Disclaimers in Part 1

Optimus arrived at the proving grounds later that morning, on Ratchet's orders to "get away from your Pit-be-damned desk and do something before you freeze up in a sitting position!"

One day, Ratchet and Diarwen were going to settle their disagreement. And after that, he would have both of them nannying him.

The Prime put that off for future consideration. Ironhide was already out there, testing modifications to one of his cannons. A huge plume of smoke marked the site of the last detonation—he had felt the shock wave through his tires on his way out here. Ironhide was not satisfied with the results. He had extruded a couple of tools from the digits of his left servo, and was tinkering with the cannon.

"What sort of improvement are you making now?"

Ironhide looked up. "Trying to enhance the guidance system to improve my accuracy when I don't have a spotter to paint a target for me. Works fine when I have line of sight on a target. I'm thinking about getting a remote upgrade to paint targets when I need to arc fire over cover or the curvature of the Earth."

Optimus suspected Chromia's fine servo in that. Ironhide did not like firing over the horizon. He wanted to see his target with his own optics before he fired. The only reason the big black mech was not a front liner was that he was such a good shot. He had absolutely no problem with going ped-to-ped with anyone, given half an excuse. Chromia, on the other hand, was just as glad when he shot at their enemies from a distance—preferably beyond the range of returned fire.

Optimus said only, "A remote is a good idea. When you need one, you really need one."

Ironhide rumbled in response, then asked. "What are you doing here? I thought you were too busy to come out."

"Ratchet kicked me out of my office," Optimus replied, with more humor than annoyance.

"Haven't agreed with Ratchet much lately, but I do on that—you're spending too much time behind that desk. Like it or not, you're a warframe now, not a databot anymore—you can't spend that much time hardlined to a console without expecting things to start breaking down on you."

"Tell that to the paperwork," Optimus replied. "If this is to be my life from now on—thanks be to Primus."

"I'm not arguin' with that. I'm just sayin', you need to make time to get out here every day. Put some of the office work off on someone else. You don't have to put your glyph on every requisition form that comes in."

"I know," Optimus said.

"Kick all the weaponry and ammunition requests my way. I know what we need and what we don't, so I can go through that in no time. Let Ratchet handle everything related to medbay. Chromia can take care of housing and all that, as well as command the skirmishers. Jazz can handle the day to day business of spec-ops, same as he did before. Put Cade in charge of new construction; the former 'Cons respect him and he needs something more to keep him busy now that Skysong's doing better. Flareup's the biggest fraggin' gossip on base, you might as well make her press secretary. Most of the time, all you're going to need from them is a summary at the end of the day. Whenever something happens that you need to take care of right away, you sure don't need to be bogged down in details when it crops up."

Optimus nodded. "You are right about that. I shall take your suggestions to heart. Remember that you made them when you have to explain to Sunstreaker why he does not need to carry a regular load of incendiary ammunition."

"The only explanation I need to give that slagger is Pit no," Ironhide growled.

Optimus laughed. "Race you to the top of Coyote Mountain."

"You're on!"

That was the highest point on base, and getting to it required as much climbing as driving; no matter which was used, there were several possible routes to the top, but the fastest were not necessarily the roads. They transformed to their alts and took off across the desert, transforming back to jump the proving ground fence, and from there, again in alt mode, headed straight across the desert toward the peak.

The straightaway gave Optimus a lead—he needed every second of it when he had to take a slightly longer route to the top. Ironhide made up a lot of time on a shortcut with a lot of sharp hairpin curves that his slightly smaller alt could navigate more easily.

Optimus estimated the time it was going to take if he stayed on the road, against how fast Ironhide's plume of dust was climbing the other road. He transformed and climbed a dry wash, cutting off half a mile, then raced for the top flat out.

He lost sight of Ironhide behind a curve of the mountain. He transformed to climb the last few hundred meters, and had the summit to himself when he got there. He sat down and let his laboring fans cool his systems. Ratchet was right, Optimus admitted to himself—he did need to get out more. He shouldn't have overheated that much. It was a problem he'd been fighting since Chicago. He was beginning to suspect he wasn't moving coolant as efficiently as he should be. Sometimes self-healing protocols would seal off a few small lines to fix more critical larger ones, then somehow they didn't get reopened and repaired afterward.

