(Chapter 27—Tears of the Forest Part 1)
(Disclaimer in Chapter 1)
A.N.: This chapter begins with a flashback to 2011, concurrent with Chapter 1. Thanks to my good friend Tahra for help with the Portuguese. And thanks to wacko12 for suggesting this chapter's new mech, and helping with the plot. /A.N.
(2011-Amazon Rain Forest—flashback)
A little while ago, the raucous calls of howler monkeys had subsided into silence. The small camp on the banks of a stream was quiet. Dr. Erik Franklin was making his usual evening journal entry. His girlfriend Dawn Brightwater folded the solar collectors into their cases, since they would be breaking camp and traveling deeper into the forest tomorrow. Their associate Rafael "Fael" dos Reis was looking through the shots he had taken that day.
Dawn finished what she was doing and excused herself to the bushes.
A few minutes later the silence was shattered by something huge roaring overhead, trailing sparks. Dawn ran back to camp, still zipping her jeans, while Fael and Erik tumbled out of the tent. They both had rifles, you never knew when you would run into trouble out here.
"What the hell was that?"
Fael said, "It sounded like an airplane or something."
"It was a meteor. It went in over there somewhere."
"No way," Erik said. "If it'd been a meteor that big, we'd be at the bottom of a crater right now."
"Whatever it was, somebody could be hurt," Dawn said.
Fael told her, "Anybody on that needs a priest, not a doctor."
Erik and Fael put their boots back on and they all grabbed flashlights. The wildlife scared by the crash had started to quiet down again when Dawn saw a downed branch. A few more gave them a trajectory.
They climbed over a huge downed tree and found a deep ditch plowed between two more.
Erik asked nobody in particular, "What the fuck?"
Fael jumped down into the ditch, since it looked like the easiest going through the tangle of debris. Erik and Dawn followed. They ran another hundred meters, then stopped dead in their tracks.
Lying in front of them was a robot three times as tall as they were. Blue liquid oozed between armor plates.
Fael said in an awed voice, "Meu Deus!"
Then the robot turned its head and looked at them with glowing blue eyes.
The three humans scrambled back out of his way. For a full couple of minutes they all just stared at each other with what-the-hell-are-you looks. Eventually Dawn took a hesitant half-step closer and did the me-Tarzan-you-Jane thing. "Dawn, Erik, Rafael," she said, pointing at each of them in turn. Then she pointed at their new acquaintance.
He made a sound like they'd accidentally called a fax machine.
Erik said, "That...makes perfect sense, actually. But there's no way we'll be able to pronounce it. What are we supposed to do now?"
Rafael said, "Get the hell out of here before the government shows up."
Dawn said, "But we can't just leave him."
"You don't even know it's a him and even if it is, what are you going to do? Stick him in your backpack?" Fael replied.
Erik said, "Let's just calm down and think this through. It'll take anybody a long time to get here and they won't necessarily be able to find him. No chance you speak English? Voce fala portugues? Habla usted espanol?"
After a moment the robot had what Dawn would swear was a light-bulb-over-the-head moment. "English? Is this your language?"
"Right! Yes!"
"Where am I?"
"You're in western Brazil. In the Amazon basin. Um, can you get the Internet?"
"Your communications network has been malfunctioning for the last forty-eight hours, then about sixteen hours ago all your comms stopped functioning correctly. I need to find Optimus Prime and report for duty. It is obvious that our war has come here." He obviously didn't speak the language yet, and was working with some kind of translation program, but it worked well enough to break the language barrier.
"Who? What war?"
"It is...complicated. If you do not know of Optimus Prime...please tell me that you do not know who Megatron is."
"Um-no?"
"Thank Primus for that, in any case. For a moment, I thought the Decepticons might have won."
"Look, we don't know about any war, any Optimus Prime, or any Megatron. Or Decepticons. What we do know is that the government here is going to be really interested in you. All the governments are going to be interested in you. We need to get out of here before they get here."
"It is doubtful that my approach was tracked. Standard Decepticon tactics are to disrupt comms as much as they can before a battle. Your network is vulnerable to disruption, though its diffuse nature will make it difficult for them to keep it down for any length of time."
"The only war we know of is on another continent called Asia, in some countries called Iraq and Afghanistan. Does that make any sense?"
He searched his memory of the transmissions that he had monitored on his way in. There were huge gaps in intel, and some of the records that he had downloaded flatly contradicted one another. "There are indications that something may have been happening in a place called Chicago before comms went down. Is that in one of those places?"
