The streets of Iacon slowed to a crawl as the entire city left their temporary shelters and drove through the city, returning to their berths. There were no jams or protests as the traffic crawled. They rolled in a sort of stupor, already quieted by the acid rain and the Prime's announcement of war. Low chords and steady beats played on the radio, accompanying them to their berths as they closed their doors, settled in for the shift's last energon, listening to the news for any updates.
After a couple joor, the road began to clear. Jazz could no longer hide on the busy highway-he pulled off to the access ramp, joining the last dregs of the midtown rush. Thousands of mechs occupied single rooms or double chambers, piled on each other in narrow apartment complexes. That left hundreds of mechs up and down the lanes between, but even that traffic began to thin until Jazz was hidden by nothing more but the shadows on his matte surface.
And then he saw them, ahead by two apartment buildings—a squad of Senate Guard marching around the corner, the sigil of Sentinel Prime raised high on two banners flanking either side of them. There were not many—no more than twenty—but they already had three bots following in stasis cuffs, chained together. From this distance, Jazz couldn't make out details, but he did see the front Guard raising his helm to spot Jazz.
"Citizen, stand and be inspec—"
Now that was a thought not worth sticking around for. Jazz transformed up onto the sidewalk and ran into the nearest door. He found himself in the lobby of a apartment complex, but there in the stairwell's alcove was an access panel a little smaller than himself labeled Maintenance Only. He kicked in the door—
And crashed down on one knee, hissing as every strut and joint from his pede to his pelvis ground against their own cracked edges. Muttering angry curses, he dragged himself past the door swinging loose on one hinge. He slammed it shut behind himself for all the good it might do. He didn't think Senate Guards were so blind that they'd miss a busted door frame.
It didn't matter. Every maintenance shaft was the same. There were the heating and cooling vents, the huge tanks of industrial antifreeze and the generator coils providing power. And in the back, the floor lay open to the levels below, where the older levels of apartments continued down into the forgotten layers of Cybertron, including the original staircase.
By the time the Senate Guard burst into the room, Jazz was long vanished into the darkness.
Vorn ago, the city of Iacon had been walled, fortified by steel berms over twenty meters deep and thirty meters tall. As the noble towers grew and the great highways began to take shape over the planet, the city built on top of its old streets and buildings. By the time the city had come into its present shape, the old walls were at least a hundred levels beneath its new surface—too costly to continue to build up from below.
So Iacon simply ended at the edge of its own buildings. Towers and tenements ringed the city like a new wall, anchored deep in the rusted struts that ran miles below, and the unlucky citizens living on the rim had windows looking out over the black asphalt and gray dust of the wastes, looking over the lamps along the highway as it ran to the horizon.
At least the great highway gave some measure of comfort. The intercity route had its own defenses along the edges, and there were enough weaponized bots on the road that no one would dream of attacking millions of travelers.
But the wastes were lawless, and the burnt out wrecks of the mechs who lived and died in the ashes were reminders of how close the danger lay.
Jazz came up out of the deep layers into the equally dark desert of concrete and steel, invisible in his own black paint. Between the cities, the vast expanse of Cybertron was dark. No one wasted lights out here. Only his own headlights broke the gloom.
Only his thoughts broke the tedium of the drive.
The situation, for all its political complexity to bring it to this point, was simple.
The Prime and his armies would attack Tarn. Nyon would join the fight and devour what it could of its neighbor city. The Vos jets would come to Tarn's aid. Refugees would pour out of both cities, spreading out in all directions.
In other words, chaos. And Sentinel Prime would be somewhere in the middle of it.
You still there? Jazz called out.
…yes, Red Alert said. I didn't want to say anything in case I…I didn't want to distract you.
Got a long road ahead of me, Jazz said. Should be clear. All the jets'll be heading to the shindig.
You aren't worried about death flights? Red Alert asked.
Maybe some straggler jets out here, Jazz said. But I'm only a few miles out from the highway. Don't think they'll come too close when there's a war on.
