Chapter 25: Unsung

I never asked to be an unsung hero.
I never wanted to be a part of history.
I never asked to have my life turned into chaos.
I never wanted this to happen to me.

- "Unsung Hero", Area 7


Bumblebee had known in advance that Spool was a Citizen, but somehow he expected the Head of Engineering to look different. To be taller or heftier or something. But no, he had the slim, barely armored chassis of the standard Citizen flyer. The only thing that set him apart were the wide bands of black paint running up his arms—painted in cheap craft paint—and a smell of turpentine.

"So here's our HQ," Spool said, waving an arm at the massive room they were standing in. The wide tables were covered with half-finished projects and the concrete floor was smudged with grease, dirt, and paint. Much like the engineers were. Including Spool. "But our work takes us all over the ship. We've been doing a lot of fixes to the plumbing lately."

"The plumbing?" That sounded so mundane. Bumblebee thought engineers built ships and things. "Um, I'd really like to learn about ground bridges, actually."

"Would you, now?" Spool rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "You sure about that? Very complicated subject and . . . I'll be frank with you . . . Soundwave is the only one with in depth knowledge of 'em, and he's not in a fit state to teach. I mean, if you just want to learn how to operate one, that's one thing, but if you want to understand how they work—"

"Yes, how they work, that's exactly what I want! Please, there must be someone . . ."

"Weeell." More chin-rubbing. "I know a thing or two about them . . . and there might be some course-sets in the Library. The kind where you study on your own and take a test each week, you know? I could start you off with those. And the rest of the time you'll work with the crew to keep the ship up and running."

"Okay. Sure."

"I'll get the datapads for you. Meantime, let me introduce you to the bots you'll be working with." Spool led him over to a table where four Citizens—three grounders and one aerial—were arguing over a set of plans. To Bumblebee's embarrassment, they fell silent and studied him as he walked up.

"Crew, this is Bumblebee," Spool said cheerfully, slapping the yellow mech on the shoulder. "You all know where he came from and why he looks like he does, so I won't repeat it. He's never done this kind of work before, so I want you to all be patient with him. From now on he's part of the day crew."

"Hello," Bumblebee beeped. The others murmured a greeting back.

"So, who's who. That's Lever, Pulley, Boost, and the jet at the end is Backfire. Now I know what you're thinking, Bumblebee," Spool continued. "How do I tell all these Citizens apart? Well, kiddo, you gotta look for tells. Don't be shy about it, everyone does."

"Tells?"

"Yeah. I've got these." Spool tapped the wide bands of black painted up and down his arms. "Pulley's got those tassel things tied 'round her shoulder pauldrons. Boost painted his knee-spikes that ugly green. Lever's got those swirly etchings on her arms. Backfire's got . . . Hey Backfire, what do you got?"

"Oh, uh. Nothing yet. I just got repainted. But I'm gonna trade this guy for some butterfly stickers."

"Stickers are very popular," Spool told Bumblebee, before turning to Backfire. "But I'd go with paint if I were you. Stickers get scraped off to easily in our line of work. Anyway, I'll leave you bots to get acquainted while I grab those datapads I was talking about."

"Sure." Bumblebee watched Spool go. After a moment's hesitation, he sat down at the table with the four remaining Citizens.

"So!" Backfire said, then immediately lapsed into awkward silence.

Bumblebee cleared his vocalizer. "Nice to meet all of you."

"Same," said Pulley.

"So . . ." Bumblebee turned towards the jet. "Your name . . . Backfire . . . Isn't that—"

"Yes, it's a disease," Backfire grumbled while the others snickered and elbowed each other.

"Uh, what? No!" Bumblebee's face heated in embarrassment. "I was going to say, isn't that more of a car name?"

"Oh!" The jet's blue visor flickered in surprise. "Uh, yes, it is. It took me a while for me to figure out that they put me in the wrong body and by that time I was kind of attached to the name."

"The wrong body, right," Pulley snorted. "This guy just wanted to move up in the world. Sick of being a groundpounder like the rest of us, right?"

"That's not true," Backfire protested.

"Yeah, he wanted to move up the ladder. Way up," Lever chuckled. "Up to the sky!"

"Aw, c'mon you guys." Backfire punched Lever's shoulder. "You know it wasn't like that."

Bumblebee's eyes had cycled wide, partly at the borderline rude term "groundpounder", partly out of confusion.

"The wrong body?" he said.

"They put him in a grounder frame," Pulley explained. "When he's actually an aerial."

