Isla de los Estados, Argentina.
Starscream dragged a waterlogged Blast Off onto the beach. He had chosen to exit the ocean on this small island off the tip of South America because human maps listed it as a nature preserve. Such areas were less likely to have human witnesses than the heavily populated mainland. One could never be too careful, especially where humans and their sneaky little cameras were concerned.
Turning up on Soundwave's routine scans of human surveillance was the last thing that Starscream wanted. Even if the Apex Armor did fortify him against physical attacks, there were plenty of worse fates that could still befall someone wearing the armor—for instance, starving into emergency stasis lock in the Nemesis brig, or being ground-bridged into outer space to drift for all time, or being drop-kicked into the sun by a furious Megatron.
Free of the ocean at last, Starscream shook as much seawater off of himself as possible before deactivating the Apex Armor. As the armor suit folded back into a damp metal disk, Starscream stretched his wings and flared his plating into the cool breeze. He had missed the sensation of fresh air.
Of course, Starscream would need to put the Apex Armor back on in order to carry Blast Off into the Harbinger, but he had been trapped within the armor suit for several days. A small break to stretch and relax was well deserved. If Blast Off had been aware of the many hardships that Starscream endured while rescuing him, he would surely agree.
Alright. Back to business. Now that Starscream had exited the water, it was safe to open up a ground-bridge back to the Harbinger. He took out the ground-bridge remote control. Flicking on the power switch, he quickly calculated the coordinates for a portal entrance a few meters in front of his current position.
The remote control screen remained black.
He double-checked the power switch. On. He switched it off, then turned it on again. Nothing. He tapped on the remote, hoping to jostle any loose wires back into place. Nothing. As a last resort, he popped open a panel on the back of the remote, unplugged the rechargeable energy cell, and re-inserted it. Nothing.
Extracting the energy cell once again, he shorted the high and low-output terminals together with one clawed finger. A fully charged energy cell should have heated the metal to glowing hot, but he only felt a lukewarm tingle of current crawl between the two terminals.
Out of batteries. Great. The dedicated energy cell also meant that the controller could not draw power from energon directly. He would have to plug it into an external charger in order to get it working again.
Without a working ground-bridge remote, Starscream and Blast Off would have to travel back the old-fashioned way. The Harbinger was over ten thousand kilometers from here. With his transformation cog still missing, walking there could take months.
Starscream did not have enough energon for months of trekking. After walking from Antarctica to here, he was down to one last energon cube out of the ten that he had initially packed.
Defeated, he tossed the Apex Armor into subspace. He was about to slump onto the ground next to Blast Off, but the crunch of sand underfoot made him think twice. He sat on top of Blast Off's forearm instead. The unconscious Combaticon would never know—and even if he did, he ought not to mind, since Starscream had just rescued him from a watery grave.
The ground-bridge was inaccessible, walking would be too slow, and reappropriating Blast Off's transformation cog for personal use would require surgical tools that Starscream did not have right now. Repairing Blast Off was the only solution. His shuttle mode was easily large enough to carry the other four Combaticons during the initial assault against the Nemesis. If Starscream could coax him to transform, they might both be able to fly back to the Harbinger.
Starscream inspected the stasis-locked frame, evaluating the visible injuries. Although he was no medic, he did have a basic knowledge of first aid, some familiarity with shuttle anatomy, and extensive experience with his own repairs.
The damage looked severe at first glance, but it was actually less crippling than Starscream had expected. Blast Off's dense space-grade armor had fared well against the immense pressures of the deep sea. There were three major issues that Starscream could identify: stones jammed in the transformation seams, a gash slicing between two armor plates, and energon deprivation.
The stone shards stuck into the transformation seams around the elbow and wrist joints would have prevented Blast Off from achieving either shuttle or bipedal modes. Deep scratches and twisted metal around each stone suggested that Blast Off had tried and failed to transform at least once. Starscream knew well the dread of being unable to transform. Being trapped in a single mode was bad enough in bipedal form, but existence as a mere arm must have been even worse.
