Cuba.

Proximity sensors pinged in warning, and Onslaught jolted from power-down to full alertness. He transformed and was on his feet in the next moment, integrated weapons humming with charge, fist clamped around a smaller wrist. The glowing blade of a laser scalpel protruded from the hand attached to the wrist. It looked blurry, but maybe that was from the vibration of the wrist's owner struggling to break free.

Below, a red visor peered up at Onslaught. Vortex dangled from his grasp, suspended from one captured arm. He stopped wriggling when Onslaught met his gaze.

"Hiya, boss. Did you have a good nap?" His visor brightened as he spoke, sending a crimson glow across the truck storage lot where they had camped during the daylight hours. Distorted reflections peered back from windows and rearview mirrors throughout the lot.

Onslaught dismissed the proximity alerts and deactivated his weapon systems. There was no threat after all, and combat protocols drained more energy than the standard idle state. Onslaught lowered Vortex until his feet touched the pavement. He held onto Vortex's wrist just long enough to confiscate the scalpel.

"Hey!" Vortex tried to snatch it with his other hand, but Onslaught raised it out of reach. Once he was released, Vortex jumped, grabbing for the lost scalpel with both hands.

"Just what do you think you're doing?" Sneaking up on a resting soldier with a knife was a good way to get oneself deactivated by automatic defense protocols. Vortex knew this. He was lucky to still have two arms.

"Don't worry about witnesses," Vortex said, deliberately misunderstanding. "The humans went home hours ago, and I looped all the cameras within three kilometers. No one is going to see us."

Onslaught waved the laser scalpel in front of his visor for emphasis. "What were you doing with this scalpel?"

Predictably, Vortex lunged for the scalpel again. Onslaught pulled it away just in time, flicked the off switch, and dropped it into a subspace compartment. Vortex made a sad little whimper.

"Vortex."

"You want to know? Alright." Vortex's voice became calm and reasonable. "I was going to stab you in your sleep. Then, I'd slice open your central processors to figure out what's broken in there, because no one with functional logic chips would parade around for days in your sorry excuse for a paint job."

Thus spoke the rotary with saltwater residue and human bloodstains liberally streaked across his armor.

"Stab me... with a knife smaller than your fingertip?" Onslaught's alt-mode was an unstoppable brick of armor on wheels. He had been built to sustain heavy physical damage and keep rolling. All of the vulnerable joints and seams required for bipedal dexterity were buried under layers of armor while in alt-mode. Even the transparent panes of his windows were far more impact resistant than ordinary glass. A single stab from a laser scalpel meant for precise surgery would not have gone further than his outermost plating. The laser scalpel might have done noticeable damage eventually, after a significant amount of sawing, but an assassin's tool it was not.

"And crack open your processors." Vortex did that infuriating little head tilt of his.

The urge to tell Vortex to check his own processors was intense. Onslaught suppressed it only by supreme strength of will. Showing frustration would only encourage more of the same behavior, as Onslaught had learned the hard way on several past occasions.

"Forgive me if I find this hard to believe." If bodily harm was the intention, then Vortex should have shot him with those integrated laser guns rather than sneaking around in the dark with a scalpel. Pulse lasers at least stood a chance of melting through his armor.

"Believe what you want." Vortex crossed his arms. His fingertips transformed from rounded to clawed with little clicks. The sharp points tapped against his elbow. "Give it back."

Onslaught cycled air through his vents and counted the dust particulates. They numbered in the millions per cubic meter. Carbon. Nitrogen. Oxygen. Phosphorous. The urge to put a fist through Vortex's smug visor faded to manageable levels by the time Onslaught finished counting the dust.

"In due time."

Vortex huffed and turned his back to Onslaught. Rotors spun and shuffled until all four pointed at the ground in a perfect picture of dejection.

Onslaught let him pout and focused on more important matters.

According to Onslaught's chronometer, fifty-five minutes had passed since sundown. Although Vortex had chosen the most disruptive possible method to rouse Onslaught from an energy conserving power-down state, his timing was impeccable. The dark sky meant that the humans normally moving crates to or from this storage lot were all gone. Onslaught and Vortex were free to enact phase two of the plan: moving from Cuba to the South American mainland.

