24. Exploring
At about the same time - Sector M-2338-2
Sunstreaker is bored. There's nothing to see out the view ports but a mass of organic sludge. The ship is empty, save for himself. The rest of his team is out on some sort of expedition under a mech who should have been shutdown an Age ago. They'd invited him along but he'd taken one look at the scanner readings and declined.
The entire planet is covered in some sort of organic growth—Synapse, the team's scientist, had called it "vegetation." Sunstreaker just hopes it isn't contagious. Outside, several clusters in bright orange and yellow and purple rise up to the height of the ship. They grow in groups, several long, fibrous tendrils branching out from a dark green base as thick around as Sunstreaker's thigh. Below, the ground is covered with a sprawling, tangled web of flat "vegetations", all of them an odd, glowing blue.
Sunstreaker's out of stuff to do. He's already run through the programs in the battle simulator and done a full-body polish on himself; no dings or scratches to be seen. He's performed a full perimeter check throughout the entire ship. Nothing. Now he sits at the command station, scanning the monitors and wondering where the slag his team is. Two orns have passed since they left. The planet has gone through five rotations. And still, he's heard no word from them.
A shrill beeping fills the air and Sunstreaker lazily spins around in his chair to glance over at the communications panel. The beeping lasts only a few nano-kliks before falling silent, but it's enough for Sunstreaker to see that it's a distress signal. He reaches over to activate the message. A small holographic display pops up. The sender must have slagged his imagers because the picture is dark, the audios keep fritzing out.
"…lease… ge…is. Need backup! Loca… 42… s-thw… please. If… d hel…"
Sunstreaker can hear a grinding and a strange hissing sound in the background. He also thinks he hears the rough vocalizer of Kup.
Outdated geezer finally fell apart, he thinks. And now they need someone to come in and scoop him up. Wonderful.
The message had originated not too far from the ship. He'd decided to take off and land near them and let them drag themselves back. But a few breems later Sunstreaker finds himself hovering over a dark crack in the ground, visible only because it's the one place not overgrown.
He tries to hail his team. There's no response.
A scan reveals that he's sitting on top of some sort of large, underground canyon. He can tell that it's deep and that there's a faint emergency beacon transmitting from inside. There's no way he can get through the top—it's too narrow—though there seems to be a larger opening about half a klick away.
He has to incinerate quite a few of the tendril-things to make room for the ship and when he opens the hatch he gets hit with the stench of burning organics.
It's going to clog his intakes. He just knows it.
His first step outside and something squishes under his foot. He can feel a cold goo seeping into his gears. Sunstreaker gives very serious consideration into using the ship's pulsar cannons to just blow a hole big enough to get through. But the walls of the canyon—a strange mineral he isn't familiar with—are already cracked. Shooting it might bring the whole thing caving in on itself and Sunstreaker can't pilot the ship by himself.
He swears that if this turns out to be something stupid, he'll slit his team's energon lines during recharge.
Sunstreaker hops off the ramp and crunches over to the dark opening of the cavern, cursing the whole way.
The inside is dry and reasonably free of sludge. It's dusty though, and narrow. Sunstreaker has to squeeze through in a few places and the mineral walls scrape some of his coloring off. He's picking up energy signatures now. There are five, though one of them is fluctuating.
That's interesting. There should be six. Maybe the geezer really did fall apart at the seams.
He entertains himself with that thought for a few breems as he continues deeper. It's dark down there. The planet orbits a red giant star and the light level is strong. But so far from the surface and with that disgusting organic covering, not much reaches him. He estimates that the surface must be about a klick up; he could fit the entire ship in here standing on its aft end and still not be able to reach the roof. Even so, he has excellent vision, especially in the dark, and it's not until he steps in a bit of foul-smelling squish that he turns on his exterior lights.
"Aargh!"
It's a large, now-cold pile of some sort of slime and he has stepped in up to the ankle servos. Sunstreaker almost leaves right then and there. He kicks, flinging pieces of filth in all directions and has actually turned to go back when he spots it.
The walls are covered in scorch marks. He recognizes the pattern of Autobot pulse rifles. There are too many to count, peppering the walls and ceiling. If he didn't know any better, he would say that all six of his teammates had stood there, firing wildly.
