Enforcer headquarters stood like a white block beside the Senate compound. It was one of the few buildings that continued to use its lower levels in a bid to save costs and ease the tax burden on Iacon, and the highest levels shone, gleaming and pure, added as the city grew around them. Financial transparency, low operating costs, and mechs sparked to the job—that was how the city maintained their incorruptible police force.

"No one adheres more to the law than those who enforce it"—the motto on the running announcement banner on the outer wall, emblazoned around the crest of every special investigar, and underlining every personal card given out when an Enforcer identified themself.

Prowl's office lay on the thirty-second level, below the pristine offices for press conferences and official visits, below the rows of work stations for the city investigators, below the reinforced bunkers for the highest ranked commanders, below the armory and washracks…down where the white walls turned gray and peeled, where doors no longer slid open easily but dragged along their tracks, where cracked tiles cracked lay broken on the floor, and where Prowl, in a cramped office for unwelcome guests, began his search.

He did not dare plug into the workstation. The screen glitched with scan lines that belied the machine's old age. Possibly there were actual cathode ray tubes and analog circuitry—all of the plug-ins required adapters to modern adapters to his current ports. Just looking at the ancient port made his optic twitch.

So he typed the information in by hand, waiting through load times, summoning up citizen databases and scouring lists of names. When mechs could live for vorn upon vorn, what other races often called eons, searching lists of civilians could take ages in itself.

Which gave him time to consider the puzzle in his other hand.

Jazz should have been easy to understand. A little entertainer who had clawed his way up to owning his own club, a magnetic personality, selling energon on the side and scrounging up enough credits to repair his optics. Simple.

Jazz made friends so easily. His staff spoke freely with him, helms up instead of submissively cowed. Lowly waiters, bartenders, dancers, looking customers and Enforcers and their employer in the optic without fear of Jazz letting them go or cutting their hours. The femmes didn't seem to fear Jazz's wandering hands under a hood, squeezing a soft cable.

Jazz cleaned his own floor. Stacked his own chairs. Polished the cubes, brought the energon, and sang in front of a weary, difficult crowd.

Jazz sang…

Prowl had the radio on. There were beats, strings, repetitive pretty voices. If sound could have a texture, this was pure plasticene, smooth and easy and forgettable. Background noise. It eased his cognitive stress and gave his spark a rhythm to work to.

Jazz sang something else. Jazz demanded attention.

Jazz demanded his attention.

Prowl frowned.

Which was odd, because nothing about Jazz screamed for attention.

True, Jazz was shiny. Oh, he was shiny. Prowl hadn't seen a mech so shiny in—he pressed his hand against his face and took a deep vent. Well. Yes, Jazz had a gleaming white chassis and a couple vertical stripes for flair, but the chassis revealed tantalizes glimpses of the dark steel underneath, the black frame and smooth cables…

Prowl clenched his hands into fists and sat straight, setting his hands straight on his workstation. Ran a coolant cycle.

Yes, Jazz was shiny, but he was a civilian with a civilian's basic frame. Certainly he had curves and clean edges, but so did many, many mechs. Jazz's frame wasn't nearly as fancy as the low end of the types rolling in the business district. A singer who'd made good, that's all.

And made good in the darker end of the city, too. The streetlights on Jazz's side of Iacon were eaten away by acid rain, rarely repaired. The few businesses nearby were all quick repair, coolant and oil change joints, a couple places to grab a stim pack or patch a tire. Only the Neon Eclipse stood out on the far end of the lane, and even that was low-key. When the lights came on, it was quiet, tired, and a little lonely with Jazz doing light maintenance. Even when the club was in full swing, the sign burned bright, but there were no marquee, no glitter, no flash.

Prowl chuckled once. It was right in the damn name. Neon Eclipse. Neon lights hidden and dark. No wonder the whole club had black walls with neon trim.

Bare walls. There were no awards, no posters, no reviews. Which was strange.

Out of curiosity, wanting to know more about his little informant, he'd researched the club, expecting to find only the business license, the energon license, an employee list and any incidents.

Instead he'd found awards. Blaster appeared as one of the leading DJs of a thriving underground scene that Prowl had never heard of— the Broadblast Community Seal of Recognition, the Twincast for Excellence, and numerous #1 shift playlists. When Prowl looked up the awards, he found several other DJs playing clubs across Cybertron that were similarly recognized—Cosmos, Soundwave, Siren—but they put on their shows in huge multi-level discotheques or deep sublevel structures. Only Blaster played in such a small venue.

