(Chapter 26—Dawn of the Acolytes)

(Disclaimers in chapter 1)

(Mars—2019)

It was late November when the first dome was finished and the construction site on Mars officially became Mars Base. The miners, the Wreckers, as many bots and humans as they had been able to cram in the Xan II and the Venture, about a hundred construction workers and thirty scientists threw an epic party when the dome held atmosphere. The Moonbase was a science station. Mars Base was Earth's first permanent settlement on another planet. People would be living here.

Optimus Prime looked around. The dome covered an upper concourse where the miners would come to sell their materials and buy what they needed to take out to their claims with them. By their standards, it would be a small operation for a long time, but next to him Stonecutter seemed satisfied. His people were busy rebuilding their way of life, and a useful miner was a happy miner.

Most of the base was underground, protected from the ever-present solar radiation. There were two levels of shops, laboratories, and classrooms, and two more levels of living quarters. The lowest level was a greenhouse environment that would eventually expand to produce enough oxygen and food for the human colonists.

Most of the construction had now moved to the science dome, which was being financed by a consortium of universities. Also being built here was a shipyard. The lesser gravity made construction a lot simpler.

Elita was hardlined into a console checking out the base's defenses. Not everything was ready, but they had a sensor net and point defenses, as well as armor plates that could cover the transparent panels of the dome. She nodded, everything was coming along on schedule.

She joined them watching the party. Aside from the people who had come up with them, Wheeljack and his apprentices had actually been up here for about three weeks. Those kids had undoubtedly been learning a whole new definition of the concept of hard work. They seemed to have bounced back from the awful scare they'd had in Australia, but no one thought it would be a good idea to give them too much time to sit around and worry about it.

First Aid, who had been assigned by Ratchet to run the clinic here, was talking to Kaela and Fixer. For the first time in a long while, Kaela was laughing at some story Fixer was telling. Her black suit bore both the healers' guild sigil and a human paramedic badge on the arm. Bulkier forearms and belt than the suits of the nearby humans testified to the presence of modifications, Primus knew what the Med-Sci team had been up to. He trusted that Kaela would be more careful than Que about things that might explode.

There was steady traffic through the main airlock. The area right around the base had been fairly thoroughly explored, but that didn't stop anyone from wanting to do some exploration of their own. Ironhide, Lennox and their families were all out there somewhere, mostly because they had wanted to get the kids away from the increasingly rowdy party.

Elita had persuaded Mearing and Simmons to take few days away from their relentless hunt for Hot Rod's kidnappers. That trail had gone cold. Whoever was responsible was hiding in their cave somewhere. But if they ever wanted to accomplish anything, they would have to come out of hiding sometime. When they did a lot of people would be waiting. In between following whatever leads appeared, there was no use putting their lives on hold.

Simmons was walking around easily in the low gravity. His space suit had his leg brace built in, and the new design was a lot more comfortable than the one he had been using. He and Mearing were talking about the listening post that was due to go into operation soon. Its array would provide coverage that would make the whole system much safer.

Wheeljack commed Optimus. ::Prime, the kids want to go out. Do you think that's a good idea?::

::They should be as safe here as anywhere else, Que. It would be worse to confine them.::

Que told them, "All right, but be careful. Kylie, watch your suit's indicator lights carefully. Take extra oxygen tanks."

Kylie might have got aggravated about the constant nagging, but it just felt too good that someone cared. "I will. We just want to look around. Why don't you come with?"

"I would but I have to be here to answer questions."

"Meet us later after all the VIPs have been here," Blue suggested.

"That is a good idea."

Kylie took care to let Que see her running through her EVA checklist, which the NASA adviser had made sure she knew backwards and forwards before she had been allowed to come out here. Then they waited their turn at the airlock. Stormracer was up here, on leave, not on any official capacity, and she had brought a lot of her friends up. She had been giving Corona a few tips on how to deal with the low air density and gravity. Now they were surrounded by a crowd of humans who wanted to go see Mons Olympus.

It was hard to tell who anybody was in a sea of white suits with US flag patches, but a lot of them also had Air Force insignia and unit patches. Those folks were armed and they walked around the bots with the same confidence as NEST did. Some of the suits were in college colors, university scientists who virtually ignored the bots in favor of the natural wonders around them. One team from Ohio State was already working, collecting rock samples from an area far enough outside the construction zone to be undisturbed. Their red and gray suits were actually not bad camouflage here.