"Yeah. It's kind of stupid it took me so long to figure it out. I thought it was just part of being in an unfamiliar frame. I didn't make the connection until right before we left Cybertron—actually I fell off a building and the fall felt good, like flying. So then I knew. You'd think they'd be ticked off about doing a chassis change with resources so low, right? But Doc Knock and Brakeline were really nice about it. Brakeline told me the spark always knows—"

"You have sparks?" Oh Primus, Bumblebee hadn't meant to blurt that out but he had, and now all four of them were sitting stockstill, staring at him—

"Yes," Backfire said finally, his voice very quiet. "We have sparks." He pulled the blueprints towards him, leaning over them.

"Scrap, I'm sorry! I'm really, really sorry, I shouldn't have said that. I don't know much about you people and I just assumed—"

"Well, the first thing you can stop assuming is that we're 'you people'," Pulley said, her visor narrowed to a thin, blue slit of light. "We didn't start out like this, you know. It was you people the Autobots who made us what we are today!"

"The . . . Autobots gave you those bodies?"

"'Course not," Boost said. "Scrap, mech. Didn't the 'Bots teach you nothin'?" He seemed almost impressed by the scout's ignorance. "We were prisoners, right? Some of us were protestin', some of us stole energon—"

"I was a tour guide," Lever put in.

"What?" Pulley said. "You never told us that before."

"Yeah, my job was to take tourists around these ancient ruins, but then the Autobots decided something about it was blasphemous or unholy or something."

Bumblebee's optics cycled even wider. "They put you on trial for that?"

"We didn't get trials." Pulley said drily. "We didn't deserve them because we 'weren't real Cybertronians', just 'traitorous rabble.' That's what we got for being protestors."

"Or tour guides!"

" . . . right."

"The point is, they locked us up. Tiny little cells." Backfire shivered.

"For ages," Pulley said. "They didn't torture us or experiment on us or anything. They just forgot about us, which I think was worse. Like nothing about us mattered. Some days a guard would come by with energon, but that was it."

"Senator Shockwave was fightin' to free us," Boost said. "Not that we knew it at the time. But yeah, that mech was the only Senator worth a drop of energon. An' when he couldn't get anywhere with the Senate—"

"Then it was Decepticons to the rescue! Oh yeeeah!" Lever pumped a fist in the air.

"Shockwave defected to the Decepticons," Pulley confirmed. "And Commander Starscream herself led the assault on the prison. But most of us had been in there so long, with so little energon, that our frames had decayed to almost nothing. So Starscream bribed a factory owner—"

"The Decepticons had lots of manufacturing ties, of course," Backfire broke in.

"Yeah. Anyway, she bribed this guy to cold-construct a run of basic frames. Two models, one for aerials and one for grounders." Pulley looked down at her orange and white chassis, tapping her chest with a claw. "These bodies are flimsy, but you'll never hear me complain."

"Until she activates her vocalizer," Lever said in a mock whisper. The others laughed.

Bumblebee didn't. "I'm really sorry about what I said. I . . . I didn't know."

"Well . . . you're only a youngling really, right? And raised by Autobots. No hard feelings," Backfire said, his wings lifting as he shrugged.

"Thank you. But, um. Why did they put you in a grounder frame at first?"

"My wings were gone," Backfire said, so matter-of-factly that Bumblebee cringed. "They didn't know."

"But why couldn't you tell them?"

It was Boost who answered. "The processor is made of metal, just like the rest of the frame, kid. Starve it long enough and it starts to crumble."

"Most of us don't remember much—from before. Just bits and pieces," Pulley said. "But what can you do, right? Just pick a new name and keep on living."

"I'm sorry," Bumblebee said helplessly. The trails of the black and purple corpses he'd left behind . . . Oh Primus, oh Primus . . . "I'm sorry."


Bulkhead was a terrible liar. He was lucky Arcee and Cliffjumper were the only other bots in the room when he said, a little too loudly, "Why, sure, Smokescreen, I'd love to track down some 'Cons."

The two mercenaries barely glanced up from their dice game. They just didn't care. Maybe they felt it was safer not to know what the other two were up to.

As for Smokescreen, he was curious. In all the months he'd been on Earth, no one had really brought up Yellowjacket or what had happened to him, and now Bulkhead wouldn't even talk about him in public? Why not? Was the subject taboo? Bulkhead usually did exactly what Prime wanted, but sometimes he'd drop a hint or two on subjects that were technically forbidden.

