Permian Basin, New Mexico, USA.

Dr. Martin took off his eyeglasses and placed them atop a stack of paperwork. "What do you mean, the oil well has run dry? Crude oil deposits do not simply empty themselves overnight. You should have noticed a decline in output weeks ago."

Tony crossed his arms. "There wasn't any warning. Don't ask me how it happened, Doc. You're the scientist here. I'm just the guy who reads the meters. That rig was giving us lots of oil yesterday, and it isn't today."

"Hmm. Perhaps another equipment failure. Those seem to be happening more often in recent days. First the Orogrande Basin and San Simon, now here." Dr. Martin steepled his fingers over the desk. "Did you verify that the pumpjack is operational?"

"The rig looks fine on camera. Still pumping, even though nothing comes out at the main plant. I checked three days of footage. No motion except the rigs and the tumbleweeds."

"The rig looks fine. That's a start, at least." A deep weariness weighed upon Dr. Martin's voice. "Alright. Tell you what. Borrow one of the field crew's trucks for a couple of hours. Go inspect the pipelines between here and that dry well of yours. Search for leaks, damage, blockages—anything that might explain why the oil stopped flowing. If the equipment really is intact, then I'll have to talk to Operations about finding a new site." Dr. Martin slumped forward, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Operations will not be pleased. Not after that mess in Orogrande."

"Sure thing, doc." Tony himself was none too pleased about having to inspect seventeen miles of pipelines in the sweltering July heat, but he kept that to himself. When the person who signed off on his paychecks assigned a task, that task had to be done.

The oil fields were organized in neat sectors of drilling rigs, monitor stations, and storage facilities. Small dirt roads snaked along the pipelines that connected the rig outputs to the central refinement plant. Tony drove along one of these roads, following the pipes from the densely packed bundles near the refinery to the narrower branches that fed directly from the pumps.

Basic pressure meters were mounted on the steel pipes at regular half-mile intervals to monitor the flow of crude oil. The pipe that had stopped delivering oil looked the same as any other pipe: round, black, and not broken or otherwise damaged from the outside. When Tony came to the first meter, he stepped out of the truck and checked the indicator dial. As expected, the line had zero pressure. Tony marked the zero on a notepad, then climbed into the truck and continued driving.

After the first ten pressure meters read a consistent zero, Tony stopped getting out of the car to check each one. There had to be a faster way to check whether the pipes were indeed the problem. He drove to the very end of the suspect pipeline. The oil rig looked as intact as it had on camera: the pumpjack bobbed up and down smoothly, while the tumbleweeds rolled by in a faint wind. The camera itself was a distant speck mounted on a pole fifty-some yards away, and it also looked operational. Tony waved at it in case his boss was watching. Odds were that no one would ever look at the footage, but one could never be too careful.

The meter stuck directly on the side of the rig reported full pressure. How strange. The well must not have been dry after all. Somewhere between here and the tenth pressure meter, the oil flow had dropped from normal to zero. That narrowed Tony's search distance to only about eleven miles.

Using a faster search strategy, Tony drove five and a half miles back toward the plant, parked the truck, and checked the meter. Zero pressure. He went three miles toward the rig, parked, and checked that meter. Full pressure. One and a half miles back, three-quarters forward, and fifty yards back again, Tony identified the problem.

Part of the pipeline was squashed.

Tony had driven by too quickly to notice it the first few times, but the distorted metal was evident once he stepped out of the truck. One section of the black pipe was bent and crumpled like a tin can. The heavy-duty steel looked almost as though it had been exposed to a great crushing force and then hammered closed to minimize leakage. Stress cracks ran out from the sides of the crushed area, and a slow trickle of black crude oil oozed from the tip of the largest crack. From a distance, this tiny leak had been almost invisible along the black paint of the pipe.

Tony marked down the location on his notepad. As he was getting back into his truck, the pen slipped from his pocket and landed on the dirt road. He bent to pick it up and froze.

A strange pair of vehicle tracks appeared in the dirt. The tracks ran beneath Tony's truck and perpendicular to the road, winding away between a set of nearby rigs. The repeated pattern marked the tracks as originating from some rolling wheel-like object, but the shape did not resemble that of car or truck tires at all. Each track was almost twice as broad as the tires on Tony's truck, and the two parallel tracks were spaced too widely apart to be from any vehicle designed for a standard road.

