The human hadn't stopped shrieking since they returned to the Harbinger.
Starscream had not either, but that was excusable. Even with his pain sensors dialed to their minimum sensitivity, losing an arm hurt significantly. There was no way short of medical overrides to completely disable those pain sensors, and Vortex was the only one here who knew his way around those. Given the choice between Vortex digging around in his autonomic nervous system or pain, Starscream had chosen the latter. No amount of reasoning, coaxing, or appeals to basal fears had convinced Starscream to give Vortex any role in the operation. After the wing incident, Starscream would rather have his whole arm torn off unanesthetized than trust Vortex with surgery.
Vortex saying, "C'mon, what's the big deal? I take arms off Autobots all the time. Yours can't be that different," had not helped matters in the slightest.
Onslaught was Starscream's first choice for the arm removal, but Onslaught apparently had better things to do than rip off Starscream's arm. Arrogant groundpounder. For lack of another option, Starscream had called Blast Off down from orbit to conduct the operation.
Blast Off had been surprisingly meticulous while disconnecting Starscream's arm. He clamped off the energon lines and avoided any delicate components, instead disassembling the shoulder joint along standard medical maintenance seams. Vortex observed the procedure remotely, streaming Blast Off's optical feed through the rarely open combiner link and providing advice that was mostly helpful. Since Vortex's occasional flashes of amusement or mischief were impossible to hide while using the link, Blast Off had successfully avoided implementing the unhelpful suggestions scattered amid the rest.
"A clean cut. Reattaching the arm will be simple," Blast Off had told Starscream after the operation.
The reassurance was unnecessary. Starscream would never have agreed to this plan if he doubted the ease of reattaching his arm. He had watched Knock Out remove entire limbs for repair purposes, and the reattachment process always went smoothly. Past experience had taught Starscream precisely how much pain to expect from a surgically detached limb—more than zero, but far less than the worst he had ever experienced.
In the end, Starscream's expectations turned out to be true. About fifteen minutes after the Combaticons returned to the Harbinger, his arm was back on his shoulder.
"You may cease that infernal noise. Your arm is fine," Blast Off said, setting aside a pair of energon-soaked forceps.
Starscream stopped shrieking. The human's shouts continued in the background, although the reason remained unclear. She had not lost any limbs or endured grievous injury yet.
Gingerly, Starscream rotated his shoulder. Not a trace of the pain remained.
"I suppose this will do."
"Of course it will. Oh, and you're filthy." Turning away, Blast Off took out a cleaning cloth and wiped energon off his own hands.
Arrogant space floater. Starscream sneered at his back.
Admittedly, Blast Off was right. Before enacting Onslaught's plan, Blast Off had poured a cube of energon over Starscream's right side. He had also stuffed an inflatable pouch of energon under Starscream's shoulder pauldron, allowing a slow trickle of fluid to drip from the vicinity of the missing arm. After the arm was restored, sticky energon residue remained all over Starscream's frame. It was on his armor, under his plating, and congealing in his joints.
Starscream climbed off the operating table, moving slowly to avoid generating sparks that might ignite the volatile fuel coating his frame. The makeshift repair bay had once numbered among the Harbinger's many research labs, and Starscream's previous inventory sweeps had confirmed that it was suitably stocked with general lab supplies. He raided the storage cabinets now in search of a cleaning cloth, sponge, and spray-bottle of solvent.
By the time Starscream finished cleaning up, Blast Off had long since vacated the premises. The human's shouts still filled the air, oddly pitiful to hear. Starscream tossed a solvent-soaked sponge onto the operating table and went off to see what Vortex was doing to that poor human.
Following the noise led Starscream to the conference room at the end of the corridor. The door hung two-thirds of the way open, either jammed or disabled from disuse. Onslaught sat at the head of the octagonal conference table, fully absorbed in a datapad. Vortex leaned against one side of the table, chin propped on one hand while the other waved a piece of string. In front of him, the human girl hopped around inside the transparent walls of an empty energon cube. Both of her hands reached for the little cellular phone that dangled from the end of Vortex's string. She jumped, nearly grabbing the phone, but Vortex lifted the string up at the last moment.
