Kelley over there looks like he's got a minor concussion, could you scan him for me, please?"
"Certainly. I see no evidence of anything more than minor trauma, no bleeding or swelling. His electrical patterns are those typical of normal consciousness."
"OK. Tsung, he's all yours—have Jolt repeat the cranial scan in the morning, sooner if you have reason to suspect an issue might be developing."
"Yes, doctor."
Optimus asked, "How did he get all the way over there? It makes no sense for a sentry to have been standing there, but I doubt he got far with that head injury."
The nurse, Tsung, shook her head. "I don't know, sir, that's where I found him when I got here."
The other injured man, Hemmings, said from his stretcher, "The big red and black one smacked him in the head, but then that smaller one zapped him over there, like he didn't want him to get stepped on. He didn't try to hurt anyone, either. All he wanted was the energon cubes. I think he's just a kid, Colonel."
Lennox and Optimus shared a significant look, and Lennox said, "Yeah, just like the child soldiers we ran into in the Gulf. Hell of a thing."
Flareup said, "The red-and-black one is Flatline. He's lucky that glitch left him alive."
Arcee said quietly, "He's gone, Flare. He wouldn't dare hang around once we knew he was here."
When Lennox got to the medbay to pick up Amaranth, he found Barricade kneeling to talk to her. "I was pretty scared when I saw you out there, but you did great," the former Decepticon said. "I wanted to tell you, though, that if you shoot a human in the eye, that human usually dies. But if you want to kill a Decepticon, you have to shoot them in the spark. Mine's right here," and he laid his servo on it. "That's about where everybody's is."
Amaranth was, at this point, very tired. Her eyes filled with tears. "But I aimed for it! I just missed! And I don't want to shoot you in the spark, Cade-Cade!" she wailed, clinging to him. "I want you to finish the story!"
Barricade looked startled, but picked her up and held her close. Then he saw Will. "I don't know how she got involved, Colonel," he said. "I got the comm and stood guard outside my quarters in case…"
"Yeah. Good thinking, Barricade." Will found a smile somewhere, pasted it into place. "Tell you what, if you'll go finish that story, I'll do what I need to here, and be with you shortly."
"Thank you, Colonel," Barricade said. He stood with Amaranth still in his arms, clinging tightly to his neck and sobbing.
"After this, I think you can call me Will, Barricade," the colonel said.
He sighed, went to his office, and began receiving verbal reports, which would be followed by making reports of his own to the Pentagon and the White House. Then, he'd be able to pick up Amaranth; but a message from Sarah relayed by Bumblebee and Prowl said she'd do that, and that she loved him.
The attack on the antenna farm had also taken out the base's cell tower; fortunately they still had landlines, so they weren't completely cut off. But Lennox was surprised at how much he had come to depend on his cell phone until he kept turning it on out of habit and getting a no-signal message rather than a few bars.
He said, "Come," as Graham knocked at his door.
-Sidhe Chronicles-
Flareup had been a soldier all her adult life—and a few vorn before that as well. She blocked her cohort bonds in combat as a matter of course. It was bad enough to get shot, without echoing the pain and shock through your bonds. Distracting others at an inopportune time could cause them to get hit as well. Therefore, Barricade hadn't known she was more upset by the raid than anyone else was, until after things settled down, and they all reached out to their cohorts once again.
::Flare, are you injured? What's your status?::
::I'm fine, but that glitch of a fraggin' medic Flatline isn't going to be when I get my servos on him! I can't believe he had the ball bearings to come here after what he did!::
Barricade asked, ::Is he still on base somewhere?::
::No, he ran like the no-good coward he is,:: she replied. ::I doubt he got three paces from the warper the whole time.::
::Where are you? Are you sure you're all right?::
::I'm helping clean up the mess down here at the motor pool. The fraggers stole our energon cubes! We're making sure there aren't any still here under the debris.::
::Slag!::
::Oh, if you have any in your subspace, give them to Prowl. He's assessing our resources.::
::OK. I have the Trine and Amaranth Lennox here. But as soon as I can find someone to watch them I'll help with the clean-up. The main hangar is completely trashed, but Wheeljack says it's still structurally stable. Somehow.::
::Thank Primus for small miracles,:: she replied. ::What the frag are we going to do for energon now!::
::It's probably not as bad as you think. I have two cubes, I always kept one for myself and one for the Trine because you never know when you'll have to bug out with what you've got on you.::
That reassured her, and mountains of junk that had to be moved from point A to point B kept her too busy to think about whatever had her so upset. Barricade didn't think it was the fight, because most Autobots loved a good dustup as much as the 'Cons did, even if they didn't want to admit it. A few humans had been hurt, only one of them severely, and he was going to live—the injuries were bad enough, but as situations went they'd all been through much worse. No, this was something else, but he didn't know the details of her history well enough to figure it out.