Sunstreaker looks down at his ruined foot, up at the walls, down deeper into the canyon, and back to his foot. The slime is already starting to dry. He can feel it oozing around whenever his gears move and he shudders at the thought. He looks back in the direction he came from. Then he folds out his missile launchers, grumbles, and heads further in.
The burns on the walls indicate that the others had come this way, still firing. He doesn't see any evidence, however, of what they were shooting at. No answering weapons fire, no nothing. Whatever it was, it was either very fast, tough, or, the likeliest option, his teammates had terrible aim.
Stupid, worthless fraggers.
The walls are closing in. The passage is getting narrower and he has to stop when he reaches a mound of debris. The walls had caved in, pieces piled up, blocking the passage-way. Sunstreaker stares for a moment, shining his lights over it, looking for some way through. He finds it about four metras up.
He almost doesn't make it. Halfway through and he manages to snag one of his back struts on an outcrop. He has to tear himself free. By the time he emerges into the other side, missing a piece of shoulder armor, feet and legs covered in sludge, he's ready to pound someone's face in.
"Is someone there?"
"Who it that?"
"It's Sunstreaker!"
He looks up. Five mechs stand against the wall. It looks like they've melted into the surface but after a moment he realizes that they're covered in some sort of rough, crystalline substance that has, in effect, bolted them there.
"What happened to you?" he says.
But something is wrong. There are only four sets of optics. The fifth mech is offline, head hanging limply. They all bear strange injuries. He can't see well enough from that distance, but he can make out exposed wiring and strange, smooth sections in their armor.
That and they're shouting at him.
"No! Go back! Go back!"
"Get out of here!"
"Sunstreaker, move!"
He stands there, frowning, when something drips onto his shoulder. He glances over, and that's when the burning starts. He grimaces and swipes at it but that just spreads it to his fingers. He can smell his own plating sizzling.
"Watch out!"
Sunstreaker looks up. Something large and dark is moving along the wall. He catches a glimpse of a long, tubular body. Then the pale maw opens up right above him, dripping acid and lined with teeth.
He raises his missile launchers as the thing drops.
"That was amazing!" Turbocharge says. His small, blue frame is covered in acid burns and he's missing his left hand, but that doesn't stop his jabbering. "It was the most amazing thing I've ever seen!"
"I know. He just sorta…" Spitfire says. He has all his limbs and is using them to support his bigger, greener, one-legged companion. "And bam! Right into the wall!"
"Do you have a name for that maneuver?" the green one, Off-Road, says.
Sunstreaker thinks of his brother and his game with the Decepticon Seekers and wishes he could remember what it was Sideswipe always shouted before he leapt onto their backs.
"I thought you were a goner," Spitfire says. "I mean, it fragging ate you! And then boom! You blew its guts out!"
That wasn't quite true. Sunstreaker had tried to blow its guts out after it had swallowed him—slagging disgusting creature—but it had absorbed the energy from his pulse rifle. So he'd popped his wrist blades out to see if it was as immune to pointy objects as it was to energy discharge. It wasn't.
"That was the most… I don't… you're the most amazing fighter I've ever seen!" Turbocharge continues. He seems to be stuck on that word.
They're nearly out of the canyon. He can see the bright outline of the opening. The four surviving mechs stagger behind him, carrying the offline body of Kup—the geezer had made it after all.
The first thing Sunstreaker is going to do after they get off this waste of a planet is commandeer the entire wash racks and take a very long, very hot soak. Maybe for a whole joor. It will take at least that long to get the organic guts out of his gears. And it'll make him feel a lot better. The rest of the team will just have to wait.
He turns when he feels a hand clamp onto his shoulder, organic slew and all, and finds the fourth mech, Synapse, standing there smiling at him.
"Thanks," Synapse says.
"Yeah. You really saved our cranks," Spitfire says to the murmur of agreement from the other two.
Sunstreaker just stares. Synapse pats his shoulder a few times and falls back to join the others. Sunstreaker looks down to his shoulder and back to his teammates.
Well, maybe he won't commandeer the entire wash racks.
Bleh. Ah well. As for the names of Sunstreaker's teammates... I pulled them out of thin air. Sorry if they're lame.
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Next week: Disheveled