The previous night, Vortex had flown them in from the Dancing Sea Star to this truck storage lot on the northern side of Cuba. He had enough fuel to fly them further, but a helicopter carrying a truck over heavily populated regions would be easily spotted by observers. There were too many watchful eyes and cameras around to risk flying over the island. Fortunately, human society seemed to follow a strict diurnal pattern, with huge swarms of activity during the day followed by stillness at night. Onslaught and Vortex had waited out the daylight in this field, blending in with the many lifeless semi trucks and shipping containers here, conserving energy while they awaited the cover of darkness.

Now that nightfall had chased most of the humans indoors, they could travel by ground to a harbor. From there, it would be easy to stow away on another long-distance ship. Onslaught had selected a cargo ship docked at a harbor two hours' drive from here. They had to move soon to sneak on board before sunrise, since the ship was scheduled to depart early in the morning.

Driving would be simple for Onslaught as a truck. With a simple tarp or other material covering his missile launchers, he was indistinguishable from any other cargo hauler. However, moving Vortex posed a challenge. Humans tended to be much better at monitoring their airspace than their roads, so flight was out of the question. His alt-mode was too large to balance atop Onslaught's truck bed. In root-mode, he could sit or crouch on the truck bed while Onslaught drove, but this would leave his obviously Cybertronian exostructure exposed to surveillance or curious eyes.

Then again, Vortex was rather small, especially when those rotors folded together as he had them now.

Onslaught at the nearest shipping container, evaluating the dimensions. Were it not for the anti-aircraft setup mounted on his back, the rectangular pod would fit almost exactly atop his truck bed. Placing it in such a manner would serve the dual purposes of disguising his armaments and concealing Vortex from unwanted observation.

With some slight modifications, the container should suffice—in theory, at least. In practice, there was only one way to find out.

Onslaught lifted the container. Though the size made it unwieldy, it was much more lightweight than it looked. The sides were sheet metal, soft and flimsy to the touch, flexing underneath the slightest pressure. The double-doors on the small end had a lock, but the mechanisms were small and fiddly, designed for miniature human fingers. He could not coax it open. After a few unsuccessful attempts, he snapped it off. Standing the container on its small end with the doors facing the sky, he tore out the bottom.

The screech of ripping sheet metal drew Vortex's attention. He came over, curious, and watched as Onslaught opened the bottom of the shipping container to leave enough room for his turret and launcher assembly.

"Tsk, tsk. Sloppy work. You'd get cleaner cuts using a laser—"

"Done sulking? Good. Hold still." Onslaught plopped the shipping container over Vortex. He fit inside nicely, boxed in by sheet metal on three sides and overhead. A surprised red visor peered out from the torn-away section.

Vortex raised one hand and carefully poked the side of the shipping container. It gave an almost musical ping. Vortex scoffed. "If you expect this to hold me—"

"No. Not hold. Conceal. Now that it's nighttime, we need to move. I will drive while you ride in the back. The box prevents any more photos of you turning up on the human internet." Scrubbing all traces of the first photo from the Bermuda Triangle had been difficult enough, and Onslaught still doubted that he had found all the copies. The humans used a peculiar combination of cloud-shared and local data storage; while Onslaught had removed every instance he could identify from the cloud network, locally saved image files could still exist with evidence of Vortex attacking that fishing boat.

"Oh. Yes, I remember the plan. Never was fond of enclosed spaces." Vortex prodded at the walls of his new disguise, testing the give of the malleable alloys. He seemed pleased at how easily the sheet metal yielded to his touch. "Though this one barely counts."

Onslaught transformed. "Hop on."

Holding the shipping container aloft like a turtle shell, Vortex clambered aboard the truck bed rather awkwardly. He crouched behind the main turret and slid the container into position, locking in the forward part of the torn edge around the front and sides of the turret housing. The rectangular base lined up against the rim of the truck bed.

Setting down the container left Vortex half crouched behind the missile launcher and half sprawled over it, in a position that was surely uncomfortable. He squirmed around, armor clanging against the metal walls with every motion. Eventually, he seemed to find a satisfactory seat. "Ready when you are."

"Doors," Onslaught reminded him. Although Vortex was unlikely to fall off while driving, the back doors of the shipping container flapping open in the wind would certainly reveal Cybertronian cargo to any observers.

Vortex hooked the back doors with the tip of his toe, pulling them closed. One snapped shut, but the other had a broken lock and swung freely on its hinges. Grumbling and twisting around within the small confines of the shipping container, Vortex managed to tug the door shut and bend the metal panes until it jammed.

