A/N: Oh, IDW. Just when I think you can't get any better, you give us time travel, unrequited love, Megatron being the snarky straight man to the man-child Rodimus, and two of the best ships I've ever seen. Even if half of one's being useless about admitting it and the other half seems to be far too easily led.


Disclaimer: Nightraider, Dreadnought and Crossfire are my rather shell-shocked babies, all the other lost toys belong to TakaraTomy, Hasbro, IDW and Marvel.

Warning: Mess around with reproductive science, and there will be consequences. Not pretty consequences either – there's a fair amount of references to miscarriage and abortion.

Italics denote telepathy/recorded speech.


Crossfire: Part 4


Cybertron, City State of Polyhex, Darkmount Fortress...


Something was wrong.

The three orns that Nightraider's notes had indicated would be sufficient for the preliminary dose of reagent to stimulate the production of energy polyps within his spark had long since passed. The first two attempts had indeed produced an increased number of polyps, but upon extraction, the necessary CNA modifications had caused the casings of all the tiny nodules to disintegrate within their petri dishes.

Theorising that perhaps a condition within Soundwave's spark had enabled him to produce greater numbers of, or stronger, polyps, he had injected himself with a double dose of reagent and began again. At the end of this cycle, he had managed to produce four polyps strong enough to survive the CNA modification process, the subsequent reinsertion, and the secondary dose of reagent.

On his first attempt, at the end of the first lunar cycle, he had examined his spark chamber, and while the process had, by all indications, been successful and he had conceived, the minute energy capsule attached to his spark had only grown by a few micrometres.

Removing it at that stage would have only resulted in a termination, and so, unwilling to accept scientific defeat, he had chosen to continue carrying, and instead had increased the size of his reagent doses to compensate.

Two orns later, he quickly and painfully miscarried in the isolation of his laboratory, deactivating his vocaliser so as to mask his roars of pain.

It took him half an orn to summon up the energy to move off of the operating berth after the drones had removed the mess of energon and half-knitted together CNA strands from his chamber. The remains of the proto-spark were tipped into a preservation tube without a shred of emotion, and observed closely while he recuperated.

Three orns after that, he made his next attempt.


Ignoring one of his increasingly regular bouts of dizziness, Shockwave settled into his chair and scrolled through the reams of notes. Nothing about this situation made sense. He had followed his colleague's decrypted instructions, right down to the glyph, and yet he continued to spawn nothing but little pools of dead CNA, all of which had been dissected and meticulously studied.

Perhaps he was missing something. The decryption program, after all, could only decrypt what was actually present within the files. If there was an extra step or process he had omitted through lack of information, it would not be unreasonable to conclude that was what was causing the miscarriages.

But while Nightraider had been careful to conceal her research, he knew her investigation and recording methods too well. She tended to keep all of her data together so it could be easily traced, and what could not be easily traced was, as he had seen, extremely well encrypted.

No, it would not be like her to deliberately omit details from her notes.

Clearly, he would need to find his own workaround for this problem.

Opening his chamber, he studied his flickering lavender spark, and the tiny silver polyp attached to the base like an energon leech.

He had perfected the budding and extraction process, but when it came to the carrying, the proto-spark always disintegrated within two lunar cycles of implantation. The only logical explanation was that his modifications to the CNA were too extreme, too different to the CNA of the parent spark. But he had already attempted less extreme modifications, and four proto-sparks had been absorbed into his spark within an orn of implantation.

Unless he could come up with another method of obtaining the CNA he needed, the entire project would simply be a waste of resources.

The obvious answer, if he could not sufficiently manipulate his own CNA, would be to use the CNA of another. But the Well of All-Sparks had been dry for thousands of vorns, and requesting a donation from any of the remaining troops within Darkmount was frankly ridiculous.

Wait.

Donation.

Shockwave closed his spark chamber and sat back in his chair, tapping his fingers against his chestplates, his mind now racing.

If he could remember how, he would have cursed himself for forgetting.

