Chapter Three
Cyclonus was not there when when the cargo bay exploded, shot down by the ship's laser canon defenses. Bumblebee had come later, after Cyclonus had stabilized and come out stasis lock, to deliver him the news.
Cyclonus' empathy for Chromedome had increased.
He had been there when they dealt with the monster that was Overlord. The same tactic had been pulled, and the Guiding Hand had seen fit to repeat the sacrifice of the small and innocent to counteract the black tide of a Decepticon Elite's sins. He tried to console himself that, like Rewind, the end had come mercifully and swiftly to Tailgate. He reminded himself that the aching gulf in his spark was the result of giving in to the futility of hope.
Never again, he promised himself, staring vacantly up at the ceiling of the medical bay, as First Aid finished the last of Cyclonus' repairs. No matter how helpless, no matter how pathetic, no matter how alone. Never again.
…..
Ultra Magnus gingerly took his seat across the table in the ship's Ready Room from Bumblebee, hands folded together. Neither wanted to be the first to discuss the details of the mission's failure. Neither wanted to address the proverbial elephant in the room as they waited for First Aid to join them.
The Force Commander preoccupied himself with arranging the files in front of him, adjusting them to be perfectly perpendicular to the edge of the table, centered precisely down to the nanometer. The meeting would be highly formal. Formality required decency and protocol.
"Why do you do that?"
Ultra Magnus looked up. Bumblebee was pointing at the files, styluses and datapads the Force Commander was fidgeting with. Even the energon cube was square with the left corner of the table.
"Order," Magnus answered calmly. The question had caught him somewhat off guard. "Someone has to make certain that protocols are followed. Laws are obeyed. The tide of entropy is dammed by the strong walls of order."
"What if no one cares about order?" Bumblebee asked.
The edges of Magnus' mouth pulled a little tighter. "Then I guess it falls on me to bear what others refuse to."
Bee looked back down at the tabletop. "And if a law is unjust?"
The doors to the Ready Room slid open and First Aid entered. Magnus closed his open mouth, the question left unanswered. It was time for the truly difficult questioning to begin.
…..
Tailgate crackled static and gibberish as he began to reboot. The first though through his processor was question of whether or not he had joined the Well of Allsparks. If he had, then all the stories he'd heard were blatant piles of scrap, because he was distinctly aching all over, and you weren't supposed to feel pain in the afterspark. It was just unfair. You'd go through your life suffering and hurting in multiple ways, and then Primus had to kick you right in the afterburner and allow you to feel the same things after you were dead? Scraplets. Dirty scraplets.
No, Tailgate thought, Be reasonable. You can't feel pain when you're dead. Probably. Mostly probably. Wait, wasn't Cyclonus technically dead when he was part of the Dead Universe, and didn't all those Dead Universe zombie-things feel pain too? They'd grunt a bit when you hit them anyways.
This brought on an entirely new worry. Oh Primus am I in the Dead Zone?! Is that where sparks go when they're extinguished?! Or – No. NO. Am I in the . . . in the Pit? Oh I knew I shouldn't have lied about helping Swerve hide that last bottle of Nightmare Fuel inside one of Rung's ship models! I was terrible, and now I'm going to pay for it FOREVER-
"Wake up."
That voice. Tailgate wanted to jump out of his own mesh.
The minibot immediately jerked upright, sitting up straight in in the seat of a cockpit, banging his head into a low display console. It was tight, cramped quarters, not intended for something his size, but he managed to fit nonetheless.
"Ow!" he complained, rubbing his forehead. "Where am I?" he demanded, cranky and groggy.
"Inside me." Sixshot's voice was coming from the flight console directly in front of Tailgate, reachable were it not for the fact that the little white bot was so curled up he was practically eating his knees.
The answer gave Tailgate pause. "That's the creepiest answer I have ever gotten to that question."
"Be thankful you can ask it," Sixshot brusquely retorted. "I could still space you. Or perhaps let my internal mechanisms crush you with a single transformation. I don't mind pain. Apparently you do."
"N-no, that's okay. You're very comfortable. Roomy even. A veritable luxury model," he blathered nervously. "I enjoy being inside you and I'm certain that anyone else my size or even smaller would be honored to-"
"Shut up," Sixshot ordered.
"okay!" Tailgate squeaked.
