Disclaimers in Part 1
Once, before the war, Cybertron was home to several of the giant mecha known as cityformers. More a collection of beings united by purpose and size than by frame type, during the Golden Age most provided both home and transportation to the mighty interstellar merchant clans which traded between the colony worlds of the far-flung Empire.
Many of their number were among the first casualties of that Empire's decline, as the vast quantities of energon that they required were no longer available. Those cityformers off Cybertron orbited a suitable star for the vorns it took them to generate and stockpile enough to travel to the next; more and more did so as the space bridge network that they depended upon for crossing interstellar space fell into disrepair.
The merchant houses were forced to depend upon the services of smaller, less energon-hungry shipformers, while the cityformers remained stationary: most in orbit, a few upon suitable planets.
As the decline of the Empire gave way to the first stirrings of war, those capable of performing maintenance for the cityformers became rare, and repair materials more difficult to obtain. A few, sparing energon for the smaller members of their impoverished clans, deliberately offlined from starvation. Many more reformatted spark and processor into more modest frames, smartships or smaller shipformers, and became one more resident in the now-lifeless hulk which had once been their frames.
A few—Trypticon, Omega Supreme, Fortress Maximus, some others—chose sides in the war. Excellion, youngest and smallest of these, became an Autobot.
-Sidhe Chronicles-
Tracer huddled in the shadows of a collapsed building, trying to get her bearings amid the smoke and explosions which had turned the once-peaceful town of Tyger Pax into an outpost of the Pit. She and some of her fellow city services bots had escaped the bombing of the town hall, but they had been caught up in the fighting almost immediately. Many had been gunned down by low-flying seekers hunting civilians and Autobots cut off from their units. The rest had been separated in the confusion. Tracer didn't know if any of her co-workers had survived.
She heard a noise. Deeper within the gutted hulk of the building, she saw two sets of blue optics—small sets. Younglings.
Something huge crashed through a wall a block away. She peered over a wall to see what it was—a huge Decepticon had smashed through the remains of a building with an energon mace. Someone screeched, but the 'Con stomped his ped, and the sound was abruptly cut off.
Tracer grabbed each kid by one hand and ran for all she was worth, dragging the little bots whenever they stumbled and couldn't keep up.
A huge explosion ahead of them blasted a deep crater in the street ahead of them. They teetered on the edge.
The giant 'Con approached slowly—there was no need for haste, as they had nowhere to run.
One of the younglings transformed her arm into a sword, and the other popped out an autocannon and fired a burst. Tracer transformed her cutting laser, meant for pipe-fitting. It would be of little effect, but she decided she might as well go down fighting.
But, just as the 'Con closed on them, its arms raised and its mouth contorted into a grin, there had been a burst of gunfire and two big mechs came running to attack, with a battle cry of "Wreck and rule!" One of them, a big green bot nearly as large as the 'Con, transformed his fist into a similar mace. The other, a red and gold mech only a little smaller than his green companion, had a vicious looking saw blade.
Tracer grabbed the younglings and ran the way the two Wreckers had come from, hoping to find more Autobots.
The next breem had been a maelstrom of falling debris, bombs going off, and, once, rolling helm over peds into a rubble pile, thrown there by the backwash of a seeker flying right over their heads.
Something slammed into her, and the world exploded in pain. The younglings screamed at her to get up, then hauled her to her peds, forcing her to run. Then rough servos grabbed at her, and she was flung over someone's shoulder in spite of her screams of agony. They clanged up a ramp and she was dropped on deck plating, her energon adding to the slippery blue mess already there.
A medic shouted, "This one won't make it!" and started to put her in medical stasis—desperate, knowing she wouldn't come out of it, she'd swiped at him with her cutting laser.
The medic moved on to another patient, leaving her to watch herself bleed out if that was what she wanted. Mecha thundered past them, shouting about holding the perimeter.
A bomb tumbled into the landing bay and exploded, blowing the medic and his next patient to pieces. One of his arms landed on her, dousing her in hot energon.
More mecha raced past, then another medic arrived, this one a minibot with a lot of legs. He shouted for someone to start an energon line, and started working on her. She understood there was no time to shut off her pain sensors.
Everything went black a few moments after that.
-Sidhe Chronicles-
"Tracer! Tracer, wake up, you're having another flux!"