Jazz…what can you possibly do? Red Alert gave a long, heavy vent, audibly sinking down on his work station. There'll be two cities, plus the jets, the Prime and his army. Civilians trying to escape.
Yup, Jazz agreed. Just one little bot amidst all that chaos.
You'll need a miracle to do anything.
Jazz grinned to himself.
'Zat's what I'm hoping.
A crack deep inside his engine block fused together. He grimaced—good to be healing, but the twisting steel hurt something fierce.
Gimme a distraction, Jazz said. Kinda driving blind right now. Got any maps of the cities, where the highway passes by, that sorta thing?
Red Alert obliged, transmitting a dozen maps of Nyon, Tarn, the highway and few ramps that split off to the neighboring cities. To Jazz's surprise, he also found topographical features like deep craters, openings torn into the surface revealing the substructure, small lakes of acid rain, as well as vast killing fields of grayed out, rusting mechs laid out in neat rows.
Is this…? Jazz wasn't sure what his question was, let alone how to ask it.
It's what I stole from the archives, Red Alert said. When I left. I was hoping they'd updated it, but…this is all I have about what the planet looks like.
Jazz read the maps again. Asphalt and pavement stretched out for hundreds of miles, covered by the irregular markings of the planetary engines burning bright. All of Cybertron was a vast mechanism, and each of the cities pushed to make the system work, and within each of those cities, millions of mechs plugged along at their function to keep the world running.
But like any machine, if one neglected the maintenance, failure was inevitable.
Rust corroded every edge, chewed down every exposed gear and axle turning beneath the surface. Jazz had heard of the Sea of Rust, but here where hundreds, thousands, of mechs had been slaughtered methodically, he found rust worn deep into the steel surface of the planet itself.
Starve one side of fuel, and the whole mechanism would suffer. Even on the map, he could see pockets of darkness and pockets of brighter light. Parts of Cybertron overheated as others grew cold, grinding slower and slower until death seemed inevitable.
Cybertron was destroying itself.
Running out of fuel, Red Alert said, feeling his emotion. We need more energon.
Jazz thought of the wealthy mechs at the Platina restaurant, the nobles in their towers, the temple slaughtering priests with their warbuild slaves. And the growth—the endless, mindless growth of their cities, building over and over on top of each other while the inside of the planet rusted and dissolved in acid.
He began to see a little of what A3 did. The corruption ran deep. And, like any machine, it would need to be kicked hard to shake the rust loose.
When he was fifty miles out, he felt the ground shudder under his tires. Thirty miles out, the distant shrieks of engines began to grow loud. At twenty miles, the flares and explosions lit the area so that he cut out his headlights and slowed. The cool air began to grow warm—he could tell where the battle lay as heatwaves made the stars shimmer.
The battle had already commenced. Chemical flames of silver and green splashed across the field—he abruptly stopped as he almost drove off a sudden edge. The planet's surface angled sharply, and Jazz took a long moment before he realized that he was at the edge of a huge crater stamped onto the surface of Cybertron. Huge beams of steel patched the hole like rebar, and asphalt and steel filled in the gaps.
Ancient meteor strike? Wound of a forgotten war? The map showed him a crevasse easily as large as the whole business district and so deep that he had flashbacks to leaping out of the temple.
The battle had lost any sense of front lines. Iacon's forces, all of them emblazoned with the Prime's red faceplate sigil, spread through the Tarn resistance, identified by the blue and white icon of a sword. He could barely make out the main players, where the Prime had swept in from the highway, where the Tarn forces had rolled in from their city.
The Prime's flanking their rear, Red Alert mused, analyzing the field. They'll be cut off at the center. But…where is the rest of Tarn? This can't be all of their forces.
Jazz tried to make sense of the fight—he had no idea how Red Alert could tell how the pieces were moving. It looked like a pit of hell, half melting, half dark. Warbuilds clashed against each other, fists and blades on their heavy armor like the constant ringing of thunder that pulsed through his frame.
He saw a single blade lift up, highlighted by an edge drenched in energon, and watched it come down through another mech, slicing it in two. The spark chamber didn't fade as much as it erupted and spilled out in white hot sparks, and the sound and force of such a massive mech falling rocked the ground so that Jazz lost his footing, landing on his hip.
