"Astrid, please! Can you just hold on a minute and -"
"We're getting picked up in thirty minutes, fifteen miles out of town, and I'll be damned if I don't have a toothbrush. I'm sorry mom, it'll have to wait!"
Astrid brushes past her parents, flustered and scared as they stand in the doorway of their daughter's bedroom as she races into the master bath. No time, no time, no time. She'd often talked of assembling a bugout bag after Hound once told her that the warehouse could potentially become a Decepticon target, but she put it off. And now look.
She throws the meager toiletries into her duffel bag and goes to dash out of the room again, but a pair of hands grab her by the arms and bring her to a forced halt.
"You've got five minutes, Boots!" Hound calls from downstairs.
She whirls to face Richard, his hands still on her. "You heard him earlier," she said breathlessly, looking from one to the other. "Lives depend on this. Not human lives - at least, not yet - but lives nonetheless. Just trust me that where we're going is safe."
"Where are you going? How long? How do we contact you if you don't have a phone? Dammit, Astrid, we have no idea what's going on!"
"Portland. To meet with his superiors. As far as how long, I don't know; maybe a couple of days at the most. You hold down the fort for me, alright? The keys are downstairs on the counter." She meets her father's gaze. His eyes, pale and remote, are so full of emotion now. It's jarring to her. "Trust me," she repeats. "And tell..." the words come out like a reflex, but as she's about to finish, it sounds hollow. "...tell Heather that I'm doing fine."
The three of them all know why she caught herself. Nobody's heard from Astrid's sister since this whole thing began. Normally, Heather would at least reach out to gloat when something went wrong. But even that is strangely absent now.
Tracy and Richard nod quietly, and Richard lets go of her arms.
"If anyone asks where we are, play stupid," she calls as she glides down the stairs and over to a transforming Hound. She pauses just before assuming her spot in his passenger seat, and: "I love you guys."
They, of course, love her too.
Astrid spends the drive out of town counting quietly in her head, trying not to think about everything that's happened. It's a wave that's threatening to crest.
One, two, three, four... How many trees on this block. How many birds perched on that telephone wire. How many black cars. White cars. How many fence posts marking the property line beside the dirt road after that turn. Hound doesn't say anything during the drive either, but she can tell in the sounds his car-form is making, the way he's taking turns a little too quickly, changing lanes a little too abruptly, that he's trying not to think about what's happening too - just focusing on the objective at hand.
One, two, three scars.
"We're here."
One, two, three, four, five bandages.
The door swings open and she steps out, cold dirt crunching under her shoes. A chilly offshore wind had picked up and she shivers.
"He's a few minutes out," says the Jeep after he transforms. His eye is focused on a low point in the mountains, but after a few moments he shifts his gaze onto her. "Hey Astrid?"
"Hm?"
"What happened earlier. You're... OK, right?"
"I don't know. I think I'll know later."
"Alright."
"Are you OK?"
The question catches him visibly off-guard. She suspects that, being a soldier, he doesn't get asked that so often. "Well," he starts, folding his arms as if trying to keep himself warm. "You're worrying me, is all."
"I think there's going to be a lot of you worrying about me in this relationship." She's not sure where that came from, but it came out very easily. Too easily. Must be something she was holding onto for a while.
He looks as though she's said something off-color, though, then resumes his vigil on the mountain pass. "Seems to be the way of things, doesn't it?" he says with a sigh from his vents. She thought he was going to fall silent, but he winds up continuing. "So long as I'm going to be stronger and tougher, or I get in just that many more half-seconds to think, or that I have a greater awareness of our surroundings..." he trails off, but clearly not done. "...so long as I have to watch where I goddamn step? I think you might be right."
Then there was silence.
About three minutes of it, until a sonic boom rips through the valley and nearly knocks Astrid to her feet.
She looks up, naturally, to where she thinks the sound is coming from, but there's nothing. Just clouds of dust being picked up by hot air that's whipping her hair around her head. She's about to ask what in the devil is going on, but it becomes pretty clear in a short instant.
The landscape in front of them bends suddenly, and after a second, sharply twists around in nothing short of a psychedelic fit. The sight is almost nauseating to her for a moment, as trees and mountain ridges seem to droop and swell and jerk, revealing some kind of shape. It's when it starts fizzling away that she recognizes the sight: Autobot technology.
And before she knows it, her field of vision is taken up by a hulking white form that practically glistens in the pale, cloudy light. It's a plane, obviously. But it's a strange plane. A huge plane. A plane at least as big as a jumbo jet, but with the lines of a fighter. She notes, too, that it has a nose, but no cockpit. As the massive form descends, deploying thick landing gear, she has to cover her mouth and close her eyes - it's just kicking up too much dust.
It touches down with surprising delicacy, though, and in no time a 20-foot hatch opens up on its side. Out of it comes shooting a ramp.
"You two had better hop in quick before anyone around gets wise," comes a very deep and powerful - but somber - voice from someplace in the aircraft. It catches her completely by surprise, and Astrid realizes that she still has no idea if the vehicle has a pilot. It probably doesn't. Hound gestures with a nod of his head toward the ramp, motioning for her to go first, so she does.
Inside is just as cavernous as she might have guessed. There are eight Cybertronian-sized seats, four against the opposite wall, one in the front, and three on the side they've entered from. They're padded with a strange-looking material, and the harnesses are immense. Hound immediately makes himself comfortable in one of them and straps in. She watches as the straps, once affixed, shrink, almost: both they and the seat conform to the Jeep's frame. Fascinating.
But that leaves another question: where does she sit down for the flight?
Hound seemingly reads her mind as the hatch closes, and he pats his leg. "Come on up," he offers. "Skyfire's vehicle mode wasn't designed for humans, I'm afraid."
She goes to take him up on the offer but stumbles forward, falling onto one of his feet as the plane very quickly ascends. She finds that she can't free herself from the floor until they've reached altitude. Righting herself, yet another question presents itself, and a worrying one at that. Oh god. "Please tell me this cabin is pressurized?"
"I can make any such accommodations that you might require, Agent Schneider," comes that deep, calming voice again. She realizes that it's all around her - yup, they're in another Autobot. "All I ask is that you do secure yourself."
A sigh of relief as Hound hoists her up onto his lap. "OK, thank you."
"Hound, I hope you'll excuse my silence during the flight, but I'm sure you understand that I prefer to focus on flying." A chuckle that vibrates her bones. "I'm still a little... distressed by my encounter with the cerebro-shell, even after all these years."
Oh wow. So this was that Autobot. The one that almost single-handedly revealed their presence on Earth thanks to the cruel meddling of a Decepticon.
"That's no problem by me," the green mech replies. "I think Astrid and I could use a little R&R ourselves right about now anyways."
"Excellent. Now if you'll hold on."