The human shrieked out a rapid sequence of syllables. Her voice was surprisingly piercing despite her small size. Starscream ran the sound byte through his translation matrix. There were no matches in American English or related variants, but further down the list, one of his as-yet unused Earth language packs reported a partial pattern recognition. Starscream loaded up that language into active memory, and the human's shouts suddenly made sense. She was swearing in Japanese—a perfectly understandable reaction to being taunted by Vortex.
Starscream chuckled. It was good to see someone else sharing his frustrations for once.
The human turned at the sound. Upon seeing Starscream, her face contorted in rage. She charged at him. A tiny fist slammed against the nearest side of the cube, leaving a greasy smear on the transparent surface.
Vortex's head tilted. His visor flashed cheekily when he met Starscream's gaze. All four rotors perked up in exaggerated surprise. He dropped the phone and string on the table outside the cube.
"Would you look at that. Two arms. Procedure went well, I take it?"
"The procedure went, which is more than your little plan." Starscream rounded on the third mech in the room. "Onslaught, do you have anything to say for yourself?"
Onslaught continued perusing his datapad. A cable trailed from his wrist into the uplink port of the datapad. Lines of text raced across the cracked screen, appearing and disappearing faster than Starscream's optics could track. The format looked familiar: a mission report. How nostalgic. Starscream had not written a mission report for ages, not since he figured out that Megatron never read any mission logs unless Soundwave flagged them as suspicious.
"Well, Onslaught? You'd better have a good explanation for calling the retreat early. I sacrificed my arm, and for what? All we have to show for it is squishy here." Starscream flicked one finger against the side of the cube. The vibration knocked the human onto her backside with a startled squeak. "As far as I'm concerned, this mission was a complete failure."
The screen of the datapad froze midway through a line. Onslaught looked up, visor focusing on Starscream.
Starscream spread his wings to their fullest extent, looming with all the fearsome grace of the elite Seeker that he was.
Onslaught's gaze slipped past him. "Ah, Blast Off. Excellent timing as usual."
Somewhere behind Starscream, Blast Off reset his vocoder.
Starscream jumped about two meters in the air. He would forever maintain that no shrieking was involved whatsoever, regardless of what Vortex might claim after the fact. There was no way that someone as large as Blast Off could move around silently enough to get the drop on Starscream—yet, impossibly, Blast Off had managed to do precisely that.
Blast Off stepped around Starscream, moving over to Onslaught's right-hand side. He unloaded four cubes onto the table: one full energon cube and three empty cubes. After removing the lid of the full cube, he began to divide the energon into four portions.
Meanwhile, Starscream flipped through his proximity alert protocols, expecting to find them deactivated or somehow corrupted to explain how he had missed Blast Off's approach. Surprisingly, all of the pre-programmed alerts were identical to how he had set them up before. High-threat individuals such as Megatron or Onslaught would trigger an alert while anywhere within sensor range. Medium-threat cases such as Vehicons would alert while within null ray or missile targeting range. Low-threat blips such as birds or humans would only interrupt his higher thought processes if they were on a direct collision course with him. Each threat level still matched the correct distance threshold; nothing had gone amiss there.
Digging deeper into the proximity alert logs revealed a troubling inconsistency in Starscream's categorization system. Somehow, his automatic threat assessment protocols had reclassified Blast Off as low-threat instead of medium. Although his proximity and auditory sensors had indeed detected Blast Off's approach, the low-threat rating had automatically shunted that data to a memory buffer reserved for irrelevant junk, thus effectively erasing Blast Off's approach from his active awareness.
Troubled, Starscream quickly rectified that error and restored Blast Off to medium-threat rating. He also added half a dozen extra safeguards to prevent other unintentional recategorizations from happening ever again.
A high-threat alert pinged as Onslaught stood up from his seat.
"Comrades, brothers in arms, I congratulate you. The success of this mission arises from your efforts. To Starscream, your valiant sacrifice." Onslaught slid a quarter-full energon cube across the table to Starscream.
Starscream stood a little straighter, wings spreading in pride. While he did not need or want praise from any grounder, especially one under his command, it was still nice to have his contributions acknowledged.
"To Blast Off, your superb aim." Onslaught handed over another quarter-cube to Blast Off, who accepted it with a nod. "Vortex, your sharp optics." A third quarter-cube slid to Vortex. "And of course, my strategy tied it all together."
Onslaught raised his own cube in a toast—only, it seemed that he had picked up the wrong cube. Instead of holding a quarter full of energon, Onslaught's cube had the human inside.