After a quick scan to ensure that both Vortex and the shipping container were secure, Onslaught activated his headlights and drove toward the parking lot exit.

The roads were quiet and peaceful, free of human vehicles. Some nocturnal animal life prowled in the bushes beside the road, but they seemed content to remain in those bushes without approaching the travelers. Onslaught took the time to enjoy the scenery: lush vegetation, small animals, interesting rock formations.

As Onslaught drove, he became aware of a small, consistent vibration coming from inside the shipping container he carried. Vortex was generating a continuous stream of sound at volumes just at the edge of Onslaught's detection threshold. Onslaught could hear the vibrations in the air and feel them transferred through his frame, but he could not identify the words.

"Speak up."

"Your wish is my command." Vortex started yodeling at full volume. "O nova of deathless splendor, forever to shine in my core..."

The piece probably came from one of those Altihexian space operas that Blast Off was so fond of—the lyrics and overall cadence sounded familiar—but Vortex sang every note horribly off-key. The dissonant tones were enough to induce a processor ache.

Onslaught sighed. "Forget I ever asked."

Vortex's only response was to switch songs. Now he belted out a familiar Kaonite drinking song. "Ninety-nine cubes of high-grade..."

It was in tune, at least.

"Ninety-eight cubes..."

"Alright, that's enough," Onslaught said.

"Ninety-seven cubes..."

"Shut it!" Onslaught blared the horn, drowning out Vortex's voice.

Surprisingly, this actually worked—for all of five seconds. Vortex stopped making sounds with his vocalizer, but he started tapping his foot. The taps were orderly, using Morse code lifted straight from the Earth language packs, and thus impossible not to understand.

"Bored. Bored. Bored," Vortex tapped out. He began to use both feet, alternating between them.

Onslaught pretended not to feel the taps. After a while, the lack of reaction discouraged Vortex, and the tapping stopped.

"May I please have my scalpel back?" Vortex asked sweetly.

"No." Rewarding irritating behavior would just encourage more of the same. Unfortunately, nothing ever seemed to discourage that sort of behavior. "Make yourself useful. Search the internet for our team."

Vortex established a wireless uplink and began to send out queries. Due to the unencrypted nature of the network, Onslaught could not help but see every data packet that Vortex sent and received. The first query was an image search for Brawl's alt-mode. The second brought Vortex to a website for human weapons enthusiasts. The third turned up images of what happened to humans after being struck by certain weapons. Within less than ten queries, Vortex had jumped from looking for Combaticons to researching human torture methods. The diagrams and photos left little to the imagination.

Onslaught revised his opinion of humans. It seemed that their innards were much more fragile—and far messier—than he had thought.

At least wireless transmissions were easier to ignore than off-key singing or tapping. Onslaught turned off his transceivers and concentrated on the road. The silence was a welcome relief. Now that Vortex had found something to draw his attention other than irritating Onslaught, the drive was much more tolerable.

About halfway through their journey, the main road was blocked off by construction cones, and the pavement ahead still held the sheen of wet tar. Onslaught had been driving on autopilot based on a memorized route. Since he already knew the precise coordinates of each intersection and exit they needed to take, there should have been no need to read the street signs. This unforeseen street closure complicated matters.

Onslaught switched on his internal transceivers again. He queried the human map service for a new driving route, received updated instructions, and adjusted his course along the suggested detour. He also downloaded a full report on local construction activities to reduce the risk of running into future blockages.

With the transceivers on, Onslaught could see Vortex's internet activity again. Thankfully, Vortex was no longer perusing the many methods that humans had invented to dismantle each other. Instead, he had gotten into an argument with some human on, of all things, an advice forum where someone asked how to find a missing cat. The thread was already thousands of responses long from their argument alone. It had begun with Vortex posting the sage advice, "To find the little vermin, you've got to think like one. Shouldn't be hard for someone like you. :3"—which quickly devolved into a long string of traded "NO U" messages that served no discernible purpose.

After perusing the first few hundred messages in the argument and finding nothing except an escalating series of insults from both parties, Onslaught categorized it as harmless fun. Vortex was simply doing what he did best—getting on the nerves of a new opponent purely for his own amusement. As long as he did not reveal any sensitive information or draw undue attention, he could toy with humans as he pleased.

The timestamps on Vortex's posts were rather close together, considering that humans needed to physically move their fingers to type out words. A discerning observer might recognize this quick posting rate as originating from a non-human participant, but the argument was far removed from topics likely to invite Cybertronian attention. Since his opponent's responses were also timestamped only a few seconds apart, maybe that rate of posting was typical for humans.