Tony brought his truck around to follow the trail. It led off the road, away from the damaged pipeline, and into another cluster of oil rigs. The tracks threaded between the swinging pumpjacks and the network of pipelines leading back to the central refinery, ending at a large army-green... tank.

The caterpillar treads, armored profile, and gun turret of the vehicle were all unmistakably military in design, but why was a tank parked between two oil rigs?

Tony parked his truck next to the tank and stepped out. As he circled the area on foot, he realized that he recognized this tank. It looked just like the one in that World War II exhibit in the museum downtown. Tony had not been to the museum for a while, but there were advertising billboards all along the roads showing a picture of that exact tank. Finding it here, nestled amid an oil drilling operation instead of in a historical museum setting, seemed surreal.

Tony knocked on the armored fender with a fist. "Hello? Anyone inside?"

The nearest set of treads shifted. Tony stumbled back in surprise.

"Yeah. What do you want?" a deep voice said from inside the tank. Although the hatch was still closed, the voice carried out with unexpected volume and clarity.

Tony was speechless for a long moment. Someone was inside. Some idiot had actually driven this tank into the oil field for no apparent reason, and then proceeded to sit inside the tank through the scorching afternoon heat. If there had been any doubt in his mind about who was responsible for those damaged pipes, it was gone.

"You can't just drive around the oil fields as you please. This here is private property." Tony thumped his fist against the fender again. "Come out of there, mister. You and I are going to the supervisor's office. You have a lot of explaining to do."

The engine rumbled. "Aw, leave me alone. I ain't harming nothing."

"You've already squashed one pipeline with your careless driving. Now, get out! Or I'll call the cops and have your fancy museum piece hauled away to the junkyard for scrap metal." Tony kicked the side of the tank. His steel-toed boot clanged against a wheel. "Out. Out!"

The tank shifted, and Tony quickly backed up in case the driver had any bright ideas about running him over. Armor plates split along invisible seams, lifting and twisting impossibly. The ordinary tank folded out into a robot with two arms, two legs, and a glowing visor instead of a face. When standing upright, the robot was easily thirty feet tall. It leaned close enough that Tony could see his own reflection in its visor.

"Fighting words, squishy. You want to say that again?"

Shaking slightly, Tony jabbed a finger toward the nearest road. "Get off my oil field before I call the cops."

The robot laughed.

Tony took the radio off his belt. "I need securit—AIEEEEEEEEEE!"

Any further words were lost as a metal foot punted Tony into the sky.

Brawl raised a hand to block the sunlight as he watched the human soar into the distance. For such a small and floppy creature, it had rather impressive aerodynamics. Given its trajectory, Brawl estimated that it would come down at least a kilometer away. He chuckled. That would teach the human not to kick mechs larger than itself.

"Dumb squishy. Should've asked nicer. Don't dish out what you can't take."

A few minutes later, a tank rolled southbound on the I-25, perplexing dozens of drivers. In the days to come, dash-cams and phones would immortalize this peculiar sight in the archives of social media and internet servers.

Brawl faced a dilemma. Which would be less conspicuous on a planet of humans: a humanoid robot, a M4 Sherman tank, or a giant foot? Brawl had gone with the tank, since his tank alt-mode was the only design of the three that originated from Earth. It seemed like a good idea, considering the human-made roads that wound through the vast deserts covering the surface of this planet. The pavement felt delightfully smooth and flat under his treads after hours of slogging through the uneven dirt and stone of the oil fields.

After twenty miles of driving on ridiculously narrow human roads, Brawl came to realize that this disguise was fundamentally flawed. The humans could somehow tell that he did not belong on Earth—that he was not one of them, not a lifeless metal shell carrying an organic pilot. It was the only explanation for why they reacted with such surprise to his presence. Little wet eyes followed him, fleshy voices squawked in surprise, and fragile cars veered off the road. All this attention went rather counter to the goal of lying low on unknown territory. Brawl had never been one to balk from a challenge, but the complete failure of his attempts at stealth instilled a queasy discomfort in his fuel conversion unit.

Nevertheless, Brawl maintained the tank form. He could not change alt-modes right now. None of the common road vehicles looked tough enough to suit his frametype, and besides, his energon levels were too low to splurge on a new alt-mode scan. Drinking the slimy organic fuel from the oil fields had only raised his energon levels by a couple percent. Transforming and simply walking was also out of the question. If the humans reacted this strongly to the sight of their own vehicle design, he could only imagine how much attention a Cybertronian bipedal mode would draw. That noisy human from the oil field had certainly seemed shocked enough.