Suddenly, and with an amount of shaking that has Astrid worried for a moment, they take off down Skyfire's nonexistent runway. She's sent hurdling backward into Hound's splayed hand, crushed against him and unable to move until they've broken the sound barrier and reached their final cruising speed of god knows what. It occurs to her that the usual cabin noise, the hissing and humming and whining of aircraft engines, are bizarrely absent now. What she doesn't know is that the sound of Skyfire's afterburners are far behind them.
Hound chuckles a little, his optic on her the whole time. "You alright?"
She groans and winces. "I think I'll be OK... so long as we don't do that again." Astrid wraps her arms around herself when the temperature begins to drop a little, tucking her face into the collar of her down vest. She tries closing her eyes to nap, but can't, and stops trying after a few minutes. Her eyes wander instead.
The cabin is dimly lit by a pair of luminescent stripes - one down the middle on the floor, and the other mirrored above on the ceiling - that throws the far corners of the jet's interior into deep shadow. She allows herself to wonder for a moment at what all turns into what: where are his arms? His legs and head? It seems almost impossible to her right now that this arrangement of parts has the ability to be reshaped into a humanoid being.
Astrid glances off to her left, spotting Hound's yellow stripes in the dimness, almost glowing against the black of his pelvic armor. She remembers the last time they'd gone at it, and it'd been good - something about him always makes it good - but it hadn't been great. He'd been a little too gentle, a little too removed. Wait, why the hell is she thinking about sex right now? After all you've been through and your mind's in the gutter already?
She shivers, remembering. Each scene from the past few days like a horror show. And yet... each one accompanied by an image of him. Tearing after her through the deep, dusky trees like a bull moose. Ripping out the side of that house. Throwing that Decepticon face-first into the pavement. She remembers what it felt like to point that gun at Codec's face. And honestly? Part of it felt good. It was definitely still terrible and terrifying, though. And yet.
Astrid had never imagined that Hound had it in him to manhandle such a comparatively small person. Codec's shining metal body had all the mass of an averagely-built, six-foot man - barely more than her in the scheme of things. But when push came to shove, the Jeep had little compunction about using that difference to his advantage and sending the Decepticon into what he'd called "stasis lock". It'd been so visceral. So raw. For a split-second, he'd been terrible and terrifying.
And yet.
"I think some part of me likes that you have to watch where you step."
Astrid feels him shifts under, above, around her. Bending forward to the best of his ability, in spite of the restraints. When she finally looks up to meet his gaze, the look on his face does not instill her with any confidence. In fact, all that there is there is cautious confusion.
"What?"
"Nevermind."
"Tell me what you mean."
She's beginning to wish she hadn't said anything. "I-I don't know."
"No, really," he says, very quietly. Hopefully quiet enough so that their pilot won't hear them. "You enjoy the fact that I endanger your life just by being around you?" His expression deepens and it makes her feel like a damn fool. "That you've become a target just by knowing me?"
"Fuck," she breathes, closing her eyes.
"It's not fun for me, you know," he continues. "The hurt I can cause you, the damage I can do if I'm not damn careful." Is his voice faltering? He covers his face with his hand. "You know... I've found myself wishing I didn't know you these past few days," he admits, even quieter than before. She breathes short and shallow and hugs herself. "Because none of this would have happened to you if it weren't for me. Dammit, Boots..." He hunches over now, encircling her in a pained hug. His mouth is at her ear and his hand is splayed across her back, threatening to clutch her into a desperate grip. "I... I care about you. A lot."
Emotion squeezes her throat. She just buries her face in his side, wrapping her arms as far around his belly as she can manage, and swallowing hard, says: "If you never knew me, I'd be dead a long time ago."
Something in him breaks. His body shakes, vents cycling air haphazardly, like halting gasps, and something nips at her back through her layers of clothing, passing from his trembling hand to her. Before long, her entire body is covered in tickling jabs of electricity, both sharp and warm. She can feel the flickers of this strange energy as it pulses and jerks in time with his own faint shudders, and for a moment she wonders if this perhaps isn't meant to feel nice. Astrid looks up after a minute, and sees his face scrunched up in pain, optic dim. His grip around her tightens, and he clutches her to him like some small, precious thing before releasing her and straightening up.
"You were..."
But the gentle little shocks are already fading, leaving her skin buzzing and her muscles soothed.
The green mech lifts his hand and softly wipes at her cheek with the textured pad of his thumb. "So are you," he murmurs. Astrid blinks and feels a wetness there. So she is.
She wipes her face on her sleeve, leaning against his belly to her side, and he covers her with a draped hand.
"I'm sorry. That must have been... uncomfortable for you."
"Everyone needs a good cry every once in a while," she says. "Even G.I. Jeeps with twenty-seven tours of duty behind them."
"That didn't hurt you?"
"No, no. It even felt... sorta nice."
She watches as the barest hint of a smile tugs at his lips. His hand holds her closer. Vents cycle air normally again.
"Let's talk about this later, OK? I need time to think about it."
Astrid nods against him, sighing.
"Skyfire?" Hound asks aloud. "How long do we have?"
"Three more breems, my friend."
"A little more than twenty minutes," he translates for her. "If you can, though, Astrid would very much appreciate if you took the descent easy," he gently suggests. "I don't think she'd be too comfortable with going from three times the speed of sound to 300 kilometers an hour in about 45 seconds. Too many G's without a suit, I'm afraid."
We're travelling how fast?
"Of course. Perhaps make it four breems, then."
"Thanks." He turns back to her: "It might not be fun, but it shouldn't make you sick, at least."
"At least," she chuckles sardonically.
Skyfire has no windows, but he appears to have VTOL capabilities, so as they descend like an elevator (after a moderately gut-wrenching slowdown) she doesn't have the faintest idea where they've ended up until he opens the hatch again and light comes pouring in.
Hound's straps undo themselves but when he sets her back on the floor she doesn't wait for him before going over to the opening and making her way down the long ramp. She has fewer reservations about being here this time, and curiosity is getting the better of her.
The space is positively gargantuan. Mostly white, with some of that orange-copper equipment that she recognizes from last time, and some brassy yellow also. Off to her far left is what appears to be a... no, it can't be. Astrid holds back a laugh at the sight of furniture so enormous that not even Hound would be able to get up into a seat. It's a bar, not unlike the one she met his friends at, with some other pieces of furniture clearly built for taking a load off. The bar's counter, though? Probably twenty feet from the ground. The whole things strikes her as silly for some reason.
"This is where the air team hangs out," Hound explains as he strolls up to her, and the two head off to the side to, presumably, give Skyfire some room. "We've got an A-10, two F-16s, an F-18, an EA-6, a couple of helicopters, and Skyfire here who, as you can tell, never took an Earth mode."
It occurs to her for a moment that Hound did indeed have a vehicle mode before he came to Earth, and that she had no idea what it was. She makes a note to ask him about it later.
"That's a lot of planes," she says, eyebrows raised and hands in her pockets.
