Those that stand without falling are remembered;
Those that stand to be crushed are not.
Those that fall with knowledge at their side are forgotten,
But their legacy is never truly lost.
An assistant scuttled into the room, dropping into a deep bow before Sharpspike's pedes.
"O mighty Sharpspike, ruler of this unparalleled arena—"
"What." The mech attached to the pedes turned to face his groveling subordinate.
"I found this security feed in the recycling unit." The assistant handed over a datastick with shaking claws. "Blasphemy, it is! They dared act against your benevolence, defy the sacred rules of your noble Word—"
"Busy. Get out."
"Ah, but this is important," the assistant insisted. "My pitiful speech cannot do such ill tidings justice; these travesties are worthy of witness by your hallowed optics alone."
"This had better be worth my time." Sharpspike snatched the datastick from the assistant's reverent servos and tossed it onto the terminal. Automatic input jacks snaked around the datastick, drawing it into a high-speed data transfer port. Immediately, the terminal sprung to life.
A miniature hologram of the eastern upper-level gate appeared. Two guards conversed in inaudible tones. The conversation escalated to an argument within moments, which ended with the brown mech shattering the other's optics with a well-timed punch. The grey guard transformed into a tank and drove into the brown mech, attempting to knock him over. The brown guard, in an impressive display of flexibility, regained his balance and flipped the grey one into the door. The control panel shattered under the force of the impact.
The door slowly ground open, and both mechs froze in alarm. Forgetting their argument, the guards rushed to the door and attempted to drag it back into place. However, the massive metal slab remained stuck open. Their attempts to prod the broken control panel back into functionality found just as little success. Another short argument ensued. After flailing at each other with almost comical panic, the two guards dropped all efforts to close the door and dashed in opposite directions.
"Behold! Deserters, who dared disobey your orders. Skip forward two joors, and you will see the product of this gross negligence." The assistant pressed the fast-forward setting. Hologram frames blurred past, skimming over two long joors of inactivity where neither guard returned to their post. Then, a blur of motion passed the door.
Sharpspike jabbed the pause button. His claw left a nasty dent in the console keypad.
The distinctive red-and-black flight-frame of the rising arena star, Blueservo, filled the screen. The vibro-blade on his blue servo halted in midair, its form a blur of silver too fast for the camera's frame rate to resolve. A deep green flash at the edge of the camera meant that the red mech had not escaped alone.
"Those incompetents. No member of the Arena may leave the premises without my approval." Sharpspike's claws slashed through the red mech's holographic helm, closing around the datastick with unnecessary force. "Repair the doors."
The assistant barely managed to catch the datastick flying at his head. "Already taken care of, magnificent Sharpspike."
"Have those guards report here. My business with them is finished." Sharpspike drew a large mace from subspace. With a dismissive shove to the assistant's protruding shoulder pauldron, he turned away.
The assistant turned his stumble into a deep bow. "It shall be done, oh wise and glorious Sh—"
"And fix your vocal processors," Sharpspike snapped, raising his mace.
The assistant scurried away, and not a moment too soon. In his place, the wall acquired a new mace-shaped impression.
The red mech recognized the lone guard outside Chopper's office. He was an old but well-equipped cargo hauler, one who had been working under Chopper even longer than the red mech. Due to his competence and career experience, Chopper had promoted him to a leadership position among the various guards of the trading business. The guard greeted the two fliers with a small nod, and he grinned at the green medic's friendly wave.
"If it isn't the Boss's favorite repair-mech." The hauler turned to the red mech. "And look here: our old scrap supplier, come crawling back." The hauler took in the red mech's brighter paint and the red glow seeping through his dark visor. After a tense stare-off, the hauler leaned close and lowered his voice conspiratorially. "Blueservo, is it now? Saw one of your fights the other orn. Looks like your new job pays well. Better than this one. Think you could put in a good word for me?"
The red mech drew back, tensing. "No one leaves a boss's employ. You know that."
"You two did, and here you are. Shiny. Well-fueled." The hauler's voice held an odd note: either hope or jealousy. He leaned close. "Look, I heard the Boss talking to your medic friend. You go in there, you're a dead mech. You know this, but here you are. I figure you learned something good in the arena, something Chopper doesn't know. I want in."
The red mech wished that he shared this guard's confidence. As far as he was concerned, this whole trip had been a bad idea from the start. However, if the arena had taught him anything, it was that he could not afford to admit weakness before a more heavily armed opponent. One of Chopper's higher-ranking employees was offering his services; perhaps, with this in mind, the red mech could set his ambitions higher than merely surviving another orn.
"Help me, and I'll see that you get your energon." The red mech set his vocalizer to the lowest volume and whispered a hasty sketch of a plan.