-Sidhe Chronicles-
After the alarums and excursions of that entirely bloody Christmas eve, Sam found that some person or persons unknown (Cybertronian variety) had stepped on his duffel, rendering his laptop toast. He turned this problem over to Que, who tilted his helm on one side and said "Fascinating," then went to his quarters.
He found that he had not seen Bumblebee during the battle because Bee was right outside their quarters, guarding Carly.
The yellow 'bot knelt, and enfolded him in strong, metal arms. Sam felt some part of Bee right itself; perhaps some conflict between guarding him and guarding Carly? Oh, Bee. That you would do this for me ...
Sam put his head down on Bee's spark, and felt so…comforted…that he entirely lost track of time. He was startled to hear Carly say, "May I join you?"
He and Bee made arm-room on the same side without thinking about it. There was a long, extended kiss between two of the three participants, while the third looked on approvingly.
"Your baby is getting very large, Carly," Bee said, in a variety of clips he must have chosen, Sam realized, to make her giggle.
"Yes, well, it's going to get worse before it gets better, Bee! I have the last third of this pregnancy still to get through."
"Please do not explode."
Even the baby kicked at that one.
Some time later, Carly, who had come out without more than a light jacket, shivered. "I should get back inside." She kissed Sam, and laid her head on Bee's spark for a moment. "Thank you, Bee. I don't think I can ever say 'thank you' enough. Will you be long enough for me to start a pot of tea?"
"No, Carly. I must report to medbay, and then assist with cleanup."
She put her hand on his arm plating. "Are you all right?"
He smiled down at her from his height. "I believe so. I had a transient occurrence that was puzzling, however, and I wish to make sure that all is well."
The Guardian and his charge watched the charge's wife and child return to their home. Then Sam turned to Bee. "Come see us when you're sure you're all right." He laid his head briefly on Bee's spark again. "Thank you. Thank you, thank you. There aren't enough words in English to tell you how grateful I am."
-Sidhe Chronicles-
Christmas Day was, for all intents and purposes, over. The presents had been exchanged, the dinner eaten, the football games begun.
At the base, those games went unwatched. Every able-bodied person of any species and every age was either participating in the cleanup, or freeing others to do so. Carly had volunteered to split her time between the kitchen and the youngest kids, so after walking with her to the commons, Sam veered off to find the Prime, to whom he had been assigned.
Optimus smiled, lifting several tons of junk that had once been three rather nice airplanes, including Parker's ultralight, and setting them to one side. "Sam."
"Optimus, excuse my phrasing, but how did this"—Sam waved a hand at the disaster that had been the main hangar—"happen? I would have thought…" He had one of the wide, flat-bladed shovels the Cybertronians had pulled out of thin air for this work, and would send back into thin air when it was done. He set to work clearing an area of the floor.
"It was quite carefully timed, Sam. They waited until most of us, Cybertronian or human, were likely to be elsewhere, celebrating a holiday with our human friends."
"Those guys Jazz was trying to track told them about it."
"Very likely. Since Soundwave's frame was accounted for after Chicago, after Jazz' encounter with him on the web it is obvious that the protoform was stolen for him. The energon…they must all be getting very short on it, and the warper in the sortie party was visibly very much a youngling, a child soldier just into that upgrade. I cannot begrudge a child the necessary energon he or she needs to grow."
Sam slowly pushed a pile of small debris into a perfect square. "I might be able to grudge him or her the need to put my wife and kid in danger."