Onslaught decided to overlook this diversion. He wrote a quick script to shunt the repeated messages directly into his comm suite's discard buffer. In the newfound quiet, his thoughts wandered back to the moment when proximity alerts had rudely dragged him out of a relaxing power-down.

"What were your intentions before I awoke?"

Vortex stiffened, fingers suddenly digging into Onslaught's missile launcher from where he crouched. The tips felt blunt, claws retracted. They were far from anything vital, but the pressure still registered as interference with turret mobility. The continuous stream of forum posts kept running in the background. Most likely, Vortex had scripted an automatic response at regular intervals.

"You must be aware that a laser scalpel would be... ineffective, at best," Onslaught continued.

"Ineffective," Vortex echoed. There was a snick of claws engaging. Vortex shifted his weight.

Pain slashed through Onslaught's awareness, unexpected enough that he nearly swerved off the road. He slammed on the brakes. As they skidded to a stop, Vortex and the cargo container tumbled onto the road. Vortex landed in a roll and popped up again, rotors flared for balance. Searchlights on his shoulders flashed online, lighting up the road in two circles around him. The claws of his left hand were coated in a powdery brown residue.

"How's that for ineffective, boss?"

Onslaught transformed, more surprised than hurt. The site that Vortex had poked should have been an unremarkable plate on the top surface of his truck bed. In bipedal form, it relocated to the outer edge of his left shin. The dense armor should have registered mere contact pressure after a gentle poke, but instead it stung. What damage had Vortex done while left to his own devices back there?

Self-diagnostics reported acceptable structural integrity and load-bearing capacity in his shin plating. Onslaught's outermost armor lacked the sensor nets needed for a more detailed status update. He lifted that leg, contorting into a partial transformation to get a look at the section of plating that fell outside of his normal visual field. Under the bright beam of his headlights, his lower leg looked blue and brown.

"…huh."

Vortex's claws could not have caused that damage.

"You look surprised. Didn't you know? It's been there since we met," Vortex said, his rotors lifting high and triumphant.

Thinking back, Onslaught recalled one of the Insecticons chewing on his leg while falling from the Nemesis. After disposing of the Insecticons, he had tended the obvious battle damage on his arms and torso, debriding and cauterizing those wounds to help the progress of self-repair. However, his leg had felt no pain at any point between the fall and now. There was no cause to suspect that anything was amiss. After weeks of negligence, overtaxed self-repair mechanisms had lost the battle against Earth's corrosive atmosphere. His leg now sported a colorful assortment of rust colonies.

Onslaught inspected the rust patch, tilting it at different angles under his headlights to assess the scope of the problem. The rough, crumbling texture of oxidized metal and delaminated paint spread laterally over nearly half of his lower leg. A thin silvery line near the edge marked where Vortex had clawed him just a moment ago. In the center of the rusted area was a deeper set of gouges in the shape of Insecticon mandibles—likely the original damage that had served as a nucleation point for the rust.

"You do realize," Vortex said, almost hesitantly, "that isn't the only spot. You're rusting all over."

"All over?" That should have been impossible. He checked and double-checked self-diagnostics, but all status reports came back within acceptable margins. There was no unexplained pain or weakness, in the same way that his leg had felt no hint of the discomfort that one might expect from hosting a sizable rust colony.

"Yes. It's quite impressive." A morbid fascination played through Vortex's voice.

Maybe Vortex was right. Maybe Onslaught really did need his processors examined. Allowing a simple scratch from an Insecticon to grow into a problem of this magnitude suggested a grave error in priority management. Onslaught had permitted himself to become too distracted by this alien world's novelty, immersing himself in knowledge while failing to notice the problem that festered upon his very own frame.

"Why didn't you inform me of this earlier?" Onslaught demanded.

Vortex shrugged. "Wanted to see what would happen."

"It's been over a week, and I've been rusting in front of your optics all the while. What did you think would happen?"

"I thought you were planning something."

"Planning something? What, planning to rust away before we find the others? Do you think I would seriously consider that? Do you?" Onslaught paused, resetting his vocalizer to a reasonable volume. "What could I possibly plan that would involve leaving my own wounds untreated?"

"Well, you have a plan for everything, and your plans always work," Vortex said innocently. "Isn't that right, Colonel Onslaught of the 32nd Battalion, sir?" He stepped into a mockery of a salute.