"A lot of planes and, when the high-grade starts flowing, a lot of fists," he chuckles. "Big fists. Poor Silverbolt gets an earful from Prowl whenever one of his flyboys gets rowdy."
Astrid's about to make a quip about human flyboys, but they're interrupted by Skyfire's big, soothing voice. "If you'll pardon me, I'm going to transform now," he announces.
If the Jeep's transformation sequence is difficult to understand, then this one is downright impossible to keep track of. Skyfire breaks into thousands of pieces where Hound breaks into dozens, or maybe a few hundred, and they rearrange themselves so fluidly that this Autobot appears to be reshaping himself instead of simply folding himself up into a different configuration. It's mesmerizing and beautiful and disorienting all at once. It takes a relatively long time to complete as well: it's more than ten seconds before the vehicle is replaced by a figure, red, black, and white, kneeling before them. Even as he rises, a few small, errant pieces tuck themselves neatly away.
"Whoa," she breathes.
Skyfire the mech stands at around five stories tall, Astrid wagers, and it seems that Hound would only come up to his knee. His aircraft mode was much larger: at least 100 feet long and almost that wide measuring from wingtip to wingtip, but he was mostly hollow in that mode, a vessel made for ferrying his fellow soldiers. Get rid of that space inside, and you're left with something much more compact.
"Welcome back to Autobot Headquarters Hound, Agent Schneider. I must go to the holo machine now, so I may join you in the labs shortly. Excuse me." With that he turns and disappears down a far corridor, ducking his head for clearance even here.
Hound must've known he was there but Astrid was too busy being distracted by Skyfire to notice the red and white mech who was now standing behind them. He's about Hound's size, a little bulkier, and it's clear by his markings that he's some kind of medical personnel. He's holding a datapad and looking none too impressed - she gets the distinct feeling that he always looks like that, though, even when he is impressed.
He nods at each of them in turn. "Hound, I take it you've got the..?"
The Jeep nods, patting his chest like a coat pocket. "Subspace."
"Good," he says, doing something with the device in his hand in response before turning on his enormous heel and heading down the corridor behind them - one built to accommodate mechs of their size. Hound follows, and Astrid is lefts scurrying behind them to catch up. "Leadership is all up there," he grunts. "So is Wheeljack, Perceptor... Red, too."
Hound notices her having a hard time keeping up, so he stops and gives her his arm. She quickly scrambles up the familiar limb and finds a seat on his shoulder.
"Now you said that you almost came into contact with it?" the red and white mech asks, still not looking up from his pad.
"Yeah... didn't get any of it on me, though."
"You sure."
"My scans came out clean, doc-bot."
They come to an elevator and the medic hits the call button, and makes a concerned, rumbling noise as he looks sidelong at the one-eyed mech with the human on his shoulder. The lift comes and they all step inside. "Jazz tells me that your sensors may need a tune-up, though."
She can feel Hound get defensive, but he stops himself, scowling instead. "Yeah," he mumbles at length.
"Your busted optic is a perfect place for it to get in," the medic says, shaking his head a little. "However, it is dormant until it gets the opportunity to interact with spark fluid."
The elevator opens and they head out. Hound seems to know where they're going, but red and white stops them. "Ah, ah, ah... over here."
He pulls them over to the right, where Astrid spies a large... thing loom into view. Half of it is transparent to view the inside, and the rest is god knows what. What she does know, is that it seems to be big enough to accommodate a mech of either Hound's or this medic's size.
"A quick visit to the vacuum chamber."
The green mech glances at her before shrugging a little and setting her down. This "vacuum chamber" looks a hell of a lot bigger from down here.
He steps in, facing outward, and the thing closes around him. The medic steps over to a lighted panel, his huge foot landing a little too close for comfort, and he begins to operate it. Hound looks around expectantly, and after a moment he suddenly seems to be subjected to gale-force winds as the chamber fills with air moving faster than she can guess. Stuff is loosed from him and swirls around at a hundred miles an hour: bits of dirt, pebbles, pine needles. When red, white, and crotchety is satisfied, he hits another button and Hound jerks backwards as all the air is sucked out through vents behind him. Then, finally, with a short, powerful hiss, it opens again and the Jeep stumbles out with a vent.
"Criminey," he mumbles. "Haven't done that in a long time."
"If it was on you and not in you, then that ought to do the trick."
"And if it's in me?"
"Then we've got about six hours before you become symptomatic... and four before you're contagious."
Astrid shivers.
"And spark collapse in 24," the Jeep murmurs, looking down at her with grim resignation on his face. She looks up at him, eyes wide and hands cold. What? What?
"H-Hound, I..."
"Don't say your goodbyes just yet," he rumbles irritably as they come to a door. "You're not a dead mech until I say so."
The door, some twenty feet tall, is labelled "lab" in both English and Cybertronian, and below it are placards warning of the hazards to be found inside. Corrosive materials, flammable gases, explosives, heavy machinery, high voltage devices, biohazardous substances, medical waste, and, like icing on a cake, radiation.
Inside is a huge, brilliantly-lit space, strewn with a half-dozen different workstations, and all of them cluttered with bits and bobs and half-finished projects. Storage lines the walls - more of those green panels that showcase a whole assortment of tools suspended inside of some material, like resin or jello.
There are six Autobots already there, all talking among themselves, and now there are three more. Apparently that'll make ten once Skyfire joins them. She recognizes Prowl, Optimus, and the expensive one with the visor - what was his name? Jazz? - along with two others she hasn't seen: a gray one with no mouth, and a smaller red, black, and teal one. The security director that she met when they checked out last time is here too, but she doesn't recall his name.
She feels really small in here like this. Hound hadn't picked her up off the floor, and her entire field of vision right now is barely anything more than giant legs and giant feet.
Her mech taps her on the shoulder, though, and before she can turn around he's scooped her up into one hand and is lifting her to a table surface, where he gently deposits her.
"I'll be fine, OK? I promise."
She nods silently.
"Alright, you," the medic grunts, setting down his datapad and pointing over to a machine in the corner. "Let's get you scanned."
Hound walks over to it, trying to keep his head high but she can tell he's struggling. It's some kind of apparatus mostly hanging from the ceiling, and it lowers itself around him in ringed segments. Everyone watches the Jeep stand still, trying to square his shoulders. She wishes she could be in there with him, but...
"What's the prognosis, Ratchet?" Jazz asks.
"That's what I'm finding out."
The medic, Ratchet, grabs a screen from the ceiling and yanks it down on its hydraulic arm until its about waist-level. He looks up at Hound, then back down to the screen, pushing a button here and there as the rings start to move and make more noise.
It seems to take forever, and Astrid struggles not to give herself away here, but after the longest five minutes of her life, the rings withdraw back into the ceiling and Ratchet hums and haws over the results on the screen in front of him with a thinking scowl.
"Gonna have to give you a clean bill of health," he says after a while. "Looks like your scanners can be trusted after all."