Disoriented, she blinked her optic shutters a couple of times, trying to get her bearings. "Get down, they're bombing the bay!"
"Tracer, it's all right! You're safe! The battle's over, there are no 'Cons here. Come on, wake up!"
Her bootup routine finished, and she realized where she was. Her own quarters on Excellion. Her own berth.
"Sorry, Zephyr. I didn't mean to wake you."
"That's OK, but these memory fluxes aren't going away. You need to see a medic about it. Schedule an appointment with Moonracer. There's no sense having to relive the battle every single time you defrag."
Tracer ex-vented. "I suppose." She lay back on her berth, feeling the distant rumble of the cityformer's huge engines taking them far away from Cybertron.
-Sidhe Chronicles-
Smoke. Fire. Screams. Energon everywhere, blue as it could be.
Along the comm lines, the "save himself who can" code began running.
Excellion twitched. Things had fallen apart, and the center was not holding. Where was Optimus? So long as the Prime was safe –
::Excellion, this is Optimus Prime. Report to me immediately.:: Coordinates arrived in Excellion's processor.
::Immediately, sir. Please send me the code word.::
::Excellion, I do not have time for this. Report, immediately!::
Ah, but you have time to snap at me, Soundwave, Excellion thought, and blocked that frequency. On another, Optimus hailed him, codeword first.
::Sir?:: said Excellion, watching a trine of seekers appear over the horizon, curving like knives through the debris hanging over Tyger Pax.
::Excellion, recover all possible Autobots, and any civilians you can. Retreat to a suitable star as far from Cybertron as possible. When we can re-establish contact, we will do so. Optimus, out.::
:Primus be with you, sir.:: Excellion flung down his boarding ramp, and a few hundred civilians ran aboard. Drift, once a Knight of Light, was among the Autobots who crowded out, searching for their fellows, taking the chance that they would return. Excellion put tabs on all of them, save Drift himself, whose training enabled him to shrug it off, with a whispered thank you.
A few hours later, pockmarked with near-misses and shrapnel, the Aerialbots flew beside Excellion as he left Tyger Pax to fall to the Decepticons. Excellion himself was not unharmed; he could not get his landing gear to retract once he'd achieved take-off speed. Then, just as he was well above the ground, someone leaped up and grabbed the dangling wheel carriage, and pulled himself into Excellion's cargo space.
Drift. Thank Primus it was Drift. Drift, with a very long rope trailing him; he turned, and began to reef it in. Others came to help.
In the end, two more injured Autobots and one last civilian were brought aboard by way of Drift's rope. And then, far above the ruin of Tyger Pax, Excellion had told the mecha he was carrying to plug the hole, called the Aerialbots to lock to him, and hit hyperdrive.
He never saw Cybertron again. The Diaspora had begun.
-Sidhe Chronicles-
He had once been a Knight of Light, but the Circle had fallen to Decepticon treachery.
Drift, alone in Excellion's conference room, sighed. He had expected to live out his vorns as a Knight. Drift himself, the Decepticons called first "turncoat," as he had been among the faction before joining the Circle, but then they began to call him "walking death."
And now he was the captain of the Excellion, and the leader of a band of refugees. A long, strange trip, he mused, and wondered where it would end.
The door opened, and Hound, his second, came in, datapad in hand. "Sir," he said cheerfully, and sat next to Drift, resuming his reading.
Hound would not have been Drift's first choice as second-in-command, but in the chaos that was flight from Cybertron, he had proven himself the most effective of the mecha on board outside Drift himself. It was an easy appointment to make, although Hound was a scout, a spy when the need arose, a specialist in organic life.
That was a useful skill, in the circumstances in which they found themselves. Hound often found raw materials for them; if Drift had the suspicion that the scout reported them only when their harvest would not upset a world's ecology, that was fine with him.
The door opened again, and Bulkhead and Hot Rod entered, Perceptor hitching a ride on Bulkhead's shoulder.
Percy – they were extremely lucky to have Percy aboard, Drift knew. A tiny, purpose-built minibot, it had been he who repaired Excellion's landing gear in those first chaotic hours out of Tyger Pax. Most of his frame type, Hook and Scalpel being notorious examples, were Decepticons. Perceptor, though, had been friends with Ratchet and Wheeljack, and was now Excellion's CMO.
Drift thought back for a moment to Percy's report upon how he had come to be picked up on the slaughterground that was Tyger Pax.