Wayfarer and Mirage joined Stormracer and Corona. Corona was carrying all off-duty NEST troops, who didn't care if she did some fancy flying. She and Wayfarer got into a mock dogfight as they flew off, somewhat restricted by the fact that they had passengers aboard. Wayfarer was still learning her new form, but she didn't have to be as careful of Mirage as Corona did of her human passengers. A real fight between two seekers included a lot more than trying to score points by getting on their opponent's six and trying to get a lock-on. They would often transform and fight hand to hand in midair, dropping thousands of feet before reassuming their winged forms and pulling out. Corona and Wayfarer did little of that beyond trying to get close enough for a quick smack. Both of them were sparkbonded. They were not about to take chances. This was just seekers' idea of fun.

Stormracer flew more or less straight and level, since some of her passengers were just civilians and couldn't pull a lot of g's without people getting hurt. But seeing what the two smaller fliers could do, the onlookers could only imagine if her duties involved something other than keeping her passengers safe.

It wasn't more than a couple minutes before the three fliers disappeared over the horizon.

Once the noise they made fell silent, it once again became obvious that this was a non-organic world. The only sounds were those made by the few people left outside, and the ever-present wind. It constantly blew dust and sand around and sang in the guy-wires of the antennas atop the dome. As far as they could see, with the signs of colonization at their backs, there was nothing but stone and sky.

A graded road gave way to a wide red plain about five miles from the dome. They took off racing into the harsh, cold wind. Wide open spaces like this were nonexistent on Diego Garcia, so they rarely got the chance to indulge their need to push themselves to their limits. The last time had been running for their lives in Australia, and they were agreed that didn't count. After the hard work they'd put in the last few weeks it felt good to cut loose.

A crater attracted their attention. Mars had some bad sandstorms on occasion. The wind had piled sand all up around the sides of it. Kylie got out and her brothers transformed.

Kylie knelt and scooped up a handful of the red sand, let it sift between her fingers. "I still can't believe I'm on another planet."

Bluestreak said, "You can see Earth from here at night."

"Really? When it gets dark you'll have to show me."

"Que will reboot if we're out here that long," Bluestreak said.

"Yeah," Hot Rod said. "I think what happened in Australia scared him worse than it did us. At least we got over it. I don't think he ever will."

Kylie said, "I know. I asked Kaela about it. She just said wait'll I have kids, then I'll understand."

A few miles away, Ironhide's family and the Lennoxes were exploring in the range of mountains that bordered the plain. The adults were sitting around in the shelter of a rock overhang while the kids were exploring strange rock formations carved out by millennia of windblown sand. Sara said, "Fifteen years later and a gazillion miles away, and here I am sitting around in another fraggin' desert cleaning sand out of my rifle."

Lennox laughed. "You know what this place hasn't got?"

"Insurgents?"

"Camel spiders."

She snorted. Like everyone else who had served over there, she had her share of "fond" memories of camel spiders. "Epps put one in my rack one time. I waited till he went to sleep and put it in his helmet. He screamed like a girl when he went to put the helmet on the next morning. Dropped the damn thing right on top of his head." She finished working on the rifle.

Chromia asked, "Aren't those things supposed to be poisonous?"

"They really aren't, not like a black widow or something. But there was a story going around that they were. Lots of people believed it so they were scared of them."

"Didn't know the Marines had female snipers," Ironhide commented.

"They didn't back then. I was an elint specialist. But every Marine is a rifleman."

"She could make shots nobody else could make," Lennox said. "A lot of the time, it was the rest of the team's job to get her into position. She usually went out with a Marine unit, but sometimes when my unit was the most familiar with the area where an enemy asset was located, she got seconded to us. The government never acknowledged that was what she was doing, officially it was always something in her specialty. Now, there are female snipers."

After Hot Rod had been kidnapped, Will had issued orders that his people were always to be armed whenever they were off base, especially when they were with any of the bots.

If anyone ever threatened Starry or Firecracker, Will was determined Hide wouldn't have to worry about disobeying orders to protect his kids. Will intended to neutralize the threat before it ever became an issue. Sara was very capable of doing the same thing from a mile away.

They should be perfectly safe on a whole other planet. Will would make sure that was true.

When it got late and all the VIPs had gone to the party, Bluestreak and Hot Rod talked Wheeljack into joining them. The four of them watched the stars come out, and Wheeljack helped Kylie find Earth. When she switched to her last tank of air, they started back.

Wheeljack's alt was a dark blue Mercedes Benz E550. Kylie rode with him, because Hot Rod and Blue were rough-housing and carrying her would have handicapped one of them. "How did it go with the VIPs?"

"Fairly well. They were mostly more interested in the party or getting out here."

"For most of us humans, this is huge. Getting to come out here. Most of us never have the chance."

"That will change. Colonies will develop throughout your star system. Industries that harm the environment tend to move off inhabitable worlds."

"Can't happen too soon." Kylie laughed at the boys as they lost their footing in a scuffle and rolled down a hill. "It's good to see them having some fun."