Starscream was well equipped to fix this issue. His sharp claws slipped between narrow gaps in Blast Off's armor, fishing out the debris jammed between the transformation seams. He pried out every piece of stone, grain of sand, and shell of mollusk that he could reach. By the time he finished, his hands were covered in organic slime, and he had amassed an impressive pile of ocean detritus.
A set of four parallel gashes raked down the side of Blast Off's upper arm, ending at the bent edges of two armor plates that had been crushed with great force. Deep scratches ran under the bent plates. The dents were just about the right size for an impression of Megatron's hand, particularly if one had been grabbed and hurled across a room by Megatron—an event that Starscream unfortunately understood firsthand.
This wound must have been leaking energon when Starscream first found Blast Off on a hydrothermal vent, but it was dry now. Self-repair must have sealed up the torn energon lines in this area during the long days of travel. Only the distorted outer armor remained as evidence of the wound, and that would require specialized tools to weld on patches or hammer out dents. Starscream could not address it at the moment.
Energon loss from this wound had driven Blast Off's systems into stasis lock. This should have been the easiest issue to fix, but Starscream hesitated. He only had one cube of energon left. If he surrendered it and Blast Off did not wake up, or turned out to be too damaged to fly, then they would both be stuck walking. However, if Starscream kept the energon for himself, then he could only drag an unconscious Blast Off for another few days before he, too, ran out of fuel. Abandoning Blast Off was not an option; Starscream had expended too much effort dragging Blast Off all the way here. He would not give up now.
It would be a worthwhile investment, Starscream decided. He pried open an energon intake port near the shoulder linkage, cracked open the energon cube, and poured in the fuel.
Blast Off shuddered. Biolights flared brightly from beneath armor plates, first near the intake port and then spreading outward along the rest of his frame. A mechanical hum filled the air while systems rebooted from the total shutdown of forced stasis. As soon as Blast Off regained enough motor control to move, he initiated a transformation sequence.
Armor lifted and folded, scraping in a way that sounded almost as painful as it looked. Slowly, shifting one plate and cable at a time, Blast Off transformed from a giant arm into a bipedal mech on his hands and knees. Water trickled down his armor to pool on the sand below. Biolights flickered unevenly across his frame, some areas bright and others dim. One side of his visor glowed white while the other side faded to dusky purple. He pressed one hand to his side, manually shutting the peripheral intake port that Starscream had pried open. His vocalizer clicked several times before initializing with a watery gurgle.
"Energon... fifty-three percent? How—" Blast Off coughed. The battlemask on his face slid aside, releasing a gush of seawater and one fish. His visor paled with horror.
"Harpagifer spinosus. Spiny plunderfish," Starscream identified. Years in the vicinity of Earth had granted him plenty of trivia about the native creatures. With nothing else to do while walking the ocean floor, he had grown quite proficient at matching this trivia to the corresponding creatures. Starscream had managed to remove at least twenty other plunderfish from Blast Off's frame while cleaning out the debris. "Looks like I missed that one. How unfortunate."
As the water drained away, the fish wiggled.
Blast Off made a strangled noise and leapt upright, weapons charging with a high-pitched whine. He shot the fish point-blank, incinerating the small creature. A good portion of the beach also turned to molten glass.
Starscream lowered the arm that he had flung up to shield his face. Glass scales fractured off his armor and tinkled to the ground. "I see that you're lucid now. What happened? Where are the others? Onslaught didn't seem the type to leave you for dead."
"He is not." Blast Off unsubspaced a tube of quick-dry medical glue and began to apply it to his wounds. Once the glue was fully spread, he flattened a temporary mesh patch over the gouges in his armor. The mesh patch had the same texture and weave as the ones used in the Nemesis medical bay.
After a few minutes of focus on repairs, it became clear that Blast Off was done talking. Starscream magnanimously chose to interpret his silence as a result of lingering disorientation after his recent stasis lock, because no one in their right mind would intentionally ignore direct questions from Starscream. Megatron did not count. He had not been even remotely close to in his right mind for ages.