When Ironhide hadn't got there in a couple of klicks, he sent a ping. ::Where are you, mech?::

No answer.

Optimus climbed down, following Ironhide's chosen route, which meant he stayed in root mode rather than get hung up on one of those curves. There were not exactly any guard rails up here.

It didn't take long for concern to turn to full-out worry. He stopped and concentrated on his clan bonds. ::Hide, where are you?::

To his immense relief, he got an answer. ::There you are! Watch yourself, part of the road collapsed. Did I bust my slaggin' comms?::

::You must have. Any other damage?::

::I think I twisted that trick ankle again. Leg's all fragged up.:: Optimus was getting a strong blast of annoyance with a side order of ache.

All in all, for a slide down the side of a mountain, it could be a lot worse.

He found the stretch of broken road and carefully looked over. Ironhide had gone down a few hundred meters, but there were several places on the way down where he'd caught himself and broken his fall. He was lying at the bottom with his leg twisted.

Ironhide looked up and advised, "You probably don't want to try to climb down that, Prime, there's too much loose slag. Go down a couple switchbacks and come across."

"I will be there in a few klicks. Should I call Ratchet for assistance?"

"Come look at it first. Me and Chromia got plans tonight that don't include me getting stuck in medbay."

"Very well."

Optimus climbed across to Ironhide, careful not to start another slide and get into trouble himself.

Ironhide's leg was twisted, but it was from his troublesome ankle joint popping out of place again, not because he'd over-torqued his shin strut.

"Give it a whack," Ironhide said.

"Are you sure you don't want Ratchet to look at it?"

"Naw, he'll just act like a little old femme and I'll never get out of medbay. I'd knock it back in place myself but I can't get turned around there right. Take the flat of your servo and smack it straight back in there, it'll pop right back into place. You know it does this all the time."

"All right, on three." Optimus knocked the strut back into place on two, before Ironhide had a chance to tense up. The weapons specialist had a few choice words for his foster-son that he wouldn't have said to his Prime if anyone else had been around; said foster-son did not much help matters by giving him a companionable grin, and no further lip.

Optimus threw some loose rocks out of the way. "Here, lean on me and see if you can put any weight on it."

Ironhide used Optimus' arm and his own good leg to get upright, then experimentally put his injured leg down.

Optimus told him, "Wait a minute, there's some fresh energon on your calf plate."

"Can't be that much, I can't feel it squirt. Can you tell where it's leaking from?"

Optimus followed the trail of droplets. "It looks like from somewhere around your knee. Turn around and get the light on it." He knelt to examine the new injury, ran his servo down the back of the joint to feel for anything marginally out of position.

Ironhide jumped, rattling his armor. "What the slag did you just do?"

"Nothing, what did it feel like?"

"I don't know, a weird tingle."

"You must have a pinched sensor. You should get Ratchet to look at this, Ironhide."

In Ironhide's life, a "weird tingle" was not worth a trip to medbay. And as for the leak behind his knee, it seemed to have stopped by itself. He wasn't sure how that could have happened—energon was under pressure, so normally it would have continued to drip for quite a while longer before his self-repair nanites plugged the hole.

Ironhide knew Ratchet would have Issues with him over not taking it, and himself, to medbay, but it was a lovely fall day, just cool enough to leave a black-painted bot at optimal operating temperature, and he had a date with the beautiful femme to whom he had somehow become bonded. He wasn't going to press his luck.

In any case, Optimus agreed that, while the injury should be seen to eventually, it was not an emergency, and the ankle was as stable as it ever got.

Optimus said, "You know, now that we are not being shot at every other day, you should consider finally having that leg rebuilt."

"I will, after they finish Jazz' frame. That's pretty much got med-sci tied up, any time they don't have an emergency in there. They don't need me taking up more of their time on something that's waited a couple of vorns already."

"Yes, of course. ─We should take it slow getting back to base, you don't want to throw your ankle out again."

Ironhide nodded. Damage indicators jangled whenever he put his weight on the joint, but nowhere nearly as insistently as he had expected. It was as if the injury had been healing for several days, not a few minutes.

He needed to let his self-repair work on it, because for the next couple of days it would be very easy to dislocate again. But once he got back to the road and transformed to his alt, there was almost no discomfort—the way his legs and peds fused when he transformed, his ankle joint did not bear very much weight in his alt form.