Wheeljack agreed. "All of you need that. I am concerned that the coming troubles will make such days few and far between again."

Kylie said, "Try not to worry so much, Que. We did a pretty good job looking out for each other, didn't we?"

"That you did."

"Whatever happens, we'll keep doing that."

"I know. But I should be doing more than just watch you walk into situations where you have to."

"You are. You made us a family, and you gave us a home to come back to. Nobody understands that better than somebody who's never really had either of those things before. We'll always do our best to come home. There's nothing more I can promise."

"I know," he said.

The four of them were just rolling up to the dome when there was a sudden kerfuffle over by the seekers. The people who had been lounging around in and on the fliers ran clear. They leapt straight to flight and headed for the black, dropping into formation as they flew.

"Wheeljack, what's happening?"

"I don't know, I think there's something on the sensor net. We're to report to Ironhide."

The humans were breaking into two groups, non-combatants headed in and fighters coming out. Kylie went to Lennox and got issued a new air tank and a rifle. They were taking defensive positions around the dome, she found herself with Sara Lennox and a couple of airmen named Collins and Turner. Sara advised them, "Sit still, keep quiet and make your air last. We might be here a while."

That wasn't easy, when Kylie didn't know what was happening. She was tired and hungry and the cold seeped through her suit after she reduced the heat to minimum to save her suit's charge. She didn't know where the others had gone after she saw them talking to Ironhide.

A couple hours later, all of a sudden the seekers came back. Wayfarer and Corona were both scuffed up, and First Aid came up to Corona to deal with a minor energon leak. A few minutes later, the Primes gathered the rest of the bots in front of the dome. Kylie found herself giving thanks that Wheeljack, Bluestreak and Hot Rod were among those who were assigned to guard the dome, and then felt like an ungrateful heel for that when the others were going out into God only knew what. The rest transformed and rolled out, hidden by the darkness and the cloud of dust they kicked up.

Kylie wanted to be a little kid and ask Sara what was happening. Instead, she checked her suit's indicator lights and waited, alone in the cold black night even if Sara was a foot away from her.

Mirage and Wayfarer skimmed over the dark hills. The scout had designed a new transformation, not quite an alt, that let him fit into her alt's cockpit, once she folded the seat away and made just a bit more space. ::I know he went down over here somewhere. We might be looking for wreckage, not a corpse. Stormracer wasn't playing games.::

::Damn the concentration of iron in the soil. It's playing Pit with my sensors.::

::Wait, I saw something. An IR signature.:: She came about and transformed in midair over a small flat area. Both of them landed lightly on their peds and deployed their guns.

::There he is,:: Mirage said, a brief flash of his work light illuminating the remains of the unfortunate seeker who had the misfortune of meeting Stormracer under hostile circumstances.

They looked down at him. ::Mirage, do you recognize him?::

::Not offhand.:: He sent their location to Prime, then knelt for a closer examination.

A second later an explosion knocked them flying. He hit the ground hard, then everything went black.

First Aid, Kaela and Wheeljack ran to Stormracer and the seeker took off at full blast from a standing start as soon as she had them aboard. Kylie clenched her fist, desperate to know what happened.

Elita's optics brightened as she turned back to Optimus. ::They'll be all right. They ran afoul of some kind of IED on a corpse, but apparently it misfired. Instead of blowing them to pieces it just knocked them around pretty thoroughly.::

::That explains what the third one did after he lost our seekers.:: He reached out with all his senses. One seeker was no match for the two of them, but if he attacked from ambush it could be another story.

Elita said, ::There's the last one, right where Corona said he'd be.::

The two Primes approached the downed drone carefully. It was quite dead, but after the exploding one had nearly killed Mirage and Wayfarer, they were cautious of another booby-trapped corpse. Elita sent a small remote up to it and carefully defused the device.

Once it was safe to approach, Optimus knelt to get a closer look at a shield on the drone's nose. ::That's no Decepticon shield. I'd almost say it was a Prime sigil, but I don't recognize it.::

Stones crunched under Elita's peds, felt rather than heard. She told him, ::Darkmoon and his followers wore that sigil.::

::Primus! That planet-sized sensor shadow that gave Wayfarer nightmares. Could it actually have been Unicron?::

::I thought it was a myth. I thought Darkmoon was a charismatic glitch. Optimus, how can we fight a god?:: She ruthlessly squashed a rising panic that did no one any good.

He stood and answered grimly. ::There's no escape for the humans. We'll have to find a way to fight and win, or watch another world die.::

Elita nodded. ::Yes, Prime. We're through with running.:: The Autobots would make their stand here in this system, and if they fell, it would be with all the honor and glory of a proud warrior race, in defense of the innocent.

(A.N.: The next chapter will be up in a few days. I've run out of finished chapters again. /A.N.)