Parts and plates for a Cybertronian's chassis or fuselage could be easily manufactured, and unlike organic beings, there was no risk of organ rejection or any need for immunosuppressant medication during or after surgery. If the spark was damaged however, an energy transfusion from a compatible spark-type was necessary to prevent spark failure. It was one of the few fundamental components of a Transformer that modern Cybertronian medicine could not adequately replicate.

In peacetime, the harvesting of required spark energy and the transfusion process had been simple, thanks to regular calls from the Iacon Medical Centre for donations of the most common and therefore most urgently needed spark-types.

In wartime, it had quickly become apparent to the Decepticon medical staff that keeping troops off the front lines due to the abundance or scarcity of their spark-type would not be viable, and so the Constructions had created the first Spark Bank within the walls of Darkmount. All Decepticon troops were required to have a portion of their spark extracted upon their initiation into the ranks. Those samples were medically nurtured and sustained within the Spark Bank, ready for the inevitable time when they would be needed to rejuvenate their progenitor spark.

The Spark Bank was located underneath the main medical bay, guarded with Omega-level security encryptions. Out of all the areas in Darkmount, it was the one section that was protected most heavily from power-cuts, Autobot raids, and Shockwave himself.

The purple gun-former's optic drifted over to the computer tower holding his colleague's decrypted notes.

He had come this far.

It would be illogical to terminate the project now.


A casual observer, watching through the window of Nightraider's office, would be forgiven in thinking that they were observing a bonded spark-pair receive information of a highly unwelcome kind, and that the medic in charge of breaking the news had been unable to keep her emotions in check.

The Femme CMO in question would have loved it if that were simply the case. Unfortunately...

Strika kept her optics fixed on the ceiling, and Obsidian twiddled his fingers together and wished he was somewhere else.

Nightraider simply clutched onto the screwdriver in her right hand and kept banging her left fist into the back of her cranium as she rested her forehead against the desk.

The Femme Commander was the first to tentatively speak up. "It is still early orns, perhaps you can..."

"Do you want to know what I'm doing right now Strika?" Nightraider raised her head off of her desk and poked the screwdriver in her commander's general direction.

Strika stared down the length of the screwdriver's shaft and glared at the tetra-jet. "Indulge me."

"I'm performing a little thing we in the medical profession like to refer to as 'percussive maintenance'. Do you want to know why I'm performing percussive maintenance at this precise moment in time?"

Obsidian bravely opened his mouth. He closed it as soon as the screwdriver was jabbed into his faceplates.

Nightraider's glare could have stripped paint. "You don't get to talk."

She snapped her gaze back to Strika's bulky frame and tried to stop her fingers from twitching.

"You see, I'm performing percussive maintenance right now because I have gone through all of my notes, all of my recordings and all of my onboard memory for the past five lunar cycles, and at no point whatsoever during any of your medical appointments did I ever say anything that even slightly resembled 'go ahead, spark-bond during the break between contraceptive shield cycles, you'll be absolutely fine'."

She rose out of her seat and loomed over the nervous –looking pair of generals. "Clearly, the only way I'm about to recall this information is if I concuss myself into remembering, because right now, all I'm remembering is me telling you, Strika, in no uncertain terms, that I CAN'T PERFORM ANOTHER TERMINATION IF YOU'RE STUPID ENOUGH TO TAKE THAT RISK AND YOU CONCEIVE!"

An extremely uncomfortable silence fell over the office at these words.

Obsidian finally broke it with a quick clearing of his intake ports.

"So... there is nothing that can be done to solve this issue?"

The red and black jet glared sharply at the Aerial Commander and exhaled.

"I'd suggest this..."

She straightened up, turned and removed a datapad from the shelf behind her, and threw it at Obsidian's head.

The assault chopper caught the pad between two fingers and cast an optic over the contents.

"Doctor Flatline's Guide to Sparkling Development?"

Nightraider sat back down and gave both generals a Look. "Congratulations, you're going to be creators."

Strika and Obsidian exchanged one look of pure, sparkfelt terror.

The tetra-jet closed her optics and buried her face in her hands.

The cream and pink tanker dragged her optics away from her bondmate to stare pleadingly at her femme compatriot. "Th-there must be a way. Some chemical or treatment only we could administer. Something you would not need to be present for. Or perhaps you could clear me for front line combat in Polyhex for the next cycle. A sparkling of this size could be missed if not specifically checked for in a medical exam..."

