-1Drone.
Chapter Two: The Fight.
Barricade silently drew up and stopped at a good vantage point where he could watch for his chosen prey. The Witwicky drive was empty of any car, be that green Porsche or yellow Camaro, but Barricade could wait. He knew the value of patience.
His patience was rewarded an hour later, as the yellow Camaro he was watching for purred up the road and headed for Sam's drive. If in robot form he would have grinned, for the need for patience was over, and there was no need at all for subtlety.
He transformed into robot form and stepped out in front of Bumblebee, who only just swerved in time to avoid the foot Barricade swung at him.
Bumblebee screeched round in a half-turn to face Barricade, disgorging his human passengers roughly.
"Oh no, oh nononono!" Sam cried as he and Mikaela backed off as Bumblebee transformed, ensuring he was between the Decepticon and the two humans. "Oh nononono! Oh shit!" he cried as Barricade lunged at Sam's Autobot friend.
Sam saw a clawed hand lash out, fingers curved so the claws impacted at a certain angle, heard the screech of tearing metal mix with Bumblebee's pained cry as Barricade's powerful hydraulic arms and fingers tensed, and ripped three deep gashes in Bumblebee's side. The two robots fell, and in the melee, nobody noticed a small form scuttle down from where it had been nestled between Barricade's hand and the wheel at his wrist, head straight for the gashes, and scuttle swiftly inside the Autobot's torso.
Once inside, the little mechanism scuttled deep inside Bumblebee, attached itself to a thick cable, and shut itself off.
Barricade and Bumblebee exchanged a few more blows, although Barricade did not, to Sam's relief, repeat the clawing of Bumblebee's side. At one point, Barricade obviously decided that he had had enough, for he threw Bumblebee from him, and as Bumblebee crashed into the side of the house and dropped onto Ron's new patio, every slab fracturing under the impact, Barricade transformed back into car form and zoomed off down the road, with a total disregard for the speed limit.
"Bumblebee!" cried Sam, rushing over to look at the damage Barricade had done. The dents and scratches did not concern him as much as the rents that Barricade had first inflicted. Coolant and lubricant was oozing from them, and it was Mikaela who dashed into Judy's kitchen, and grabbed the kitchen paper and aluminium foil wrap. Then she went into the front room and grabbed Ron's roll of heavy-duty duct tape. Going back outside, she started stuffing wads of kitchen paper in the rents, covered them with the foil wrap, and used the very sticky duct tape to hold the foil wrap in place.
"Hopefully, that should deal with the leakage for now." she said. "Really, we need to get Ratchet to you."
"It would be better if I could get to Ratchet, his medical bay will have everything he needs to repair me. I can still transform and take us there." said Bumblebee, who although he whined a couple of times as he moved was otherwise reacting as if having his side ripped open was a part of Autobot daily life. 'Perhaps it was before I met him.' Sam reflected. There was a lot about Bumblebee's early life Sam didn't know about, and wasn't sure he wanted to.
Early on in their friendship, after the Mission City battle, Sam had managed to coax Bumblebee into telling him about what actually happened at Tyger Pax. He had asked Bumblebee to leave nothing out. Sam had thought talking about it in detail might be therapeutic for the little Autobot. However, Bumblebee, optics dimmed and voice halting, had gone into so much detail that Sam had started to feel extremely ill. At the point Bumblebee had told Sam about how and why he had lost his voice, Sam had barfed, and not stopped until all he could do was dry heave.
Sam was pulled away from those unpleasant memories (recalling the telling still made his gorge rise) as Bumblebee transformed and opened his doors. Mikaela pressed down on the bits of duct tape still showing, making sure it was still adhering. Then they got in, and Bumblebee drove them to the base. Ratchet had admired Mikaela's quick thinking and the first aid work, but had insisted they could not stay with Bumblebee as "You'd only get in the way, and how would I explain it to Optimus or your parental units if I trod on one of you?"
They had had to wait outside as Ratchet patched him up, which hadn't stopped them hearing Ratchet's opinion about the Decepticons in general ("AllSpark rejects pre-doomed to the Pit before they were first onlined.") and Barricade's likely parentage in particular ("That Pitspawn's got to be the Dark God's favourite offspring!") as he found the extent of the damage ("Primus help me! What a slagging mess!") and welded Bumblebee's side up. Once the welds had cooled, a quick spray of yellow paint covered the unsightly scarring, which Ratchet assured Bumblebee would heal in time.
"I must admit, for Barricade to take off like that when he seemed to be winning was a distinct oddity." said Ratchet, as he scanned Bumblebee for any damage he'd somehow missed. "He probably realised that to hang about in a public place looking and behaving like that might bring the Army down on him. He must know that units armed with Sabot rounds are sent out to investigate any activity that suggests Decepticon involvement."
After putting Bumblebee in a recharge chamber for three hours, Ratchet declared him healthy, and released him to take Sam and Mikaela back home, as Ratchet could find nothing from his scans to indicate that anything was at all amiss.
As it was in complete shutdown, the scuttler inside the Autobot scout was not detected.