The hauler nodded, turned around, and coshed the green medic over the helm.
Chopper was shiny enough to resemble the liquid gleam of mercury. Standing before him once more, the red mech felt little more consequential than the scrap he had once scavenged for Chopper. This impression was, as the red mech understood, the very image that Chopper aimed to inspire in his visitors.
"I see one flier, yet I asked for two. Where is my assistant? Green with yellow stripes, blue optics—you know the one."
The red mech twitched. "Doesn't matter. I'm here. What do you want?"
"Still insolent as ever, I see." Chopper pressed a button on his desk, and a light on the attached console blinked. "Guard! Teach this nuisance some respect."
Time passed. No guard appeared. The red mech watched the irritation in Chopper's optics grow. He took a cautious step back, recognizing the faint hum of a rotary stealth-frame's battle system activation. The last confrontation with Chopper had ended in a lucky rescue, but he could not expect such intervention this time.
"So... you have conspired with my guard."
Silver flashed, and the red mech was on the floor. Pain cut through the side of his helm. Error alerts flashed in his vision: 'Unsafe flight parameters. Abort mission.' The mech shook his helm—he was on the ground, not flying. The alerts made no sense. The world spun, visual and sensory input in sudden disagreement. Chopper stared down at him.
"Let me guess. You think, just because you bribed one guard, you could pose a serious threat." Chopper fanned his rotors. "To me, of all mechs. Me."
The red mech tried to stand again, but the blow had knocked his internal accelerometers out of calibration. Automatic stabilizer protocols conflicted, unable to determine which direction was down. He kicked in Chopper's general direction, but his pede only hit air. Before he could scramble away, Chopper hauled him up by a wing. He crashed helm-first through something that collapsed under his weight, scattering broken glass and tiny components everywhere.
"Argh, do try to land somewhere inexpensive. Do you know how hard it is to find a good computer terminal down here? No, I don't suppose the likes of you would understand. That customer better pay double for property damages." Chopper walked in a circle around the broken console and its marginally less broken occupant.
The red mech glanced at the door through a cracked visor, calculating his chances of survival if he activated jets and fled. Now would be a good time for backup, but the hauler's assistance was tentative at best; if Chopper gave the guard a direct order, the red mech would lose his only ally. Somehow, the mech had to survive Chopper's wrath on his own power.
"What do you have? A past that no one cares about, a pitiful existence, and parts worth more on the market than your spark." Chopper's rotors whirled in amusement. He reached back and detached a rotor-sword, testing the edge with a silver-and-black digit. "Much more, now that you've squeezed a bit of fame from that hack Sharpspike."
Electrical sparks arced between the live wires in the broken console. Chopper was right—the red mech had his past. Right now, that past told him that Chopper's secondary exo-plating lacked the electrical insulation of the primary armor. Old warframes, particularly the rotary models, were only designed with alt-mode insulation requirements; the primary mode was riddled with gaps where flexible proto-plating intersected the rigid alt-mode outer segments. Chopper's hands would provide a direct conductive path to his inner circuitry.
The red mech dug claws into the broken console, tearing the main power relay from its bundle. It popped loose, but only a tiny bit. No matter how he tugged, the cable refused to emerge more than the length of the mech's shortest digit. The severed end flashed in his grasp, searing angry black lines into the blue paint of his right servo.
Chopper approached lazily, still spouting some nonsense about his own superiority. The rotor-sword was a silver blur, spinning too quickly for the red mech's optics to resolve the motion.
The live wire was too short to reach Chopper. The red mech only had one chance. He decoupled the sensor net input in his left arm, leaned back, and stabbed the live wire into his shoulder joint—fortunately, his own tetrajet model was better insulated than rotaries of the same time period. A faint tingle of harmless electricity spread over his shoulder.
The sword flashed down in a wave of silver, and the red mech caught it—halfway through his left forearm. The circuit closed. Lightning arced from the live console wire. It zipped through the arm, across the sword, and into Chopper's subsystems. The rotary spasmed from the shock as every motor and servo misfired at once.
The red mech's left arm overheated and began to melt. The paint around the stuck sword smoked away, but the sensor block held; the arm itself felt numb. Chopper convulsed in temporary paralysis. The red mech's balance protocols may have been damaged, but his vision worked just fine. Chopper's silver plating shone like one of those targets from the shooting range: just one more obstacle to remove.
The red mech leapt toward the glittering blur, activated the vibroblade in his right servo, and stabbed Chopper through the chest. Metal snapped, sending a painful jolt up the red mech's arm. Chopper's warframe-grade armor was made of exactly the same material as his own weapon.
"You—y... you dare..." Chopper's optics flared pure white. "You worthless scrap..."