The human banged on the walls and shouted. "Let me out! I'll break your face, you hear me?"
Onslaught put the human back on the table. He took the last quarter-cube of energon and inserted a fuel intake tube from his wrist, moving smoothly as though he had intended to swap the cubes all along.
Vortex cheered. "Hear, hear!"
Blast Off reached over and plopped a square lid atop the human's cube. The noise ceased, although the human was clearly still screaming at the top of her lungs inside the soundproof container.
The sight of the agitated human seemed to trouble Blast Off. He turned away to open his mask, tossed back his energon in one long draught, and shut the mask a moment later.
"I shall return to orbit. Send a message if I am needed. Only if needed." For some unknown reason, Blast Off looked directly at Starscream while saying this last part. He left the conference room without another word.
Starscream scowled into the depths of his own quarter-cube of energon. "What is this success that you brag of with such confidence? We have no Swindle, no Brawl, and no Autobot kills."
"Indeed not. However, we have achieved every secondary objective. First, acquisition of a hostage: if not an Autobot in frame, then a human collaborator at the very least. Second, message transfer. Swindle and Brawl are now aware that we know they are in Autobot custody. Third, and most valuable of all, we have two hundred and forty frames of camera footage from within the Autobot base. Observe."
Onslaught slid the cracked datapad into a rectangular indentation on the conference table. The entire table lit up, long-unused holographic projectors flickering online from all eight corners. A three-dimensional projection appeared, lurching forward frame-by-frame. The images showed a groundbridge event horizon, a spacious command center jumping past in roughly linear steps, a cement wall, and an optic-searing blaze of light.
"Your missiles were bugged," Starscream realized. Clever.
Onslaught paged back through the frames until he found one where the missiles were roughly in the middle of the command center.
"It's them all right." Vortex leaned over the table, poking at the hologram with one finger. Interactive gesture recognition systems registered the motion and zoomed in on the indicated spot. In the expanded view, Swindle and Brawl were both frozen in the process of diving to the ground. They appeared unharmed and unrestrained. Swindle had a new cannon attached to his right arm.
The human stared up at the frozen image of the Autobot base from within her transparent cube. Her eyes looked impossibly wide, and her mouth hung open in sheer astonishment. Given the sparsely equipped nature of the Autobot command center, this human had probably never seen a real holographic conference table before.
Onslaught waved a hand through the projection, and the holographic image zoomed out to a full scale perspective again. The rest of the aerial view showed a sparsely equipped chamber: a Cybertronian scaled computer, Ratchet standing in front of the computer, some sort of human nest, a service area, and Bulkhead laying on one of the repair berths. Several medical instruments connected to Bulkhead's frame via various leads and tubes. His optics were dark in unconsciousness.
"That explains why Bulkhead didn't show up," Starscream muttered.
"Indeed." Onslaught shot him a sideways glance, and Starscream grimaced. If he had known that Bulkhead was out of commission beforehand, he might not have vetoed Onslaught's original plan to storm the Autobot base rather than merely capturing a hostage.
"Excellent work. A most ingenious spying tactic." Starscream laid on the flattery by force of habit, simultaneously distracting from his oversight and placating any perceived offense. "Now to phase two: contacting the Autobots for a hostage exchange."
"At dawn," Onslaught decided.
"What? Why wait several hours when we could strike now, while the iron is still hot?"
"We seek a hostage trade, not annihilation at any cost. Hostage negotiations must be conducted with a clear processor and level head. Right now, the Autobots are wounded and furious at the loss of their human collaborator. Fury may drive them to entertain foolish notions such as rescue missions or daring escapes. In four hours, anger will fold into despair. They will come to understand the leverage that our party possesses. The singularity of choice will become clear: a hostage exchange, or permanent loss of their pet human. Then, and only then, shall we put forth our terms, for then the Autobots will be the most agreeable to negotiation."
Starscream gaped at him in disbelief. "That's quite a significant chain of assumptions, given that you've encountered these Autobots just once. I, on the other hand, have fought this exact team of Autobots in countless battles."
"Then you will no doubt agree." Onslaught spoke this with absolute confidence. "If we control the enemy's morale, we control the outcome. You of all mechs should know this—remember Vos? Remember Praxus?"