By the time they got back to base, Ironhide was feeling fine. He went looking for his mate while Optimus got the rock slide on the repair list, before someone else fell and got hurt.

-Sidhe Chronicles-

Mearing put aside her work as she took Lennox' call. She asked, "How did it go with Treadwell?"

"They're more trouble than they're worth. I'd say send 'em home, but the Wreckers are more trouble than they're worth, too. Same kind of unit. We'll need them. We just don't need them causing trouble with the rest of the outfit."

"The Wreckers. H'mm. That gives me an idea. They use pretty much the same tactics, don't they?"

"If you can call busting down the front door and killing anything that moves tactics, yeah. I've been on a few raids like that and tactics don't have much to do with it," Lennox replied.

"Have them train with the Wreckers," Mearing said. "They'll learn a few things from each other, and S5 won't be able to stir up trouble there, because if the Wreckers are anything at all, it's loyal to Prime."

A slow grin spread across Lennox' face. "That works. S5 is the only human front-line team we have outside my NEST troops, but not a one of them has a military background. That's going to get them killed as soon as they go up against a trained unit. Roadbuster can teach them what they need to know. And it won't hurt the Wreckers to train with some humans who have the same attitude they do."

"You're eventually going to have to deal with the attitude problem, Colonel."

"I hope broadening their horizons will take care of that for us. At least I'd like to give them a chance for that to happen."

Mearing nodded thoughtfully. If Lennox thought there was still a chance of integrating S5 into the greater whole of NEST, she was all for one more try before giving up on them.

S13 were great investigators who were capable when things got dangerous. They had proven that they were team players. If it came to a choice, their place with NEST was assured.

If their efforts with S5 didn't work, the vampire hunters would get their wish: they'd be freed of the agency. They were, fortunately for them, useful enough not to be fired outright. They'd go back to life as it had been before they'd ever heard of NEST, working out of their book shop, investigating the cases that fell within their narrow purview, but they would be closely watched, and that would be as far as they would ever go in their careers. Mearing didn't want to see that happen, as she thought they had a great deal more than their present work to contribute, but it was up to them.

-Sidhe Chronicles-

Three time zones away, Jazz went through the results from his web spiders, and quickly examined the image files from the cameras he monitored.

He had access to only a fraction of the cameras that were out there: those which deliberately made their feed available to anyone on the Internet who wanted to watch. There were others—security video, traffic cams, and so forth— which would all be more likely to get results for him. But this massive effort would come to nothing if he obtained information from some source their human allies were not allowed to act upon.

He was thinking about that when Jolt came in. "Jazz, do you have a minute? Ratchet wants you to come in and test your new frame."

Jazz whooped. "You mean you're that far along with it? I thought it would be orns yet!"

"It isn't fully ready—you covert ops bots have a ton of subsystems the rest of us have never even seen before. You're just lucky Ratchet has been your healer long enough to have experience with all of them, or you'd be slag-out-of-luck getting some of them back. Right now we need you to test the primary systems."

Jazz' holoform winked out as he jumped into the wiring to meet Jolt in Wheeljack's lab.

It was starting to look like a human morgue in there. In addition to his own protoform, there were three other completely undifferentiated ones in various stages of construction, and one smaller one that would be Skysong's youngling frame as soon as she had developed enough to be reformatted into it.

She, and it, had matured now to the point where Barricade could bring her in and show it to her, and let her touch it. She understood that it would be hers someday when she was big enough, and then she would be able to fly again—although that "someday" seemed a very long way away to such a tiny sparkling. The intermediate form of her second flier, to be hers once she outgrew her ultralight, was nearly completed.

All of those rested beneath shroud-like dust covers, protection against the desert grit which got into everything left lying in the open.

Jazz' own frame was starting to be identifiable as his—which made looking down on it, lying on a slab, a very creepy proposition. He did not care to explain to anyone at all how a ghost would be creeped out by looking at a body, since he was well aware it was the "ghost" part that tended to creep other people out.

And if Sides and Sunny ever got wind of his creeped-outness, he would never hear the end of it.

Jazz floated over to the frame, using some of the training that Diarwen had been giving him to make himself visible without his holoform generator, which was back in his office. "Ratch, wow, this is lookin' great! You an' Wheeljack have really—Ah—thanks, mechs. Just, thanks."