Silenced, the minibot decided the best thing to do would be to try to figure out where he was being taken. He could see the starfield in front of him through a video display in front of the chair. A bright yellow medium-sized star was looming large on the horizon, and the rounded masses of several planets were just starting to become visible. Dimly he recalled the ship's warning blaring into the cargo hold before everything went crazy: They were getting near the forbidden Sol sector, where the species calling themselves Human beings had developed on the third interior planet, called Earth.
Tailgate wasn't sure why Cybertronians weren't allowed to go to Earth; of course, Cybertronians weren't allowed to go to a lot of places in the galaxy. They were a blacklisted species, or so he'd been told. The conflict of the Autobot-Decepticon war that had spilled out across hundreds of planets and eliminated entire planetary populations of sentient life had guaranteed it. It was really the Decepticons who were to blame for that – they were the ones that had this whole Grand Plan thing that involved infiltrating other worlds, turning the populations against each other and then wiping them all out to make new military bases – but the Galactic Council didn't really seem to put much difference between good Cybertronians and bad. Only guys like Chief Justice Tyrest had been considered neutral in their eyes – and look at how that turned out in the end. Maybe the other races in the galaxy couldn't really be blamed for their decision.
But then guys like Bumblebee, Ratchet and Ultra Magnus had been on Earth. They'd helped to save it from being cyber-formed and saved the human race from extinction. Wouldn't that have made humanity Autobot allies at the very least?
He'd asked once before but Bumblebee didn't want to talk about it. Neither did Ratchet, and Ultra Magnus was just too... Ultra Magnus to ask these sort of questions. The last thing he needed was another 10,000 page lecture from someone whose name plaque didn't even fit on his desk. And it was a big desk.
He'd missed too much in six million years. Rewind's highlights of the war helped fill in some missing details (and prevented him from making a very stupid decision) but there was still too much he didn't know. Tailgate's optics angled into a frown. He was tired of having to constantly play catch-up.
"Are we there yet?" Tailgate asked.
Sixshot hesitated to answer, as if uncertain how to take that question. "What?"
Well, that didn't get him killed! Tailgate decided to push his luck further. "We're going somewhere. Are we there yet?"
"Do we look as if we are arriving at a destination at this moment?" was the sixchanger's surly reply.
"Well no, but I'm assuming that since you haven't killed me and you didn't let me explode-and-or-die back there, we're going somewhere together because you have a plan," Tailgate innocently stated.
This seemed to change the Elite's mood. "Ah, now you're being perceptive rather than stupid. Good," he praised. "You are correct. I do have a plan for you, and we are going somewhere. That small planet – the third one – do you know of it?"
"It's Earth," Tailgate said simply. "The sentient life there call themselves Humans."
"Very good. That is where we are going," Sixshot stated.
"But isn't that, y'know, off-limits because Humans want us all dead and they're dangerous?" Tailgate asked with only partially feigned naivete.
"Yes, and that's precisely why. Tell me, minibot, can you conceive of what it's like to be unkillable?" Sixshot asked.
Tailgate wasn't sure where this line of questioning was going, but it wasn't something he'd thought about before. Immortality? Yes. Oh Primus yes, especially after his hand had accidentally passed under Ratchet's life scanning device. Since he was all balled up with nowhere to go, and no idea how long he'd be traveling inside a Decepticon Elite, he opted to give the question some thought instead of just tossing out witty repartee.
"I think once I kind of wished I was unkillable," he confessed. "But no, I never really thought about it. This whole "millions of years of war" thing is kind of new to me."
Now it was Sixshot's turn to be quizzical. "But you were a member of the primal vanguard," he reminded the minibot. "That time was over six million years ago. You're three million years my senior. Certainly someone as aged and experienced as bomb disposal technician of your caliber would have made a name for himself during the war."
Tailgate wanted to crawl into himself and hide. "Well, uh, guys like us don't get much credit. They keep us hidden away from all the action until we're really needed. We're always cooped up in the R & D facilities," he bluffed.
"I see," Sixshot drawled smoothly.
"You're not buying this are you," Tailgate sighed, defeated, tapping his servo-tips together uneasily.
"So where did you put that bomb back on the ship?" Sixshot purred, corning the minibot like a feline with a mouse.