"Oh, hell no," Erik said. "Chicago is in North America, in a country called the United States. We're in South America. Asia is on the other side of the world."
Dawn asked, "Can you say your name in English? Because, I'm sorry, but I don't think we can say it in your language."
"I don't know exactly, but I think you could translate it Hound." Actually, in one memorable instance the Decepticons had called him "that damn little turbo-fox" and it had stuck, but he decided Hound was close enough.
Worries about whether or not there was a war on got sidetracked when Hound tried to get up and realized he couldn't. One of his leg plates was bent and obstructing his knee joint, near where the blue stuff was leaking. He said something in his language that needed absolutely no translation.
Erik hurried to help, but yelped when he got his hand in the blue stuff. His fingers were quickly turning bright red. "That's hot, people."
"What can we do?" Dawn asked.
"Climb up top and keep watch, let me know if trouble's coming," Hound said. As long as he'd been fighting, he knew how to take care of minor injuries. If it was something major out here far away from any help, he was in trouble.
The main problem was a loose energon line, he found a fastener in his subspace and tightened it up. His self-repair would seal it quickly. He carefully pounded the bent armor plate back to shape and replaced it. That would have to do.
After that, he got up and took a few careful steps. His leg held his weight well enough. He must have just slammed into something on the way down and loosened that connection. Nothing else seemed damaged.
Finding an alt would have been nice, but he didn't think there was anything suitable likely to be nearby. Bipedal form was more effective for getting around in this stuff anyway.
He needed a few hours to sort through the information he had and classify some of the things around him.
Erik said, "Let's see if we can get back to camp."
"What are you doing out here?"
"We're environmentalists. We're making a documentary on the logging industry and big agriculture, and its affect on some of the local people," Erik explained. "I used to be a professor at a university in the States. A lot of the local tribes have lived here for centuries. But the people who make up the majority here live a different way. They want to come in and cut down the rain forest and plant crops or raise cattle. That's the really short version of the conflict. The bottom line is, we're destroying the forest before we understand it, and this may be something that our planet needs to survive."
"Why are you doing that?"
"That's the $64,000 question," Erik said. As they walked back to camp, he gave a better, longer explanation of the troubles. "It all comes down to this: when a minority has something that a majority wants, the rights of the minority tend to get trampled. I guess that's just the sad thing about human nature, it's the way we are."
"You're not doing it."
"No, we're not, personally, but we're just three people. The best we can do is try to get the truth out and hope more people listen."
Hound said, "My people's war started over the same thing. We had the All-Spark and the Decepticons wanted it. We had sources of energon and the Decepticons wanted that too. By the time we left, my planet was in ruins and most of my people were dead. Nobody ever wins a war."
"Amen," Erik said. "Sometimes people get stuck fighting one whether they want to or not, though. That's the situation a lot of these tribes are in. Not that they really have any chance to win, when the money starts rolling in."
"There could be cures for diseases here that are being bulldozed before anyone ever gets a chance to find them," Fael said.
Hound moved a big tree limb out of the way so the humans could get by. Soon they got back to their camp.
There was really nothing more to be done tonight. Hound settled down to try to get some recharge when the humans went in their tent for the night.
To his surprise, the peaceful sounds of the night were soothing. The canopy went up fifty meters or more, several layers, each with its own constellations of small organic beings. A rich collection of scents came up from the forest floor and from the botanical organics growing all around him.
Something nearly the size of one of the organics but of another species paused on a branch, looking down at them but wary to approach any closer. It was yellow with dark spots, and its eyes glowed gold in the darkness. For a moment they just observed each other then the organic went on about its business. He searched his collection of images and found something similar known as a jaguar. Hound fell into recharge listening to the wind in the trees.
The next morning the humans packed up their camp, careful not to leave a scrap of anything lying around that wouldn't return quickly to the earth. Whenever they stopped, he put out his energon cube with the solar collectors that they used to power their small electronic devices. They had some food with them, but for the most part, Rafael knew where to find things to eat. They lived off what the rain forest provided whenever they could. They walked for days without seeing any more people, humans or Cybertronian either one.
A few days later they had a little excitement when they saw an organism that sent the three humans scampering. Something six meters long slithered across the path, and instantly he had Dawn and Erik climbing up to his shoulders as fast as they could move. Fael didn't panic, but he had his rifle out, and he put Hound between him and the creature.
"What's that thing?"
"Anaconda," Fael explained. "They live on wild pigs and so forth, but it's possible they could attack a human. We give them plenty of room."
