What Makes No Difference Is No Difference (WMNDIND 21)
-0-Jasper, Nevada
It was silent as they stared at the wall which had been etched with details by The Magnificense. The black glyphs looked like they were carved by an artist. Prime had read them. They listed an enormous array of weapons both known and unknown to history. Solus Prime had made them all but for a handful that were unknown even to Optimus. Given the number of lunatic inventors on Cybertron at the end including the war criminal, Jhiaxus, it was a given that some of them were Decepticon weapons of mass destruction.
The Earth diagram was interesting. So were those of Mars and that of the newly discovered hitherto unknown Planet X where many of them were buried. Why they hadn't been discovered there yet indicated to Prime that the 'Con's focus was on Earth. That played in their favor. It meant they had the chance to retrieve them if they could.
"I need to talk to Prowl," Optimus said more to himself than anyone else.
"Do you think I should send for him or would the relay be sufficient?" Ratchet asked.
"No. It is too dangerous to send messages about this over relays or subspace," Prime said. "Please, Ratchet. Ask him to come here. We can discuss this and what we can do about it while he is here. He can update the news out there to us as well."
Ratchet nodded, then walked to the console nearby to write, encrypt and send the message through a mass of human and environmental relays that would reach Prowl in three joors time. He turned to Prime noting a strain in his posture. It was going to be frantic soon and maybe their anonymity to the human population would be a victim to the urgency of their situation as well.
-0-100 light years away
He took the data wafer, read it through, then turned to his second. "Hound, I have to meet with Optimus on world. You're in charge. I won't be there long."
Hound nodded, watching as Prowl walked to the door and beyond. Then he turned back to the task at hand, moving Teletraan I to the new installation in the side of a huge stone mountain nearby.
Prowl walked outside of the mess building after refueling with as much energon as he could hold. There were many ways to generate fuel for travel in transitional mode. Space was filled with energy so if you know how to tap into it and the Cybertronians did, you could travel an infinite distance relatively safely. However, it was always good to eat before you left. Nothing was worse than to arrive somewhere short of everything with an empty tank.
He walked to the tarmac, his peds sploshing through that orn's rainfall, then paused. He began to break down, shedding his trans scanned format as his body shifted until he was bent into an elongated mass of metal. With a moment to organize within that form, rockets ignited and he lifted off heading into space with ease and speed. By the time he was headed in the direction of Optimus Prime, Prowl was already acquiring the ice and debris that would disguise his presence as one of the dirty snowballs of space, a comet.
-0-Night time at Jasper
The kids grudgingly went home with June, promising to return the next morning. Saturdays, the bane of Ratchet's existence came awfully fast it seemed to him. He monitored the mechs in the field as they scoped out the location of the fifteen relics that were located here on Earth alone. Some of them as objects were known to Prime but others were just names with no information beyond that or new altogether.
Prime had gone to his quarters to contemplate the new information, taking The Magnificence with him for inspiration. It sat on a shelf in the room, a nondescript gold ball that was more precious and dangerous than just about anything known to exist. The others who were on base played cards or worked on their weapons. When Prowl arrived things would be moving so they took their downtime with gratitude.
-0-On his way
Prowl hit the leading edge of the Oort Cloud blasting his way through the bluster and mess of the debris of creation for the faint star ahead. The transitional form was incredibly tough, maybe even tougher than root mode. Bound tightly, they were elongated forms dense enough to be weapons if applied thus.
Optimus Prime himself had done so on more than one occasion during the active war, blasting Decepticons to bits with the speed and force of his body slamming into a fortified area.
Now he was plowing onward, just another cometary force finding its way to the sun, drawn in on a fixed orbit to that fiery furnace. That this comet could divert and travel freely made a huge difference. He plowed onward heading toward the secret base of his commanding officer hidden in a discarded missile silo in the wild lands of some place called Nevada.
-0-Early morning
Ratchet responded to the sound of an alert message that brought him to his station whenever something entered the solar system that might be intriguing or worse. He arose as gently as he could, slipping off the wide bed that served both him and Ironhide. Halfway to the door, Ironhide spoke to him. "What's happening, Ratchet?"
"We have incoming. It could be Prowl or maybe just a comet. I've tracked the comets. We won't have one on this trajectory until the end of the month."
Ironhide rose, then the two walked out heading for the control station nearby. Pulling up his sensor grid laid out on any number of human relays, they saw a shape rushing through space slipping past Jupiter almost too fast to follow. Its long icy trail covered what appeared to both to be the familiar configuration of an Autobot transitional form. "Could you awaken Prime? I will track this for him."