Of the 32nd Battalion, only Onslaught and Brawl had survived. It was one of the few black marks on an otherwise impeccable service record. Vortex had not been there, had not seen—

Roaring, Onslaught lunged. Vortex leapt back with a whirl of rotors, kicking up dust and plant matter. Onslaught's fist missed and struck the road, shattering the pavement. Cracks spiderwebbed across three lanes. When the dust cleared, Vortex crouched twenty meters away, visor and searchlights blazing in the darkness. The crumpled shipping container laid just in front of him. Flimsy as it was, it would be worse than useless as a barricade if Onslaught charged.

"Temper, temper," Vortex chided, straightening up. "Can I have the scalpel now?"

Onslaught looked at his fist, anger fading as quickly as it had arisen. Crumbs of asphalt coated the knuckles, but the paint was not even scratched. His arms and torso had been pitted with scrapes and gashes from the battle with the Insecticons. Now, self-repair had filled in those gashes to create smooth patches with the fresh silvery sheen of regenerated metal. The paint nanites over those wounds would regrow more slowly than metal, but self-repair was already making steady progress there. His leg and any other rust spots should have healed in the same way, had the corrosion been properly managed at an earlier stage.

As frustrating as Vortex could be, he was not the root cause of this problem. Fighting him would do neither of them any good, especially when they had limited options for repairing battle damage. Onslaught cycled air through cooling vents and willed himself to calm down.

Wordlessly, Onslaught offered the laser scalpel handle-first. Vortex approached with caution, wary of a trap. Once within arm's reach, he snatched the scalpel away and skittered backward.

"I was trying to help you. Plan or no plan, I can't stand seeing all that rust anymore," Vortex said once he stood a safe distance away. He fiddled with the tuning buttons and activated the narrow blade. It seemed more diffuse than usual—either low on power or not correctly focused to a cutting point.

"Help me, with a laser scalpel? I need to de-rust the infection, not amputate the whole plate," Onslaught gritted out.

With typical scalpel spot sizes on the order of a few microns, it could take hours to ablate the rust patch on Onslaught's leg with a systematic raster pattern. The alternative would be to misuse the laser scalpel as a laser cutter and very, very slowly trace it around the edges of the affected plate, thus severing the armor across half of his leg. The latter method would be both time-consuming and unnecessary overkill. Since the surface-level corrosion had not yet diminished the structural properties of that armor plate, removing the whole plate would disadvantage him more than simply ignoring the rust.

"This isn't just any laser scalpel. This is a custom modification, just for you." Vortex stepped closer, twirling the scalpel between his fingers. The blade traced fuzzy helices in the darkness as it spun. Light sparkled off each piece of dust that passed through the beam. "It's a defocused scalpel. I've shifted the focal point up into the safety casing." He pinched the scalpel between two fingers and pressed the blade to the opposite forearm. "See, the beam spot is a centimeter instead of a micron."

Indeed, the blade produced a glowing circle on Vortex's arm instead of a single dot. In the infrared spectrum, Onslaught could see the light merely heating the paint instead of slicing through into the living metal below. As Vortex moved the spot, it burned off a streak of saltwater residue and organic debris from his forearm, leaving clean gray paint nanites in its wake.

The results looked promising from afar. Onslaught walked up to Vortex, intrigued. Vortex demonstrated again on his own arm, removing another neat line of stains from the paint. Up close, illuminated by the bright glow of his headlights, Onslaught could see in microscopic detail as the defocused laser beam superheated each grain of salt and smear of carbon over the paint, burning the foreign residue into gas that quickly dissipated in the night breeze.

Onslaught grasped Vortex's arm, inspecting it under various spectral filters to examine the integrity of the two laser-cleaned streaks. The paint and underlying metal looked warm but unharmed by the heat.

"Have you ever cleaned a wound with this method before? Are you sure that it will work on rust?"

"Of course I'm sure! I'd be a rather useless interrogator if I didn't know what will and won't harm a mech."

That was reasonable enough. Onslaught found himself nodding. Using the defocused laser scalpel to clean a wound... was actually not such a bad idea. Not that Onslaught would ever admit this.

Vortex crouched down, aiming the defocused beam toward the rust patch on Onslaught's shin. "Plus, I saw this done in a holofilm once."

At Onslaught's horrified glance, Vortex chuckled. "Hold still."