"Where someone like you wouldn't find it!" the little white bot blurted out.
"There's no need to continue the facade; your friends are likely convinced you're dead and on their way home to mourn. Your life is unequivocally in my hands to end or extend as it pleases me. I would highly suggest that you refrain from further clumsy attempts to outwit me. You lack the capacity."
Tailgate sat back down in the pilot's seat, quashed.
"Older than the war, older than the caste system, old enough to remember the launch of the First Ark, and yet you know nothing about the war. You don't have the training to have been a member of the vanguard, that much is clear, so tell me – Tailgate was it? – what are you really?" Sixshot asked.
"I …. I was a waste disposal unit. Fourth class. I don't know anything about the war, because I fell through the Mittreous Plateau, got injured, and passed out for... for six million years," Tailgate explained with reticence. "I came out of stasis lock just before the launch of the Lost Light. I thought I was being invited onto the Ark."
Sixshot was silent for an undetermined length of time.
"You're no better off than a protoform!" he retorted disdainfully.
"... Well that would explain why the holographic avatar I installed for that trip to Hedonia generated me as a human infant," Tailgate offhandedly thought aloud.
The multichanger was quiet again as the Earth drew larger and larger in the viewscreen, leaving the minibot to stew in his own innermost energon. Seeds of despair were sprouting rapidly in the fertile soil of Tailgate's predicament. He really was going to die alone, but perhaps this time, at least there would be a handful of bots that would miss him when he was gone.
…...
"I'm sorry."
Cyclonus had to turn his head to the left to verify the owner of those incongruous words.
Lying across from him on the repair slab was Whirl, or rather, what was left of Whirl. His lower half was unrecoverable, lost when the cargo bay had been jettisoned and detonated. He would live, but he would never function properly again.
"Why?" Cyclonus asked weakly, hardly able to move his repaired jaw, his nanocellular functions still working on the micro attachments and connections needed to restore him fully. First Aid had done a remarkable job with what he had on hand, but even Cybertronians had to spend a small amount of time in recalibration after massive trauma.
He was puzzled, and not in the best state of mind to accept any sort of olive branch offered by the ex-Wrecker. He tried to grasp what it was that Whirl was apologizing for, but in the end, was too exhausted and mentally devastated to want to put much thought into it. His internal diagnostics were still reading him a steady stream of error messages in the form of discomfort. His sensors were still giving him static and Whirl's image was ghosting, his optics not fully centered.
"What are you blathering about?" he tersely spat, placing a hand over his eyes to try to force them to reboot in sudden darkness.
"Tailgate," Whirl replied, uncharacteristically withdrawn.
"Spare me your pity!" Cyclonus hissed, looking away. He was in no mood to deal with Whirl, and the ex-Wrecker's attempt at an apology was rust in the wound as far as he was concerned.
"No." Whirl's will was carbon steel. He wasn't going to drop it and walk away. "No, you don't get to give me the big brush-off, Cyclonus. Even this means we go backsies on being cool with each other, no." He turned his head to look at the ceiling, lying back on the medical slab as much as was possible, staring into the overhead repair armature that hung over him like a spider.
"See, it was supposed to be me," Whirl quietly continued, ignoring the searing glare coming from the ancient Cybertronian nearby. "You're no idiot, Cyclonus. Taking Sixshot back to Cybertron aboard this bucket? Yeah, he was gonna escape. I knew he was gonna escape. It's fait accompli." The blue rotorcraft wheezed through his vents, internals seizing up for a moment and then releasing. "That's why I wanted to just get it over with. Sixshot would escape, I'd bring it Wrecker-style, and he and I would go up in a big fireball in space just like Overlord and Rewind. I'd die a hero and it would all be over."
"Dying a hero?" Cyclonus growled. "Is that all you care about? After every contemptible, rotten, sin-smeared thing you have done in your tremendous waste of a life, you planned out your own death to make yourself look like a hero?!"
Whirl looked back at Cyclonus. "You were right, you know. When you told 'Bee to jettison the cargo bay, and give me what I wanted? You were right." The rectangular wedge of Whirl's head was illuminated in the center by the brighter glow of a single golden optic lens. "But you said it yourself. My life is a waste. Everything that I done - you think I can repay that? Being a Wrecker, it gave me some absolution, but it wasn't enough. The war ended, and I wasn't done yet." He raised his claws. "I can't go back to what I was before all this happened. Before Megatron happened. All I could do was keep killing the bad guys and hoping that at the end of it all I could just die breaking even."
