[* * * * *]
Pt. 3: Promotion
[* * * * *]
The second island they settled on was approximately the same size as the first, but they'd never know for certain. The scrubby sandbar Blast Off had lived on for days was gone, scattered over the ocean in a fit of anger. Brawl's short temper had snapped completely once his self-repair changed plans.
The other Combaticons dully watched from their patch of beach as Brawl dug up the rest of the island and pitched it in every direction. They didn't object.
They should have. It turned out that explosions, smoke, and chunks of plantlife hurled into the ocean scared dolphins. Who knew, right? Well, they knew now, which wasn't terribly helpful. Hindsight merely ground in how stupid they were not to anticipate their owner's reaction to a giant metal alien throwing a temper tantrum.
The dolphin pod fled from the violence. The Combaticons were left behind. It took them a full day to figure out why their owner didn't return, and if the previous punishments were unpleasant, they soon learned how bad it could get.
The slave code wouldn't allow them to think of their fleshy Master as a dumb animal motivated by fear, but it was quite capable of searing into their cringing minds that he was shy. He had an aversion to loud, unsettling noises. They should have known better. They did known better. They'd disrupted their Lord and Master's normal feeding and play schedule. They'd driven away their master.
Only bad slaves didn't think of their owner's reactions first and foremost, and oh, had they been bad slaves. They'd caused their Master discomfort, and as a result, he'd abandoned his rude, unworthy, bad slaves.
Yeah, the slave coding went to town on the Combaticons over that.
Vortex curled up into a whimpering ball. Brawl kept randomly blurting half-formed apologies to thin air, then crumpling under a fresh surge of pain as the slave coding decided the tank wasn't remorseful enough. Onslaught remained on his hands and knees, shuddering silently. He was the most withdrawn of any of them throughout the waves of sensor network triggers, but stubborn dignity couldn't outlast their punishment. Muting his vocalizer didn't stop the gasps or clenched fists, and real desperation filled his visor whenever he scanned the horizon looking for any hint of their owner's return.
After hours of howling in self-inflicted, internal pain, they were exhausted. The beach was grooved by the clawing of their hands. Impressions of their faces pitted the sand. Swindle miserably raised the idea of purchasing tow lines, jumper cables, and industrial magnets for the purposes of torture, and the Combaticons flinched in collective dread as the coding clicking through their heads almost audibly changed tracks. Apparently self-punishment was no longer sufficient discipline for such bad slaves.
Blast Off had stoically knelt throughout, forehelm in the sand and vocalizer offline as she suffered. There was no point in struggling, and she already knew begging pardon of her Lord and Master was the only solution the coding would accept. She kept her optics offline, concentrating on accepting the pain as her due. By the fourth hour, her total surrender before the programming earned her some respite, easing off to a simmering pain deep in her wires. It was relief so needed she was ready to do anything the coding prompted.
She assumed the respite came from the coding recognized her submission, but no. No, not quite. It spared her further punishment in order to slot her into a role she never wanted: leader.
A whole directory of hierarchal, mandated actions opened up in her head, and Blast Off was unsettled to discover her position within the new hierarchy was that of the slave in charge. Especially since that discovery came via Brawl hanging from her fist weakly apologizing. Not apologizing to a military leader - Onslaught was standing to one side looking helpless - but to their Master's first and favorite. The head of the harem, as it were.
Slavery shifted military ranking over to what was, to a slave, a more important indicator of authority: their owner's favor.
They didn't even realize the team chain of command had changed until, panicking, the Combaticons found themselves turning to Blast Off for directions. And Blast Off didn't consciously recognize what had happened until she began disciplining Brawl. The slave coding was that insidious.
The shuttle jolted as it hit her what exactly she was doing...and how Brawl hung there taking it as if she had every right to punish him. Which she did, now. According to the activated code. Anything they believed to the contrary was overridden. Mere military rank meant nothing.
Blast Off stopped, hand wrapped around Brawl's barrel, and suppressed the urge to turn to Onslaught for help. Onslaught couldn't help her. None of the other Combaticons were any better off than she, and she was, in fact, in a comparatively enviably position at the moment.
"I screwed up, c'mon, I did, I get it, I get it," Brawl was blubbering, but Blast Off shut him out. She had to think.
Fortunately, the directory was well organized. Slaves followed strict rules of proper behavior. Blast Off tentatively explored the files, wincing away from some of the titles but unable to stop a sickening sense of gratitude that at least there were guidelines. Now that she'd stopped fighting the slave coding, most of her errors stemmed from just plain not knowing what to do. This would…help. Once her owner was convinced to accept her back as a slave, of course.
Pain washed over Blast Off's wings like a reminder. She hastily summoned humility to the forefront of her thoughts. Yes, yes, she was a bad slave seeking her owner's approval. Always.