Nightraider's growl was slightly muffled by her hands. "My audials must have temporarily malfunctioned, because I definitely didn't just hear you suggest any kind of illegal method of abortion - most of which I will point out don't even work most of the time - and which would get all three of us court-marshalled and summarily executed.

"Look Strika... if there was a way to sort this out to yours and Obsidian's satisfaction which didn't involve a significant mortality risk, I'd be doing it. I wouldn't like it, but I'd be doing it. But, as it stands..." The Femme CMO raised her head, her optics tired but not without sympathy, "for the sake of this argument, there are two options. Both are terrifying. Your preferred option will end up with you greying out on my operating table as your spark ruptures and implodes, with your bondmate most likely following right behind you on a medical berth as his spark suffocates and flickers out. Taking the only other available option means that both of you, and your sparkling, will live."

The Femme Commander studied the datapad clutched in her bondmate's hands with barely-concealed fear. "Neither of us are adequately prepared to be creators."

"I don't think I've ever met any creators who were adequately prepared. Even the best creators have often just muddled through the best they can."

Obsidian finally spoke up, his optics full of unease. "A military base does not come anywhere close to being a suitable place to raise a sparkling."

"And yet it's been done before." Nightraider pushed herself away from the desk and stood up.

"Foundlings may not appear regularly, but they still turn up often enough to warrant the need for foster creators on base. You wouldn't be the only Decepticons here in the roles of guardians."

Strika's expression did something fast and complicated. "Esmeral and Deathsaurus."

Nightraider nodded, trying not to wince.

Obsidian stared down at the datapad, deliberately not meeting the CMO's optics. "Except... they chose to be foster creators. We have not even been given a fair choice as to whether or not we want to be creators."

"They chose to be foster creators because they can't be true creators, no matter how much they both wish for it. Even if Deathsaurus wasn't in the military post he's in now, the fact remains that Esmeral is sterile; there's nothing I can do about it, and I can see how much it kills her whenever she takes in a new foundling. So can you, Strika, you can't deny it."

Another painful silence fell over the cramped office.

The cream and pink femme finally stood up and carefully extracted the datapad from her sparkmate's deathgrip.

"...How far along am I?"

"Just under two lunar cycles, so almost halfway through."

Strika nodded.

"I will assume that from this point onwards, I am under strict medical supervision and off active front-line duty."

"Yup."

"I will also assume that during my examination, you reset my fuel intake moderation chip and fitted additional filters to my intake valves to prevent any kind of external toxins entering my energon lines and jeopardising the carrying process."

"Uh-huh."

"Furthermore, I will make the assumption that you were fully aware I had conceived before the examination and simply wanted an excuse to yell at us both before presenting us with a fait accompli."

Nightraider leaned back in her chair and folded her arms behind her head. "Pretty much, yeah."

Obsidian and Strika both glared at her.

Nightraider glowered right back. "And that is just creepy, stop it and get out of my office."

She flapped a hand at them as she turned her attention to her computer screen. "I'll alert Esmeral; go and see her and she'll get you sorted with the basic equipment. I'll see what Dreadnought's got lurking around in terms of parts for protoforms, and the pair of you need to be back in here same time next decacycle for scans and health checks."

The two most feared and respected generals in Cybertron's history shuffled quietly out of the office, looking for all the world like two elder fledglings leaving a Youth Sector Director's office after getting caught with stolen cy-gars.


"...Yo, Dreadnought."

The battlecruiser wriggled around enough to free his arm from the tangle of wires he was busy smothering with soldering paste.

"If you're alive, answer."

He tapped his comm. unit and rerouted the signal direct to his left audial. "'Raider! You sound both sober and annoyed."

"And you sound both smug and upside-down."

Dreadnought looked down, or possibly up, at the ceiling and grinned under his face-mask. "I can neither confirm nor deny the possibility that I'm disobeying the laws of gravity."

"And probably playing with a few laws of thermodynamics into the bargain. Just upright yourself and listen."