"How did you become separated, then?"
"Fell through a portal." His battlemask clicked shut, but Starscream saw the grimace for a moment before the mask covered it up.
Having run afoul of Soundwave's ground-bridge trickery a few times himself, Starscream could sympathize. The abrupt jump in coordinates and force vectors wreaked havoc on his navigation every time. Crashing into the ocean after a portal incident was understandable. However, this ground-bridge should not have opened. Soundwave should have been off of the Nemesis during the Combaticon attack.
At the time, Starscream had used the human internet to post a doctored picture of Soundwave's long-lost felinoid symbiote climbing the Eiffel Tower. Every Decepticon knew that Soundwave's devotion to his cadre was legendary, second only to his devotion to the Decepticon Cause. Even a shaky, low-resolution picture of Ravage should have provided an irresistible lure, compelling Soundwave to investigate Europe while the Combaticons approached the Nemesis.
Perhaps Starscream did not understand Soundwave's priorities as well as he had expected. He contemplated where that scheme might have gone wrong, but nothing particularly stood out. He had served alongside Soundwave for millions of years; being unable to predict Soundwave after all this time was a heavy blow to Starscream's pride.
Blast Off, now with two useful hands, managed to repair himself to a flight-capable state. Starscream discovered this when Blast Off abruptly subspaced his tools, walked several steps away, and transformed into a space shuttle. Flight engines activated and thrusters ignited in a classic pre-launch warm-up sequence.
Starscream yelped and ran over to pound on the door. "Wait, let me on board!"
If Blast Off flew away now, then Starscream would never be able to find him again.
The door did not open. Blast Off made a derisive noise. "A Seeker asks someone else to fly him around, inside the atmosphere, of his own free will? My audials must be malfunctioning."
"To conserve energon, of course." Starscream said hastily, unwilling to reveal his transformation cog difficulties. "I may have refueled you, but that was the last of my energon supply. There's no point in both of us burning fuel when one will suffice."
"Really." Blast Off sounded skeptical.
"Besides, it's common knowledge that shuttles are faster than Seekers." Only when flying in straight lines, Starscream carefully did not add. Telling Blast Off that his alt-mode had all the maneuverability of an unguided missile was unlikely to help the situation, no matter how accurate the comparison.
"Hm. True enough." Blast Off seemed pleased by the flattery. The door slid open, and Starscream climbed inside.
"Set course for the Harbinger," Starscream ordered.
"Not until we find my team." Thrusters flared, and they rocketed into the atmosphere.
With Blast Off's inertial dampeners active during takeoff, Starscream barely felt the impulse of launch. Only the sudden haze of a vapor cone hovering around the windows and the blur of numbers on his internal altimeter betrayed their rapid ascent.
The northward heading brought them closer to the Harbinger anyway. Thus, Starscream opted not to dispute Blast Off's priorities. He arranged himself on the cargo bay floor, leaning back against one wall, and extended his specialized energon scanner to its maximum range. The sooner he located the other Combaticons, the sooner they could return to the safety of the Harbinger.
Starscream's energon scanner was not very effective at ground level, since rock formations and dense concentrations of organic life could scatter a faint energon signal. In the open sky, however, he could sweep a vast hemispherical region of the ground below. Blast Off's frame created a local distortion in the scan results, but Starscream averaged several scans for a baseline readout and subtracted that correction factor from all future data. The background-corrected results looked almost as clear as if Starscream had been flying solo while scanning.
"Your calm is most atypical," Blast Off noted. "The last Seeker I carried—for medevac, no less—had to be sedated before they could get him on board. He was missing both legs and half of one wing. Still refused to let anyone fly him back to base."
"He must have had processor damage," Starscream said. Experiencing discomfort when being flown by someone else's engines was reasonable, but that did not excuse acting like a moron. After millions of years aboard the Nemesis, Starscream and every other aerial frame aboard had long since grown accustomed to traveling inside other vessels. Anyone who could not overcome those instinctual fears was no longer around.
"Hmm."