"I was separated from my unit," Percy said from his medbay berth, calm as black space around them. "The smoke and the noise increased substantially, and I lost sight of them. Then I saw Megatron's head over the hill, and there were screams." The little minibot had swallowed.
Moonracer was tending his injuries, as he had worked on others until he collapsed, whereupon she found not one but four separate lines cut by slugs, two of which had to be pulled from Perceptor's frame.
"There were too many Decepticons for me to come to my comrades' aid. I went in the opposite direction. I was able to take a few of them down, but not enough…when I heard the 'save himself,' I knew we'd lost. I kept moving in the direction of my unit's initial objective. I didn't know where else to go. I never saw any of them again." Perceptor swallowed. "I treated any wounded civilians or other Autobots that I found, and they came with me."
His had been the clot of refugees who rushed Excellion's ramp, when he lowered it. The next group were shepherded on board by Bulkhead and Hot Rod, the last survivors of a Wrecker unit: Moonracer was in that group, along with Bluestreak.
Bulk led the Autobot forces on board Excellion. Silverbolt was Bulk's second, Drift's third, their Air Commander: a title he said he'd like to replace with one that didn't taste of Starscream.
If the civilians had a elected a representative, he or she wasn't at this meeting, which was a military stocktaking.
Too few survivors of Tyger Pax, shepherded through the vast darkness of interstellar space by too few soldiers, five flighted mecha, and one cityformer, pursued by Primus Alone knew how many Decepticons, who would take every single one of those lives if possible.
Shipboard chimes rang, representing the shift change; the meeting began.
Drift asked, "Hound, is that the inventory?"
"Yes. We have enough energon to last us as far as the Pentriax System. There were mining colonies on the second and third planets, but they played out a megavorn ago, and the system's been abandoned since. It's possible that there won't be any reason for the Cons to look there. We might be able to salvage something from the old mining colonies, while Excellion uses the energy from the star to stock up on energon."
"Percy, what about the mecha?"
"The battle injuries have been treated, though not everyone could be repaired completely. We don't have the resources for that. Everyone is stable now. We do have a lot of programming issues. Some mecha are showing signs of lingering glitches resulting from the trauma of the battle and our escape. Nearly all the civilians are having defrag fluxes to one extent or another. We don't have a programming specialist to deal properly with that. In many cases, I'm considering having them write those memories to a sequestered file. It's the most beneficial way to deal with it, under these circumstances."
"Do we have anyone who is endangered by the situation?"
"Not at this time."
Drift said, "You have my permission to let patients do that, as long as it's what they want to do. If someone would rather keep their memories and deal with the issues, that's their right."
"Of course."
"Bulk, what's our readiness?"
"We have Excellion, of course, as well as Defensor, the Aerialbots, and seven others who've seen combat, including the mecha in this room. The rest are civilians. Most would be physically capable of fighting, but they don't have the training, and what weapons they have are either the tools they work with, or small weapons intended for self defense. And some are too young or too old or too badly damaged to be able to defend themselves."
Drift said, "We'll need to form a militia to train any who are willing to volunteer, and can pass a physical. Percy, how fast could you start giving that kind of physical to anyone who wants one?"
"Oh, I could be ready in an orn."
"All right. Split 'em into two groups, the adults to be trained up to be home-guard ready, the younglings in self-defense—I don't want any youngling deactivating unnecessarily who could be saved by knowing how to fight back or evade capture."
Bulkhead nodded. "It'll make people feel better too. Maybe they won't have fluxes so bad once they learn how to kick a 'Con's skidplate."
"How many bots total?"
"Three hundred six," Perceptor replied.
-Sidhe Chronicles-
"I don't know why," Hot Rod said. "I just don't trust him."
"At all?" Bulkhead said.
They were having a weekly meeting in the conference room. Rivet, the civilian leader, was sometimes invited to them: but not today.
Four recharge cycles earlier, they had overtaken a drifting ship whose markings labeling it too as a survivor of Tyger Pax. It contained four members of the noble caste, and nineteen slaves, all in stasis lock for lack of fuel.
The ship was currently maglocked to Excellion, and would be consigned to a star, once the medics had followed his last wishes and recovered all parts suitable for reuse. The shipformer was one of two who had not survived.
On treating the nobles, Perceptor had turned out their subspace pockets, and found nothing of use beyond precious jewels and precious metals. Those he could use he confiscated. Those he could not were returned to their owners.