Served him right for interrupting Brawl's nap. Brawl chuckled a bit at the memory, but the tail end of that chuckle sputtered out into a cough.

Come to think of it, Brawl's fuel conversion systems really didn't feel that good. There was an error message blinking in the corner of his visual field, too—something about clogged filters?

Probably nothing important.

Brawl dismissed the alert and drove south toward the rest of the team. Onslaught and Vortex were more to the east, while Swindle and Blast Off were southeast, but this human road only ran in a north-south direction. Brawl would have to take an eastern turnoff at some point.

Bermuda Triangle, North Atlantic Ocean.

Fog blanketed the night sky with gray haze from horizon to horizon, erasing all signs of the moon or stars. After three days of sunshine and good fishing, the weather had taken a turn for the worse. A tropical storm from the south was due to strike at dawn, and the crew of the Sea Floater hoped to be back in port before the rain started to fall. Partway through the return journey, the GPS signal had begun to falter—first freezing up, then hopping to random locations. This equipment malfunction had left them out on the open ocean longer than planned, and the leading edge of the storm had arrived.

By unanimous agreement of the three more experienced crewmen, Nathan had been relegated to bucket duty. The approaching storm kicked up swells just large enough to crash over the deck of their small dinghy. Seawater pooled in the corners faster than their onboard pump could remove it. Removing this water with physical labor had been Nathan's thankless task for the last fifteen minutes, although he had neglected it for the last two in favor of peering into the gloom beyond the boat's little island of light. Working or slacking off made no difference to the overall flooding problem, anyway. The onboard pump was ten times more effective at removing seawater than his small bucket.

"Two hours overdue for departure, and nothing but stormy seas as far as the light goes." Frigid water sloshed over Nathan's shins, but his pants were already sopping wet up to the thigh. He was suddenly very glad that he had the forethought to put his cell phone into a plastic bag before accepting bucket duty. Shivering, he turned and raised his voice to reach the other three seafarers in the main cabin. "Admit it, guys. We're lost."

Jerry had been doing something with a screwdriver to the old FM radio in the cabin, but he looked up at Nathan's shout and lifted one side of his headphones.

"Not lost—just a little bit off course. I'll have it straightened out in a moment, soon as I get the radio working."

The bucket slipped from Nathan's stiff fingers, splashing down somewhere by his ankles. He shuffled toward the cabin, clinging to the deck rails to avoid being thrown overboard by the heaving waves. Three-foot swells might have felt like nothing to the three more experienced seafarers onboard, but Nathan had never been more glad for the presence of those safety rails.

"Did I hear you right, Jerry? Get the radio working? What's wrong with it?" Nathan could not believe his ears. First the GPS had acted up, and now the radio had a problem. Did nothing on this ship work properly? Three days of smooth sailing and good weather had lulled them all into complacency.

"Nothing's wrong, really. There's some static interference on the usual channels." Up close, Jerry sounded far calmer than he had any right to be, considering that the radio was their only means of communicating with the outside world. Here in the high seas, there was no internet, no cell reception, nothing. Just four guys and the sharks.

"Oh man. Ohhh man. This is bad," Nathan muttered, dragging his exhausted body through the doorframe of the main cabin. He collapsed in a waterlogged heap next to Jerry's chair. "Bad GPS, no radio. What if it's not a coincidence? What if we're actually further east than we thought? Not by the Florida coast after all, but closer to Bermuda. What if, what if... oh, no."

"Are you alright there, kid?" Parker looked over from where he was studying the GPS module.

"No, I'm not alright. None of us are alright! Don't you realize? We're all going to die out here, and they'll never find our bodies. You know those stories about the Bermuda Triangle disappearances? There was another one just last week. I knew, I told you guys that it was a bad idea to go in this direction." Nathan buried his face in his hands.

A fist slammed against wood. Kevin crossed the cabin in two strides and loomed over Nathan.

"Oh yeah? I knew it was a bad idea to bring a city guy along on a deep sea fishing trip. Never should have let my sister talk me into this." Kevin grabbed Nathan's shoulders and gave him a rough shake. "Snap out of it, you wimp. Don't start getting superstitious on us now. Even if we were in the Triangle, which we're not, that garbage was debunked in the seventies."