Astrid fights back tears as the other mechs clap or cheer.
Hound dashes over to her, the biggest spring in his step that she's ever seen, and... pauses, sobering up. No PDAs, his suddenly frustrated face says. He does raise his hand at her and a little smile crosses his face. With her own open palm and her own smile, she gives him a high five - hitting him a little too hard, though, and she has to shake the sting off with a chuckle.
Optimus Prime's voice demands their attention, though. "Don't misunderstand me, captain, but you'll have opportunities to celebrate later. Now we must sort out the bigger issue at hand. Time is... of the essence."
Hound looks away from her and toward his massive, towering, superior officer, and nods. With that telltale faint flash, the canister appears in Hound's hand and he sets it down on the table nearest Prime. "There is is, sir."
The room falls deathly silent for a moment, and Astrid notices that Skyfire had joined them at some point - much smaller, this time. Some kind of hardlight avatar.
"Well I'll be slagged," the gray, mouthless one says, the protrusions from the side of his head faintly blinking with his every syllable. He's got a thick Brooklyn accent.
Jazz folds his arms across his chest and shakes his head. The red and black one cocks his head to the side, murmurs "fascinating" under their breath, and Ratchet grumbles. Prowl and Prime are both unreadable.
"You know, I'd be lying if I didn't say that was by far the scariest thing I've ever had in my subspace compartment."
"I don't blame ya one bit," the mouthless one says, muscling in to get a closer look.
The red and white mech, Ratchet, snorts somehow. "It's ironic too, considering that subspace is probably the safest place you could keep it."
"I would like to thank you, Hound," Prime says, "For taking such a dangerous task upon yourself. I wouldn't ask any of my soldiers to carry such a burden lightly." He chuckles a little - a sound that she's never head. "If I had any decorations to give you, I would."
Hound looks a little surprised, but very pleased with himself. "Thank you, sir. Really, it was a non-choice. I think you all might agree with me that letting this fall into Bureau hands would be..."
"...catastrophically dire," Prowl finishes. "It was foolish of you to act outside the chain of command, but seeing as how you did exactly as we'd have asked regardless, the transgression is forgivable."
If Hound isn't bristling, then she is for him.
"On that note," Ratchet says, grabbing the container off the table and whisking it away to a small chamber off on the side of the room with mechanical arms inside, attached to the ceiling. "Let's see what the Jeep has stumbled on here." The container is quickly obscured by four large, metal bodies - characters she can only assume at this point are responsible for the Autobots' STEM-type operations.
"The Red Hand virus, you said?" Skyfire confirms.
"Yes. Revealed by my spectro-analysis and the forensic lab's mass-spectrometer."
"The forensic lab?" Prowl asks, cold and calculating, despite a raised brow plate.
"I eliminated all evidence of it having been there."
Jazz chuckles, still looking over at what the science-bots are doing to the canister. "You should think about putting in for a black ops job."
"No thank you," Hound smiles, eye fixed on them too.
"Easy... easy does it..." the mouthless one mutters. Astrid sidesteps the pile of junk on the table and draws closer to the far edge to get a better look. Skyfire moves a little, allowing her a sliver of a view, but it's enough to see the mechanical arms at work behind the glass: one holding the canister and the other one carefully undoing the final clasp holding the lid on.
"There we go."
The lid is set aside and all four bots maneuver themselves to get a peek inside.
"That's it, alright," Ratchet grunts.
"Frag me and leave me fer dead, there it is," the mouthless one quietly exclaims.
"I'm hesitant to say for certain, but it does indeed look the way I remember it."
Skyfire just rumbles balefully.
They're moving quickly, now, and three of them step away to draw their own screens down to get to work.
"I'm grabbin' samples, guys," says the mouthless one, taking control of the arms inside the sealed chamber. "Perceptor, see about identifying any possible trace of Cybertronian material inside of there. If it's got fuel to mutate, I wanna know."
"Analyzing now."
"Skyfire, get to work finding its marker. We might be able to trace this to a place of origin on Cybertron. If, that is, it's legit. And Ratch -"
But Prime, apparently, has a more important order to give: "Ratchet, get to work on a defensive strategy should we face an outbreak. Designation, Code Black."
Ratchet doesn't seem to like this task, but it has to be done. "Right away, sir."
"We should find out who made that fancy-ass container," Jazz suggests with a frown. Prowl nods and Ratchet makes a non-committal, yet still agreeable, grunt.
This is all terribly exciting and scary, but Astrid remembers that she's barely knee-height here and standing on a table the size of her bedroom. Even if she weren't, and that this were n army lab full of top human brass and scientists all hard at work trying to solve a some military puzzle, she'd still feel small. She looks over to Hound, who meets her gaze. They're thinking the same thing.
"Are we dismissed, sir"? he asks.
"No," Prime says, turning toward them with his body and not just his head. Jazz and Prowl, his right and left hands, notice and shift their attention as well. "Agent Schneider, I need to know everything you saw and heard during your time with the Pretender."
What first strikes her about the request - aside from the fact that it came from Optimus Prime, an Autobot whose speaking voice alone makes her want to join the ranks and do what he says - is his wording. He didn't ask for everything she knew; but rather everything she saw and heard.
Maybe it's that choice of words that wracks her memory, specifically, or maybe something else about where they are and what she'd experienced that morning, but after a few long moments of thinking, something else percolates to the surface. Slowly, awkwardly, but it comes.
"He kept telling me... telling me that Hound was going to find me, but not yet. He said to give it a few hours."
"Anything else?"
"Yeah," she murmurs, hand at her chin as she presses her brows together more, like trying to physically squeeze it out. "I remember later, the power went out."
Jazz comes to life at this. "It sure did, didn't it."
"I don't remember the power going out," Hound says, frowning.
"We assumed it was that EMP that knocked you flat on your aft."
Prime addresses her again and the chatter ceases. "What about the power, Agent Schneider?"
"I think I remember Codec... he seemed to be happy about it."
"What do you mean by happy?"
"He didn't say anything, but when the lights came back on, he was grinning about it. And I know this sounds stupid, but it's almost as if he was expecting it."
Prowl, Jazz, and Prime all look at each other. Hound looks at her, and she swallows.
Astrid didn't know about an EMP - Hound had simply said that something happened to him on Friday night, and that he wasn't sure what it was. She's a little upset that he didn't talk about it further, but, she supposes, that's water under the bridge now.
"You three, in my ready room," Prime says, all twenty-some feet of him making for the door. Jazz and Prowl are right on his heels, but Hound hesitates.
"Sir, but what about -?"
"She can stay here for now."
The Jeep glances at her one last time, and then he, too, falls into step behind them. "Yes, sir."
Astrid's not stupid - she knows now what the implications of this are: Hound had been attacked by Decepticons or someone working with Decepticons that night. And if she was with Codec, then there were more of them out there, roaming the streets of Anchorage. She sits cross-legged down on the table, half-thinking, half-watching the STEM bots do their work in front of her.