But there were no awards on the walls, no old posters or scan-glyphs for playlists, not even Blaster's name on a flashing marquee. The other DJs were hyped. Blaster was big among the music crowd…but only an indistinct shape above the crowd in his club.

Then there was Wheeljack—a mere barkeep who mixed drinks and kept the coolant flowing. Except Wheeljack held the patents on the refrigeration system for the liquids on tap. The coolant frosted at the edges of the glowing cube, a show in itself. And oil flowed along warmed glass tubes that glimmered like dark rainbows, shots into small tumblers with a flourish.

And the energon…

Prowl wasn't a health inspector. He didn't know the regulations regarding energon storage and purity. But the energon shimmered differently when Wheeljack poured. Prowl had seen him add in tablets that fizzed and vanished in an instant, and the prices for fancy flavors went up several credits with each tablet.

Wheeljack was a special spark, a chemical engineer. Why was he working a club? Prowl found records on Wheeljack going back to to his initial sparking, made by the Polyhex technical institute, but there was a long gap of a vorn, and then he was here in Jazz's employ.

Of the two femmes, there was even less information. Sparked in Iacon, they were classified as simple entertainers, recreational pleasure bots…but without any criminal charges, so they'd never crossed cables for credits, awaiting the senate's decision on if their function was valid. Or they'd never been caught.

And of Jazz's security—

—but the search for Langston was complete.

Prowl would look up Sunstreak and Sideswipe, Dead End and Beachcomber later. None of them were warbuilds. For now, that was all that mattered.

And he saw that Jazz had gotten the name wrong, just a little. Langton, without the 's'. But easily explained by Jazz being overenergized, lost in a blur among an audience that wanted the tactile play that an entertainer was built to provide.

Langton
Viridis Frame Class
Political Adjutant
Sparked to Tower Semper
Lobbies for Kaon Investments
Loading data…

Not much, but enough to go on.

There was a knock on his door. Surprising, since the rest of the force had ignored him since his arrival. Another Enforcer leaned in.

"Hi there. Special Investigator Prowl?"

"Agent…?" Prowl started, not recognizing the copper and gold chassis.

"Chromedome." He pushed the sliding door to one side, kicking it the last meter. "Sorry, I tried comm'ing you, but the signals bounce around down here. I just got attached as your partner."

Prowl frowned. "I was unaware of being assigned a partner. Who ordered this?"

Chromedome narrowed his optics. "Nice to meet you, too. Looking forward to the chance to work together. Hope I can take some of the processing load off your hands."

Prowl sat straight, slightly flaring his doorwings…and then the message popped up in his inbox.

Urgent: Chromedome reassignment—Prowl's acting partner for duration of this case. Attached, to function as autonomous peripheral. Travel expected. Addendum: authorization to investigate records pertaining to assassination of Senator Decimus and on-scene access.

Prowl froze, staring at nothing, focused on the information suddenly downloading through the ancient workstation.

Photographs. Video. Witness testimony. The pieces of Decimus strewn between the grayed out frames of the mob, mechs shot down by the security arriving too late. The dead mechs were missing pieces of themselves—armor, limbs, wheels, so poor they had to sell parts of themselves for energon. Civilians already dying from lack of fuel.

Prowl refocused.

Most of them were civilians.

A handful of them were small warbuilds, oversized tanks and jeeps.

And each warbuild had a purple mark on their shoulder or hood, plain but visible.

His investigation into that sigil had just turned red hot.

Jazz's ride to visit Ratchet should have taken less than two breem. Instead he was stuck in traffic for over three joor, waiting for the highway to clear. All the lanes were backed up bumper to bumper until—although it was illegal, most mechs transformed and sat on the pavement, starting card games or playing their radios so loud that the music rattled the denta of everyone around them. Highway Enforcer units formed a line across the highway to keep mechs away from the "disturbance ahead," shuffling from one pede to the other out of boredom, rifles in hand but held low to the ground.

By the second joor, tempers started to fray. The highway stood too tall to safely jump off the edge. And the presence of traffic patrol meant that while being in rootmode was tolerated, trying to bypass the Enforcer blockade was not. That meant hundreds, thousands, of mechs stuck in place as they started to overheat and grow stircrazy.

Grounders were simply not built for idling.

The patrol no longer looked bored. Now they stood facing the crowd, edging closer to each other, barrels up as the mood began to turn. They ignored the insults grumbled their way and focused their dwindling authority at the larger trucks trying to edge ahead.