Parker hummed. "Think on the bright side. We've caught more fish these three days than in a month near shore. When we get back, we'll all be rich."

"I don't care about being rich. I don't want to die out here." Nathan glanced between the other three. Kevin scowled down at him with disgust. Jerry's headphones were back on, and he was fiddling with the radio again. Parker had only pity in his gaze.

"Calm down, kid. Deep breaths. We still have plenty of food, water, and fuel. I've survived on much worse odds in the Marines. No one is going to die."

Nathan put his head between his knees and tried to believe that. The fear did not fade, but some of the seasickness abated.

"Radio battery might die," Jerry said a minute later, taking off the headphones. "Forgot to change it before we left. Anyone got a backup?"

"Plug it into the generator." Kevin tossed over an extension cord. "Parker, any luck with the map?"

Parker shook his head. "GPS still isn't going steady. Jumped again just now. Says we're two miles inland of Miami port, not in the middle of the sea. Useless newfangled tech. Back in my day, we used LORAN and a compass. Never got lost once."

Kevin grunted. "First time for everything. Jerry, how's the radio coming along?"

Jerry unplugged his headphones and turned a knob. The shriek of static filled the cabin, and all four crewmen winced.

"Nothing," Jerry reported, shouting over the static. He dialed the volume down, and the noise sank to manageable levels. When he plugged the headphones back in, the sound stopped. "Every channel is like this. White noise. If I didn't know better, I'd say we had one of those prank radio jammers nearby."

"We're doomed, and I can't even call my girlfriend one last time," Nathan groaned. He fidgeted with his phone through its protective plastic zip bag. The icon in the corner of the screen showed no cell reception, as expected.

Kevin glared. "Shut it, loser. Whining isn't helping us here. Make yourself useful. Go check that the hold isn't flooded or something."

Nathan glared right back, pocketed the phone, and marched out of the cabin. He only stumbled twice on the way out, which was admirable, considering that the waves seemed to have doubled in size after only a few minutes. At a guess, the average wave was six feet from crest to valley. The deck tossed underfoot so hard that Nathan could barely walk in a straight line while clutching the railing with both hands.

Back in the main cabin, Kevin turned to the other two. "Jerry, send out a SOS. Even if our receiver's busted, someone might pick up the message. Parker, did you try turning the GPS off and on again?"

"Yes. Twice. Got any other bright ideas?"

"Impact recalibration?"

"Sure, why not." Parker gave the GPS a solid thump against the table. The screen flickered off and snapped to life again, showing a new location. "Would you look at that, it worked. Good call. Florida coast coming up at two o'clock, fourteen miles out."

Jerry let out a little cheer, and Kevin clapped. "Nice work, Parker. Now we're getting somewhere. Full speed ahead."

The boat engine roared to life, and Kevin steered to the new heading. The Sea Floater zoomed forth, skipping between the wave crests like a motorboat half its size. The marine speedometer marked their speed at a respectable 40 knots.

Thirty minutes later, the waves had halved in size. Kevin peered out the cabin window, searching the darkness for any sign of their destination. Only a little could be seen beyond the pale yellow glow of the ship lights and the scowling reflection of Kevin's own face in the cabin windows. Gray fog and black waves were everywhere, but the horizon held no telltale streak of land between the ocean and the sky. The speedometer and odometer readings both indicated that they should have reached the Florida coast by now.

"Even in this fog, we should see something."

"Uh, the GPS jumped again. It's saying that we should be in the middle of Miami International Airport."

"The airport that's seven miles inland? Not a chance. We must have had the wrong coordinates before. Let's wait until the map shows something halfway reasonable." Kevin cut power to the boat engine.

They drifted with the waves. All was silent until Jerry jumped in his seat. He frantically waved the others over.

"Come quick! I've got someone on the radio." Jerry pulled out the headphone jack. They heard a lot of static. Then, the radio crackled and resolved into words.

"SSSSKH—st Guard, I repeat, this is the US Coast Guard. KKKSHSH—unidentified vessel, state your purpose."

Jerry activated the transmitter. "Hello, we're a bit lost—"

Kevin pushed Jerry out of the way and leaned close to the microphone pickup. "This is Kevin Jamison of the Sea Floater speaking. I'm here with three others on a fishing dinghy. Our ship isn't big enough to ride out the storm, and navigation is down. Can you direct us toward shore?"