"I cannot argue with you there," said the Prime, and shifted more once-expensive mangled metal. His effort left much of the hangar area, or what used to be the hangar area, clean except for small items, which could be shifted by one human person or two at most.
Que commed the Prime just as Sam completed shoveling the smaller debris into several discrete piles, and they were finished.
The Prime let Lennox, who was similarly busily shoveling debris out of the way at the motor pool, know that this was so, and the leader of the Autobots and Sam left for the antenna farm.
"Wheeljack!" said Optimus. "What have you found?"
"Hello. Hello, Sam, nice to see you again."
"Thanks. You all right, Que?"
"Oh, yes, yes, it didn't take Ratchet any time at all to repair me, but it was more than I could do to get him to let me out of the repair bay until this morning. Thank you for asking. I found something interesting. Look at this antenna." The scientist pulled from his subspace a—thing—which resembled a 1960s pop-art daisy. This daisy, though, had begun life as the signal-concentrating dish of an antenna. "That kind of damage comes only from spacewarp capability," Que said, turning the piece over in his long, slender fingers, and looking for all the world like Albert Einstein on a good-hair day. "The torsion damage to the atomic bonds…oh, yes, it's very clear that a spacewarper did this."
"We know that the sortie party was six in number. Two humans, Blitzwing, Lugnut, Flatline, and that youngling warper who escaped with Flatline when we first moved back here."
"This damage was the first inflicted on us; with the antenna farm out, we couldn't get help from Nellis. I think that, along with the theft of the protoform, proves Soundwave's involvement. Say whatever else you like about that slagger, he's a very competent tactician. And I can give you a rough sequence of events right now. When Ratchet brings Jazz out of stasis, today or tomorrow he says, Jazz might be able to tell us what he saw. It's he who raised the first alarm, Prowl said."
Optimus blenched at the memory: Jazz' voice, calm as a Chinese poem, saying clearly and without haste and with no trace of the accent he usually employed, ::We have at least two Decepticons inside the base. I repeat, we have two Decepticons inside base perimeter. Presently they are attacking the hangar. I say again, they are presently attacking the hangar.:: Then there was a tremendous explosion, and surveillance tapes told the rest of the story.
Optimus had been in Las Vegas with Diarwen at the time he got that comm, and during their subsequent flight back to base had heard all the comms relating to the battle. But at 260 mph the distance between the town and the base was shortened to fifteen or so minutes, ten of those used up in getting clear of Las Vegas at much lower speeds. He'd radioed the police, asking for escort, but they had nothing fast enough. They cleared the road ahead of him instead of everything but rescue vehicles. Sunny and Sides made good speed as well, catching Optimus at the last turn before the base.
But none of them got there before the battle ended.
"Yes," he said now. "Please reconstruct it for me. I'll have you do the same at the senior officer's meeting later today."
"Right," Que said. "The unknown youngling, being a warper, used that method of travel to get from the antenna farm to the motor pool, roughly concurrent with the attack on the hangar, which was diversionary in nature. The youngling began warping in and out with cubes of energon, presumably to a place where they could be picked up, and then subspaced as many as he could carry. Flatline also subspaced cubes. NEST troops engaged them there, but Flatline provided cover fire for a time while the warper continued his theft. Then the warper grabbed Flatline and they were gone. One of the human sentries stationed there, Optimus, reports that the youngling warped another sentry, injured, to safety.—All of the damage in the motor pool, beyond the theft, looked defensive rather than offensive, except for that caused by accessing the energon."
"Then," said Optimus, "we have the theft of a protoform from the storage around medbay."
"The two humans were responsible for that. While the protoforms were stored under lock and key, using Cybertronian technology, surveillance tapes showed them using some device that made short work of that. Jazz will run photometric IDs on the two when he can. The two summoned the warper with implants, or at least this is what the surveillance tapes indicated. He returned and picked them up, carrying them and the protoform away. Blitzwing had previously been routed by Amaranth —"
"By Amaranth. Who is four years old," Sam said incredulously.
"Yes," Que said noncommittally, and waited for further comment from Sam, but there was none. He went on, "Lugnut disengaged, and the attack was over."