Starscream stiffened. Indeed, he remembered. However, that did not make Onslaught's current proposition seem any less outlandish.
"What if they just execute Swindle and Brawl on the spot?" After all, this was exactly what Starscream would have done, were he in the Autobots' position. It was exactly what he had done when Cliffjumper entered his custody.
"They will not. Autobots profess moral righteousness and fair treatment of prisoners above all else. They also value their allies' lives; they will not risk retaliation while there is still hope that their human collaborator lives. And if they do... if they do, they shall know defeat—not paid in their own frames, but in the systematic destruction of all that they hold dear." Onslaught's voice took on a distinctly murderous edge toward the end.
Considerably unnerved, Starscream nodded. "I see, I see. A very... solid... plan."
If Onslaught wanted to gamble the lives of his own team on a hunch about Autobot morality, far be it from Starscream to stop him.
Static crackled as Vortex reset his vocalizer. "Hate to interrupt a deep moment and all, but don't humans need oxygen?"
"Probably. Why?" As he spoke, Starscream glanced at the human. She had collapsed against the side of the cube, and her face sported a distinctly blue coloration. The soundproof lid Blast Off put on must have been airtight.
Three pairs of hands simultaneously grabbed for the lid.
It took Ratchet four hours, twenty-three minutes, and seventeen seconds to coax Bumblebee back from the verge of spark decoherence. The sniper shot had vaporized armor and liquefied internal circuitry, leaving a gaping hole in the left side of Bumblebee's chest. It was only by sheer chance that Ratchet had a patient and not a corpse in front of him right now.
Ratchet labored over Bumblebee's broken frame nonstop, sealing off energon leaks and mending as much of the critical infrastructure as he could. His every sensor, scanner, and processing thread focused wholly upon the patient in front of him. Nothing else mattered.
Four hours and thirty minutes into the operation, a large object approached Ratchet. Optimus Prime said something in a soft, concerned voice that was completely lost beneath the whirr of power tools.
Ratchet switched off the angle grinder he had been using to cut away a clump of half-melted cables. "What was that?"
"How is Bumblebee?"
Even though Bumblebee's vital signs had stabilized, the work remained far from complete. Haunting tendrils of sparklight seeped out from his chassis despite the patch that Ratchet had installed over the fractured laser core. Extensive reconstruction would be necessary to restore most of his left shoulder, torso, and alt-mode bumper.
"He will live." Ratchet had rebuilt Bumblebee from scrap metal and sheer determination too many times to lose him now.
"Well done." Optimus Prime shifted his weight, gaze slipping to the side. "Can Bumblebee be left unattended for a moment? I require assistance. The computer will not respond."
Bumblebee had remained stable for several minutes already, and Optimus Prime would not have interrupted Ratchet's work unless the task was critical. Now was as good a time as any for a short break from surgery. Ratchet double-checked that all of the torn fuel lines were securely clamped, set a spark-pulse monitor to alert him at the slightest hint of core destabilization, and ran his hands through a quick decontamination sweep.
"Alright, what do we have here?" Ratchet picked his way over to the computer, stepping over shards of glass and broken concrete from the missile impact.
The central monitor of the main computer had been obliterated, while the right monitor had thick opaque cracks running across the screen to the point of illegibility. The left monitor was mostly intact, aside from a few unsightly cracks running outward from the right corner. On-screen, a fatal error message blinked on repeat: communication failure, personnel database not found.
"This better not be a problem with the memory drives," Ratchet muttered, entering a command sequence to reboot the computer. "It'll take hours to dig out the backups from storage."
The monitor went dark, flashed white, and settled into a uniform green. The communication error persisted. Ratchet ducked under the console and popped open an access panel to examine the wiring. Far in the back, almost invisible among the dense network of wires, one cable had snapped in the aftershock of the explosion. A trivial fix. Ratchet pinched the loose ends of the cable together, dabbed it with his spot-welder, and glanced at the screen again.
The error message disappeared, and the search bar of the personnel database popped up without further problems.
Ratchet flipped through the background tabs on-screen, quickly calling up a collection of health and location data on everyone connected to the system. Everyone was within normal parameters except Bumblebee. Arcee and Switchbox were still stationed on the roof, likely with Brawn as well, though his lifesigns were not connected to the base transponder network yet. Ratchet, Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, and Bulkhead were all in the command center.