That? That unrecognizable smelting pool of giants destroying each other? A3 wanted him to ride into that?
He vented hard—the air had reached the intensity of a furnace, blasting waves of flame up out of the crater. The whole area rippled like a nightmare, and Jazz crawled back, startled by a flash of light far in the distance.
The cities of Nyon and Tarn rose up at the edge of the horizon like little streetlights in the dark. They stood hundreds of miles apart, but to Jazz, they sat close enough to watch both of them waver in the smoke of fire bombs and poison gas.
Nyon was closer to the ground, its spires thin and gathered in its center. Tarn, in contrast, looked like a miniature Iacon of high towers across the entire city. He didn't know why Nyon glowed a little more pink, Tarn a little more blue. And lights trickled out of the cities, a million refugees fleeing the coming carnage.
They weren't going to make it, he thought. They're so close—they can't—
Those trying to flee ran straight into a wave of Iacon's artillery, igniting before the concussive force could hit them as the heat rolled over their thin frames and sparked the oil and energon within. Jazz couldn't see beyond scattered dots, but every dot was a mech until they all turned into a single flame licking up to the dark sky.
As civilians immolated in neat rows, each city provided their own display in his visor.
Nyon
Alpha Level Class
Coordinates 55 45 21 π 37 37 2 θ
Independent Torus City-State
12.4 million residents
2.3 warbuild / 10.1 civilian
Sub-senate
3rd Functionist Parish
283 districts
Recent Order: under martial law and civilian curfew
Loading data…
Tarn
Alpha Level Class
Coordinates 42 42 46 π 74 00 22 θ
Independent Torus City-State
8.8 million residents
4.5 warbuild / 3.5 civilian
Sub-senate
4th Functionist Parish
193 districts
Recent Order: TERMINATION
Loading data…
The battle was spreading to the edges of the crater, pushed by explosives erupting throughout the field. A plume of flame and steel flashed upward, throwing mechs in all directions, and pieces rained down on their comrades. Energon glowed as it spilled.
Tracer rounds arced overhead, white plasma bolts that hinted at the barrage of bullets unseen. The shots grew louder, the carpet bombing closer. The battle spread for miles and miles in all directions, and it crept toward Jazz like a monster, highlighted by the burning oil slick underfoot.
A shower of sparks burst over Tarn. The explosive looked like a firework, its glittering pieces falling down toward the city. It looked so faint and fragile…
…then dozens of small orbs floated up from Tarn. They looked like golden dots slowly rising without any pattern. Then the first one touched a piece of glitter falling from the sky.
White fire burned through the atmosphere, swallowing the tallest Tarn spires as the light pushed out and out—the shockwave rolled like distant thunder against him, and he felt a wave of heat even this far away.
What was that? Jazz gasped. What the hell was that?
I…I don't know, Red Alert said. I don't—I never heard of something that big. I don't—
Thunder from nowhere.
The jets finally arrived—Vos, come to the aid of their allies. The firelight gleamed on their wings as they roared into view, startling the Prime's forces visibly to one side, dropping heavy payloads that smashed through his line, blasting mechs into shrapnel.
Jazz shuddered at the edge of a crash.
This was not sane.
No one could step into that and survive.
The massacre was the size of a city. The energon and oil and coolant flowed like a river, spreading like a lake. Warbuilds beat each other into pulps, slung each other into the air like makeshift clubs, fired bolts that grayed out frames in an instant before being grayed out themselves. Helms lay crushed, tiny doorwings stomped flat.
His vents caught in his throat. There were doorwings all across the ground. DeadEnd had said the Prime would use Enforcers, hadn't he? How long could an Enforcer survive in that pit?
Sentinel Prime was going to destroy everything and Jazz was insane for ever thinking he could stop him.
He couldn't vent. He was going to overheat and collapse. And still the battle crept closer toward him—hide, he needed to hide, to get under cover.
He staggered to a piece of debris taller than himself, sheltering in its shadow. Overhead, jets turned a broad arc and doubled back. The ground shook and Jazz's joints rattled.