She pieces a little more of those exchanges she'd had with Codec together, and it's becoming more and more likely (to her, at any rate) that that entire ordeal - the kidnapping, the holding her hostage, maybe even the interrogation - was nothing more than a ruse. An excuse to get Hound away from Bureau agents and away from her while making her think that she and not him was the target. But to what end?
The security mech is not doing anything right now. At least, not to her simple human eye. He looks agitated, though, and has taken up pacing in a tight line as he watches the others warily. He takes notice of her for a moment, but only to screw up his face and shake his head.
"Irresponsible, leaving you in here alone," his huff.
Astrid lifts her head from her hands. "Excuse me?"
"You, a human," he states. "Small, fragile, full of corrosive liquid in a sensitive environment." She raises her eyebrows at him.
Ratchet scoffs from where he's standing some forty feet away, working, as he is, at his giant datapad-like screen. "You talk like she's a water balloon with a leak." The slimmer red and white mech squares his shoulders and scowls when Ratchet looks up from his screen and her way for a moment. "You'll have to excuse Red, he's not all that used to having humans on-base. Even after twenty years." That last bit is delivered especially low and deadpan.
"That's all you have to say at a time like this?" Red Alert - that's his name - bursts. "We discover one of the most dangerous weapons in Cybertronian history on an alien planet and you think it's a time to crack jokes?"
"Relax, alright?" the mouthless one butts in. "You think we don't know what this means?"
"I think you're being flippant is all."
"Ah, we're all flippant to you."
Red draws his lips into a tight line and somehow finds his way over to the workstation she's sitting on, leaning his hip plating back against it as he crosses his arms and pouts, almost. "Why are you even here? You gave your statement, you should go."
"I'm with Hound," she shoots back, frown deepening. "And I'm waiting for him to get back." She's not offended for some reason, though she is losing her patience with him.
"Why in the world are you with Hound?"
She swallows. "I'm his friend."
"The captain makes too many human friends if you ask me."
"I didn't ask you."
"One of them got killed, you know."
Astrid bites her lip and looks off to the side, remembering Hound's message from earlier that year on her way to Elko. Ryan Manning, a name that she'd never forgotten; a man murdered for being saved by Hound and then giving him a year's worth of car washes for it. Distantly, and with a morbid bit of amusement, she wonders what the Xeno Trackers would do if they found out that she was fucking him.
"And you're talking to would-be number two," she mutters acerbically.
Red starts a little with surprise. It's a second later that she realizes that everyone else in the lab has paused in their work and fallen silent.
"Sorry," Red says quietly. "I... didn't know."
"In the past week I've been shot, beaten, interrogated, burned, poisoned, and almost shot again."
"We got us a regular Rasputin in here," the mouthless one remarks, and Astrid can't help but chuckle.
"Really?" Red exclaims. "With the jokes again? Can't you mechs take anything seriously?"
"Everyone copes in their own way, Red Alert." This time it's Skyfire. Then: "And to get back on subject, I've got a marker. It's boron."
Astrid and Red (Alert) straighten up at the news, though she doesn't know what it means.
"Boron?" Ratchet grunts. "That's not a tell from any wartime Decpticon lab I'm familiar with."
Mouthless strolls over to Skyfire's screen, who gestures at it. "Yeah, well, who knows just how many mad science projects they had goin' on back in those days. Just 'coz we didn't document this strain, don't mean it don't exist."
"It could be a new strain," red and teal says. Their British accent borders on campy, but it fits them somehow. "Also Wheeljack, I've detected no trace of mutagenic material within the confines of the container."
The mouthless mech nods. So that's his name. She recognizes it from somewhere, but can't remember the context. "Good. Means it's not volatile. Yet."
The four STEM bots, Red Alert, and Astrid all gaze into the sealed chamber and look at the unassuming container - barely the size of a film roll to them.
"There could very well be more of this stuff out there," Ratchet murmurs with a rumble, saying what they're all thinking.
Astrid finds herself raising her hand then; like a student in a lecture class. Wheeljack notices, giving her room to speak.
"If you don't mind me asking," she says meekly, not wanting to feel smaller and dumber than she already does, "How does it work? Why is it so dangerous?"
"You know," mouthless chuckles - if it didn't come from someone so silly and outgoing, she might think his laugh had a conniving quality to it - "I'm not sure Jazz even knows the details. But boy when it comes to something he don't wanna know, good luck gettin' him to ask!"
The other mechs, save Red Alert and the British STEM bot, have a good laugh at this.
"See, it's like this," Wheeljack continues, hitting a button on his screen. Three holographic panels flicker to life in front of him and he moves out of the way so he can show her what she quickly recognizes as a basic schematic of a Cybertronian body. "Spark chamber's here, spark fluid conduits run along here, here, here... you get the idea."
She nods.
"The stuff can get in just about any way you might imagine. If its temporarily airborne, it might get in through the vents. Suspended in liquid, it might get in via the fuel tanks. As a solid it can coat the ends of ballistic weapons or be scattered with shrapnel. The possibilities are endless."
"And the Decepticons loved it," Ratchet grumbles. "For a while, at least. It takes disciplined ranks to maintain clean rooms and safe handling procedures, and the 'Cons don't exactly have disciplined ranks." He vents, folding his great white and red arms. "Their own started getting sick and it almost reached the scale of an epidemic before they bombed their contaminated facilities to save the rest of the army. Without new hosts, the virus ran its course. Haven't seen it since."
The diagram pans in to get a better view of the middle of the body: hips, thighs, hands, forearms. The conduits that Wheeljack had pointed out, marked white, are shown to be more complex in this view than before.
"So one way or another, it gets into the spark fluid, and from there is has a field day," Wheeljack explains. "By Earth reckoning, it takes 10 hours for the Pax strain to become contagious, 8.4 hours for the Altihex strain, and a mere 7 hours for the Kaon strain. This is a new strain - we gotta figure out how long this one takes to mutate. Anyways, it's called Red Hand because it crystallizes the body in stages. The first thing it attacks is the plating of the hands, and by then it's too damn late. You're not only a goner yourself, but every time you cycle air you're sending out particulates to be cycled in by someone else. By that point you got about... a day or so to go before catastrophic spark failure."
"Jesus," the human says, letting out a breath.
"Ugly stuff."
"You're not kidding. How did this stuff... come about? Evolve?"
"It's not the product of natural evolution," red and teal explains. "A scientist working in the field of nanene technology long before the war stumbled upon this crystalline molecular arrangement in seeking to develop fuel additives that might introduce what human medicine calls a clotting factor; something which our bodies do not have. I am sure you can guess what happened after that."
"Have we lost all perspective? Forgotten all safety protocol?" Red Alert snaps. "Here we have a bomb that can only target Cybertronians and you're explaining to a human how to use it! She could be a Bureau plant for all we know!"