The huge snake seemed likely to slither up and investigate. Hound kicked some leaves at it to discourage that, nearly dislodging Erik, much to Fael and Dawn's amusement.
Communications started coming back up. Hound produced a hologram of the CNN feed so his new friends could see what was happening in Chicago. They all stared in horror at the devastation, but at least the long terrible war was over.
"We've been called to join Prime," he said.
"Is that what you need to do?"
"I suppose so," he said. "I don't know what we'll be doing now that the war's over. I don't think I know how to do anything except be a soldier."
Erik said, "Well, you can hang out with us as long as you want to, until you figure out what you want to do next."
"Someone's coming."
Erik said, "Get off the road, quick."
They hurried back into the jungle. Soon a local vehicle full of armed men drove by. Hound scanned it.
"Who are those people?"
"Company thugs," Erik spat.
Fael said, "It's better they don't know we're here. They wouldn't like it much if they knew we were going to be filming in the area."
"Give me a little room." Hound transformed into his new alt, a jeep, much to the delight of his friends.
Erik pointed at some company decals. "You want to not have those. They'll think we stole you," he said.
Hound deleted them. They walked around him, carefully looking for any other markings that would attract the wrong kind of attention. Then the three of them piled in, and Hound hid their cameras in his subspace. Now they were just two American tourists and their local guide, nothing for the thugs to care about.
It wasn't that Hound made a conscious decision to stay with the three of them forever. But day after day went by, and he had less and less reason to move on. The three of them made their documentary, and it did some good. They made several trips into the rain forest to follow up. Once Hound had to stay in his alt form for three solid weeks while they took some American movie stars to see what was going on. That led to more publicity and more help for the locals.
Erik, Fael and Dawn had started out to make a documentary, not join a movement. But again, day after day passed, and the fight became their own. Before they knew it, five years were gone. Dawn got pregnant. She and Erik got married, and they had a little girl that they named Joana. Fael had a long string of girlfriends, never serious about any of them. Erik became well-known in environmental circles, due to the success of their documentary and the book he wrote, and by early 2020 he was being asked to lecture at universities all over the world. Though he hated to be separated from his wife and child, he went, because the cause was so important. They ended up with a home and an office in Rio to take care of the arrangements. They also ended up with something they thought they would never have, enough money to get by on.
In March, Fael and Erik were walking out to join Dawn and Joana, who were already sitting in Hound's alt form. They were making plans for a trip to London.
Suddenly Fael saw a flash of something and shoved Erik. There was a crack, and Rafael went down on the sidewalk. People were screaming and there was blood everywhere.
There was a hospital just blocks away, but Fael never got there. He died in the arms of his family.
The police took their statements and supposedly investigated, but they all knew the truth. Nothing would be done. The killer would never be found-unless they found him themselves.
Hound and Erik wanted Dawn to take Joana to her family back in the US, but Dawn refused. These people had money, they could send kidnappers there. They were safest if they stayed together, and the best defense was a good offense. The day after the funeral, they headed upriver.
*-T-F-Rising*
(Diego Garcia)
Charlotte Mearing smiled quietly as she looked over the files on the datapad in front of her. She had been unable to locate any solid evidence on the people responsible for Hot Rod's kidnapping, but what she had located was money disappearing into a black hole in Cheyenne, Wyoming. She might not be able to touch the person who ordered the kidnapping yet, but someone was getting a lot of financial backing from some very unsavory people. She could make life very unpleasant for those people.
Cutting supply lines was a time-honored objective of any war. Pretty soon her real target would figure out that she was going to keep sticking him in the pocketbook until she bled him dry. Then he'd come out and fight.
At the top of her list was a man named Raoul Braxton. The Brazilian-American son of an American industrialist and a Brazilian heiress, he had spent his time between both wealthy families. When the political climate had turned distinctly chilly for his kind, he'd moved his operation to his mother's home country. His legal operations included several high-profile construction projects, including a few that were drawing the high-profile interest of the environmental community. Mearing had discovered a lot of rumors that he was involved in a lot of less than legal dealings involving drugs and human trafficking.
He was about to find out that he had given money to the wrong person.
She went out to Ops and found Optimus and Elita together. The subject was what it had been for a couple of months, whether something in the news was a sign of the presence of the seeker who had escaped a few months ago on Mars. Elita thought a sighting in Japan might be. Optimus rather had the feeling that the seeker had escaped with his report. Mearing figured it was trouble either way.