Ironhide nodded, then walked away heading into the mountain to get Prime and a team together. They would have to get this protoform before the enemy did.
-0-On the way
His internal configurations lay in dormancy as he traversed the mass of space that was required to reach Earth. A timer signaled him to awaken so he did, swimming to sentience through layers of internal barriers and energy savers that protected his body and mind from the passage of time. He was alert when he hit the roiling boiling solar well of the star system that beckoned him, the star system where their great Prime was fighting Megatron.
He screamed in passing Uranus, the first planet he had encountered on his journey, then Neptune. His internal screens showed the planets as he flashed past, blurs of light and shape in the darkness. All was fuzzy if he looked at it closely and nearby but when in transit in space, the stars seemed fixed in the sky from distance and physics.
A huge gas giant loomed with many moons, then a ringed planet that only revealed their circular presence after he made a course change and could see them. He liked ringed planets. They often obscured transmissions to the benefit of those who lived there. He passed them heading into the long expanse of real danger toward the fourth planet from the sun, one where he could detect energy signatures of Decepticon ships. He dampened his signal and waited, the long crossing nerve wracking as he continued onward.
-0-At Jasper
Optimus Prime watched the trajectory of the protoform transitional format of his second as he aimed himself around Mars, then headed onward toward Earth. They tracked him and he was on course to the touchdown spot where he would be landing. It was in the dry lands outside of Fresno in California, a sparsely populated area of farms and open vistas.
"What is his ETA?" Optimus asked.
"Forty minutes, Optimus," Ratchet replied.
Optimus nodded, then turned to Jazz, Ironhide and Springer. "We will get him. Be ready to go shortly."
The others nodded, then watched as Prime walked to a console nearby to track the trajectory himself.
-0-Prowl
He entered the free space past Mars though he didn't know the planet's name. It was a number on his work datapad, a huge device that could hold tens of thousands of systems down to the dust motes hanging in vacuum between planets. He thundered on, just another hapless comet making its suicide run past the star around which it endlessly traveled until the day it either burned up by proximity, crashed into a planet or zeroed straight into the fire of the sun itself. This one had a rational orbit and a long trail of debris. No one would notice if it fell into the atmosphere of the third planet to the sun.
Usually.
-0-At a camp in the middle of nowhere
They'd come to hunt for rocks, commune with the desert and chase insects and lizards. They were students from a nearby college who spent their free time specimen gathering in the desert. When they were ready to douse their campfire and retire into their tents, they were interrupted by the sight of a large object high up in the atmosphere thundering toward the ground about a mile away.
"Oh man. Do you know what meteorites go for on the open market if you can find a good one? That one is a motherfucker. It could put me through my Ph.D. program if we can find where it lands and grab the pieces," Shane Boone said as he watched the brilliant fire of a falling object get ever bigger.
The other two nodded, then ran for their jeep. Their rock pick and other gear was in the car so they motored forward over the rough tractless ground heading toward the place where they expected the meteorite to strike. They disappeared into the darkness almost immediately.
-0-Bridging to the outback of the beyond
They stepped through the bridge appearing in the desert wilds near Fresno, California. A windswept area with low bushes, hence the name of the city of Fresno itself, it was dark, empty and wild where the meteor was heading with all its speed and thunder. A sonic bomb rattled the area as the fire ball struck the ground, bounced three times, then plowed a rut three hundred feet long. It finally halted, a glowing mass in the middle of the thick darkness.
Jazz ran forward to pause at the edge of the furrow, grinning as the familiar shape of a winged mech began to appear. He stood up slowly as things continued to assert themselves into place. At last, a figure turned to Jazz, one the familiar grayish-brown of a mature protoform bearing the luminous blue optics of an Autobot.
"Well, it took you enough time," Jazz said with a chuckle.
"Where is this place?" Prowl asked as he walked forward out of the hole.
"Fresno. Now that you don't know any more than you did a moment ago, let's go before Megatron finds us," Jazz said. They both jogged toward the swirling light of the bridge, then with the others there stepped inside it one after the other. When they did, the light abruptly winked out and nothing but the imprint of that light was left on the optic nerves of the kids who had driven there hoping to find riches in magnetic space debris.
All they would find was a hole.
-0-TBC 3-17-16 edited 4-5-16 01-24-2021
Starfire201: I agree. Movie verse. :D