Skyfire, Ratchet, and Wheeljack glance at each other and shrug. "Hound trusts her," the jet says.
"I don't."
"Don't you trust Hound?"
"Wheeljack, I don't trust anybody on this planet."
When Prime returns, he's only got Jazz and Hound in tow, and while all of them look uneasy, Hound looks particularly distressed.
"I'll tell you about it later," he murmurs quietly as he finds a place against the edge of the workstation she's nearest.
The STEM bots explain their findings to the brass, and Prime accepts the grim news with dignified unease.
"Skyfire, you worked with many scientists who later became Decepticons when the war started. I'd like you to pay a visit to me later so that we may discuss possible candidates for masterminds behind this. A profile might help us."
"Of course, sir."
"Red Alert, I want a report detailing crisis predictions and courses of action should we suffer a virological attack. Run diagnostics on your entire system. If a camera is out, repair it. If wiring is exposed anywhere, cover it. If a bolt is missing, anywhere, replace it. Clean up the databases as well, and send out a notice to everyone to keep their chatter to a minimum. I want the Ark and all Autobot communication airtight in 24 hours."
"Yes, sir!"
"Jazz, have Rewind see if he can't figure out where that canister came from. Who made it, and who bought it."
"On it, sir."
"Perceptor, can you get a half-life on that strain?"
Red and teal nods. "Undoubtedly, sir."
"Then do that. Its age will be able to tell us if it was made here or if its leftovers from the war."
"Well, wait a minute," Jazz cuts in. "If the container is man-made, we can't rule out the possibility that the contents are too."
Prime rumbles. "You're right. However, judging by our talk earlier, that it not the likeliest situation."
Astrid narrows her eyes at the Jeep, but he doesn't look her way.
"On that note," their commander continues. "Ratchet, Hound needs looking at in the morning. Prowl will get you a diagnostics order."
"Sure thing, boss," the medic says. "In the meantime, Hound, I'm prescribing you two hours in a CR chamber to get you through the night."
"Oh? Which one?"
"Number, uh.." he glances at a datapad on the workstation next to him. "Four."
Hound nods, turning to Astrid. He goes to extend his arm to her but pauses. "Did you need Ast- Agent Schneider for anything?"
"You're both dismissed," Prime says, a kindness in his tone. "Get some rest."
"And that's an order," Jazz says. The edge of his mouth is curled up into the barest hint of a smile, but Astrid can tell that he wishes he were getting ordered to get some R&R about now.
"Come on," the Jeep sighs, and she steps into the crook of his arm.
"Goodnight, everyone."
A few of them bid their goodbyes, and Astrid is surprised to find Red Alert look at her in particular before nodding his head at her in acknowledgement. For the first time she gets a full view of his face; there's worry and exhaustion there, too. She nods back.
"What happened?" she asks when they're outside and the door shuts behind them.
Hound's shoulders, squared and set back since they disembarked Skyfire's cabin, slump now. "They think I've been deliberately compromised," he mutters, heading down the hallway in the opposite direction of the elevator.
"Wh... what does compromised mean?"
The Jeep vents and rounds a corner. "It means what it means."
Astrid frowns. "Humor the human, would you?"
"I'm sorry," he vents, stopping in front of a door. There's a big 04 painted on it. "It's just... I don't know." He presses a button and the room opens. Inside is a small, dimly lit room, maybe the size of a large closet to him. He gently kneels down to the ground and she hops off him before he rises up to his full height again. The mech, now very much the fifteen foot metal giant, steps past her and over to some kind of large device and begins to operate it.
"You don't know what?"
"It's... a pride thing," he mutters.
A pride thing? She knits her brows as she watches him finish what he's doing. The device, she realizes, is a large vat, and as it hums to life, the lid retracts, revealing glowing stuff inside that faintly illuminates the ceiling. The lip is almost ten feet off the ground, though - far too high for her to catch a glimpse of what's inside. His silvery face is lit by the glowing liquid, and she sees the frustration there. Is it a new frustration, though? Or an old one?
His sensors are the reason he enlisted, the reason he felt different from his fellows, and the reason he lives for his work.
But now, they've been... compromised. Ripped from him.
Astrid swallows.
"What'd they do to you?"
He steps in, and she catches herself flinch, some automatic response to the sight of his huge leg lift up and over the edge of the vat. He settles in with a sploosh and disappears from view. He doesn't reappear for a moment, so she resigns herself to spending the next two hours with him and finds a place to sit on the floor with her back to the wall.
The green mech does reappear though, folding his arms along the edge and resting his chin on them. "We won't know for certain," he murmurs, "Not until Ratchet has a look at me. But they think I was cerebro-shelled."
"Cerebro-what?"
His brow plates press together and it looks like talking about this pains him for some reason. She recognizes the term from someplace, and then it comes back to her. It was how the Autobots were given away to humans in the first place: Skyfire had been the victim of a similar attack decades ago and made to dance like a puppet in the sky above Groom Lake before crashing to the ground. It scared and humiliated him so much that he never took an active role outside of the base again after that. Never even took an Earth mode.
Oh.
Oh damn.
"It's a bit of Decepticon technology - a bit of technology that Autobots either never figured out or refused to figure out - that we call a cerebro-shell in English. It's sort of like a tick. It buries itself into your CPU, integrates with your systems, and hijacks a few of your processes."
A chill passes through her. She has no idea what this means. It doesn't seem anyone else does either. But yeah... yeah. This is definitely a pride thing. Hell, it's a dignity thing. A "who knows what the Decepticons are learning from this" thing.
"That doesn't make any sense," she exclaims. "You... you almost killed one of their own! I-if they had some kind of control over you, why would they let you..."
"I'd rather not make any guesses yet, Boots. They've got some sick minds over there."
Astrid sighs hard, slumping. Her mind's a flurry of angry, frustrated thoughts, and when she steals a glance at him out of the corner of her eye, she sees no more Decepticon in him than she did last week. How? Why?
The side of her fist comes down hard onto the floor, and it makes a weak, muffled thup. No crack, no dent, no sign of her frustration is left - not even like the faintest of his blows. The pristine spot makes her want to keep hitting it until something does show. But blood would run sooner than that, so she just falls forward, forehead pressed to the ground like she's in elementary school again, ducked under a desk for an earthquake drill.
This isn't a drill.
And just like an earthquake, there's nothing she can do but wait it out.
Actually, she wants a drink.
Ten minutes pass in silence between them, and she's since straightened up again. He's not moving much, and when she looks up at the giant again, she sees his eye is "closed". Is he asleep?
But some unknowable technological part of him catches her looking his way and his single good optic lights up again and he stirs. Not asleep - just thinking.
"What is that in there?"
"Stuff," he shrugs. "I don't know, exactly. It helps regeneration processes along."
"Can I go in there?"
He smiles, lazily, tiredly, down at her. "I don't think so." The smile fades. "You don't have to spend the whole time in here with me, you know. You must be getting hungry at least."