Ratchet started to pat his shoulder, then remembered Jazz was sensitive about being touched, and didn't. "Our pleasure, Jazz."

"Jolt said ya needed me to run some tests?"

"Yes, I want you to wake it up, and then if everything goes according to plan, see if you can sit up and walk around."

"Have ya already installed m'backups?"

"Yes, there was no other way to give you systems control. There's a four-year gap, of course. Do you want to update from your mainframe first?"

Jazz said, "Ah can do that tonight, when y'all aren't workin' on it. If it's to the point where it can walk around, Ah need to install some security to make sure Soundwave can't take it for a joyride."

Que said, "We certainly don't need that. Can you secure it when you aren't in it?"

"Not perfectly. Nothin' AI-based is going to keep Soundwave out for long, he's too good for that. But it can let me know he's tryin', an' then Ah'll take care o' him."

Que said, "I have installed a mechanical failsafe that may be useful in that eventuality." He opened the protoform's chest plates.

Jazz concealed a grimace, but looked where Que was pointing. Hidden deep inside the protoform's internals, where it could not possibly be hit by accident, and would be very difficult to hit by design, was a small switch. "This disconnects the batteries and shuts down the generator."

"A suicide switch?"

"Essentially. I would not even think of installing such a thing in any other frame, regardless of how well protected it is. But in your case, as a last resort, if someone else takes possession of your frame, you can simply bail out and then use this switch to shut them down. I don't know whether that would do Soundwave any true harm, but I daresay it would inconvenience him greatly. Especially if you do not download the memory of this conversation into the frame's drives."

Jazz grinned. No one else would be able to get to that switch easily, but Jazz could. "Que, Ah just love yer lil' surprises."

"Are you ready to try this?" Ratchet asked.

"Yeah, easiest way would be if ya hardline it to th' power grid," the saboteur replied.

Ratchet attached a line from the work table to a power port on the protoframe's arm, and said, much more gently than was usual for him, "Jazz. This is only a dry run. We go into it assuming that there will be issues, the objective is to find them and correct them. Don't be disappointed if it isn't perfect right away."

Jazz nodded. If he went into this expecting to wake up the protoform and immediately be back to normal, he'd just be setting himself up for a huge downer if it didn't work out that way. "Here goes," he said, and jumped.

To begin with, it was weird with a capital "W" to inhabit a frame that was in stasis while he was wide awake.

As the frame came online, the weirdness settled down. The HUD came up first, scrolling the boot sequence. If he'd really just been coming out of stasis, he wouldn't have been awake enough yet to concentrate on that, but then the sensors started to come up.

He had gotten used to using cameras for optics and microphones for audials, though there was always a bit of dissonance between the remote sensors and what his ghostly senses told him. But as the frame woke up, Jazz could see and hear normally—could even perceive energy fields, though he knew a lot more now about what he was actually seeing than he had before.

And then his haptic arrays came online. The work table was both hard and cold. The room's ventilation fans blew warm air.

Other senses crowded into his perception—the smell of oil and energon, and hot metal from some welding that Que had been doing. Time and position sense. Field interaction. The pull of gravity. The taste of his oral cavity. An itch below his left shoulder strut.

"Primus! Give me a klick, it's like spinnin' around inside a kaleidoscope!"

Ratchet said, "Dim your optics, dial all your sensors including your audials down, then bring them back up slowly. I should have anticipated that there would be a recovery period from sensory deprivation."

Jazz obeyed. With the sensors on-lining gradually, it was not quite as overwhelming, but he decided he could spend about an orn simply standing in front of a fan and experiencing the sensations of air moving across his plating. Incredible.

Nathan Stoughton had spent more than two vorns as a ghost, and didn't seem to mind at all. Jazz had been in this state for a few weeks, and only now did he realize how starved for sensation he had been.

He pushed that thought away, busying himself with the tests that Ratchet needed to run. If he thought about that, he'd start thinking about why, and before long he'd be thinking about Prowl, and how much he missed the touch of his bonded. One thing about Ratchet, once he got busy doing tests, there wasn't a spare minute to worry about anything else.

By the time the tests were finished, Jazz went back to collect the results from his web spiders. All but one had reported back. The log for the missing one showed it last having reported from Denver, Colorado.