"You are entering United States waters," the radio said. The voice on the other end of the line sounded different from before. It was deeper and more strained.

Parker frowned. "I wasn't aware that we ever left."

Jerry poked the transmitter. "Which way is Florida?"

"sKKKKHGH KKKKKSSHH." The radio cut into static.

"Hello? Hello?" Jerry twisted a knob on the receiver, but static continued to crackle over the open line. He sank into his chair in defeat. "We lost the signal."

Kevin patted his shoulder. "That was a good start. Try to get it back. If we're reaching the coast guard, we must be near one of their patrol routes."

The cabin door burst open with a gust of wind, startling the three crewmen. Nathan was back from whatever he had been up to outside, and he looked even more bedraggled than before. There was barely a square inch of him not soaked through. Seawater dripped to the dry cabin floor, puddling beneath his shoes. His teeth were audibly chattering. The winds outside had picked up enough to send papers fluttering around the cabin.

"Hey, guys. I found this old compass below decks." Nathan waved an ancient brass compass in the air. The brass was tarnished and the glass housing had some air bubbles floating inside, but the needle was able to rotate freely when held horizontally. "Why are we going east? I thought Florida was west of here."

"We're going northwest," Parker said, walking up. "GPS coordinates might be messed up, but the orientation has been consistent. We're going north... west..." Parker trailed off, a dawning horror upon his face. He had caught sight of the compass face. Indeed, if one ignored the bubbles and the tarnish, the compass needle disagreed with the GPS. He put out a hand that shook ever so slightly. "Give me the compass, lad."

Shaking or rotating the compass did not change its reading.

"I'll be damned. We are going east," Parker whispered. He showed the others. Even when the compass was held level, such that the bubbles were exactly centered, the needle pointed to the left. North was ninety degrees counterclockwise from the direction of their current heading. Northwest would have brought them toward the refuge of the Florida shoreline, but east led them deeper into the open ocean.

A vein pulsed visibly on Kevin's forehead. "Okay. Change of plans. We'll follow the compass. When we get back home, this GPS is going straight into the trash where it belongs."

"No argument there."

The ship turned around, and they moved westward in accordance with the compass direction.

As soon as they started moving, the radio static cut into intelligible words again. "KKSHH—vessel, maintain your current position. A Coast Guard escort is inbound, ETA seSSSSSSHHK minutes."

Jerry glanced at the others. "What do you think? Wait and hope they reach us before the storm does?"

"Coast Guard doesn't mess around. If they say help is coming, then help is coming," Kevin said. He activated the transmitter. "Roger that, Coast Guard. We'll wait for you."

They waited. Waves lapped at the hull. Kevin peered out the window at the restless black waters. Outside, the howling wind began to take on a rhythmic pattern. The sound was faint at first, but it quickly became louder and more distinct. Parker went to the cabin door and looked up at the gray sky.

"That's a chopper if I ever heard one," Parker said, grinning. He left the cabin completely, heedless of the water sloshing over his ankles or the wind whipping against his jacket. The others followed, clutching at railings to keep their balance amid the wind and waves.

Bright searchlights cut through the fog above, carving two glowing beams into the night. The chopping sound of rotors intensified. The wind began to blow vertically, rather than horizontally, as a rescue helicopter descended from the clouds. Waves off the ship's starboard side flattened and depressed into a bowl from the force of its powerful downwash. The helicopter rotated slowly to place the Sea Floater in the path of both searchlights.

"Here, down here!" Squinting from the lights aimed toward his face, Parker waved both arms at the helicopter.

The other three crewmen followed Parker's example, waving at the helicopter and cheering. The searchlights blinked back, three short and three long pulses. Morse code. S-O-S.

Jerry laughed. "We're saved!"

The helicopter gained altitude again, moving until it hovered over the Sea Floater.

"What are they doing?" Nathan raised one hand to shield his face from the wind.

"The pilot's going to hover while the rescue squad drops a ladder for us to climb aboard," Parker explained.

Directly overhead, the pitch angle of rotors inverted, pulling air upward instead of pushing it down. Simultaneously, an alien anti-gravity module kicked online to maintain the helicopter's altitude. The water around the Sea Floater shot upward with the suction of a small tornado, and four humans went flying.

Much screaming ensued.

Four humans splashed into the ocean some distance away, flung away from their ship by the rotational inertia of the artificial waterspout. If one used one's imagination, the chopping sound of rotors almost resembled laughter in the wind.

