-1Drone

Chapter Five

Technical Difficulties

"The view is quite beautiful, isn't it?" Mikaela asked Sam, as they lay on Bumblebee just as they had the first time they had been here, but with two important differences: this time, there was no Optimus, Ironhide, or Ratchet here, and it was closer to the middle of the day than the end.

"Mm, yeah." Sam murmured, who was certainly enjoying the view, although he wasn't looking at the landscape. Mikaela noticed where his gaze was going, and playfully slapped his leg.

Bumblebee had not talked for about half an hour now, but had seemed content just to play a mixture of recent hits and romantic songs from before Sam and Mikaela's time. Much as Sam and Mikaela would have liked to have stayed there snuggling for longer, they had already spent two hours doing so, and Sam had decided that he wanted to go and see their friends at the Autobot base.

They got in Bumblebee. "Can we go to the base, Bumblebee?" asked Sam. Bumblebee tooted his horn and pulled out, but something just wasn't right, Sam realised. Once again, Sam noticed, Bumblebee seemed mainly to be playing music. They weren't even songs he and Mikaela particularly liked, they seemed to be sad, depressing songs. Sometimes, Bumblebee wasn't even playing whole songs, he was just playing bits. He listened closer to the bits.

"….the sound….of silence." then

"It's so funny, how we don't talk anymore…."

Sam wondered what Bumblebee was doing. It reminded him of when Bumblebee could only talk through his radio. That really didn't make sense, Bumblebee loved to talk, as Sam knew, and he also, after his disastrous attempt to therapise Bumblebee, knew why.

His reflections were interrupted by a horrendous, painful-sounding squeal, as the radio went through some painful feedback and then squawked once, and then fell silent.

"Bumblebee?" he asked, but neither voice nor radio answered him, but Bumblebee speeded up, barely keeping to the speed limit. Silent and fast: in humans that often signified anger, and although Bumblebee wasn't human, Sam, oddly enough, found that he had more in common with his guardian than some members of his own species.

Sam fiddled with the radio knob and stroked Bumblebee's dash, but it made no difference: neither voice nor radio responded. Sam was now concerned that he had unintentionally pissed Bumblebee off. Had he farted and not realised it, or had Mikaela done something else equally organic and disgusting?

"Bumblebee, have I said or done something to upset you, buddy? If I have, please tell me what it is that I've done wrong? It wasn't intentional whatever it was, I promise!"

Mikaela added her apologies and pleas to Sam's.

Both Sam and Mikaela felt the seats cradling them give them both what they recognised as a comforting squeeze. On the one hand, Sam was relieved: Bumblebee would not have done that if one or both of them had upset him. On the other, he was concerned: why wasn't Bumblebee talking? Bumblebee loved using his voice, having lost the use of it for so long, so if he wasn't talking to them, but wasn't annoyed with them….. Sam's thoughts took a disturbing turn.

"Bumblebee, one seat-squeeze for yes and two for no. You're not refusing to talk, are you?"

He was answered by two squeezes.

"So, is it that you can't talk?" he asked. This time he was answered by one squeeze only, and a small shudder ran through Bumblebee's entire body. Sam ran a comforting hand over Bumblebee's dash.

"Oh no. Oh no no." Sam said, fighting a rising fear within him. "Bumblebee, you're going to be okay, right? We're headed for the base, right, Ratchet'll sort it out."

One long, comforting squeeze: yes. However, Sam felt that Bumblebee was only saying it to comfort him, he wasn't sure if Bumblebee believed his words of comfort, and why should he? Sam didn't know anything about Cybertronian anatomy or how easy or otherwise it was to fix a vocal processor, or what could go wrong, so his assurances were empty hopes, and Sam realised that Bumblebee knew that.

He also knew that Bumblebee as hoping the same thing, but that he was scared. The odd, irregular tremors running through Bumblebee's bodywork told him and Mikaela both that Bumblebee was terrified.

The drone had finished its attack on Bumblebee's communications systems, having destroyed not just his vocal and radio communications, but his data and Cybertronian communications systems too: he could hear vocal input, he had not lost his hearing, but all of his other data input and output methods were dead.

Scuttling back down into his chest - and once again pausing by Bumblebee's Spark chamber for a second - it moved on to its next instruction. Reaching his transformation circuitry and the linkages within it, it began disconnecting and severing wires, causing a short-circuit here and severing a linkage there. It left dead wires and broken chips in its wake. It was completely dismantling his transformation matrix.

As the drone severed the second-to-last connection, the loss triggered a Cybertronian built-in survival instinct: for the body to be in its most defensible form.

It triggered a last transformation.

Bumblebee shuddered, this one greater than the others, and he felt his bodywork beginning to shift without any conscious output from himself. Horrified, he realised that he was no longer in control of his transforming abilities, he was transforming with no control whatsoever over it. If he could have screamed, he would have.

His human friends were still inside him.