Very interesting.

Web spiders, like drones in the physical world, sometimes glitched. In the physical world, you went out and got it and repaired it. On the Internet, they simply stopped running. Or maybe someone's intrusion countermeasures smacked them with a rolled-up e-newspaper. There was no way he could tell which had happened, or how long the missing spider had been active after its last report, or where it had gone from there.

He messaged Charlotte Mearing, asking for a meeting when she had time. Web spiders were all fine and good, but he needed something a little more directed. For that, he needed to know exactly what he could legally do.

It was a quarter joor before Mearing had a chance to get back to him. They were both on a secure line; he initiated programming to make sure it stayed that way before explaining why he needed to speak to her.

Mearing listened quietly while he told her about his efforts with the web cams. "Director, Ah've read everything Ah could find on this, and there don't seem to be any clear guidelines on which surveillance I can legally get into. What about traffic cams? It would really help if I could use those."

"I don't see why you couldn't, Jazz. It would be a matter of getting permission from the towns and cities which are responsible for the cameras."

"Let's start with Denver, Colorado."

"Why Denver?"

"One of m'web spiders reported in from there before it disappeared there last night. Might not be anything...but then again, it just might. They have images that anyone can look at on the Internet, but those only get refreshed every ten klicks. I'm sure they have a real-time feed."

"I'm sure they have the ability to transmit real-time data, but I doubt the city could afford to put that online. I'll make a call and see if I can get you permission to access them. Under the Patriot Act we may not need permission, but since we don't have evidence of a specific threat, I'd rather not tread on anyone's toes."

"Is it legal to spy on people like that?"

"You mean the traffic cams?"

"Yeah."

"Yes, it is, as long as they only cover public streets. No one has an expectation of privacy in the middle of a street. In order to conduct surveillance of an area where people do have a reasonable expectation of privacy, it's usually necessary to go to a judge and get a warrant—and judges don't give those out like candy. You need a good reason. If you give me a good reason, we have a whole staff of lawyers to get the warrant. That having been said, if you have a legitimate reason to believe that the Decepticons are there, under the Patriot Act we don't need a warrant to search for a terrorist cell, but I do have to sign off on it, and I'll have to be able to defend it later. The rule of thumb about a warrantless search is, you'd better be right. If there are exigent circumstances, I'd rather go to the Hill and defend a search than let the 'Cons kill a bunch of innocent people. If they're not going anywhere, let's get the warrant."

"The thing is, if we get a warrant, then Soundwave'll know about it as soon as any keyword he has flagged gets into a system he's monitorin'," Jazz replied. "And none o' your computer security has a prayer o' stoppin' him, except maybe some of the really high level CIA operations whose first line of defense is an AI. There's no way somebody typin' on a keyboard and dependin' on a monitor to tell 'em what's happening could react fast enough."

Mearing gave an exasperated sigh. "Jazz, you're not supposed to know about those AIs. That's beyond top secret. Is this line secure from everyone except the two of us?"

"As far as I can tell it is."

"Don't mention them, ever, off this secure line. In fact, don't mention them, full stop, unless you've got a really good reason."

"Gotcha," Jazz replied. "Thing to keep in mind is, even they can't stop him. But they can slow him down and give the human hackers a chance to counterattack."

"He's that dangerous."

"He's been Megsy's 3iC since th' start o' th' war. He was a front-liner, ya didn't wanna mess with him. But Megsy hardly ever sent him out in th' field because he was too damn valuable jacked into a comms system somewhere. He didn't go out on the front line till Megsy was ready to go all in. That's how good he is."

"That would definitely factor into my decision," Mearing said.

After they ended the conversation, Jazz went through the data his spiders had returned. One of them had been tasked with locating any information regarding James Smith, and it had found a hit. Information about an early 80's DARPA-funded project on early DNI technology had been leaked into underground hacker sites—many of those guys considered a working DNI model the holy grail and there were several groups known to be working on various technologies. Jazz read through the files. The project from the 80's wouldn't have worked, but it was valuable preliminary research, and one of the scientists working on it had been a young Dr. James Smith. Working with him had been another inventor, a man named Lester Hardy.

