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Pt. 2: Infection
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The rescue hadn't gone as planned. In fact, it'd been a complete failure.
Instead of landing on the island and supplying Blast Off with the fuel they'd assumed he lacked in order to complete self-repair and lift off, the other Combaticons had been forced to hold down the shuttle to forcefeed him the cubes of energon. He'd clearly been delirious, or so Onslaught had thought at the time. Now he realized that Blast Off's incoherent raving and jerky motions had been an attempt to fight the slave coding. The shuttleformer had tried to warn them away before - well, before this. Before the coding detected their proximity-opened gestalt-links and activated the rest of the unit.
Rescue had turned into joining Blast Off as slaves little better than drones, and to what? A fragging marine animal , of all the species in the cosmos!
Pain spiked across Onslaught's sensor network, and he made a low, rough noise before deactivating his vocalizer. The blasted coding expressed its disapproval of his disrespect, even if he hadn't said a word out loud. Agony lashed his cannons in broad stripes. It felt as though his plating was being peeled back and acid poured onto the bared circuitry underneath.
Onslaught's fists curled into tight fists hidden by how he held his arms loosely crossed atop his knees. He refused to show more weakness than that, although the constant punishment had worn him down. A mech could only take so much self-inflicted agony before seeking any means to placate the slave code. Submission earned a respite he dearly needed at this point.
Tortured into hasty reconsideration of his uncomplimentary thoughts, the Combaticon commander turned his mind toward flattery. Humble admiration. Self-abasement, making himself dwell on his unworthiness in comparison to a dolphin's rubbery-fleshed charms, concentrating hard on not thinking about how little he meant such thoughts. His loathing was buried under total focus on dolphins as the perfect species, the epitome of evolution on Earth. They had many lovely features that he listed in detail, slow and thorough, one at a time so he could truly meditate on them, filling his mind with nothing but devotion. He couldn't imagine a more noble beast. They were wondrous creatures.
Anything to appease the coding scorching his processors to burnt slag.
The pain eventually ebbed. Onslaught took care to summon a sense of gratitude to the forefront of his thoughts for the coding to pick up on. He'd learned his lesson on that. A slave either held to proper behavior or was taught to behave via punishment.
When his vision finally stopped fritzing out into static, Onslaught lifted his forehelm off his arms and glanced around. Nothing much had changed while he'd been occupied. Beside him, Swindle sighed and wiggled his tires to sink a little deeper in the sand. On the Jeep's other side, Vortex lay flat. He had his face burrowed into the sand, arms clamped over his helm in a defensive pose. Onslaught doubted he'd sprawled out that way for comfort. Convenience seemed more likely. Every half an hour or so, a distinctive shudder wracked Vortex's rotor blades, and muffled sounds came from under sheltering arms. Onslaught could guess what the sounds were, since the rest of the Combaticons had recited more than their fair share to their absent…Master.
Beyond Vortex's miserably groveling, Brawl sulked. He had his legs pulled up to his prominent chest as he glared at the ocean as if it was to blame for the code ruling him. He'd already thrown a temper tantrum, demolishing everything on this tiny island he could destroy: shrubs, skittering lizards, even the lone hill that made this island more than an exposed sandbar in the middle of a shallow sea. Black, tarry smoke rose in a column to smudge the sky. Onslaught would have stopped him out of concern for attracting human attention and then - inevitably - Autobots, but numb disbelief had held him inactive while Brawl's temper ran its course. Now the island was a wreck, and the tank had exhausted his rage enough to join the rest of the team sitting on the beach.
At the end of the row of Combaticons, Blast Off shifted restlessly. Loud clicks and clanks came from his direction in a steady stream. Brawl kept twitching and looking at him funny.
Onslaught accessed the gestalt-links to check Blast Off's status. Part of him flinched from bringing the combiner tech online again, but what else could the shuttle possibly do to him? The slave code had activated; the entire team was enslaved. They were all in this together, and so help him Primus, Onslaught was still the commander of this sorry excuse for a unit.
They'd forced a full tank on Blast Off upon arrival. According to Onslaught's read-out, that had declined sharply in the last several hours. "Blast Off. Has your self-repair completed major repairs?"
His question didn't earn so much as a glance down the row. "Yes," was grunted vaguely in his direction.
"Your fuel levels are still dropping." Onslaught put enough steel in his voice to make it more than a statement.
And Blast Off answered the implied question after a long pause, sounding as though he hated his life, the universe, and everything. "…the coding is changing my body to fit new criteria."
Vortex lifted his head out of his arms to stare in horror. "It can do that?" He twisted in the sand to stare in unconscious appeal at Onslaught. "It can't do that! I don't want to change to fit some squishy's - erk! " He flinched violently. The slave coding had evidently caught on to his less-than-submissive train of thought, something not permitted in a good slave-drone. With ruthless efficiency, it immediately began to discipline the unruly slave.
Vortex curled up on the sand, arms jerking inward to protect himself. It did absolutely nothing to ward off the instant agony. Soon enough, he began making those whimpering, apologetic noises the Combaticons had become familiar with.