They flew northward until Starscream's scanner chimed.
"Contact ahead," Starscream said. An energon signal had just entered scanner range to the northeast of their position. He transmitted the coordinates to Blast Off, and they adjusted course toward the signal.
US-Mexico border, Texas side.
Two hundred kilometers of fences, and Brawl had not found one entrance that was not crawling with humans.
Brawl had been driving parallel to the national border for hours in search of a way through. There were only fences, more fences, human guard stations, vehicle barriers, and barbed wire. None of this should have provided a true obstacle for a determined tank, but Brawl was trying to lay low. Getting spotted by surveillance cameras while running through a blockade would not be ideal.
Even so, Brawl's patience wore thin.
The nearest guard station was five kilometers back. Out here, there were only fences and cameras. Brawl targeted the nearest camera, swung his main gun into position, and fired.
A big poof of black smoke emerged, and the camera remained where it sat.
Brawl ran a self-diagnostic. The usual warnings came up: filter lifetime negative, filter replacement needed, line energon contamination detected, combustion efficiency below fifty percent. All of those notes had been there for the last few days, and Brawl could still drive just fine. He cleared those alerts away, searching for anything related to weapons systems.
One new warning had appeared. Propellant feed obstruction.
Brawl had encountered this warning before. Usually, it meant that some residual goop existed in the energon lines leading to his main gun, preventing the energon-based propellant from reaching the ignition chamber. Without propellant, the payload would simply remain in the loading chamber, unable to emerge without external propulsion.
The typical way to deal with propellant difficulties was to attempt shooting until the obstruction cleared itself out.
Brawl tried to fire the gun again: once, twice, thrice. Each time, black smoke emerged instead of the intended high-explosive shells. The propellant feeds did not seem to get any better. In fact, they felt more clogged after this. His main gun was most definitely inoperable until he could find medical attention.
Great. No ranged weaponry, unless one counted the severed Vehicon arm from the Nemesis. Brawl did not, since all the energon had leaked out of that arm a while ago. Without energon, the attached blaster was useless, and Brawl did not have the right connectors to clip such a small weapon into his own fuel lines.
The camera still sat on the fence, as unaffected as ever.
Though Brawl could not shoot it down, there were other ways to disable it. He transformed and picked up a rock. After a quick trajectory calculation, he hurled it at the camera. The rock struck exactly on target, spinning the camera head around before it snapped clean off the fence.
There. Now, no one would see him cross the border.
Returning to tank mode, Brawl bulldozed through the fence and drove on to Mexico.
Lake Llanquihue, Los Lagos, Chile.
Blast Off circled the area twice before he was satisfied that no humans were around. He made one last arc over the volcanic peaks and swept down toward the center of the lake. The energon signal magnified as they approached.
"If you get stuck down there, I will not fish you out. I've had enough of water," Blast Off warned.
"Yes, yes. I heard you the first three times." Starscream crouched in front of the cargo bay door. The disk of the Apex Armor was ready in his hand. "Let me out already."
The door opened with a rush of air. Starscream leapt out in an elegant swan dive, activating the Apex Armor as he fell. By the time he hit the surface of the lake, he was solidly encased in the protective bubble of the armor. He sank like a rock, recalibrating proximity sensors and optical frequency bands to compensate for the pressure and darkness at the bottom of the lake.
The energon signal was strong and steady just beneath his feet. Glad for the strength boost of the Apex Armor as well as its environmental seals, Starscream dug his claws into the lake floor. Unearthing the signal did not take long. When the hole grew half as deep as Starscream's height, a pleasant blue glow flooded the water.
"Aha! Crystallized energon," Starscream transmitted over a short-range channel. The stable crystal form was not as bright or volatile as refined energon. It was not directly consumable either. If they brought it back to the Harbinger, Starscream could feed it through the energon purification system he had cobbled together to produce drinkable fuel.
"Crystal," Blast Off echoed, sounding disappointed—either by the raw nature of this energon or the fact that the signal had not led to a Combaticon.