"I can solder and listen. Trypticon's neural wiring's at a delicate point and I can't risk leaving it." With that, he relit his propane torch and started heating the soldering paste to melting point.

In her office, Nightraider rolled her optics.

"Fine. Whatever. Look, do you have anything kicking round your workshop at the moment that could work as part of a protoform frame?"

The dull roar of the propane torch filled her audials for a few moments before Dreadnought responded. "Erm, potentially? I'd need to look- waaaaaait a breem!"

She heard the squeak of the propane canister being shut off.

"Is Strika sparked up!?"

"Do you have to be that crude?"

"Duh. Also, protoform? They're keeping it this time?"

Nightraider sighed. "Yes and yes."

A crow of delight echoed through the comm. link. "YES, called it! Contagion officially owes me 50 credits!"

An underwhelmed silence met the battlecruiser's audials as he righted his frame and winched himself down to the platform surrounding Trypticon's massive half-built cranium.

"You're somehow giving me a look of great derision through the medium of sound, aren't you?"

"Correct."

"But, but... 50 crediiiiits."

"Still not impressed."

"You're just unimpressed because you'd called spark-twins if it happened again."

"And Flatline's going to be even smugger than you are, since I now owe him 20 credits."

"Heh. Anyway, d'you know if they've got any preferences as to frame style?"

"Honestly? I think if Strika could bud and expel this sparkling right now, she'd be on my operating table before I could ask her what drugs she wants. Frame style isn't really something they've thought about, especially considering they were only in to confirm if she was actually carrying and then how fast she could... well, not be carrying."

"Ah. So it's one termination too many?"

"The phrase 'I did fragging tell you' was used at least once."

Dreadnought screwed his faceplates up into a sympathetic wince as he checked off the completed neural cables.

"Eeesh. Well then, might I suggest a teeny-tiny beastformer? Bipedal, black and purple as a colour scheme, little wiggly saurian tail... all I have to do is scale down Trypticon's blueprints and do a little scavenging work."

"...Are you seriously suggesting that we give the two most decorated Cybertronian generals in history a mini-city-former as the frame for their first creation?"

The battlecruiser cast his optic band up at the ceiling and waved his hand in a non-committal gesture. "Mmmm."

"I can't see it, but I'm assuming you're now staring at a corner of your lab and twiddling your fingers about."

"FYI, that's creepy. And... yes."

He sighed. "You're about to give me another glare of audible derision, aren't you?"

"Actually, no. I've heard of worse things. Saves them having to choose a name and frame, for starters. I'll run it past them and see what they think."

"Sweet. When d'you need the frame for?"

"You've got two lunar cycles to come up with something sturdy, sparkling-friendly and not installed with its own set of machine cannons."

"Awww, 'Raideeeeer!"

"Don't 'awww, 'Raideeeeer' me. I'm not having a repeat of the Heavyarms incident!"

Dreadnought performed the universal arm gesture for 'oh-for-the-love-of'.

"One time. That was one time!"

"And the repair team had to pick bullets out of two walls, the ceiling, four medical drones and Long Haul's aft for three orns straight, just because one sparkling sneezed and activated a built-in trigger for guns which I distinctly remember telling you at the time were a seriously dumb idea."

"OK, fine, no weaponry. Spoilsport."

An irritated "pffffht" resonated through the comm. link before Nightraider signed off.

Turning back to Trypticon's neural circuitry, Dreadnought shook his head and rolled his optics. "One little mistake and you hear about it for the rest of your life. Femmes. Medics. Medic femmes."

Silence.

"I'm kidding. She can annoy the slag out of me every orn, but I wouldn't trade her for all the high-grade on Cybertron."

More silence.

"Nah, not Glit either. Or that little Seeker femme trainee who came through during the second raid on Altihex... Lyzack, I think?"

A monitor pulsed quietly in the background.

"Fine, I wouldn't trade any of them. Well, 'cept maybe some bits of Shockwave's personality."

A pause.

"Dunno. S'pose for any bits that might mean he could feel for something or—"

His fingers clenched together briefly.

"Or someone."

Another pause.

"Look, you don't need to keep telling me. I know it's pointless even hoping, but... it's, it's what we do. You'll find that out once you're online."