The laser scalpel felt warm against the healthy armor of his lower leg. Once the beam hit the edge of the wound, that warmth abruptly shifted into a sharp burn. Onslaught locked his joints to remain as still as possible while Vortex swept the laser beam over the corroded area in a grid pattern. He could not easily see Vortex's progress while standing, but he felt the red-hot blaze of the scalpel moving horizontally across the affected area. Rust particles ablated from the surface of the wound clouded the air in front of his leg, glittering under the spot illumination of his headlights.

Vortex removed all of the rust, leaving a large silvery patch of bare metal across Onslaught's leg. The area tingled long after he finished, but the shimmer of healthy metal looked much more promising than the huge rust colony that had been there before. Vortex set the laser scalpel aside and took a roll of metal-mesh tape from subspace. He sliced off a few pieces of appropriate size.

"From the Nemesis, same as the scalpel," Vortex explained, sticking the mesh patches over the bare metal.

Onslaught nodded, recalling the small storage room on the Nemesis that had diverted the advance team from their original checkpoint. Swindle's looting habits had always proved valuable enough to make up for the minor inconvenience of planning around his tendency to get distracted by those same habits.

"You said there were other rust spots?" Onslaught prompted.

"Just a... few... on your back," Vortex said.

Since the scalpel had performed quite well on his leg, Onslaught saw no reason to delay treatment any further. He sat on the roadside while Vortex addressed rust spots on the back of his left shoulder, his right elbow, the base of his turret, and the dorsal plates on his right side.

All in all, the laser rust removal took about an hour. Vortex had to swap the drained energy cells for new ones three times during this process, cursing the cheap low-capacity design every time. He was just pressing a mesh patch over the last wound when tires screeched somewhere behind them.

A random human had driven down the road in one of those near-silent electric cars while Onslaught and Vortex focused on rust removal. Neither one noticed the car approaching. By the time the human driver spotted two obstructions in the road and slammed on the brakes, said obstructions only had enough warning to glance up. Yellow and red visors flared in surprise.

It was too late to transform. With Onslaught's headlights and Vortex's searchlights both shining over the surrounding area, there was no doubt that the human had already seen them.

The human raised a cellular phone and snapped a picture. In her haste, the human forgot to turn off the auto-flash settings. Both Combaticons saw the camera blink as it captured their image. The car started up again, and the human made a sharp U-turn to drive in the opposite direction at maximum speed.

Onslaught's headlights went dark as combat protocols engaged. Missile launchers rotated into position. A single strike could easily eliminate the car and the photo, but the explosion might draw undue attention from human authorities, which could in turn alert Decepticon surveillance—

"I'll handle this." Vortex leapt into vertical takeoff, transforming and swooping after the car. He overtook it within moments and transformed again for landing. Two feet and a hand slammed into the pavement in front of the car.

The human swerved sharply to avoid Vortex, overcorrected, and spun off the road. The car skidded into the bushes. Vortex casually walked over to knelt beside the driver's door. He tapped on the closed window with one clawed finger.

"Hello there. Open up."

"Go away! Leave me alone!" the human shrieked, voice muffled by the window.

Vortex put his claw through the window, and the human suddenly screamed a lot louder. Glass shards spilled across the ground, glittering with the reflection of Vortex's brilliant searchlights.

"Do you want to die?" Vortex asked softly, tilting his head.

The human sobbed. "No! No no no. Please, please don't kill me."

"No? Then hand over your phone."

The human was quick to comply. Vortex retracted his hand. A purple flip-phone dangled from his grasp. Over a short-range transmission channel, he contacted Onslaught. "I have the camera. Squish or release?"

"Release the human. They are quick to notice missing persons. An investigation would be inconvenient," Onslaught replied over the same channel. Without photographic evidence, the verbal claims of one human could easily be dismissed as the delusional ravings of an overstressed mind.

Vortex sent a ping of acknowledgement and dropped the phone into a compartment. Its periodic pings to the local cell tower went silent the instant it phased from realspace into subspace. As far as the cell tower or any other tracking entities might be concerned, this phone had just disappeared from existence.

"Since you asked so nicely, of course I'll let you go," Vortex told the human. He helpfully pushed the car back onto the road, ignoring the alarmed squeaks from inside. "You won't tell anyone about what you saw tonight, will you?"

"I won't, of course not. I won't. I swear," the human babbled.