"Good. All systems are functional." Ratchet navigated back to the personnel database for Optimus Prime's benefit. Internally, Ratchet resolved to hold a tutorial on basic computer repairs for all members of the base. Being interrupted in the middle of surgery for such a menial task was not ideal.
"Thank you, Ratchet." Optimus Prime typed into the search bar, but he paused before submitting the database query. He turned to look at Ratchet, one hand hovering over the control panel. "One more question. You have spent considerable time with our two guests lately. What is your impression of them?"
"They're alright, I suppose. Switchbox is friendly, easygoing, talkative—although he did have an interesting reaction to seeing a Quintesson earlier. He has an unusual habit of slipping sales pitches into normal conversation, potentially hinting at a past mercantile occupation. Brawn is less socially adept. More blunt. He lets Switchbox do the talking whenever possible." Ratchet leaned in, peering at the cracked screen. "Why, what's this about?"
The search bar contained one name: Onslaught.
"The missile attack. You've identified the perpetrator," Ratchet realized. An icy dread crept through his frame. More Decepticons, including a unit commander infamous enough that Ratchet recognized the name even after millions of years—this was precisely what the Autobots didn't need right now.
"Indeed. Our most recent battle heralds the return of an old enemy, one whom I fear turns the tide of this war in the Decepticons' favor."
Lines of text and schematics scrolled across the screen, confirming what Ratchet remembered from long ago. Decepticon Onslaught: war-build, grounder, mobile anti-air artillery unit. Commander of the Combaticon special operations team. Central component of the combiner Bruticus. Beneath Onslaught's entry, schematics of the other Bruticus components appeared on the screen: shuttle, rotary, automobile, and tank frames. Blast Off, Vortex, and...
"Not Switchbox and Brawn," Ratchet realized, voice dropping to barely more than a whisper. How could he not have noticed this sooner? With the schematics in front of him, it was impossible to overlook the striking resemblance to the two guests. Despite the aesthetic difference between Cybertronian and Earth alt-modes, the intrinsic structural commonalities were unmistakable. "Swindle and Brawl."
All five were listed as deceased, killed in battle during the launch of the Ark four million years ago, as reported by one Autobot Jazz.
"Not quite as dead as we thought," Ratchet muttered. Onslaught, Vortex, and Blast Off had collaborated with Starscream in the ambush. Swindle and Brawl had infiltrated their base. All the while, Ratchet had been repairing the enemy, unaware of the threat in their midst. Brawl had even handled the human children.
Optimus Prime's optics hardened, and one fist clenched atop the control panel. "It is as I suspected. With the Combaticons here in full force, we face the threat of their combined form. We cannot allow Swindle and Brawl to reunite with Onslaught. Under Megatron's command, Bruticus could cause untold destruction to this world and its inhabitants."
Brawl and Swindle sat on the roof of the Autobot base, watching meteors streak across the starry night sky. The Cybertronian-sized elevator had still been operational after the missile strike, and Ratchet banished them all from the command center in order to focus on repairing Bumblebee. They had settled up here for the past few hours while Arcee regaled them with war stories.
"And that's how old one-eye became no-eyes," Arcee concluded. This was the fifth tale in as many hours, and the contents kept getting better and better.
"Good riddance. Pity it only took one shot," Brawl chuckled. A moment later, Swindle's elbow jammed into his side, and Brawl remembered too late that they were supposed to be cowardly neutrals.
Luckily, Arcee nodded. "Yes, a real pity. If there'd been time, I'd have put a few more rounds in him just to finish the job, but the spacebridge was already unstable. It was either leave right then or lose my one chance of joining Optimus on Earth. I chose Earth, and I don't regret it for a moment."
The positive response was all the encouragement that Brawl needed to confirm that he was fully in the right. Brawl returned the offending elbow with interest, and Swindle went from seated to sprawling on the mesa. Arcee glanced over at the clatter of armor against stone.
"Servo misfire," Brawl said smugly. That would teach Swindle to keep his pointy little elbows to himself.
Swindle shot Brawl a dirty glare from ground level. "That's some servo misfire! Maybe you ought to get that arm checked out before you break something important."
Over the private comm channel, Swindle added, "For instance, our cover."