The nineteen slaves had been overjoyed when told they were now free mecha. The nobles had objected.
Sunstone, whom Hot Rod did not trust, said bitterly, "Will you complete the ruin of my House that the Decepticons began?"
Drift said calmly, "You may leave at any time you wish. However, I cannot afford to allow Excellion to provision you. lf you choose to remain with us, you will share in our resources, and in our fate, as equals."
There were not enough spoonsful of sugar in the galaxy to make that go down in a most delightful way, which was why Hot Rod now said, "Lemme put it this way. If, during a pitched battle with the Decepticons, Sunstone saw any advantage to turning his coat, he'd do it. I won't let anyone I value spend time alone with that one."
"I agree," Perceptor said, to everyone's surprise. "That mecha resents all of us as the very symbol of the hard times his House has fallen upon. His sparklings do not willingly spend time in his presence."
If the brash Hot Rod was seconded in his opinion of the mech by the thoughtful Perceptor … "Is that so?" Drift said thoughtfully. "When will we make planetfall on that next world?"
"Twenty-two orn."
"Hound, your reports on that world: is there sufficient solar energy present there to support a bot Sunstone's size?"
Hound accessed his report, and then said, "Yeah, just barely."
"So, if we leave him with a small energon cube in addition to what he can produce himself, he should be able to support himself adequately?"
"Yes, certainly. One mech will be able to salvage everything else he needs from the ruins, with plenty left over."
"Very well. Sunstone will disembark Excellion there. If any of his House choose to accompany him, they may do so. Any who choose to remain aboard may do so, regardless of their age or relation to him. –Has an elder been chosen to use the frame we found deactivated?"
"Yes," Percy said. "They voted among themselves. I don't know who will show up for the reformat tomorrow, but they've all had the tests and the physical for it. I'm prepared to cope with any of them, except perhaps Milestrina."
"Why not her?"
Perceptor hesitated. "She is the eldest of them all, and is already fragile, physically. Were a reformat to fail, hers would be likeliest to do so. In addition, she has told me she has little interest in reformatting; she does not feel she can spare the time from teaching."
"That's a little…illogical."
"She's four thousand vorn old, Drift. If she wants to be illogical, I say let her. And she's been teaching everyone everything she can, as fast as possible, as well as spending a great deal of time with the survivors of the Youth Sector massacre. If she draws the short straw, as she puts it, I am to download certain sectors of her memory, and give them to three others."
"Who?"
"I won't know until I need to."
"Very well." Every bot would eventually reach a point where, as their memories degraded and their sparks no longer easily accepted a new frame, they chose to return to the Well rather than reformat. Milestrina had been sparked a few vorn after the War of Independence from the Quintessons, and lived through the height of the Golden Age. For her, the decline had begun with the loss of the Original Primes, some two hundred vorn ago—some time before Drift had been sparked. The Knight respected her choice, but resolved to make time to sit at the elder's peds in days to come, while there was still time to hear her wisdom.
Drift turned to Verge, communications bot. "Any more sightings, or hearings, of the 'Cons?"
"No sir, just that last transmission four days ago. And that proved to be from a ship heading away from us."
"Good enough. We –"
But Verge interrupted him. "Sir, two breem before I came here, Excellion picked up a ping. Like the others. Untraceable. But we aren't alone."
"That's what, eight in four orn?"
"No, sir, this is the ninth."
"Nine pings in rapid succession. Well, mechs, we aren't alone, and that's good news. There may still be other Autobots alive out there. With luck, one of them is Optimus Prime."
Those nine pings were the thin soup of hope that kept them going, doing the daily work, finding the resources they needed, seeing to their little band of survivors. But then, Excellion's sensors picked up a message, transmitted into space and distributed through radio repeaters, the remains of the spacebridge system:
With the Allspark gone, we cannot return life to our planet. But, fate has yielded its reward: a new world to call home. We live among its people now, hiding in plain sight, but watching over them in secret, waiting... protecting. I have witnessed their capacity for courage, and though we are worlds apart, like us, there's more to them than meets the eye. I am Optimus Prime, and I send this message to any surviving Autobots taking refuge among the stars: We are here. We are waiting.
And at long last, Drift requested that Excellion set his course toward a new home, with hope of a new life for the survivors of Tyger Pax.
End Part 13