Before releasing the car, Vortex crouched by the driver's side again. "One last question. Do you know where the nearest fuel depot is around here?"

"F-fuel? You mean a gas station? That way, two exits, two exits and take a right," the human stuttered out, pointing a finger through the broken driver's side window.

"Appreciated." Vortex straightened the car in the center of the road, brushed some twigs off the front hood, and stepped back. "Off you roll, then."

The car peeled away with a screech of tires, leaving burnt rubber streaks on the asphalt.

Onslaught inspected the shipping container. The corners were dented from falling off Onslaught's back when he slammed on the brakes, but the overall shape was still intact. He bent the malleable sheet metal back into a rectangular shape and set it on his back, transforming into a truck. The shipping container fell into place crookedly, leaving half of one muzzle sticking out in the air while the rest of the missile launcher was concealed.

Vortex helped straighten out the shipping container and climbed inside, pulling the doors shut once again.

"Let's stop for fuel before heading for the harbor," Vortex suggested, transmitting the coordinates of the gas station that the human had mentioned.

Onslaught had not refueled since Starscream reactivated the Combaticons on Earth. By idling unused systems, entering power-down whenever possible, and hitchhiking on the human cruise ship for much of the journey between Florida and Cuba, Onslaught had stretched out his initial energon supply until now. Meanwhile, Vortex had been flying around, luring ships to their doom, and creating artificial tornados on a regular basis. All of those tasks burned fuel much faster than sitting idle. To compensate for the extra energy consumption of these activities, Vortex had siphoned the fuel tanks of those trapped ships. On land, however, the lack of boats to raid meant that an alternate fuel supply was needed.

The molecular composition of the gasoline used in both boats and cars looked... unappetizing, to say the least. Gas, diesel, and even the high-octane fuel variants used in planes all contained a significant amount of carbon. Unlike energon, which had a unique metastable phase that could create a self-sustaining incendiary reaction without needing oxidizing agents, all of these Earth-based fuels required oxygen to extract energy. They would be practically useless outside of an oxygen-containing atmosphere, unless one's internal systems were modified to permit compressed gas storage.

Onslaught forwarded the chemical datasheet that he had found on the internet. "You've been drinking this sludge?"

"Better than stasis lock. It needs a lot of air to burn clean. You just have to run your exhaust fans on overdrive to get enough air into the fuel converters. Otherwise you won't extract all the energy. Oh, and the filters will get clogged with soot and unburnt residue."

"Sounds unpleasant."

"The defocused scalpel also helps when cleaning out fuel intake filters." Vortex said this last part with a smaller voice.

Those fuel intake filters required quite a bit of disassembly to extract. Onslaught had never taken out one himself, since it was delicate work that ran the risk of damaging other important components in one's fuel processing system. In the past, there had always been a qualified medic on hand to help with such tasks. If Vortex had extracted and cleaned his own filters at some point while wandering the Bermuda Triangle, then his continuing functionality was a good endorsement of his unofficial medical skills.

They drove up to the gas station. There was a small building staffed by one human and a row of fuel dispensers. After a quick internet lesson on how to extract fuel, Onslaught pulled up next to one of the dispensers, positioning himself to block the human's line of sight to the pump itself. Vortex wirelessly tapped into the surrounding cameras and set the footage to a few-second loop.

"Cameras are set," Vortex reported.

"Kiosk is ready." Onslaught had hacked into the fuel dispenser payment system while Vortex handled the cameras.

Vortex lifted the edge of the shipping container and stuck out one hand to grasp the fuel nozzle. He brought it inside, refueling Onslaught and then himself until their preliminary fuel tanks were full.

The gasoline felt sticky and unpleasant in Onslaught's fuel intakes, but he tolerated the sensation. Driving across the island taxed his energy reserves more than sitting idle had done. They had no means of finding pure energon on this planet; by all evidence, the humans did not even know of its existence. However unpleasant this fuel tasted, Onslaught could use the extra energy boost. It would take time for his systems to process the stored gasoline into the pure form of energon in his main fuel circulation, but this quantity would sustain him for at least a few more days.

They left the gas station without incident, returning to their original route.

At the harbor, they found the target ship. The cargo barge was unstaffed, monitored only by a few easily misdirected cameras. Onslaught altered the inventory registry to account for their presence—one military truck and one helicopter for transport to Venezuela, top secret government project, full discretion of the crew requested.

Course set, they hopped aboard.