"Sure, let's go," Smokescreen said. "I could use some fresh air."

He was a little surprised when the coordinates Bulkhead entered into the ground bridge set them down near a known Decepticon energon mine. Apparently the big bruiser had been serious about 'Con hunting.

"Ah man, look at that," Bulkhead complained, peering down at the mine from the ridge they were standing on. "I knew we shoulda done this sooner; the mine's practically played out."

"How can you tell?" It looked active to Smokescreen; the orange and white Citizens (inaccurate name, since Prime had officially stripped all Decepticons of Cybertronian citizenship) were hauling out cart loads of energon.

"The stuff they're mining is a darker blue than normal and kinda dusky, see? That's not good quality energon, Smokey, that's the dregs. They ain't gonna have a full crew here if they have any sense."

"Since when do Decepticons have sense?"

"Yeah, well . . . still." The tan-shaded bot carefully looked over the scene below. "Looks like mostly air frames, too. Scrap. They're gonna be out of there the minute we fire."

"Not the way I shoot," Smokescreen said confidently, transforming his arm into a blaster.

"Not those ones and not yet," Bulkhead warned. "I'll go down there and rout 'em out of the mine; you shoot 'em down as they come out. And remember, Doc Ratchet needs them alive."

"I know that." Did everyone have to treat him like a youngling? He was well-aware that the dumb orange bots couldn't be turned into even dumber Vehicons if they were dead. "I thought you brought me out here to talk about Yellowjacket, not to shoot 'Cons."

"Thought you liked shooting."

"Eh, it's okay." Frag yes, he liked shooting. He was a better shot than Prime, he was sure of it. Because he practiced, instead of putting his faith in the "power of Primus" or whatever. "But I want to know about this weirdo Autobot too."

"That's not a very nice way to talk about a dead teammate," Bulkhead said, sitting down on a boulder.

"Wasn't my teammate."

"Well, no." The camouflaged bot paused, then said, "Guess there's no reason not to tell ya. Yellowjacket was this little guy . . . Black and yellow bot. Used to be all black with yellow detailing, but he decided to change his look after a while. Anyway . . . he was young. Real young. Maybe even younger than you."

"I am not young, you rusted out bucket of bolts!" Smokescreen glowered.

Bulkhead just rolled his red optics. "Give it a rest. I'm just sayin'—he was young. Really young when Prime found him. He was a Neutral—"

"Oh please," Smokescreen interrupted again. "Like Prime would give a Neutral anything but a blast through the brain pan."

"Hey, that's our leader you're talkin' about." Somehow Bulkhead looked a lot more menacing when he was glaring back. "Chosen by Primus! Shut your mouth before I do it for you."

Smokescreen gave a huff and crossed his arms. His dents from Ultra Magnus' beating still ached. He knew Bulkhead wouldn't have done a thing to stop it, if he'd been there. He knew he'd have joined in, if Prime had told him to. " . . . sorry."

"All right. Where was I? Geez Smokey, I like you and all, but you've got to learn some limits."

"You were saying Yellowjacket was a Neutral."

"Oh yeah. More like he was too young to pick a faction, but yeah. I mean, this was a kid who had barely picked his alt mode. He wandered onto the battlefield—this was near Praxus—and didn't know what the frag was going on and just panicked. Started running, not knowing where he was going, and got peppered with laserfire, hit by shrapnel—really beat up. But Primus gave him a strong spark, and he kept running. Prime and Megatron were fighting, hand-to-hand, and the little shrimp practically bowled right into them. Megatron sorta backhanded him away. That's how his vocalizer got crushed. Couldn't talk right after that, just made sounds."

Smokescreen had to admit that a fight between Optimus Prime and Megatron sounded like something worth watching. Megatron was impressive—for a lousy Decepticon. "So then what? Yellowjacket shot Megatron in the back? Clearly he didn't do a very good job."

"Are you kiddin'? Little guy like that gets hit by Megatron, what do you think happens? He was knocked unconscious. Bleeding everywhere. But the distraction did let Optimus get some really good hits in on Megatron. After the battle Optimus had Ratchet repair Yellowjacket. Patched up everything but his vocalizer." Bulkhead sighed. "He was a good Autobot. A little quirky. But he served the Cause for almost all his life."

"So how'd he die?"

The tan Autobot's expression became sad. "Megatron. We boarded the Heretic and . . . Bucket-Head got the little guy. Couldn't even recover his body. Optimus didn't talk much about it—still doesn't—but he was real torn up. That's why no one talks about Yellowjacket. Prime doesn't like to be reminded, y'know?"