Astrid takes stock of her body and yeah, she is hungry. He probably wants to be alone right now anyways - she can at least do that for him.
"Want me to call one of my friends over to escort you out? One of the ones you met, of course."
She thinks, suddenly struck with a faint jolt of unease at the idea of being handled by another mech. But at the same time, it's a little exciting. She's never sat down and spent time with another Autobot... it could be fun.
"OK."
"I'll ask Trailbreaker."
Trailbreaker was the big black, red, and silver mech, wasn't he? He probably won't be weird with me, she decides.
A few long minutes later there's a knock at the door before it hisses open. Hound sloshes around in his tub and Astrid gets up.
"Hope you two don't mind if I list you as a reference for my human-sitting business," he says, leaning against the doorframe.
Astrid smiles and shakes her head and she can hear Hound chuckle.
"When's her curfew?" he continues.
"Just give me a couple hours, OK?" the Jeep says, less happy. "Doctor's orders."
"Oh no worries - we'll have all kinds of fun without you. Won't we, Astrid?"
She raises her brows at him. "I just hope we have the same definition of fun."
"Details," he announces with a wave of his hand. Then a little more serious: "You, uh, want me to carry you, or would you rather walk?"
"How far are we going?"
He thinks for a second before crouching down and giving her his arm. "Yeah... I'll just carry you."
She looks at him for a moment, scrutinizing his anatomy before she just goes leaping up onto this other Autobot.
He's big, alright - a few feet taller than Hound, and while sporting smoother lines, he's bulkier. His arms are thick, built similarly to the green mech's, but his shoulders are different. Sloping, with stuff mounted to his back. It won't be quite as easy to balance up there, and she'll be even higher off the ground, but...
"I don't bite," he says in a warmer, quieter voice. "Promise."
"Go on," the Jeep encourages. "I'll be fine."
Well, there's nothing for it, so she walks over to the big SUV and steps into his hand. Slowly, steadily, he lifts her up as he rights himself, and protected by a steadying hand, she climbs up onto that wide shoulder, bracing against the top of his arm and the equipment on his back. It's different - very different, somehow. But the most glaring difference is that he doesn't hold her with nearly the same kind of confidence as Hound does. It must have been a while since the last time he's picked up a human.
"Well, we're off."
Astrid can see him from up here. Hound is sitting in a tub of whitish glowing liquid that comes up to his chest, and he almost looks small from this angle. Well, human small.
"Stay out of trouble you two," he says, forcing a smile. He taps the side of his head twice, then, and points it at her. I'm thinking of you? she guesses.
"See you in a bit, big guy."
"Hey, can I... see your quarters?" she asks.
It's admittedly an odd request, but she can't honestly think of much else that she'd like to do. There's too much on her mind right now, and surprisingly enough, the idea of quietly chatting with a mech that she trusts sounds like the most appealing option. She also hasn't ever seen another Autobot's living space yet, and that sounds kind of interesting too.
"Well, I, uh," he stammers for a moment, caught completely off-guard. "Sure, I guess. Why not?"
They head off down the hall and round a few corners until they come to a wide corridor that she's never seen before. There are lots of doors here, and she spies several other mechs coming and going from some of the suites.
2E is the number of Trailbreaker's door, and in a moment it shunts open, revealing a white room not unlike the temp quarters that she and Hound stayed in when they visited last. Excepting, of course, that this one is very lived in.
It's dark at first, but accent lighting flickers on at their entrance. Furniture-wise, there's a berth, storage units, and normal shelving for stuff that, she guesses, can't go in the green goo. There's also a desk, and on the wall above it, an collection of items that has her biting back a laugh. (So quickly, at least.) There's not one, but two signed sports jerseys, a neon Pabst sign, a taxidermied skunk head, some sort of art made from license plates, a "Hang in There" poster - the one with the kitten - and, best of all, a singing bass.
He hesitates for a second before deciding to set her onto the desk, which is littered with stacks of datapads, and she quickly makes her way over to the bass. She hasn't seen one of these in years. On tip-toes she can reach the button, which she pushes without hesitation. It starts singing Take Me To the River, and flapping its rubber tail. Astrid starts laughing as Trailbreaker takes a seat on his berth, under a sign that says "Man Cave - Est. 2004".
"Holy shit," she says, a big fat smile still on her face when its over. "You've got to have the coolest room here. This is hilarious."
"That fish is stayin' right here," he warns with a grin. A cube of energon has appeared in his hand from somewhere as he sits on the edge of his berth. He points at her with the hand holding it. "Go catch your own."
"Where did all this come from anyway? Where does a giant robot get signed jerseys from?" Astrid marvels at the sight with a chuckle, shaking her head.
"I've put in my fair share of service hours too, you know."
"Oh? Doing what?"
"Fires and shipwrecks, mostly."
Fires, she can believe. But shipwrecks? "Shipwrecks? How in the..?"
He thumbs at himself. "I'm the 'Bot they call when they got crap to salvage or people to rescue. Especially when there's still air trapped in a wreck."
She just gives him a confused look.
"Forcefields come in handy!"
She gives him more of the same.
"Oh come on, nobody told you I've got a forcefield?"
She shakes her head.
"Your boyfriend wounds me. Here. You gotta see th -"
But she goes rigid and imagines that her face has turned beet red. "Oh come on, Trailbreaker. He's not my..."
The eighteen-foot mech freezes too before letting his shoulders slump. "Well slag, I, uh..." A vent escapes him. "I guess Hound didn't tell you that I know about you guys."
Astrid swallows, staring at her fingers. "No, no he didn't..."
An awkward silence passes quickly between them, but she soon figures out just why the Jeep has been friends with him for so long. "Well, if it's any consolation, I really don't give a damn."
"Y-you don't?"
"Hell naw! Why should I?"
She sits down on a particularly tall stack of datapads, folding her arms tight and screwing up her face. "It's just that... well, when I met with Prowl and Prime, they seemed..."
"Ah, phooey," he says with a dismissive wave, taking a swig of that energon. "Prime's brass and Prowl's a damn jerk no matter what you do. If things were up to him, the rec room would be gone, we'd all be painted white, and the Ark would have hall monitors. There's not much in the universe he does approve of."
She gives a half-hearted chuckle, but the image of the looming mech, sterile white and grim black, won't leave her.
"You know we helped get you back, right?"
Her head snaps up to look him in the... well, visor. "You did?"
"Seems he didn't tell you much of anything that went on that night, heh."
"What did happen anyway?" She's not sure she wants to know, though. "I... I figured that he was looking and eventually found me. I mean, that's what he does, right? He's a tracker sometimes?"
Trailbreaker smiles an old smile, and Astrid can't help but wonder what the black mech has seen in his eons being alive. "Hound wears a lot of hats around here. We all do, bein' so few of us, but he wears the most, and always has. He's real blue collar that way, you might say."