The edge in his voice made Brawl take a longer look. Swindle was tenser than usual: grin on the uncanny side of too wide, optics several shades brighter than normal, enthusiasm replaced with a brittle reactivity. He had been this way ever since the Autobots returned in defeat. When Ratchet ordered all non-essential personnel out of the command center for the duration of Bumblebee's repairs, Swindle followed Arcee and Brawl to the rooftop with all the jittery energy of a mech walking to his execution. Something about the other Combaticons' role in the trap had spooked Swindle, and Brawl could not figure out why.
"Loosen up, Swi...iiiitchbox. No need to look so mad." Brawl clapped a hand around Swindle's shoulder pauldron and hauled him back upright. Swindle vibrated to the touch, his whole frame shivering with subsonic tremors from an engine primed to flee at a moment's notice.
Brawl was not worried. Onslaught had a plan. That much was obvious from recent events. The perfectly staged ambush, the coded comm signal, the missiles, the attack that ceased as quickly as it began—all of those pointed toward a grander scheme in the works. Brawl did not need to understand this to trust it. Onslaught's strategies were rarely transparent from the outset, but they always worked out in the end.
Arcee peered at Swindle with a sympathetic expression. "It's alright to be on edge after an attack. Today was worse than usual, but the important part is that everyone pulled through. Even Bumblebee. Ratchet will make sure he recovers. We'll get Miko back in no time. You'll see."
"Right. That's good." The slight widening of Swindle's already glazed smile suggested that Bumblebee and Miko were the very least of his concerns.
An encrypted comm line buzzed in the background, and Arcee stiffened. Her mouth pressed into a knife-thin smile.
"Oh. Ratchet wants us back inside." Arcee bounced to her feet, surprisingly silent as she moved. One hand gestured toward the lift. "Shall we?"
Swindle led the way, and Arcee tugged the lift doors shut behind them.
At the entrance to the command center, Swindle stopped short. Brawl nearly ran him over.
"What is the meaning of this?" Swindle's voice was flat, clipped. His tone kicked Brawl's battle protocols into high alert.
Brawl looked up, straight into the barrel of Optimus Prime's ion cannon.
"Hello, Combaticons Swindle and Brawl. Coming here was your last mistake." Spoken through the battlemask, Optimus Prime's voice was laced with the promise of imminent violence. Brawl shifted into a crouch, more than ready to oblige.
Swindle looked past the cannon, optics wide and earnest, voice steady. "I don't know what you're talking about, but this is all a big misunderstanding."
A blaster whined with charge behind Brawl. Arcee had both of her weapons trained on them. "Where's Miko?"
Swindle half-stepped sideways, opening the path between Brawl and Optimus Prime. He caught Brawl's gaze for a moment, then gave a placating little smile and turned fully to face Arcee.
"How should we know? Be reasonable, my friend. We've been here this whole time."
"You're no friend of ours," Arcee spat.
"No?" Swindle's optics flashed.
Brawl and Swindle simultaneously lunged in opposite directions. Brawl went for Optimus Prime, shaking off two ion cannon blasts without losing momentum. He batted aside the third shot in a flying tackle. Behind him, metal crashed as Swindle landed a solid hit on Arcee. Swindle disengaged, racing across the command center, and vaulted over the top of the computer console.
Optimus Prime's fist caught Brawl across the helm, and there was no more time to think beyond the ringing in his head. Brawl focused all of his attention on suplexing Optimus Prime through the floor.
A foot hooked Brawl's knee. He went down, leg swept out from underneath him. In the next moment, he rolled into a crouch, deflecting the sword with the dense plating of his forearm, and drove a fist into the lighter armor of Optimus Prime's midsection.
Distantly, Ratchet shouted. He was on the floor, a pitiful heap of red-and-white plating. Swindle stood over him, blindly typing into the groundbridge terminal despite the lack of a functional screen.
Optimus Prime twisted free with a furious roar, and then Brawl was airborne. He crashed against the wall on the opposite side of the command center, visor fritzing. Static washed over his vision. The ringing in his head became louder, but there was no time to run a diagnostic. Brawl used the wall to pull himself upright, manually rebooting his optical suite.
There were two yellow pillars in front of him—Swindle's legs. Swindle frantically tapped away at the groundbridge console, entering some complex sequence of coordinate glyphs. In the distance, Optimus Prime leveled an ion cannon at Swindle's back. The muzzle flashed pure white.