The rotor pitch readjusted to normal, and the vortex dissipated as quickly as it had begun. The helicopter descended toward the Sea Floater, breaking apart at the seams with the clatter of folding metal. Plates neatly rearranged into a shadowy humanoid figure with a brilliant searchlight mounted on either shoulder. Where its face should have been, an optical band blazed crimson.

The shadow crouched on the wind-ravaged shape of the Sea Floater, tearing open the deck as easily as if reinforced fiberglass and nautical-grade steel were wet paper. Three days' worth of captured fish splashed overboard as the hold split open. With the outer shell of the ship peeled aside, the shadow reached into the engine room and ripped out the fuel tank.

In the water, a trembling hand raised a phone in a plastic zip bag and snapped a photo.

Two days later, a phone in a plastic zip bag washed ashore on the Florida Keys. There was still one bar of battery power remaining. When a curious tourist turned it on, the phone connected to the nearest cell tower and delivered four unsent text messages.

"Biggest fish I've ever caught! Can't wait to show you. Sushi banquet?" [Attachment: IMG_ ]

"Storm on the way and GPS acting up. Will be late for dinner tonight. So sorry."

"Sweetheart, your brother is insane, and we're all going to die. Love you always, Nathan."

"Berm trangle ufo real. SPREAD TE WORD" [Attachment: IMG_ ]

Scotia Sea, 545 km north of the Antarctic Peninsula. Altitude: 3,631 m below sea level.

Blast Off had been crawling toward the rest of the team since the moment he awoke on the ocean floor, yet he had barely covered any distance in that time. With his transformation sequence disabled from injury and the pressure equivalent of three hundred and fifty Earth atmospheres, he inched across the hydrothermal vents as a disembodied arm.

Progress was slow. Worse than the damage and the lack of maneuverability, however, was the tedium of this whole situation. He crawled across a never-ending field of rock and organic life in all its disturbingly fragile complexity. The first sightings of organic creatures located safely outside his plating had been a novelty. Blast Off had spent some time observing their behavior and searching for traces of sentience. One arthropod bore passing resemblance to an Altihexian transport ship. One crustacean had the same oblong shape as a planetoid in the Nebulan system. One cephalopod even looked like a miniature Quintesson. Blast Off beeped the universal greeting at that one, idly hoping for any sign of intelligent response, but it only squirted a viscous fluid at him and swam off.

Blast Off managed to entertain himself with this game for an embarrassingly long time, but it eventually became tiresome. After seeing a hundred of the same type of fish, the hundred-and-first one barely registered as a blip on his peripheral sensor array, automatically noted and then shunted to the realm of irrelevant data. By now, every single sea creature in the vicinity had made it onto that list of irrelevant data. All that remained were the rocks—and, really, once he had scanned one rock, he had scanned them all. In chemical composition, they were simply rearrangements of the same base components: oxygen, silicon, aluminum, iron, calcium, magnesium, and so forth.

Perhaps if Blast Off was trapped down here long enough, the saltwater would corrode him into a rock-like heap on the ocean floor. At the very least, the finely forged Cybertronian alloys of his frame would add some variety to the neverending fields of basalt and shale around here.

Days on the surface of the Earth were marked by the orbit of the sun, yet no sunlight filtered down into these watery depths. A perpetual night enveloped the ocean floor. For lack of light, Blast Off had tuned his optical suite to a different band of thermal emission wavelengths. Hydrothermal vents now shone brightly with heat. Glowing pillars of warm water spiraled up from these vents into the ocean above. The rising currents intermixed with cooler water, drawing delicate swirls of turbulence in the darkness. It almost reminded him of the atmospheric turbulence one might observe while orbiting a gas giant.

Blast Off crawled toward the nearest of these glowing vents, hoping to bolster his depleted energy reserves with absorbed thermal radiation from the lava flow beneath the heated water. He had hopped between similar hydrothermal vents since his arrival, interspersing long crawls with short periods of rest. Recharging on the vent output helped a tiny bit, but self-repair systems and mobility consumed energy at a far higher rate than his systems could convert geothermal energy into usable energon. His energon levels had fallen critically low.

Climbing up the vent was like scaling a mountain with one working hand—difficult, especially given the general slippery nature of rocks coated in fragile shells and slime. Small organic creatures fled from his approach, and he tried to suppress the disgust when they landed on his plating or attempted to burrow inside. There were already plenty of living and dead ones inside; a few more would not make a difference, but the sensation still irked him.