Chopper toppled over, breaking the circuit. Half of the red mech's vibroblade stuck through his chest plating and into the glow of the spark chamber. The rotor-sword clattered to the floor between them.
"You have no idea what you've done," Chopper hissed, his usual drawl now ragged with static. He clawed at the blade impaling his torso, but fried motor circuits denied him the strength to pull it out. Though only half the length of the red mech's servo, the broken vibroblade shard was seated deeply enough to bisect Chopper's spark chamber and scrape against the floor beyond. Damaged relays spewed a shower of sparks, and Chopper collapsed to the ground again. "Why do you think Iacon has so few Empties?"
"Few? Wrong," the red mech snarled. His wings flared, highlighted in a razor-sharp contrast by the flickers of light from the broken console. "There are thousands—"
"Because of mechs like me," Chopper spat, somehow managing to retain an infinitely condescending tone even while his spark flickered and writhed around the blade fragment. "Mechs who took it upon themselves to clean up the rusted scraps of the underground, for the benefit of Cybertron."
"You mean your own benefit," the red mech retorted, watching as the strength left his enemy's frame. His right arm sparked where the blade had split from its retractable housing. The left was a fused lump of metal, but at least he could not feel it. Using his good right claws, he grabbed the left arm by the elbow and tore it off at the joint. Once, the red mech would have balked at willingly removing a part of himself. Now, he had something better. Vengeance. The arm fell to the ground besides the defeated enemy.
"You lived in luxury, Chopper. We offlined from energon deprivation. This orn, your greed is your undoing."
The silver mech's spark flared one last time, glowing tendrils desperately lashing around the blade in a final, futile effort to survive. Their efforts were for naught; the single point of icy light finally vanished, crushed by the oppressive darkness.
The office door slid open, discharging the green medic and the door guard. The former wore a surprisingly shocked expression, as well as a dented helm. The latter looked nonchalant at the sight of his deactivated employer. The hauler crossed his arms and leaned back against the door, sharing a nod with the victorious red mech. "Pay me and I'm your guard, Boss."
"Impossible," the green medic cried, rushing towards the still frame. Despite all that Chopper had done during his time online, the medic could not stop from falling to his knees beside the offline frame. "Chopper can't die... he's supposed to be unbeatable..."
The green medic knelt by the silver frame, seemingly unable to grasp the fact that the crime lord had deserved such a terrible fate as deactivation. The red mech almost understood. Ethical subroutines had once plagued his processor, too, insisting that no mech, no matter how vile, should ever be terminated. Fortunately, he had deleted those flawed code snippets long ago. In time, the medic would come to understand that no spark was more valuable than one's own. The red mech looked on, unreadable red optics smoldering.
"It's over," the green medic eventually whispered, armor plates clattering as he stood. Wings trembled and drooped in a pitiful display, and a haunted glow tainted his ordinarily brilliant blue optics. He reached out with one hesitant arm, almost—but not quite—touching the pristine silver frame of the crime lord who had employed his services for countless megavorns. "It's over."
Chopper's frame lay, sprawled across the ground, as silvery and polished in deactivation as it had been in life. His ordinarily proud features were relaxed, and his once-cruel optics were dark. If not for the broken shard of sharp metal embedded in his perfectly buffed chassis, breaking through layers of armor and wiring to pierce the crystalline spark-chamber beneath, Chopper could have been simply recharging.
"Er, Boss. What's next?" The door guard walked up beside the red mech. He prodded Chopper's lifeless frame with a pede. "Could make some decent energon from this."
"It's over," the green medic repeated, seemingly incapable of saying anything else. "It's finally over—"
"No," the red mech interrupted. His visor slid up, and crimson optics cast a harsh glare over the scrap at his pedes. It was just another set of expensive parts for the harvest: another job to be done. A circular saw module, knocked from Chopper's office wall during the fight, caught the red mech's gaze. He flexed the arm with the broken vibroblade attachment, sensing opportunity in the glow of freshly spilled energon. Chopper had controlled a fine office, fine guards and scrap harvesters, and a fine assistant. All of that would fall neatly into the red mech's servos, if only he had the initiative to reach forth and claim it.
"This... is just the beginning."
Far, far above, the stars shone ever on in their unseen glory. The red mech would not fly among them today, nor tomorrow, nor for a thousand thousand tomorrows. With Chopper gone, the mech had a business operation to command: not by strength, not through force of frame or armaments, but with the same long-dormant authority that a nameless red field medic had once bargained away for survival.
Units:
nanoklik—second
breem—minute
joor—hour
orn—day
vorn—year
This is not the end; there are still threads to be tied, pieces to be moved. A war approaches, and shadows vie for power. One red-and-white medic gains his circular saw, as well as an appreciation for electrical weapons...
~The Vs