Brawl dove toward Swindle, intent upon tackling him out of the way. A split second before Brawl arrived, the shot struck Swindle directly in the back, knocking him forward. Then, Brawl crashed into Swindle from the side. They landed atop the groundbridge console, smashing the whole setup to bits.
Smoke poured out from the sparking wreckage beneath Brawl, stinging slightly against the chemoreceptors in his vents. He peeled himself off the wrecked console. Amid the heap of broken circuitry, Swindle looked small, charred, and slightly crushed. His optics and biolights were dark. He wasn't moving.
Brilliant blue-green light flashed behind them. By some lucky accident, the groundbridge had opened. Brawl hauled Swindle's frame over his shoulder and ran for the portal. Autobot voices shouted in alarm as Brawl charged into the light.
The air went cold, and Brawl's gyros spun as the ground suddenly dropped away.
When the world reappeared, Brawl found himself fifty meters above a plateau of white ice and falling fast. He powered on his anti-gravs to maximum, flailing about in midair until his feet pointed downward and Swindle upward. He stuck the landing—quite literally. Momentum plunged him through the ground, burying him thigh-deep in the remarkably soft snow cover.
The groundbridge still glowed against the night sky, wide open to the Autobot base. The muffled roar of a two-wheeler engine approached. A moment later, Arcee flew out of the portal in alt-mode, transformed with a rather startled yelp, and abruptly went flailing into the snow some twenty meters away.
Brawl ripped himself free of the ground and ran as quickly as he could in the opposite direction. Moving on this terrain felt like trudging through thick sludge. His feet kept sinking into the soft snow. Alt-mode treads might have fared better over the snow, but he could not carry Swindle while driving. As it was, Swindle bounced against his shoulder with every step.
Overhead, Optimus Prime charged through the groundbridge with a thunderous roar and promptly fell through the air. Brawl picked up his speed.
After all of the ruckus, Swindle still had not awoken. That was definitely a bad sign. Brawl could not hold off Optimus Prime and Arcee while also defending an injured teammate. He needed backup.
Brawl flung the combiner link open to its widest extent, searching for the other Combaticons. He sensed their lifesigns but not their presence: all four had their ends of the link closed. Onslaught and Vortex were southwest. Swindle still showed a "location corrupted" entry. Blast Off was... up? Possibly close by, but not looking at the link.
Optimus Prime broke free of the snow with a furious roar, charging straight for Brawl. He was lighter and faster on the snow, anti-gravs unburdened by the extra dead-weight of Swindle that pressed Brawl's feet knee-deep into the ground with each step.
Blast Off could evacuate them in a moment, if he knew where they were.
Using long-range comms was always a risk, especially with enemy presence nearby, but Brawl had run out of options. He transmitted a distress beacon at maximum intensity across all channels. The Autobots certainly heard it, if their sudden burst of encrypted chatter was any indication. Brawl could only hope that Blast Off heard the transmission as well.
A blaster bolt flew past Brawl, missing his arm by a narrow margin. Brawl dodged and overcompensated, nearly falling over in the snow before he regained his balance. Optimus Prime approached quickly, and Arcee followed not far behind. Both of them had their weapons out. Brawl moved Swindle's frame from over his shoulder to in front of him, held crosswise in both arms. Though this position was more unwieldy, it also made Swindle's head a less visible target to the two Autobots chasing them from behind.
The combiner link opened, and a dizzying flood of information washed over Brawl's senses: a vast and wondrous freedom, ten trillion stars rolling past his cockpit windows, the gentle blue-green curve of a nighttime planet under his wings—and, beneath it all, recognition.
Brawl.
Blast Off!
Brawl poured a status update into the link: his current location, Swindle's injury, frantic impressions of the snowy plateau, a hasty backward glance that showed Optimus Prime and Arcee charging faster than Brawl could retreat.
The link closed a moment later, leaving a lingering echo of acknowledgement. Brawl turned off his distress signal and focused on running.
Brawl didn't see when Blast Off broke through the cloud cover. His sleek dark frame was invisible against the night sky. One moment, Brawl was running; the next moment, the snow behind him lit up with a line of cannonfire. Voices shouted in alarm: two still, meaning that Optimus Prime and Arcee were both very much alive. Two brilliant stars flared in front of Brawl as Blast Off made the final descent on root-mode thrusters.