When Blast Off reached the top of the hydrothermal vent, the glowing coils of turbulent water surrounded him. A welcome warmth spread across his armor until he, too, glowed with heat. He collapsed in relief. Warnings of high pressure, severe systems damage, and low energon reserves flashed across his internal displays. He brushed them aside with a thought. All of the warnings were familiar. None were actionable. His fuel converters already labored at maximum efficiency to gather the ambient heat into stored energon.

Amid the exhaustion, despair closed in. What if the other Combaticons never found Blast Off? They usually avoided using the gestalt link, but it would be nearly impossible to locate Blast Off among Earth's vast oceans without any hint as to his location. He was far enough underwater that his own scanners could not reach the surface, and he possessed the longest sensor range of any of the Combaticons. None of them would have the right equipment to detect him on the ocean floor. If the portal that had whisked him here had not left any trace of its endpoint, then they really would never find him.

Worse yet, what if the others already knew about his predicament and had decided that it would be too much trouble to retrieve him from the bottom of the ocean? Blast Off could almost imagine how that conversation would go.

"Consider the costs and benefits," Swindle would say, businesslike as always. "We could spend months of effort and millions of shanix on a submarine that would fetch the rusted carcass of our getaway shuttle, and then spend years and even more shanix on repairs. Or we could hire a replacement with the same alt-mode for cheap pay, plus the great honor of working alongside the infamous Combaticons. Easy choice. Even Brawl could do that calculation."

"New mech sounds good to me," Brawl would agree, cheerfully consigning Blast Off to rust in a watery grave if only to avoid arguing with the teammates that were actually present.

Vortex would probably back them up, too, simply for the sake of his own amusement. "Think bigger, Swindle. Why settle for a mere replacement when we could get an upgrade? Someone who's actually fun. Consider it—a shuttle without the attitude problems. You'd like that, wouldn't you, Onslaught?"

Onslaught probably would like that very much...

But not enough to agree. Onslaught would not abandon a teammate out of simple inconvenience, even one who vexed him. Vortex's continued presence on the team was evidence enough of that.

For all of his pride and perfectionism, Onslaught took his responsibilities as a unit commander seriously. He had chosen each member of the Combaticons for their specialized skills, and those skills made Blast Off irreplaceable. The Combaticons had never left Blast Off behind before—not when a sniper shot him down during the Rorsha Campaign, not when the Autobots took him prisoner in Kalis, and not when an electromagnetic pulse mine had offlined half of his systems in the Battle of Technahar. All those times when Blast Off was disabled or otherwise in trouble, the others had come to his aid. Blast Off had repaid them in kind on countless occasions.

After all that the Combaticons had been through as a team, there was no reason to doubt them now.

Onslaught had a plan for every scenario. He would have a plan for this one. It was only a matter of time before the rest of the team came searching for Blast Off. Searching was only half of the task, though. Finding him would be a massive challenge of its own. Finding him before he went offline or into permanent stasis lock from energon deprivation would be ideal.

This area of the ocean floor was silent, devoid of even the faintest trace of comm signals. Blast Off could neither hear the chatter of other Cybertronians on this planet nor transmit to them. What he could do was set up a signal beacon to ensure that his own location would be detectable to anyone who broke through whatever dampening effect was blocking comm signals.

Activating his comm link, Blast Off set off a repeating galactic-standard distress beacon. The signal was not transmitted on Decepticon frequencies. Rather, it used a generic pre-war frequency band that had been primarily used by interstellar explorers. This choice was intended to alert his teammates to the identity of the one transmitting the beacon, since only a rare few Decepticons who had been involved in space exploration before the war would broadcast this distress signal instead of a regulation Decepticon beacon. The other Combaticons only knew of it because Blast Off had shown it to them in the past.

More warnings flashed in Blast Off's visual field. Energon levels were approaching the threshold for emergency stasis lock. The hydrothermal vent beneath him did help to recharge his systems, but it did not contribute nearly enough energy to compensate for his current power expenditure. To conserve what little energon remained and sustain the beacon output as long as possible, Blast Off shut down all non-essential systems, including sensory suites and motor function. He sank into a state as close to stasis as possible while still transmitting the distress signal.

The vent was warm. The beacon was active. His team would find him. They would. It was only a matter of time.