The coding subsided, satisfied.
Blast Off held onto submission a minute longer, too cautious to believe her good fortune. Had she finally worked out a means of working with the slave code? Not around it, obviously, but any method to convince it she was doing as a good slave should gave her a sliver of wiggle room.
The Quintessons had enslaved Cybertron, once upon a time. History noted that Cybertron hadn't stayed enslaved.
But Blast Off was a good slave who would never think about rebellion! No, never. She simply made a note and moved on, delving deeper into the directory in a search for what her new status meant in terms of duties.
It didn't take long to find out what was expected of her. The good news was that head slaves typically took over the small tasks classified as too petty to bother their owner with. Not that the code didn't make her defer at every moment to her master's judgment, but Blast Off was digging for whatever good news she could find. She'd never wanted to be in charge of a harem, but one of the delegated duties was keeping the rest of the slaves in good working order. That included, thank Primus (and their master, always their Master), keeping them fueled.
Blast Off dropped Brawl. "How much energon did you bring?" she asked Onslaught without acknowledging the tank at her feet.
Onslaught looked between her and Brawl, bewildered. Blast Off didn't push him. The mech seemed slightly dazed by everything that was happening, unable to wrap his mind around how the code was changing them. They all had some trouble sorting out what they felt naturally versus what the code imposed on their programming. Turning to Blast Off for orders felt right, accepted without question, but not once they stopped to think about it. They knew better.
Bewilderment gave way to bitter surrender as Blast Off's question sank in, or rather, as it sank in how a question from someone who had been a subordinate now inspired an automatic urge to answer. Onslaught had lost his freedom and his command in one fell swoop.
Something hateful sparked in his visor, but he answered. "Enough to fuel you twice over. We assumed your self-repair would need at least half a tank to fix you, with a stopover at the main medbay afterward. Scrapper wanted to check you before we returned to base." Meaning that the Constructicons were expecting them at some point in the next week, although Scrapper would likely chalk their absence up to arrogant disregard of medical orders on the part of one or more of them. The Combaticons operated on their own unless the Word of Megatron dictated otherwise.
Blast Off didn't even want to think about a conflict between slave code and loyalty programming. She doubted Starscream and Shockwave had considered code activation when installing the damn programming.
"I'm never gonna say I hate Lord Megatron ever again," Vortex promised fervently from his place in the sand, and Blast Off almost glared at him. They'd all followed the train of thought to get to that feeling, but -
"Don't think about it," Onslaught ordered as if that could possibly work.
Vortex's engine revved full-throttle, but all the 'copter did was curl into a tighter ball, whimpering soft apologies. Because of course he'd thought about it. They were all thinking about it to varying degrees now, about how the loyalty programming had been the Pit but obeying Megatron's commands was far, far preferable to serving a fragging animal.
It took a long time to recover from that thought. Every time Blast Off managed to clear her mind, the slave coding would turn up a hidden wish for rescue, and suddenly Blast Off would be back to swearing up and down that she was happy to be a slave, she was glad her owner was a tiny Earth mammal, dolphins were the best.
The tide had come in by the time Blast Off recovered. She shifted on the unsteady sand, shuffling up the sliver of remaining island until she was out of the water. There wasn't much land left. She sat in the dry sand watching the moon rise, trying not to listen to the others shiver and moan. Less experienced at giving up hope, they recovered slower than she did.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Swindle recovered next. He crawled up onto the sand beside her. With his lights off and biolighting as dim as his optics, he seemed beaten down. The sound of his self-repair clanking around inside his chassis seemed terribly loud. Blast Off systems were down to an annoying whirr, but they both radiated heat.
"I have an energon converter," Swindle volunteered after a while. He sounded as subdued as he looked. "It's an emergency device meant to turn anything fed into it into something useable, even if it's just a weak grade. I don't know what we can feed into it." He glanced around. "Maybe we can salvage some of the brush. Driftwood? Seaweed and dead fish, I guess. It won't support all of us, but, yeah." But it was something they could use.
Blast Off side-eyed him. They were all in this together, but the situation had to be bad if Swindle was tossing his belongings into the pot.
It was worse than that, even. Vortex was the last Combaticon to drag his sorry aft out of the ocean, and he sighed after flopping down in the sand. "…I got solar panels. I'll set 'em up tomorrow." He avoided all of their optics. When they just kept staring, he hunched his shoulders, rotor blades bristling aggressively. "What?! What'd you think I carry around in my cargo space, Soundwave?!"
Brawl huffed a tired laugh. "Kinky."
"Shut up."
"Why do you have solar panels?" Onslaught asked slowly.