When the two Primes acknowledged her, she explained what she had found. "They're being very careful with their finances. I don't know where this money is going, but I know where it's coming from. If we can shut down their funding sources, we may make them angry enough to take direct action."
Elita nodded. "A good strategy. You have an initial target?"
"I do." She plugged in her datapad and put Braxton's picture up. "He's the sort of person we'd be doing the world a favor if we can prove him guilty of a crime, but I think he's got mixed up in this through his father's family. They've been associated with suspected criminal elements of the extreme right wing for twenty or thirty years now, but they've never been caught at anything illegal themselves. The other people who have been pouring money into this either move in those circles or are closely associated with people who do."
Elita said, "Most of the people on that list were involved with Prentiss' political campaign, or at least major contributors," she said.
"Yes."
Optimus had hoped there would be no more trouble from that human after his Presidential ambitions had been thwarted. "Prentiss wanted to use us to fight his wars in the Mideast, Elita. I wonder if he could be coming at the same thing from a different angle? Possibly some mad attempt to force our cooperation by holding our young people hostage?"
"A private citizen can't conduct a war, and that's all Prentiss will ever be. He's finished politically," Mearing said.
Elita commented, "That was once said of Megatron, before he assassinated most of the Council and started a civil war."
Mearing said, "I won't say it's impossible that their proposed endgame is similar, but they aren't at that point yet. With a little luck they never will be."
Optimus had been scanning the information on the datapad. He said, "This individual has been associated with a group of men who were imprisoned for collecting young girls from the streets of Rio de Janeiro and selling them as slaves in other countries. No one was ever able to prove that Braxton was involved. I was not aware that slavery was a problem on this planet."
Mearing said, "Slavery has always been a problem in human cultures. It became an issue a couple hundred years ago when most countries began to outlaw it. Now it exists in the shadows in every nation of the world. If we can prove that Braxton was involved with this, or any of the other things he's been accused of doing, his own nation will have to act."
"Whether he was involved with Hot Rod's kidnapping or not, that's worth doing," Optimus said. "Slavery is an abomination. If we can act to stop it, we must."
Elita said, "I suggest that Black Team should work together with human agents who can move among these people to get the information that we need."
Mearing said, "I've done a lot of work in Central and South America. I think my Ops team will be very well able to handle this."
"You, the Pretender Sisters, and Li?"
"Yes."
"You need to travel separately. It shouldn't be a problem to manufacture something for Elita to be investigating in Brazil," Optimus said.
"There's always the Vanishing Meteor," Simmons suggested.
"The what?" Elita asked.
"It happened right after the Battle of Chicago. An observatory in Peru got footage of a meteor crashing into the rain forest. Nobody else confirmed it, and nobody has ever found anything in nine years. Believe me, I've kept an eye out. But it crops up on the internet every so often. What leads me to think there may be something to it is, there was no seismic event connected with it. If this had really been a meteor, there would have been. It's a big rain forest. There could be something down there we'd be interested in finding. The important thing right now is, the impact site was in the same general area as Braxton's holdings. Nobody would be surprised if we sent a team to check it out."
Elita said, "That would be perfect. Is there an airstrip where we can put down?"
Mearing said, "You'll have your pick of airstrips. Most travel in that part of the world is by air and water."
Optimus said, "Elita, if these people are connected with the kidnapping, they may see you separated from the rest of us in a very isolated area. It might tempt them to take action."
"Well, that would be an extra cube of energon, wouldn't it?" She said. "I doubt it would be that simple."
Mearing said, "You'd be surprised what's dropped right into my lap over the years, but I tend to agree with you. I don't think they'll take the risk right away. It's worth hoping, though. Prime, there is one thing. I won't take Masque and Mirror unless they are allowed to use necessary force to defend themselves. They're only marginally more resistant to small arms fire than Li and I are."
He thought about it. "Agreed, but they are only to use lethal force if it's absolutely necessary. In a situation like that, it would be better if you or Li took the shot. For that matter, better if Li did. We don't want to involve the US State Department in a shootout with Brazilian criminals if we can help it."
Mearing smiled angelically. "I'm certain that's precisely how it would happen, Prime." When they got to Brazil, she had the contacts to acquire ordinary weapons for them all. No one who found a thug with a 9-mil slug in him would suspect he had been killed by Cybertronians. Her idea of a perfect operation did not involve gun-play, but sometimes it was unavoidable. And that particular 9-mil could be found in anyone's possession.
(Continued in Part 2)