Blue collar, huh?
He waves his hand. "Anyways, yeah, we got shipped up for the night to help. Jazz, Skids, Cliffjumper, and me. When we got there, the Bureau had him in chains for insubordination."
Astrid gasps, clasping a hand over her mouth. Motherfuckers.
The visor covers his wold-be eyes and would-be brows, so it's hard to tell, but she's pretty sure he's scowling. "Jazz... finagled our way out of a bad situation and we got the hell outta there. It was a long night. A long, long night." He vents slowly. "So that's how I know." Then, a laugh: "Though I could tell something was up months ago. He'd sometimes talk about this little human civvie he'd met and just light up."
Astrid blushes deeply and bites back a giggle.
His grin turns into an open-mouthed smile when he sees her, and he points his finger again in her direction. "I think he likes you more than he even knows. More than the rest of us know, at least." He ends with another swig of energon.
"Hey Trailbreaker -"
"Ah, it's just Teebs."
"OK, Teebs... I've got a question, then."
"Shoot."
She swallows, wondering if this isn't maybe inappropriate to ask, but it's something that's been weighing on her since she confronted him that night during the road trip and tried to wrap her head around his answer. She still hasn't quite been able to, and ever since moving in with him, the rabbit hole just seems to only get deeper.
"Why does he like me? Why does he like me and not... another Cybertronian?"
Trailbreaker leans back against the wall and vents, long and slow, biding a few moments as he thinks up an answer. "Don't tell him I told you this, but..." Uh oh. "But ever since I've known him, he's had a fascination with organics."
A fascination.
"Fascination?"
She's not sure what to think about this, and it hits her harder than she thinks is rational. Images go flying through her head of him; of him looking at her, touching her; snippets of words echo in her brain.
"Yeah, like, he'd try and get himself stationed off-world all the time. Sometimes he'd use his hardlight to try and sneak into exclusion zones during the war and mingle with locals. Never seen him look at a mech the same way as an organic either. Of course, you ask him and he'll flat-out deny it." He taps the side of his head. "But I'm not as aloof as he thinks I am. Friends notice stuff."
Is this why he... hooked up with me? Because I fit a profile?
"He once told me he was treated like shit back home."
"Organics are... how to I put this... a novelty to us, at the end of the day. A stupid number of us see organics as at least a little inferior, and that's a downright shame. But mostly, your average mech just doesn't care to get involved. Like being organic is a lifestyle or somethin'." He mimed scare quotes around the word.
A novelty?
Like whip-wielding fem-doms or overeager virgins?
"I... I think I knew," she says, surprised at her own stammering. She did know; or at least, she thought she knew. But there's something about getting such frank vindication from someone who's known him for fucking millennia that's throwing her. Someone who's saying it in such plain English. "I think I knew, but..."
"You know what Cybertronian sex looks like?"
Her eyebrows shoot up so fast that they nearly go flying into the air.
"A handful of mechs sitting in a room, sending data packets to each other at slightly different frequencies so that the waveform builds up in our primary hydraulic regulatory complex, or whatever the hell it would be in English, until the spark fluid reaches its carrying capacity - around 30 volts - and then you short yourself out."
"Sounds, um..."
"I think it's great. Shorting is like being wide awake and dead asleep at the same time. You can taste color, smell sound, reach out and touch everything's source code for a fraction of a second. Pure, stinkin' bliss."
She laughs a little. "Sounds like an LSD trip if you ask me."
"Yeah but, to each their own, right? That's what this is about?"
She considers this and nods.
"What's human sex like?"
Astrid about chokes on her tongue. She's about to blurt out an excuse me? but remembers that this is a giant alien robot she's talking to. It's probably going to turn him on as much as waveforms and source code does it for her.
"Well, uh... beyond the mechanics of it, it's... very tactile. It's a lot of friction and pressure, a lot of putting parts of yourself into someone else or vice versa, like you're trying to smash yourselves together into one thing. And you say stuff to each other - almost doesn't matter what it is - to stimulate the brain, which is the one erogenous zone you can't touch. A lot like the spark, really..." she pauses to let that sink in a little bit. "But you keep doing it and like waves that amplify each other, you do it until you crest, and, uh... boom. Orgasm. For a moment it's like you're made of ball lightning, or it's like getting a gasp of air after being underwater for too long. Except that the air is laced with cocaine," she snorts.
"Now see, that sounds pretty uninteresting to me. I don't even know what a hit of cocaine is like." She does. She did one once. ONCE. "But Hound? He's always... liked that, I guess."
"Way you describe it, I feel like he should see about marching in the Folsom Street Fair." Then again, judging by the bruises he left...
Trailbreaker laughs. "You get him to do something like that and I'll give you a slaggin' medal."
The two spend the next half hour talking with his holo in the Bureau common area while she stuffs her face with something barely recognizable from the freezer. He tells her that it's about three in the afternoon. No wonder she's starving; last time she ate was at seven that morning.
Astrid asks what the CR chamber does, what he knows about pretenders, his opinion of Red Alert. But then she looks at her peeling hands again and remembers why she came.
"What does Ratchet know about human physiology?"
"I imagine he knows a good amount - worked with some field surgeons in the Balkans back in the day."
"I mean more... diagnostic medicine."
His holo - a man a few years younger than Hound's, who sports a brown beard and short-cropped hair under a Yankees baseball cap, black work pants and a red t-shirt; it all goes so well with the man-cave paraphernalia - hums and haws at the shabby table. "Your guess is as good as mine." And then after an inordinately long pause: "Well, looks like your boyfriend's done. Let's go get 'im."
She throws away her microwave tray and heads out to the main hallway, where the big SUV is waiting for her, hand low to the ground for her to jump into.
It's a few minutes but they're back at the CR chamber as Hound walks out, hand on the jamb. He smiles a little as he sees them approach, and Astrid can't help her own. He looks like he's been through a hand wash, gotten buffed, waxed, and even his busted eye looks a little better.
"Stay out of trouble?" he asks.
The black mech snorts. "You kiddin' me? We're like Thelma and Louise over here."
Hound can't help but laugh as she switches from one 'Bot to the other. Soon she's resting her rear on a familiar flat, green, panel of armor, hand on a jagged tire. She's acutely aware of the shape of the treads; they're like crumbled granite.
"Say, I was thinking... what if we all came back to my room and broke out some high grade? I could invite a coupla mechs down, we could make an afternoon of it. What d'you say?"
Astrid is honestly hoping that Hound takes him up on the offer, because Trailbreaker's words won't leave her alone now, but the Jeep vents and shakes his head. "No thanks, Teebs. Not tonight. I've got an appointment with Ratchet in the morning and he wants me to lie low until then."
"Hey, suit yourself. I'll see you two around alright? Oh, and hey: how long you here for this time?"
"Don't know. We'll see what the Bureau has to say about it."
"Well see if you can hang out before you high tail it out of here, alright?"
"Will do."