"Huh." This Yellowjacket character didn't sound so special to him. What exactly were the highlights of his life? Avoiding getting snuffed by Megatron in Praxus, just to get snuffed by him on Earth. Oh, and sucking up to Prime. Not like Smokescreen, who had trained with the Elite Guard and guarded important bots and artifacts. "And you're sure he's dead?"

Bulkhead looked at him like he was crazy. "'Course he's dead. Cliffjumper and Arcee saw him. Idiots mercs didn't pick up the body, but yeah, he'd been shot through the spark. Ya don't come back from that, kiddo."

"I guess," Smokescreen said, thinking of the yellow and black bot he'd seen. A bot with a broken vocalizer.

"You guess," Bulkhead snorted. "Then you guessed right. C'mon, are we gonna get some 'Cons or what? Ratchet needs more Vehicons."

"All right, all right." Smokescreen turned his arm into a blaster. Picking his position, he aimed at the entrance to the mine and waited as Bulkhead clambered down the far side of the slope.

The Citizens pushing the carts scattered like birds as Bulkhead charged through their midst in his alt mode, a camouflage patterned SUV. The bruiser disappeared into the mine and less than a minute later panicked Citizens were pouring out of the entrance. Or trying to. Smokescreen smiled as a few carefully aimed shots brought two of them down. The legs—that's what he was going for. Harder to hit than the wings, but it also meant the little slaggers couldn't run.

And besides, Smokescreen was just that good.

The more he hit, the easier the genericons were to hit, forced to slow down as they tried to clamber over their fallen comrades, or in a few cases (frag, Decepticons were stupid) help them up.

Bulkhead shoveled them out of his way when he emerged from the mine, lunging to grab the few that were in any condition to try to escape. Binding their hands and legs, he dropped the prisoners in a pile and waved his arm. In response to the signal, Smokescreen skidded down the shale slope.

"How many'd we get?" he asked.

"Eight. Not bad. C'mon, let's get outta here before the 'Cons send backup."

Smokescreen nodded. Normally he would have taunted Decepticon prisoners, maybe given them a good kicking, but both he and Bulkhead ignored the cursing and pleading of the struggling bots.

They weren't worth it.


Knock Out lounged in Dreadwing's old room, admiring his new claws. He'd politely but firmly resisted Trauma's suggestion of blunt fingers and Knockdown's opinion that three-jointed fingers were better than two-jointed. Like scrap they were! Sure, three-jointed digits were better for gripping, but two-jointed digits were better for precision. Surely any medic who knew a scalpel from a scraplet knew that.

He had decided not to bring up his door; there wasn't a single grounder on the ship (unless you counted the orange Vehicons, and who would?) and he didn't trust the medics to produce something up to his standards. Instead, he'd taken a bunch of datapads full of medical journals and, with Knockdown's blessing, had gone off to study. And if the room he'd chosen to study in also happened to contain the replicator, which could create new parts if provided with the right raw materials, weeeell, wasn't that a coincidence!

Not that the door would be an easy replacement; this was an artisan project, not something that could be slopped out like a mass-produced trinket. No matter. Knock Out was still working on the blueprints to feed the machine, but he was going to finish it and he would . . . figure out something to explain how a young clone could use such a complex machine to produce (what would surely be) a work of astounding beauty.

Knock Out was just pondering possible excuses when Bumblebee shuffled in, holding a pile of datapads.

"Oh, there you are! Engineering tracts, I hope?"

"Yeah. Ground bridge stuff. I'll study 'em and then they'll test me." Bumblebee sounded morose as he set them down with a clatter.

"Well, all for a good cause."

The yellow bot heaved an enormous sigh. "I guess."

"Look here. Mission accomplished." He held up his new fingers and wiggled them.

"Cool."

"Cool? That's all? Cool?"

"I'm glad you got your fingers back to normal." Bumblebee picked up a baseball cap, turning the tiny scrap of fabric around in his hands. "Hey, Knock Out?" he said after a minute or two. "Do Vehicons have sparks?"

"Of course they do." When the Autobot didn't say anything, he added, "You didn't know that?"

"Do they talk? Do they . . . do they feel?"

"Yeees . . ." The red mech cocked his head, raising an eyebrow.

"And they have names and things? Hobbies?" Bumblebee was looking at him with something like desperation now, leaning forward.