Behind him, the centrifuge finished its cycle with a beep.

Dreadnought closed his optics and hung his head. A sick wave of longing and grief swirled around his fuel tanks.

"You don't get to choose who you love. You'll find that out as well."


Much as he would have preferred to use a software-based method of obtaining the security override, Shockwave was aware that the entire storage unit was kept on its own generator and computer system which he had no access to. The single door into the Spark Bank was accessible only via a single keypad recessed with the doorframe, so any standard decryption tech would stick out like the proverbial injured first digit.

However, according to the blueprints he had hidden in his private node on the DataNet, there was a small lighting component which illuminated the keypad from above. Small enough not to be noticed, large enough that one of the disposable pinhole cameras Overcast had engineered for the Leviathan's crew would fit discreetly to the front.


04:00 joors.

It was now the middle of the night-shift and the med-bay was deserted.

Glit was recharging, and Dreadnought had retrieved Nightraider from her office several joors prior for a drinking session at Maccadam's – apparently the theory was that the femme jet would control her high-grade consumption if she was around other mechs and femmes.

As the party consisted of Oil Slick, Conduit, Fracture, Heavy Load and Rollcage, Shockwave was not hopeful of any of them staying even remotely sober, though at least Diabla was reported to be stationed in Kalis and not invited to this particular gathering. The crew of the Leviathan had a pool running on when exactly the younger femme would successfully offline the older femme or vice versa.

Quietly passing from the main med-bay into the storage area, he glanced around for any security cameras within the room that he had not taken temporarily offline.

Nothing.

Unsurprising. The chemicals stored in here were not dangerous in themselves provided they were handled properly, and any lethal chemical compounds were vacuum-stored in the weapons vaults.

Just to be safe however...

As he entered the stairwell, Shockwave twisted his arm behind his bulky frame to activate a portable antenna rig attached to his back.

The hyper jammer activated with a beep, instantly shielding his chassis from any infrared and radar scanners. It would not work if he had the misfortune to encounter a regular security camera, but, as with the storage area, all of the regular cameras in this section had been deactivated for the duration. The feeds usually remained unmonitored even when they were functioning normally; there was little point trying to observe the medics entering and exiting the area, and having too many security protocols to override during a medical emergency could mean the difference between a patient remaining online and rejoining the Matrix.

In the worst case scenario, he could hack into any of the security recordings and delete his appearance, but it was untidy and something he preferred to avoid.

He knelt on the stairwell landing and quickly scanned the area for additional cameras.

Nothing.

And no alarms had been obviously triggered, so his assumption about the security protocols was proving to be correct so far.

Turning his cooling fans down to minimum, Shockwave slid quietly down the remaining stairs, carefully removing the pinhole camera from his subspace.

The Spark Bank door was titanium-framed and fitted with transparent aluminium panels. Industrial magnets lined the edge of the frame, while a red LED flickered in the shadow above the door, throwing a weak light onto the boxy alarm system below.

Just beyond the grey tinted partition, the Military Ops officer could see hundreds of rows of supercooled canisters, each containing their own little fragment of spark energy.

All of the sparks pulsed in one curious harmony and flickered in perfect, peaceful response to their neighbours' movements. Blue, silver, green, pink, yellow, purple; every colour in the spectrum shimmered within the bay and made the whole floor glow with all the tranquil brilliance of an aurora.

For one brief moment, Shockwave was thrown by the display before him.

He remembered this.

Or rather, he almost remembered it.

The peace.

The light.

No pain.

No war.

Then a face, two faces... no, many faces, all with blue optics.

Autobots?

Their faceplates were hopeful, cautious almost.

As if they were analysing him...

He exhaled sharply and shook his head, ignoring the sudden bolt of nausea in his tanks.

Newborn senses were never to be trusted.

He had learned that lesson well.

The pinhole camera slotted flawlessly into place above the keypad, the light fitting totally obscuring the edge of the device. Feedback from his remote computer link showed a perfect view of the keypad buttons.

Shockwave withdrew his hand and stood back. Now it was time to watch and wait.

And failing that, it would be time to engineer a military operation to suit his needs.


TBC