A panicked, weak laugh bubbled out of the ex-Wrecker's torso. "Tailgate. Brave little Tailgate - he didn't do anything to deserve what he got, and here I am - I'm still alive!" Whirl slammed his arms down on the table as hard as he could. "I'm still alive, and now I'm useless!"
Cyclonus swore that after Tailgate's end, that would be the end of it. He would never allow himself to care again, not about anyone. He'd violated his own belief that no one should ever cling to hope. He'd paid the price for his mistake in the pain that rolled through his spark at Tailgate's end - and yet, here and now, he could not help but pity Whirl, as he saw through the ranting, as the ex-Wrecker teetered on the edge of desperation and madness in front of him. He could not help but wonder if he would do the same, if robbed of mobility and alt-mode.
"... You are not useless." Cyclonus delayed the words, pondering if he should have said them as an afterthought. No, he reasoned, it was the right thing to do, no matter how difficult. The Guiding Hand was certainly testing him this day. He set his sight on Whirl's head. "If anyone can figure out how to be a killing machine with only a torso, it would be you."
"You mean it?" Whirl asked quietly.
"I do," Cyclonus affirmed, relenting from his anger with a sigh.
"Then it's settled. We're gonna avenge Tailgate. You and me, Cyclonus. We're gonna make that gearstick pay," Whirl announced, "and maybe ... maybe I can still go out in that blaze of glory."
Cyclonus' face remained inscrutable. "For Tailgate, then."
"For Tailgate," Whirl agreed.
…..
"So this is Earth," Tailgate mused.
Sixshot had been quiet for the entire ride down, not saying anything more to Tailgate after their last conversation. Tailgate wasn't sure why Sixshot had been tight-lipped after worming out the fact that the minibot wasn't the great heroic figure of the Golden Age that he'd passed himself off to be, but he couldn't work up the nerve to ask Sixshot anything more. Even when the multichanger transformed and ejected Tailgate like a first stage booster rocket onto the ground, he hadn't spoken. Needless to say, the minibot was beginning to fear his long, unlived life was about to come to a messy end.
It hadn't happened, however, not just yet. Though Sixshot had grabbed him back up to prevent him from running, he hadn't harmed the smaller Cybertronian. He hadn't even give him a warning squeeze, which allowed Tailgate to relax enough to try to take in his surroundings.
Earth was magnificent, or so Tailgate thought. The humans were tiny, but then again, not everyone was the size of a Cybertronian; nevertheless, sometimes very dangerous (and even deadly) things could come in small packages. It was best for them to remain cautious and out of sight of the natives.
The two had landed outside a large city in the middle of a desert; with next to nothing surrounding them for miles it was easy to slip in undetected, and therefore unmolested, to make a landing. They would have to scan Earth vehicle modes, but finding anything suitable would be next to impossible without entering the human metropolis in the distance; at the same time, they couldn't just walk right in to try on the local fashions.
"Yes," Sixshot finally answered gruffly. "Do you have a holomatter avatar?"
So that was how they were going to do it. Not a bad idea, Tailgate thought. "Yeeees?" he replied with a high note of caution in his answer. Well, he had one, but it wasn't going to be terribly useful.
Sixshot grunted again. "Good. I will activate mine. We'll look for Earth-modes. I will only warn you once about trying to escape me. If I don't find and kill you, the natives will."
"Yeah yeah I got it," Tailgate grumbled. His attentions turned to his impending "handicap". "I uh, I hope you have something that's more …mobile than my form."
"Whyyyy?" Sixshot asked, narrowing the shutters on his optic visor.
"Oh you'll see," Tailgate replied nonchalantly. Transforming into a small and highly compact wheeled vehicle, the minibot projected his holomatter avatar.
A human infant appeared, sitting upright on the ground, partially inside a baby sling, on the desert floor a short distance away.
Sixshot snorted in disgust. "Figures," he muttered, looking down in the tiny Tailgate-baby. "At least it will blend in well. Humans generally do not harm their young."
"So what about yours?" Tailgate said around his pacifier.