Jazz sort of understood. If all the mechs suddenly started rolling in one direction, the smaller mechs would be crushed under the largest. Whatever was in the way would be stomped flat. But the Enforcers were spread so thin that their guns might make no difference in a riot, and a plasma bullet could trigger violence just as quickly as a fight.

So when mechs started yelling, posturing, standing hood to hood and insulting each other's paint jobs, Jazz slowly got to his pedes, glancing around the vast expanse of mechs around him.

There. A green and gold little femme. A black and yellow motorcycle with his wheels flared on his shoulders. Small, light, flexible—entertainers.

He didn't know their personal frequencies, but he could target his radio directly at them, giving them his comm line in a burst.

Sorry to startle ya, he said. But this is looking more'n a bit dangerous for us little bots. You willing to put on a show?

If you think it'll work, she said, looking not at him but at the two semi trucks arguing just one lane over. I was about to take my chances getting past the enforcers.

I can get their attention, Jazz said. Gonna need some help keeping it. My vocals're only good for small crowds.

Then I'll see what I can do, the other mech said, clambering onto dusty pedes. Name's Roadstorm. Just give me a beat. I got the vocals.

I can boost, she said. And dance. I'm Greenlight, by the by. And you?

Me?

He opened up his sonic array and loaded one of the council approved rhythms, loud enough that it carried across all fifty lanes of traffic. The sparks that followed sent ripples of light over the shiniest mechs, reflecting gold and white like a disco ball in all directions.

I'm Jazz.

The vocals started from his right. There were several common songs that Roadstorm could have chosen, and he selected one made more of tonal howls, accentuating the beat and hitting the consonants where Greenlight turned and arched.

The semi trucks threatening to come to blows looked down at the shiny little femme twirling so that her frame caught the light. The patrol paused, surprised at the sudden concert, watching the music's effect on mechs threatening to fight.

And then the music began to pour out of another mech half a mile up, with a handful of other small bots standing and dancing, interspersed along the highway. The signal boosted, the music carried with no lag, and Roadstorm's singing echoed with back up vocals.

The mood on the highway palpably lifted. The posturing trucks sat back, watching the show, encouraging Greenlight in a few raunchier moves. Two fire suppression vehicles released a spray of foam that rippled down the highway, so cold that the air frosted around their nozzles. A wave of relief followed as the temperature fell.

Jazz recorded video, intending to send it to Blaster later as a background for his stage shows. He took the highest quality copy of everything—the dancing, the song, the lights, the foam kicked up in wide sprays as even the Enforcers started to relax, nodding their helms in time.

They kept it up for another joor before the jets roared overhead.

The music cut off.

Every mech dropped low to the pavement, tensing as the powerful engines rumbled through their frames. Three jets screamed just meters above the road, hitting a concussive afterburner that shook the highway.

Warbuilds. That could only mean that whatever was up ahead was something the city council couldn't stop on their own. But there'd been nothing on the radio, nothing on the news. There was no time to panic, nowhere to run. Jets meant huge caliber bullets and bombs and hands that could crumple a civilian's frame—

But the jets didn't come back.

Something rumbled in the distance, like rolling thunder.

Then nothing.

After long moments, the civilians slowly relaxed, looking around, asking if anyone knew what was happening. They were gratified to see the patrol bots likewise on the ground, one clutching his helm, curled up against the guardrail, another calling audibly for more information, his voice shaking deep in his vocalizer.

Half a joor later, the sirens on the highway flashed the alarm that traffic would soon be permitted to flow again. In silence, the cars and trucks formed up into lanes and slowly began to roll forward. In a breem, Jazz found himself passing through what would later be called the Iacon Highway Incident.

At such a slow speed, even through the thick smoke choking his filters, the carnage was obvious.

Ashes covered the pavement, still hot and smoldering. Chunks of the street were gouged out, pitted with bullet holes, scorched and cracked. Several grayed out frames lay on the shoulder, pushed into a jumble with broken hoods, ripped cables, sheets of steel so warped that he couldn't tell what they'd used to be.

There had been a protest. A riot. They'd probably tried to block the highway and refused to move.

Scraps of rivets, screws, and metal shavings lay on the road. He rolled over a sign that read Fuel for All Functions. There was a hand, cables sheared at the wrist, still holding the sign.

Jazz had the terrible idea that if his tires blew here, they'd sweep him over to the side. He shut his optics and kept straight.

—he turned up the volume in his helm so he didn't hear the screams—

And the highway, just like the vast deserts outside of Iacon, was silent save for the wind blowing the smoke up into the high buildings of the business district.