Blast Off offered a hand. Brawl shuffled Swindle's frame to one arm and grabbed it. Blast Off heaved upward, transforming around them both and launching into the air the same moment. Brawl ended up on his knees in the cargo hold, wrapped around an unconscious Swindle.
"Hold on. We have company," Blast Off said.
Through a viewport, Brawl saw another groundbridge glowing at ground level. Vehicon fliers poured out of the second bridge. Some of them circled around to hassle the two Autobots, but most of the Vehicons flew toward Blast Off.
Spaceworthy engines hummed, power redirecting from all other systems into a massive speed boost. Inertial dampeners failed to fully compensate for the sudden acceleration. Brawl and Swindle slid backward in the cargo hold. Brawl gathered Swindle's frame close and braced against a support strut.
Through the viewport, the tiny glow of the aerial Vehicons shrank into the distance.
"Atmospheric fliers. Couldn't keep up if they tried," Blast Off scoffed, every word dripping with disdain.
Brawl chuckled. "You're the fastest."
"Naturally."
Once the Decepticon squadron dropped back to the trailing edge Blast Off's sensor range, he eased off on the thrust. The inertial dampeners reasserted themselves, restoring a smooth force-stabilized environment with only artificial gravity present. Brawl leaned back against the side of the cargo hold, basking in the familiar hum of shuttle engines.
The combiner link remained open to Brawl, though Blast Off had closed his side. Through the link, Swindle's location indicators still read as corrupted. Remembering an earlier conversation, Brawl grasped Swindle's left arm and prodded at the dataport cover there. When the cover did not slide aside, Brawl dug in his fingers and peeled it off by force.
Swindle would be furious when he woke up, but furious was better than dead.
The Autobot transponder was there, just as Brawl remembered. He pulled it out of the dataport and smashed it within his fist. Swindle's location data suddenly appeared in the combiner link: right in front of Brawl, as expected. A slightly more detailed lifesign readout also appeared. Despite his present state of unconsciousness, Swindle's vital systems were within normal limits.
"What was that?" Blast Off asked, watching from the internal cameras.
"Autobot comms tracker. Swindle said it was blocking the link, too."
"Strange. The Harbinger comm chips don't block our link. I could sense you perfectly once I heard your call."
Brawl shrugged. "That ship's been buried almost as long as we were out. Autobots must have new tech after all this time."
"Hm. Better not to be tracked, in any case." Blast Off banked around to a new heading. "Setting course to the Harbinger. ETA: seven minutes."
They skimmed over a sea of darkness. The glitter of human cities flashed past in tiny fractal patterns. When they passed into a desert, starlight glanced off ridges of stone and sand in faint ripples, there and gone in a blur as Blast Off flew past. The ground opened into a chasm, and the chasm became a familiar canyon. At the end of the canyon, the blacker-than-night spires of the Harbinger emerged from the gloom like a great fortress set within the cliff face.
Onslaught waited for them outside the ship, his visor a sharp yellow blaze in the darkness. Vortex stood beside him with both searchlights pointed at the ground, surrounding the two of them in a puddle of light. Blast Off touched down just beyond range of the searchlights. Once the landing ramp lowered, Brawl carried Swindle out, mindful to avoid jostling his wounds. Onslaught greeted them with a health-status query ping.
"Welcome back, Brawl. Report."
Obligingly, Brawl sent over a data packet with his latest batch of system self-diagnostics.
"Safe and sound, sir. Except for Swindle. He was shot. The Autobots also replaced some parts. Might've bugged him." Although Brawl had watched the repairs, it would have been simple for the Autobot medic to slip in a tracker or remote surveillance device disguised as another part.
Onslaught nodded once. "Bring him in. Vortex, see to his wounds."
As Brawl carried Swindle toward the Harbinger, Blast Off transformed behind them to follow from the rear. Vortex closed in from the side, scanning over Swindle's injuries with a well-practiced competence. Onslaught took his rightful place at the head of the group.
They marched inside, five Combaticons reunited once more, and Brawl basked in the warm contentment of once again being surrounded by his team.
No matter what disasters might arise in the future, all was right in the world tonight.
Notes:
Tentatively the 50% mark of the story, although outline tends to expand unpredictably.
Thanks for reading! For story-related art, discussions, etc, find me on Discord: Cyw8JB9Pq2