Sixshot transformed into jet mode and rested across from Tailgate's vehicle form, weapons aligned to shoot the minibot if he should feel the need to.
A ninja in 16th century Japanese garb appeared nearby. "I believe this will be sufficiently mobile," he announced, walking over to pick up Baby Tailgate and his convenient carrier.
"Thanks," Tailgate replied, adjusting himself to look over Sixshot's shoulder as the two began to trek towards the outskirts of Las Vegas. "It would be an awfully long way to crawl."
…..
"Am I allowed to ask questions?" Tailgate queried from over Sixshot's right shoulder as the artificial ninja continued effortlessly across the empty desert wastes, just a short distance from the suburb outskirts of Las Vegas.
"I will answer questions I feel like answering," was the noncommittal reply.
"Well, at least it's a start," Tailgate muttered. He stopped to take the pacifier out of his mouth and stare at it. "How do human protoforms even talk with one of these things in their mouth?"
"Perhaps it is to prevent them from speaking," Sixshot curtly suggested, casting a glare at the artificial infant at his back.
"Well that seems silly," Tailgate said, oblivious to Sixshot's hinting. "How else are they going to convey their needs to their progenitors?"
"Humanity is an odd species," Sixshot relented, feeling that indulging Tailgate's curiosities might earn him a measure of peace. "They are one of the only non-Council species to have ever driven us off their world."
"I take it that's because you guys were trying that 'Great Plan' of yours here," Tailgate accused.
Sixshot humphed, smiling to himself beneath the cloth mask wrapped over his human nose and mouth. "The Decepticons only reached phase two. I was called in well ahead of schedule," he said, feeling no need to be secretive about it now. What happened back then would be recorded by the Autobot victors. At this point, all he could do was tell his side of the story as plainly as possible. There was no Decepticon cause to defend anymore. "I was the first Cybertronian the general populace of this planet became aware of."
"Well, that explains why they're hostile," Tailgate flatly stated.
"Oh, it was more than that. There was the occupation of one of their largest cities, the attempt to cyberform their world, the particle cannons from New Darkmount, the general destruction caused by both Autobot and Decepticon warfare … one could say that they'd simply had enough," Sixshot said. "Have your Autobot allies never told you why even they, being so noble and stalwart, are not welcome on this world?"
This gave Tailgate pause, and his tiny baby face screwed up cutely in thought. "... No. No one even wants to talk about it much."
The glittering lights of Las Vegas loomed large in the distance, drowning the two artificial humans in its shadow against the skyline. Skyscrapers glittered, white and reflective, rebuilt and re-engineered in the time that had passed since humanity was shaken out of its galactic innocence. Small vehicles darted through the air like multihued metal birds, weaving in and out of the urban sprawl. The highways in the distance streamed with tracked and treaded vehicles, far different in design than the ones Sixshot had encountered in his first days on Earth.
Now, among all the movement, light and sound, the taller forms of robotic humanoids flitted in and out of the mix.
"Because for all the good you did, they judged us all as equals. They did not distinguish between Autobot and Decepticon. We were all alike to them," Sixshot explained. "But more importantly … this species is more like Decepticon than Autobot."
Tailgate seemed confused. "Humans are evil?" he asked. From what he had heard about Verity Carlo from Ultra Magnus, that hardly seemed the case.
"They bought weapons from Swindle to use against Autobot allies and Decepticon foes alike. They captured Cybertronians to dissect them. They gutted Cybertronian bodies to turn them into weapons they could fuse into and control," Sixshot said firmly, stopping in his tracks to look into Tailgate's eyes as if to impress upon the other Cybertronian the wickedness of the human species through tone of voice and eye contact alone.
"They are the offal of Unicron," he continued, "generated from the anti-spark energies of his dormant physical form over the eons."
Tailgate's eyes got huge. "Wait, that would mean that Earth is...!" he trailed off, covering his mouth with both hands, suddenly fearful that the chaos-bringer might be listening, ready to spring out of the shadows at the mention of his name.
"Correct," Sixshot said. "It is not a secret shared with the common masses of Cybertron." Noticing Tailgate's sudden terror, he turned and stamped his feet into the dust a few times. "See? Nothing. Unicron's anti-spark is no longer in his body. This is nothing but his empty husk now. His degenerate organic spawn have free run of it now."