The same starburst that fell out of the sky above Tarn now exploded over the battlefield—instead of glitter, he heard missiles shrieking down towards him, and then rockets fired upward, sending dust clouds out in a gale.
Rockets intercepted missiles—the sky flashed brilliant white, searing hot, and Jazz screamed as his dark paint smoldered.
He couldn't conceive of the fury of whatever was hurting him. He had no idea what it was.
Red Alert's signal clicked off, suddenly silenced. The presence that moved into Jazz's cortex demanded his attention beyond the pain.
VOS SMALL FUSION BOLIDES, A3 said. FIFTY MEGATON AIR BURST AGAINST IACON DEFENSIVE IRON DOME.
Somewhere in Jazz's soul, he understand what A3 meant. He imagined fire and shockwaves rippling over the city, kept out by a shield. But Jazz did not understand the words themselves, and all he knew was the thunder of jets and the crackle of gunfire, flare rounds and missiles screaming away toward Tarn, shrieking between jets dropping bombs somewhere ahead.
It's too much, Jazz said, struggling to grasp onto anything to anchor himself. I can't…I can't think.
The heat began to fade. His paint blistered, and he curled up into the shadow, staring out over the slaughter.
This wasn't assassination.
This wasn't even terrorism.
He was no warbuild.
NO, A3 agreed, and the looming presence was tinged with sadness. NOT A WARBUILD. AND BROKEN AS WELL.
Jazz covered his face in one hand, overwhelmed again as another wave of jets screamed past.
How could he keep Prowl? He couldn't face the chaos behind him. He would break—shatter—waves of sheer force washed over him, howling and hungry—
IMPOSSIBLE TO CHANGE YOUR PROGRAMMING, A3 said. IMPOSSIBLE TO CRAFT A WARBUILD FROM A CIVILIAN.
Jazz cursed himself. Underneath his keening, he felt a strange sense of satisfaction—finally A3 realized that Jazz had limits.
But those limits meant Jazz would die, meant Prowl would die. Curled up alone in the shadow of a sheared faceplate of a war ages past, Jazz sank into himself.
A3 gave a small, single chuckle.
Gripped the edges of Jazz's programming.
And snapped him clean through.
THAT DOES NOT MEAN YOU CANNOT FIGHT.
Jazz seized up tight—his frame refused to move and his gears strained in their moorings. Pieces inside of himself that had healed began to crack under the stress. Components that hadn't healed now snapped into place as his programming ran unevenly—background executions took priority and front end applications closed to save space. Something deleted entirely, and he felt the loss even as it blinked out of his memory.
NEVER UNDERSTOOD FUNCTIONISTS PARTITIONING WARBUILDS AND CIVILIANS.
A kaleidoscope of golden designs blossomed behind Jazz's sight—he knew he was in his own programming, just as he had been with Prowl. Only now he was watching his code sift and transform, changing configuration like a bright puzzle spinning into place.
THE BEST FIGHTERS HAVE THE MOST TO LOSE.
The fear clicked off. Jazz floated in a bubble. He knew the war raged just below, that bullets now peppered the ground around him. He knew that the heat and the blast were there at the edge.
He no longer cared. The blast was just information. The bullets were just information. The mechs and the politics and the bombs and the dead were just information, all of it up in the air, waiting for someone to put the discordant notes to a tune.
His dark paint turned white—the blisters and burns rippled and crackled, leaving the paint job patchy, revealing the steel beneath. But the heat no longer lay so heavily on his frame.
What are you doing? Jazz asked, numb, as if he were watching A3 build a little castle of steel shavings instead of his soul. What are you doing to me?
NOTHING YOU WOULD NOT HAVE DONE YOURSELF IN TIME.
A3 swept the stray bits of Jazz clear, to be cleaned up in the next defrag cycle.
BUT TIME IS NOT A LUXURY YOU HAVE.
In the brief moment before A3 released him, before Jazz would take the step down into hell, Jazz knew that his master meant time on a far greater scale than even a mech normally counted it.