Jazz began another search, this time for Hardy. After thirty years, nearly half a human lifetime, it was probably too much to hope for that Hardy knew where Smith might have gone. In fact, one or both might now be dead—but it still was a lead.

-Sidhe Chronicles-

After lunch, Mikaela went to the medbay to report for her first shift. Ratchet had her help him scrub the berths while he gave her an oral quiz to see what she remembered from when she had studied with him before, and what she had learned in college.

After, she asked, "What are we dealing with right now?"

"You're familiar with Jazz' situation, aren't you?"

"Yes, we've talked a few times since I got home." She smiled at that memory. Alone of all humanity, she had a second chance to connect with someone who had died.

"Well, we're building a frame for him. He inhabited it for the first time this morning. I have a whole list of things that need to be fine-tuned, but on the whole, he and I were both pleased with it."

"That's wonderful. You know, I heard about miracles all the time when my neighbor used to take me to Sunday School when I was a kid. But I always thought they were just stories, until I saw a few for myself."

"Your people say that there are no atheists in foxholes. I have certainly seen enough to believe that there is much more than what we see," Ratchet said. "Still, Optimus and Sam, and now Jazz, having been returned to us—as you say, these are things out of legend and mythology."

"Amazing. I was right there in Egypt while it happened, and I still don't know what to make of it. I don't know if I ever will."

"There weren't any atheists in that foxhole, so to speak," Ratchet said, which made Mikaela grin: when had he developed a sense of humor?

The medbot went on with his summary. "While we're doing that, we're also building a few extra protoforms so that we'll be prepared if someone needs to reformat. And, of course working on Skysong's flight drone and her youngling frame."

"Is the flight drone like an intermediate form between her sparkling and youngling frames?"

"In broad terms, yes, but it still is more of a vehicle than an actual frame. But she will be able to hardline to it just as she would to one of our large transport ships, and fly it as an extension of herself."

Kaela scrubbed at a stubborn oil spot. "How is she?"

"Healing, both physically and emotionally. She's afraid of Earth vehicles and won't go near the parking lot."

"That sounds perfectly reasonable to me."

"We're not making an issue of it. Dr. Parker told me that, among humans, a technique called desensitization is used to reduce the impact of a phobia—exposing the sufferer to the source of their fear in gradual increments until it loses its power over them. That wouldn't work for our sparklings—it would be more likely to ingrain the fear and result in a lifelong glitch."

"So how do we help her?"

"Make it possible for her to help herself. If she evidences fear, get between her and whatever is frightening her. Sparklings are programmed to take shelter behind an adult if something frightens them. Then ask her what she is afraid of, and give her a logical reason not to be afraid. Usually she's afraid she will run into another vehicle, of course. You could tell her that you won't go onto the pavement where the vehicle is, for example, or that you will wait until you are absolutely sure it's safe before you cross. In time, once her processor matures enough to do so, she will internalize all those reasons, and come to see the phobia for the illogical reaction that it is."

"I don't understand. Isn't that the same thing as desensitization?"

"No, of course not. Desensitization involves exposing yourself to the object of your fear, at first in very distant ways. For instance, if you were afraid of snakes you might start by looking at a picture of a snake from across the room, and progress from that to watching a video of a snake, and then to observing a caged snake, and finally to actually touching a harmless one. All of those things involve repeated exposure to the object of fear, so that the fear lessens more or less by a process of becoming tiresome.

"Our method involves first protecting the sufferer from the object of fear, then making the fear logically unnecessary. After a while, the sufferer will begin seeking logical alternatives to panic as a matter of habit."

"And, it works, because the little ones can depend on their cohort to protect them, regardless."

"Yes."

Ratchet didn't understand the sadness that filled Mikaela's eyes for a moment, before she went back to scrubbing the medical berth. She had no cohort, really. One father whose primary relationships were with alcohol and criminality, and that was all.

The human-sized door opened and Chip Chase rolled in. "Ratchet, got a minute? I wanted to talk to you about the neural-interface unit for my chair. Got an idea for somethin' but I don't know if it'll work."

"You might do better to ask Dr. Parker, Chip, she is the expert in human systems."

"Thing is this, I'm trying to come up with a way to avoid using them contact pads. That means readin' the electrical fields—and you're the expert on that, Doc Bot."

"I'll do what I can, on one condition."