"you're sure?" Tailgate squeaked timidly, clinging desperately to Sixshot's neck.
"Quite," the multichanger-in-disguise calmly assuaged.
"You're really sure?" Tailgate questioned again.
Sixshot's eyebrows drew together beneath his his hood. "Yes."
"You're REALLY REALLY-"
"YES!" Sixshot snapped. "Stop being such a protoform!"
"Well, all things considered ... ," Tailgate pointed out, waving his pacifier in one hand sheepishly.
"Right. How foolish of me to forget," Sixshot grumbled.
Without warning the shadow of a jet flashed over them, kicking up a cloud of sand and dust; moments later the sonic boom caught up with them shook the area. The two artificial humans, shocked out of their conversation, watched the airborne vehicle blast off into the distance. Still visible on the horizon, it looped upwards in a right angle and transformed, landing on a tarmac below in robot form.
"... I thought Cybertronians were blacklisted from this planet," Tailgate mused, sounding completely puzzled.
"We are," Sixshot affirmed, but he, too, sounded curious about this strange transformer in the distance. "But it appears things have changed since I was last on this ball of mud and flesh."
"They don't seem to be attacking that robot either," Tailgate noted, keeping his tiny eyes focused on the jet-frame robot as it walked over to a group of other robots lined up together outside a large hangar.
Sixshot did not immediately answer, but after a few moments of silence between the two of them, the multichanger began to laugh, slowly at first, and then with more mirth and intensity. "At last!" he cried. "A challenge! There might be a worthy challenge here for me!"
"That's what this is all about?!" Tailgate shouted in disbelief. "You kidnapped me and drug me to UNICRON'S CORPSE full of Humans that want to kill us, because you were BORED?!"
"Do you remember when I asked you if you had ever thought about what it was like to be unkillable, boy?" Sixshot asked, unruffled by the angry infant shouting into his "ear".
Tailgate stopped. He'd never answered. The conversation had darted off down another trail like a startled rabbit. Sixshot continued, answering for his smaller prisoner.
"As you may well have guessed, I am a point one percenter, and furthermore, I am the best point one percenter. I heard that you fought Overlord on your ship, the Lost Light? Overlord was never a threat to me, and Tarn sought to follow in my footsteps."
"I was sparked to be the best fighting machine Cybertron had to offer, and in my time as a member of the Decepticon Elite, I brought entire inhabited worlds to waste. I fought with Titans. I battled with the strongest warriors that either of our armies brought to bear, and in the end, it was all too easy. Boredom is a powerful thing, Tailgate. In your long and storied life, have you ever felt unfulfilled? As if everything you had ever done was a waste of your time and efforts? That every so-called challenge set before you was just another vast disappointment?"
"Millions of years stretched on and there was never an end to it. Never an end to the killing, to the fighting, to the war – oh, it had its moments of satisfaction here and there but they quickly became footsteps in a long and winding trail to nowhere. I am not going to go back to Cybertron, to be disassembled, to be locked away to rot in boredom, to face so-called "justice" in the shambles of Iacon on a wild, disheveled planet. No, Tailgate. I have my pride, and I am a warrior. I do not disagree with my life coming to an end, but it will be on my terms, and at the hands of someone or something that is, at last, stronger than I."
"So... what about me?" Tailgate asked quietly.
Sixshot laughed. "You are simply a guarantee that the other Autobots will come and give me the worthy end I have always looked for. When it is all said and done, you can go back to being the nobody I am guessing you always were. I have no real desire to end your life. I don't seek out and slay children."
The words were sharp and cut to the spark. "What about all those inhabited worlds you destroyed? There were children there, I'll wager," Tailgate protested.
"By the time I had reached a world in Phase Six or even Phase Five, most of the population had already turned on and was destroying itself. I brought an end to the suffering, conflict and desolation already begun on that world. I put down sick and dying species as rapidly as possible. I did not loiter in hopes of catching stray children to torture," Sixshot snorted.
It was a side of Sixshot that Tailgate wondered if anyone had ever lived long enough to see. There was something under all that armor and weapons, a small spark of pride, honor and nobility that the Decepticon cause had never eliminated. Despite the insulting truth that the multichanger all but rubbed in his face, Tailgate could not help but pity him. Sixshot had come to Earth to die.