Well, too bad. Starscream's scanner was specifically calibrated for tracking energon, not Cybertronian life. The two were often found in close proximity, especially if a mech was injured, but not always.
The energon crystal was almost as tall as Starscream himself and not much wider. If he had not been wearing the Apex Armor, carrying the crystal would have posed a challenge. He hauled the crystal into the open and rooted around in the bedrock for any loose splinters. A handful of shards had broken off during the excavation. Starscream gathered as many of these as he could carry in his hands, since subspace was inaccessible without opening up the Apex Armor.
"Done. I'm heading to the shore," Starscream transmitted. He balanced the energon crystal over one shoulder and began walking uphill.
Blast Off sent a wordless ping of acknowledgement.
Once Starscream reached the beach, he set down the raw energon pieces and deactivated the Apex Armor, letting the water run off both. The Apex Armor went back into subspace where it belonged. The smaller energon shards were similarly easy to store, but the large crystal was too big for his subspace compartment to hold.
Blast Off landed next to him with a roar of engines, transforming. He picked up the energon crystal that was as big as Starscream, weighing it in his hands.
"Crystal indeed. This had better not explode while flying," he said, slanting a suspicious look at Starscream.
Starscream shrugged. "That depends entirely on your flying skills."
"Hmph." Blast Off transformed back to alt-mode, unfolding around the energon crystal. When he finished, the crystal sat in the pilot's seat with two safety straps wrapped around it. Inertial dampeners hummed to life.
Starscream climbed aboard. Moving inside the cargo bay felt as though he were wading across the ocean floor all over again. The inertial dampeners dragged at any sudden movement, giving the whole experience a surreal, slow-motion quality. Blast Off must have used a much higher setting than before.
"You know, raw energon is less volatile than refined cubes," Starscream pointed out.
Judging by the sudden decrease in the inertial dampening field, Blast Off had not known this. Starscream chuckled to himself. He settled against the wall, extending his energon scanner as they launched into the sky once again.
Chiapas, Mexico.
Blue and red flashed in Swindle's rearview mirror. Local law enforcement was trying to get his attention with lights and sirens. How quaint. Did they not realize that he had noticed them following him ever since the Guatemalan border? They had been broadcasting updates along police-only radio frequencies the whole time, practically shouting their identity for all the world to hear. Plus, lights or no lights, that striking blue and white paint was impossible to miss amid the somber monochrome of the usual traffic.
Swindle coasted over to the side of the road, activating holographic driver number eighteen—the expensive looking one with slick black hair, twelve gold teeth, and a three-piece suit in his signature beige and purple color scheme. The original model had sported a dull black suit and only one gold tooth, but Swindle had taken the liberty of upgrading some features to better represent himself.
The doors of the squad car opened up, and two officers stepped out. They looked on the younger side, so Swindle adjusted the facial features of his holographic driver to imply a similar age. Experience suggested that humans felt the most comfortable around those they deemed as having a similar expiration date.
A knuckle knocked on Swindle's window.
"You in there, open up!"
Obligingly, Swindle rolled down the window and bared all of his shiny teeth. "Good afternoon, officers."
The shorter of the two did a double-take. "Is that an oil drum?"
"Jet fuel, actually," Swindle said, waving at the two steel canisters in his passenger seat. Ever since his subspace compartments had run out of room, he had been forced to carry an increasing number of objects on his seats. This was an inconvenient necessity, and hopefully one that would be dealt with soon. "Don't worry, it's empty. Been driving on fumes for the last ten hours—no rest for the weary, you know? I'm overdue to get a refill."
Judging by the expression on the short officer's face, this was not very reassuring.
"Enough about that. How can I help you fine officers today? I'm sure that I followed your speed limit and traffic signs."
"Mister, you cannot have a cannon attached to your vehicle," the taller officer said. "This is illegal possession of heavy artillery, and it's scaring the neighbors."
The holographic driver rotated to glance at the cannon. It looked fine to Swindle. It was powered down and everything.