Sam remembered jumping out of Bee, whom he didn't see again until the battle was over, dropping his duffel in the dirt, and grabbing a rocket launcher from Graham. He saw Ironhide and Chromia fighting to save the hangar. He couldn't remember having looked at the antenna farm or the motor pool.
Jazz had already been taken out by then; Sam saw Ratchet only as he was disappearing with Jazz in his arms. Prowl fought like a demon to cover their retreat.
They knew now that Jazz had sent Barricade a warning. Jazz, at least, had trusted the former Decepticon implicitly.
How had Amaranth escaped Barricade's custody? Barricade had volunteered to share his memory files from the period of the battle, and they showed a fascinating private side to the former Decepticon, but they didn't show Amaranth's escape or any sign of it. And individual quarters weren't surveilled.
The files confirmed Barricade's account of Jazz' warning. If the ex-Decepticon wanted to return to his former fellows, that was the time to do it. Instead, he stood guard over the sparklings, human or Cybertronian, in his charge.
He also commed Ironhide with an ex-comrade's knowledge of the attackers' vulnerabilities. So the one good thing to come out of this mess might be that there was no longer any question of Barricade's loyalty.
Amaranth, however—she wasn't saying how she got out, and she wasn't showing her route to any of her little friends. Once she joined the battle, she saved the lives of Binns, Chase, and Banes by grabbing another rocket launcher from a NEST soldier who lay wounded nearby, and shooting Blitzwing in the optic with it when the big Decepticon threatened them. It was just the sort of bad luck that sometimes happens in battle that Chase and Banes had been bingo ammo at the same time as Binns' weapon jammed.
"Que," Optimus said, "when things have settled down a bit, I want you to research a linkage that could be attached to or built into weapons borne by a group of humans. It will sound an alarm individual to each person when one of the group is running low on ammunition. Something amenable to adaptation to the current head's-up display would be most useful, but one without it could be used here on base. It might be more useful if it were group-based rather than proximity-based."
"Sir," Que said, acknowledging the order. "With your permission, I'll begin making replacement energon cubes as quickly as possible."
"How many do you believe can be replaced, and how quickly?"
Que made a helpless noise. "I'll have to source the materials before I can even give you an estimate, Prime. I have three cracked ones, including a large one, that can be repaired. I'll have those ready in a few joor. But, as for making more...I'll have to find Earth materials to substitute for whatever I can't salvage from the Decepticon vehicles at Area 51."
Optimus nodded, and he and Sam returned to work.
There was more after that. A lot more. It was hard on Sam, but harder on the Cybertronians, now short on fuel. Three or four of the wounded had, with Ratchet's permission, gone into stasis. It would delay their healing, but help their comrades. When their work was done, Burnout, Killstrike, the tractor gestalt, and the Little Twins had also gone voluntarily into stasis. Wheelie was still with Carly, but had gone into a rouseable power-down mode. Brains was doing admin work, piggybacked off the grid to keep his batteries charged.
Ratchet had the mecha in stasis stacked like cordwood in medbay, where he could send a single electromagnetic pulse to wake them all if the base was attacked again. More importantly he could easily monitor each of the sleepers.
Lunch: Sam took it only when he began to shake, and Optimus flatly refused to work with him any longer until he remedied that. He walked wearily to his quarters, to find Carly there, to his delight. "Optimus sent me home," she said. "He said that if we let the 'cons take this time with me away from you, they've won on some level that's actually more important than the loss of a protoform to Soundwave." Tears shone in her eyes, and she reached for him.
"Honey," he said, evading her. "I smell."
"Yes, you do," she said, negating that evasion and hugging him to her as tightly as the bulge of their son in her belly would allow. "And I don't care."
He showered and ate soup and salad, taking with him a sandwich which he consumed one-handed while walking back to the carnage, and a bottle of water.
More shoveling. Bots were given half-rations when they yellow-lined. Optimus, Barricade, Sideswipe, Sunstreaker, and Bee, whose energon levels were highest before the battle, had worked nonstop since the end of it.
Somewhere between lunch and sundown, Sam's brain stopped recording details. Optimus sent him home at eight o'clock, with orders that the next day was a rest day for him.
Sam went home, ate another sandwich, managed not to drown in the shower, and fell into bed.
And that was Christmas Day 2011.
End Part 13