"Yeah, what's that?"

"You stop calling me that!"

Chase laughed. "You got it."

Ratchet offered his servo to give Mikaela a lift down from the berth. Now that his apprentice had removed the stains, it was easy for him to spray the berth down and let it air-dry.

She and Chip were quickly introduced—actually, reintroduced, as they had met in Egypt, and seen each other around the base a few times since her arrival here. But a lot had been going on then, and this was really the first time they had a chance to say hello. Chip became very interested very quickly when he realized that she was now a) no longer jailbait, and b) no longer Sam Witwicky's girlfriend.

For her part, Mikaela had always found the big red-head easy on the eyes, and when Ratchet mentioned that they would probably be working together, that was an interesting piece of news.

Ratchet had seen that before. Pupils dilated, flood of pheromones. He shut down his vocalizer before he groaned out loud. For many reasons, their short lifespan at the top of the list, mating had to be a high priority for their species to survive. But would it be too much to ask to keep their courtship rituals out of his medbay?

Apparently so. He crossed the room to check his schedule at his workstation, completely unnecessary since he could have pinged it wirelessly, but it was a polite excuse to give them time to say hello.

Mikaela said, "It's good to see you again, Chip."

"Hi, Kaela, yeah, it is. Been a while."

"Yeah, since I left Diego," she replied. It was hard to comprehend: Chip, in a wheelchair? "I don't want to be rude, but what-?"

"In Chicago, Shockwave backhanded me into a second story wall, an' I landed on a wrecked taxi," he explained. "Broke my back in two places."

"Aw, fuck. I'm sorry, man."

"Hey, I'm alive," Chip said. "When I got swatted, that wasn't how I expected it to come out. I was pretty lucky, considering."

"God, I can imagine."

Chip broke the awkward silence that followed by asking, "Where the hell have you been, anyhow?"

"I finished my engineering degree at Texas A&M. Just got back in town a couple days ago." She glanced at the photo ID hanging around his neck. "You're a civilian contractor now?"

"Yep, IS department. So...it looks like we might be seein' a lot of each other, huh? Gotta say, the scenery just improved a whole lot."

"You haven't changed a bit," she replied. "Still the biggest horndog on base." And now...she was single. Joy.

Chip grinned. "You wouldn't have it any other way, honey."

"Keep telling yourself that, Chipster," she shot back. All the same, in spite of herself, she registered that he wasn't exactly an eyesore. "What's this project you're working on?"

Chip outlined the basics of his chair's control system, and almost immediately mating rituals took a back seat to Tinkering with Something.

That crossed the species barrier without even noticing it was there. Ratchet rejoined them, so that Chip wouldn't feel obliged to explain everything twice.

Kaela's background was purely mechanical, her human medical skills limited to the advanced first aid training that avid motorcyclists and hikers were wise to take. She occasionally asked questions about the neural interface.

"How far from the surface of the skin are the nerve impulses you need to control the chair going to be detectable?"

"It varies. It's best t'use th' closest ones, though; th' further away, th' more interference there will be from other nerve bundles, an' that could cause control issues with th' chair. I don't want to reach for a pencil an' ram into the desk."

"Could be entertaining for the rest of us, but you wouldn't get a lot of work done that way," Kaela observed. "At least you don't have to worry about getting your sleeve caught on the joystick. The lady next door where we lived when when I was a little kid used to do that all the time."

Chip was startled into a wide grin. Very few people were accepting enough of his condition to make wiseass remarks about his chair; they were too afraid of hurting his feelings or being politically incorrect. He almost kissed her on the spot. "Two-way radios can make 'em take off unexpectedly, too. So can other kinds of EMI or RFI. It ain't a huge problem, but it can happen."

"Indeed it could," Ratchet told him. "In fact, I, or any other Cybertronian, could easily take remote control of your chair."

"Somethin' t' keep in mind," Chip replied. "Anythin' I can do about that?"

"Yes, there is some shielding you could put in place."

"Be something to work on, after we finish this," he said. "Sooner or later, somebody's gonna get a bright idea."

"Oh, yeah," Kaela agreed. "Quick disconnect for the batteries, maybe, somewhere you can reach it easy?"

Chip nodded. That went on the list of possible upgrades, then the three of them turned to the problems posed by contact pads.

End Part 8