Previous law enforcement squads had not taken any issue with Swindle's cannon. He had passed the Guatemalan border into Mexico just recently, though. If this country had different policies than the previous one, then Swindle might have a small problem. The junction between North and South America contained so many countries arrayed within a short distance that Swindle had not fully read up on the laws of each one. Triangulating Brawl's position based on a handful of internet sightings had been a much higher priority than obeying every last one of the humans' ridiculously extensive laws. Thus far, following the speed limit had been enough to avoid unwanted attention.
"Scaring the neighbors? How terribly unfortunate. We can't have that, now can we?" Swindle turned an easy smile toward the tall officer. "Well then, what do you suppose I should do about it?"
"I'm going to need your papers."
"Papers? Of course. Just a moment." This could be a problem. While Swindle had plenty of false identification credentials for his many holographic drivers, he had not bothered to hack any government databases to register himself as a legitimately owned vehicle. Being impounded as an unregistered car would be highly inconvenient.
Perhaps the simplest solution was best. Swindle materialized a wad of cash in the holographic driver's pocket. He made a show of pulling out the money and flipping through it.
"How much do you want?" Swindle asked, fanning out the bills like a hand of cards.
The tall officer's eyes widened. He had the startled look of a mech—or a man—inevitably losing the battle against his conscience. Swindle extended a hand with the holographic cash, waving it in front of the tall officer. Wet eyes tracked its motion. Fleshy fingers reached out, hesitant but eager.
From the side, a handcuff snapped around Swindle's wrist with a metallic clink. The short officer pushed his partner out of the way, leaning in to scowl at the holographic driver.
"Attempting to bribe law enforcement is illegal," the short officer snapped.
"Hehehe, think of it as more of a toll payment, not a br..." The holographic driver paused mid-word, freezing in place down to the last strand of hair.
One of the automated scripts Swindle had set up to monitor the internet seized his attention. Partial image match. A shaky photo of Brawl's alt-mode had just been posted on social media by someone with an IP address in the northern Mexico area. It was quite some distance from the previous sighting in Texas, but three days had passed since that last image of Brawl. At typical traffic speeds, Brawl could easily cover a thousand kilometers a day. Swindle made over twice that distance these days, though he was pushing himself to drive nonstop in an effort to reach Brawl before the Decepticons did.
Brawl's general southward trajectory was promising, although the frequency of sightings left much to be desired. If Swindle had been singled out just for carrying a cannon in the back, it would be impossible for law enforcement not to notice a battle tank driving through town. Brawl's passage would require a great deal of damage control.
The holographic driver came back to life. "While I'd love to stay and chat, I'm on a tight schedule. Better luck next time, officers."
A small electric shock zapped across the holographic driver, passing through the metal handcuff and into the short officer. He gasped and tipped over, muscles seizing from the shock.
The holographic driver flickered from hard-light to soft-light. This change was undetectable to the human eye, but the handcuff fell through the suddenly incorporeal arm to clatter on the ground.
"Well? You got a problem with these papers?" Swindle offered the holographic cash again, reveling in the way organic eyes tracked it. Desire and principle warred within that gaze, so very delicately balanced. It made Swindle feel warm and fuzzy inside, seeing evidence that even among upright humans, greed still reigned supreme.
"I, uh." The tall officer glanced at his partner lying on the ground, still spasming from residual damage to the nervous system. The smoke rising from him was probably a bad sign. "No. No problem at all." He snatched the pretend money and backed away, clutching the wad to his chest. "You can go. Er. Have a nice day?"
"Wise choice. Good day to you too, officer."
With those words of farewell, Swindle peeled down the block at exactly the speed limit, leaving a horrified human to watch as his newfound earnings disintegrated into thin air.
Caribbean Sea.
The cargo ship had onboard internet access. It was both a relief and a burden.
If not for the internet, Onslaught could have lived happily in blissful ignorance of his team's complete and utter failure at stealth.