Not that they spared him any sympathy, as they were too concerned with their own problems. Onslaught checked his own fuel levels and felt his tanks sink at the unexpected drop. That did not bode well. He accessed his self-repair, dreading what it would tell him.
The list was long but added up to relatively few physical changes once he sorted them out. Coloration shifts, seals being manufactured around his doors, cannons, and air vents - a floatation device?! What?!
Okay, no. No. Wait. He could understand the changes once he stood back to look at the larger picture. If he had to be immersed in ocean water in order to serve his new owner, being more waterproof and being able to float probably made sense. The changes weren't as bad as he'd feared, to be honest. He wasn't sure why his colors had to change, but he didn't care about that .
"My life as a dolphin's bitch: the true story," Swindle said bitterly, transforming out of altmode to plop down on the sand with his legs akimbo.
Onslaught blinked at him. He had to look the word up. "Bitch would require you to be canine." They were changing to adapt to a marine mammal, if anything.
"Colloquial slang. The implication is that I'm the unofficial housewife of the - of our Master." One thing in Swindle's favor was the speed he adapted to any situation, no matter how strange. He barely slipped up before correcting himself, and the coding let it slide.
"What's a housewife?" Brawl asked from further down the line.
Vortex lifted his head and blew sand out his helm vents. "Female human, usually found in a servile role in a relationship."
"Swindle ain't a human," the tank said suspiciously, as if the conmech was trying to trick him again.
"He's not female, either." Vortex eased his hands open where they'd closed into pain-seized claws. Acting as though nothing had happened, he rolled up onto his side to sweep the smallest Combaticon from helm to tires with a profoundly lewd look. It had a tired edge. Vortex was doing his best to appear normal but wasn't succeeding, and Swindle didn't grace his leering with a reaction. Vortex gave up and twisted around to look at Brawl instead. "He's referring to the fact that we're gonna fall all over ourselves to serve our new Lord and Master as soon as," he faltered, and the Combaticons winced as one as the slave coding lashed them, "he returns. Wh-when he comes back."
Brawl held his head in both hands. His motor chugged in thick, painful cycles. "He is coming back, yeah? Yeah?!" They weren't such failures their Master had abandoned them here on this island permanently, right?
They all knew the answer. Blast Off had bleakly filled them in on the normal schedule of the dolphin pod, speaking the whole time in a dead-voiced monotone. Yet the whole team couldn't help but shoot him anxious looks of inquiry now, almost begging the shuttle for reassurance. As much as they hated the newly activated coding - and they really, truly did hate it - being separated from their owner hurt . The coding kept punishing them, turning their bodies on them. The pain made them angry at their Master for his absence and ownership and it didn't matter what all they were angry about because resentment earned more punishment until they buckled, willpower worn tissue-thin and sparks cringing in their chests at the idea of further defiance.
Then came the long, humiliating period of convinced the coding that they were sufficiently submissive and humble. No, no, they weren't angry. They accepted the pain as the discipline they had earned by their behavior, and they had reformed. They were good slaves who were obedient and loyal and would never think thoughts of hatred and violence against their Lord and Master.
Blast Off dipped his chin in a curt nod. Relief and self-disgust flooded the others in equal amounts.
"None of us are a bitch," Onslaught said to end the discussion. He'd had time to look up the word and cross-reference it with popular media. "The other connotation is explicitly sexual, if not gender-specific. Dolphins are not compatible with our species in that way."
"Wait, so if we're not his bitches, what are we?" Trust Brawl to ask that.
"We're his slaves," Vortex said, speaking insultingly slow. "Obviously."
"No! I mean, yeah, but," Brawl waved a hand, trying to illustrate his point, "even slaves got different jobs. If we aren't bitches - "
"Stop using that word," Blast Off ordered, oddly irritated. The strange clicking from his self-repair system had only gotten louder. Even from here, Onslaught's passive scanners picked up the excess heat sheeting off him. What kind of changes was the slave coding inflicting on the shuttle?
"Uhhh…" Brawl thought for a second. "…housewives. If we aren't housewives, what are we?"
That was actually an interesting question. Swindle sat up straight as Onslaught turned to look down the line. Vortex pushed up out of the sand to sit back on his heels. Silence blanketed the beach as the enslaved mechs delved into the active code at work inside them, looking for what role they'd been slotted into. A lone slave might be a jack-of-all-trades serving one owner, but the Combaticons were an integrated unit. The coding had certainly recognized that when it forced Blast Off to transmit the activation sequence to the rest of them. The likelihood of being designated as a 'type' of slave was fairly high, as their prior connection as a unit made divvying up duties simple.
"I think I'm a bodyguard?" Brawl ventured.
That resonated with Onslaught. "So am I."
"What the frag?" Vortex muttered. "Transport? That doesn't make any sense. Or - aw, frag, I get it." He squirmed, looking queasy. "That explains why self-repair's modding my interior seals to keep water in instead of out. Oh, yuck. It's gonna be inside me." Panic flashed across his visor. "He! Our Master! Who has every right to be wherever he wants! I-I didn't mean - " Groaning low, the helicopter fell prostrate in the sand again. His rotor blades shivered as the slave coding proceeded to brutally punish his disloyal thoughts.