"What's gotten into you? Vehicons have serial numbers, not names. I seriously doubt they have enough time for hobbies. Busy getting slaughtered by Autobots, you know."

"No names?" The scout sounded relieved.

"No. They try to get them, of course, and some officers look the other way . . . "

"They try?"

Knock Out wished Bumblebee would stop staring at him so . . . bleakly. It was unnerving. "Yes, they'll call themselves Grind or Spoke or whatnot—simple designations, usually, they're unimaginative creatures—but technically it's against army regulations. Names are for . . . well, for real Decepticons."

"Oh." Bumblebee went quiet again. "What makes them . . . not real?"

"They just aren't."

"But they have sparks like you, and they talk like you, and they FEEL like you, so how do you know they're any different?" Bumblebee's tone was almost aggressive now, his door-wings hiked up.

"I know because I know," Knock Out snapped. "And since I've been dealing with Vehicons since before you were sparked, I suggest you accept me as an authority on this matter."

"You just don't want to admit that you're taking advantage of them like you'd have to if you admitted they were people!"

"I'm taking advantage of them? Me?" Knock Out shoved to his feet. "Which one of us patches them up? Which one of us retrieves their corpses? Which one of us inoculates them from disease? Which one of us saves them? And which one of us rips through them like they're tinfoil?"

Bumblebee flinched. Knock Out sneered.

"Is that what this is about? You suddenly feel guilty?"

"They have sparks!" Bumblebee shouted. "I didn't know that! You . . . you should've told me!"

"Right, sure. 'I know we're about to fight, Bumblebee, but before we do I would like to point out that the drones accompanying me—'"

"Don't call them that. They don't like it."

"Pardon me, but since when have you ever given a frag about what they liked? I'm fairly sure they don't like having their heads kicked off or being shot to death either, but that's never stopped you before."

"I didn't know," he wailed again, wringing his hands.

"Then you're an idiot." Knock Out sat down again. He picked up one of the datapads, ostensibly examining it as Bumblebee paced. "Aren't you going to ask me if Insecticons can talk?" he asked after a minute, just to be cruel. "Because they can."

Bumblebee gave a little sob, and Knock Out relented.

"Look, you're putting far too much thought into this. Not that I'm thrilled about Team Prime's habit of sending Vehicons to the scrapyard or into my med bay, but that's what they're made for. They're cannon fodder. Neither side would get anywhere if we thought of them as anything else." Bumblebee was giving him that bleak stare again, so he continued. "It's not like anyone expects them to survive the war. Even they know it's not likely. So you're really just doing what's expected of you when you kill them."

"That's what you expect from Autobots? That's really what you expect?"

Knock Out couldn't understand why he sounded so strained. "To destroy the enemy? Yes, that's what I expect, from both sides."

"Yes, okay, but . . . we don't count them as killing people, all right? We don't even count them, or think about them, or—or anything! I mean, I killed Skyquake, and I don't regret that because he was attacking me and Optimus, but at the same time . . . I do? Because he was a Cybertronian, and I think about if things had been different, like if the war hadn't happened . . ."

"Yes, but—"

"I mean, I didn't even think about Vehicons! Ever! That's the bad part! Like they didn't even count."

"Bumblebee . . ." Knock Out sighed, pressing his new fingers to his face. "Sit down."

The Autobot sank into a chair across from him, fidgeting, his hands in his lap.

"You're getting all worked up over nothing," Knock Out said. "Do you think the Vehicons would have stood down if you'd asked them who their favorite author was, or their favorite song? No. They're sent out to kill Autobots and they do kill Autobots." He paused. "Or at least they try very hard. Their weapons and armor aren't the best—worries about rebellion and all that—anyway! My point is . . . even if you'd known they had sparks? You still would've had to kill them. So why waste time feeling guilty about it?"

"I don't think it's a waste of time," Bumblebee said quietly, staring at his hands. "I think it's sort of important."

Autobots were so illogical. Knock Out cast about for something to soothe the ridiculous scout. "Well, if it makes you feel better, they have sparks, but not whole ones."

Bumblebee looked up. "What do you mean?"

"Well, Shockwave built the Vehicons in big batches right as all the hotspots were drying up. Fewer and fewer sparks were being produced, so—innovator that he is—he found a way to fracture one spark into . . . oh, twenty or thirty pieces, I think it was. So you see," Knock Out said in his kindest tone, "they really aren't like us."

Strangely, judging from the scout's expression, this didn't comfort him at all.