Vortex mauling a boat had been the first Combaticon-related image that Onslaught found, but not the first image that the humans had taken. There were sightings of a rogue tank in North America spanning the past three weeks, tracing a clear southward trajectory from the United States to Mexico if one connected the locations. Once Onslaught happened across the first photo of Brawl's alt-mode, a general image search using the first one as a reference returned dozens of results. Brawl featured on forums, social media sites, blogs, chat logs, news articles, videos—anywhere and everywhere a human might post something unexpected.
Onslaught painstakingly edited the location metadata on each post, swapping the most obvious photos with stock images of other generic tanks. If he could find Brawl simply by searching the internet, then others would as well.
After Onslaught cleaned up the tank sightings, he looked for signs of the others. News reports in the United States were still buzzing over a sequence of three missing boats, one of which had been a Coast Guard vessel under military employment.
Somewhere inside Onslaught's alt-mode, a servo twitched.
"Vortex."
"Eh?" The background chatter of Vortex aggravating a human on some automobile enthusiast forum paused. Vortex inched closer as quickly as a helicopter could manage while standing on landing gear. "What is it?"
"Stop bullying the humans and clean up your mess." Onslaught forwarded him a compressed summary of all the relevant Bermuda Triangle news articles in the last month, plus three new instances of the photo of Vortex tearing into the fishing boat. That photo seemed particularly hard to erase from certain conspiracy websites, no matter how thoroughly Onslaught tried to scrub it.
"Why, boss, I'm not bullying anyone. Simply showing them the limitations of their little worldviews. Such fragile egos they have..."
"Get to work."
"Aw, come on. This one wasn't even me," Vortex protested, sending back one of the older news reports. It was a passenger ferry that had gone missing three days before the Combaticons were revived on Earth.
"The timing implicates you. Handle it."
"Timing? That's all? You should be glad I didn't turn up like this." Vortex sent over a link to an unmarked website, one of the many not indexed by the common search engines.
The link opened a page offering R$50,000 for the live capture of one Salmon Winters. A smaller note priced the dead body at R$20,000. Below that listing was a picture of a human climbing out of a beige Jeep. The human's color scheme was suspiciously familiar, all purples and yellows that matched the Jeep's colors exactly. When Onslaught zoomed in on where the human's hand touched the door, it became apparent that the hand was not so much on the door as inside it; the last two fingers had slipped through solid metal as though immaterial.
Swindle and his fancy holo-projector. Those holograms were nowhere near sophisticated enough to appear to Cybertronian optics as anything but a projection. However, human senses were limited enough that they just might be fooled by a bit of hard-light trickery.
Getting a mob hit placed on one's head, holographic or otherwise, was the exact opposite of staying low. Was Onslaught's entire team incapable of the most basic form of disguise? His engine turned over with an unhappy grumble before he forced it quiet. Frustration was no excuse to alarm the humans aboard this ship about any unusual presences.
"Focus on your own problems," Onslaught said. Swindle would answer for his carelessness in due time, but they needed to find him first.
Vortex grumbled, but he started editing the photos of himself. In the new version, the tentacles of a giant squid were tearing apart the fishing boat. Vortex had taken the liberty of adding a few extra texture maps and enhancing the lighting to more dramatically present the giant squid.
"Satisfied, boss?"
The whole picture looked... slimy. Very organic. Disturbingly so. Onslaught said as much.
"Of course! That's the whole point of—" Vortex fell quiet, emitting a series of radar pulses. His anti-gravity module came online with a soft thrum, and his rotor pitch adjusted for takeoff.
"Contact above," Vortex said over an extremely short-range channel.
Onslaught activated his targeting suite and swept out a scan of his own. One vessel, transport sized, approaching fast.
"Confirmed."
His missile launcher adjusted to target the unidentified blip on scanners. Turret mechanisms shifted and clicked minutely as he matched coordinates, linear velocity, acceleration gradients. Nothing in the approaching vessel's trajectory indicated that the approaching vessel had noticed their presence, but that could all change in an instant. Onslaught remained ready to fire at a moment's notice.
The vessel flew overhead at Mach 3, thundering far above the clouds as it zoomed past them. Two kilometers away, it abruptly slowed and reversed course.