Onslaught looked away, uncomfortable. The way the slave coding worked, they were sabotaging themselves. "Swindle?"
"I'm not sure." Swindle shrugged. "Butler? Accountant? Estate manager?" Hands flexing helplessly in the sand, the conmech stared out to sea. "This is…I don't know what I'm supposed to do. I mean, I'm in the process of signing over every single one of my accounts to - to someone the humans don't even recognize as sentient. The official documentation is piling up, and I have no idea how it - um, our Master is going to sign off on them. The coding's pressuring me to hand over ownership of my assets immediately, but how does that work on a planet where he can't hold citizenship or full personhood anywhere? Should I hold the money in trust? Am I allowed to do that? I have purchases lined up ready for approval, but I don't know if he wants them or how to ask. Can we even interpret anything from dolphin into a language we understand?"
"Not often," Blast Off put in. "I hope you were fueled up before you arrived, because if you haven't discovered it yet, we can only fuel with permission."
Onslaught twitched. And wasn't that horrible news, considering the rate the modifications were burning through their fuel levels.
"What kind of purchases?" he asked Swindle. There wasn't any point in dwelling on what he couldn't change, after all.
Swindle made a depressed sound like a tire deflating. Money was slipping through his fingers the longer he waited for a decision from an authority figure who couldn't give him orders. "Toys to amuse him. Shipments of fish. The deed to this island and surrounding reef."
"You can afford to buy an island ?"
The conmech smiled weakly as Onslaught glared at him. "Might have forgotten to tell you I have a Swiss bank account or four on the side."
"Yes, you did!"
"So what're you?" Brawl poked Blast Off in the side. The shuttle's engine roared angrily for a second, but Brawl was more concerned with staring at his own hand. "Wow, you're really overheating. You okay?"
That caught Onslaught's attention. Still glaring at Swindle, he barked, "Blast Off! Sitrep ping, now ."
It took a minute. Fortunately, although the slave coding now registered Blast Off as 'first and favorite' in their new internal hierarchy, the gestalt-link still had priority when it came to status updates. Blast Off glowered at the sand but eventually pinged a full system report to his commander.
Who promptly attempted to swallow his own vocalizer. " What in Primus' name - "
"I'm the bitch," Blast Off said coldly before the other three Combaticons could annoy him with their curiosity.
His flat statement cut through their own personal Pits. The whole unit reset their visors and wondered if they'd heard that right. Onslaught was still sputtering.
"…what?" someone asked. It might have been Vortex.
Blast Off huffed air out every vent and repeated himself louder. Why not? It wasn't true humiliation unless they were all aware of his new status. "I'm the bitch. I'm our Master's new pleasure slave."
The sound Swindle made was what Onslaught imagined a drowning Teletraan drone model would make. "Wh-what?"
A broad ping went out to them all. Even Vortex choked on air when the shuttle's new schematics popped up on his HUD.
"That's not possible ," someone insisted, sounding sick. Onslaught was too sunk in horror to recognize his own voice.
"It's possible," Blast Off spat. "Our Lord and Master is a mammal, and mammals in general are all about reproductive imperative. So my body is reformatting itself to - to cater to his needs." He - she finally looked as ill as the rest of them felt. "The…the aperture along my back in altmode is..." She turned her head away, ashamed. "You can guess, I'm sure. And the structure inside my cargo bay is a - I believe it's supposed to be a," broad shoulders hunched in futile defense, "a womb. Of some kind."
"I'm going to purge," Vortex said matter-of-factly. "You're turning into a freak."
Blast Off just huddled there in the sand radiating heat, a hopeless slave-drone reformatting for improved service. "My main duty as a slave is now mating and gestation. I can't really do that without becoming…compatible."
Onslaught had no idea what to say. He knew he should say something , but what exactly did a mech say to someone being forced to take on the anatomy of an organic species in order to serve as - what, a pseudo-mate and carrier of young? Was that even physically possible? Would Blast Off start generating the organic genetic material necessary to create dolphin young? Oh. That was…ugh. No. Horrible. Horror and sympathy fought in his vocalizer, and only static buzzed out.
Brawl suddenly stood up and walked around to sit on Onslaught's other side. Blast Off blinked and watched him go, confused. A second later she understood, and Onslaught smacked Brawl upside the head as the shuttle's visor narrowed in a spiteful, hateful expression. Provoking her was a bad idea!
"You know," Blast Off said, thoughtful and sadistic, "dolphins aren't monogamous. The more mating possible, the happier our Master will be."
The Combaticons stared at each other. There was a nearly audible clunk as the slave coding processed that bit of information.
Brawl whimpered.
Onslaught sighed hot air and turned to glumly stare out over the water again. His HUD helpfully updated to reflect the changes self-repair had planned. "…well played, you fragger. Well played."
Beside him, Brawl began making pathetic little sounds. Swindle had his head in his hands, making a similar set of sounds.
Vortex tilted his head to the side and asked, "Wait, does this make us a harem?"
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