A comm signal—several kilometers in range, loosely encrypted, easily intercepted by anyone in the Caribbean area with working comm transceivers—chirped familiar identity codes.
"Commander, do you copy?" Blast Off transmitted. He slowed to a circular holding pattern above the ship, remaining above the clouds to minimize visibility. The roar of his engines was still clearly audible from sea level.
"You're alive!" Vortex sent back, delighted.
"Loud and clear," Onslaught replied, using a much more localized channel. His weapons systems deactivated, folding back into the usual idle state. To Vortex, he said, "Give me a lift."
"Sure thing." Vortex ejected a grappling hook.
Onslaught partly transformed his armor to lock it in place. When Vortex took off, the grappling hook dragged Onslaught along below. His anti-gravity module reduced his weight to a tenth of its normal value, easing Vortex's ascent. Still in truck mode, he swung back and forth as the cargo ship below shrank into a small dot.
Once they breached the stratocumulus clouds, Onslaught transformed, grasping Vortex's hook with one hand while he searched for Blast Off.
The dark triangle of a shuttle alt-mode blotted out the sky above them, streaking by much faster than Vortex's top speeds. Upon spotting them, Blast Off flew down and slowed. He entered an anti-grav-assisted hover just long enough for Onslaught and Vortex to hop aboard.
When the cargo bay door slid shut, Onslaught came face-to-face with an intruder.
"Starscream. How unexpected."
"Onslaught and Vortex. Glad to see that you survived the Nemesis." Starscream looked them up and down, expressive faceplates contorting at the sight of the mesh patch on Onslaught's leg. "More or less."
"No thanks to you. The plan would have gone perfectly, had you not revived us defective."
"Eh? I don't know what you mean. Did something happen up there?" Starscream frowned. "You never returned or sent word of the outcome. Even Blast Off didn't know how it ended. I thought Megatron had captured you."
Onslaught relayed how they had invaded the Nemesis and outwitted Decepticon forces at every turn—right up until they combined, and Bruticus bowed to Megatron rather than smashing him into scrap metal.
"Bruticus did WHAT?" Starscream's limbs and wings shot out in all directions, the very picture of shock. "This—this is a complete disaster!"
"You knew nothing of this?"
"Of course not! Do you think I would sabotage my own plan to take down Megatron? Unthinkable." Starscream had the look of a hunted mech. He paced back and forth between the small confines of the cargo bay, clawing at the air with jerky motions. "It must be Shockwave's doing. He kept your sparks online for experiments, after all. Before sending you off on the Harbinger, he must have created some kind of loyalty program, some failsafe to keep you from turning on him when you reactivated."
Onslaught stared Starscream down, but he saw no evidence of a hidden agenda. There was only surprise and indignation.
In the background, Blast Off pinged a wordless query. While Onslaught and Starscream spoke, Blast Off had continued flying in circles over the cargo ship. Now, he wanted new coordinates to target.
"The Harbinger, of course," Starscream said. His presumptuousness rankled.
"No." Onslaught was in charge here, not Starscream. The first priority was to find his missing comrades. "We will continue this discussion later."
Onslaught stormed off to the cockpit, leaving Starscream and Vortex in the cargo bay. His preferred pilot seat was already occupied by a large energon crystal, but the co-pilot seat had almost as informative a view of Blast Off's front windows and instrument displays.
"Set course for Mexico. Brawl was last spotted in the Durango region," Onslaught ordered, transmitting the geographical coordinates of the most recent photo that he had found on the internet.
Blast Off turned toward the new heading without question. After too much time spent solo with Vortex, Blast Off's cool professionalism was a welcome relief. Equally welcome were the powerful thrum of flight engines and the sturdiness of Cybertronian alloys underfoot. Blast Off's hull felt infinitely more reliable than the flimsiness of human-made aluminum or steel boats.
For the first time in weeks, Onslaught permitted himself to truly relax. Three Combaticons were found, and the other two would be gathered shortly. Things were finally going well.