Vortex shot him a glare, thoroughly on the defensive and hating it. "Look, Command don't give me pitslag when they shove a prisoner off on me. Half the time they're injured and leaking, and nobody they give me's starts on a full tank. How the frag else am I supposed to keep somebody alive for questioning? Magic? I'm not gonna be held responsible when a prisoner offlines 'cause of somebody's too stupid to give me the energon I need to do my fragging job. And don't say I should just send in a request; I've filled out so many requests I got a template saved to my central cortex." He seemed to take the lack of response personally.
The Combaticons stared at him in silent wonder. Vortex grumbled, wrapping his arms around his knees. They continued staring. It was no secret Vortex liked his job, even enjoyed it to an unnerving extent, but this responsible side was a revelation. It made sense, but huh. Still odd. Interrogation was as much a part of war as tactical meetings and permission briefings, but it was hard to think of Vortex in terms of bureaucracy.
"Yet you can't turn in an after-action report with even a passing resemblance to professionalism," Onslaught said after a while, dryly amused by the contrast.
Vortex scoffed. "You should see my reports to Soundwave. I don't half-aft them." Implying a whole host of things to get under Onslaught's plating, but the attempt to needle his commander lacked spite. He turned his head away. "Anyway. Solar panels. They don't generate a lot, but it's better than nothing." Which was what they'd be fueling on once they burned through what they'd brought.
Onslaught shook his head. "It doesn't matter what they generate. We can't refuel without permission." Blast Off had informed them of that before the low fuel warnings began. The issue had become more urgent since then, but with their owner gone there didn't seem much hope for them.
"There's a way to refuel." Blast Off didn't look at any of them, focusing on rubbing salt crusts off her armor instead. She could feel their attention snap to her. Warning them seemed redundant, but she did it anyway. "You won't like it."
Because the good news was that Blast Off could grant them permission to fuel, but the bad news was that even Onslaught had to ask - beg, really, because they were bad slaves and didn't deserve the dignity of asking - for that permission. Blast Off had always hated being a subordinate, but she hated even more being the most powerful of powerless slaves. She didn't want to listen to Onslaught beg, not like this, but the slave code had strict rules they had to abide by. Slaves must be humble before their owner. Humble, and grateful, meaning that Blast Off had to judge the sincerity of the thanks offered in return for every cube she doled out on behalf of their absent owner.
She hated his life.
Being in charge did allow her to pick up the whole unit and relocate on her own initiative. That almost made her horrible promotion worth it. They couldn't just stay here and suffer endlessly. Better to find their owner and pray they could ingratiate themselves back into his good graces.
Bringing them to the second island more than 26 hours later. It took Vortex 19 hours to find the correct dolphin pod. He was the only one of them capable of flying a search pattern without drawing attention from outsiders - the coding had evidently caught onto their desire for rescue and determined isolation the best solution - and his ability to find marine life was a unreliable mix of sensor sweeps and visual inspection. He'd had to wait until dawn before taking off.
Blast Off spent that time systematically doling out punishment to the other Combaticons, who meekly accepted the torture without protest. Onslaught seethed, Swindle babbled nervously, and Brawl just took it and whimpered for more. Conditions hardly improved once they moved. Blast Off had fought the programming but conceded that some further form of penance had to be assigned to the slave who'd stepped out of line. Brawl spent another 6 hours groveling in the water, uselessly begging forgiveness from an animal that couldn't understand anything he said. Whimpering on his knees in the water was better than being punished by his own sensor network or screaming under Blast Off's hands.
Plus, keeping Brawl down via orders meant there wasn't a repeat of the temper tantrum that had started all this.
If nothing else, staying quiet and still in the water appealed to the dolphin pod's curiosity. The animals had been scared off by the violence, not necessarily the alien robots. Those, the dolphins had positive associations with. Once they ventured close enough to shore, Blast Off waded out to reintroduce himself to the pod, and eventually he managed to coax their master into playing.
It made the Combaticons practically giddy. Playing with the head slave implied forgiveness. Sheer sobbing relief when the pain finally stopped collapsed Swindle in a limp pile on the beach reciting praises unto their Lord and Master.
Onslaught had stayed out the way the entirety of the search, keeping to one side as Vortex reported every single movement of their owner in real-time to Blast Off and pointedly not interfering in the others' punishments. He'd quietly submitted to his own discipline at Blast Off's hands, as the slave code demanded. He'd accepted the shuttle's orders when relocating. That didn't mean he was happy about any of it.
Now he stood on the beach watching Blast Off redeem the unit in their owner's eyes. That, as nothing else, cemented the new hierarchy into place in his mind.
"So this is how it is, now," he said while the shuttle cupped massive hands around the small, rubbery form of their lord and master. "You're in charge."
Blast Off kept his visor down, but there was a strange swell of authority in the back of her mind. It was foreign and tasted wrong in a way only a formerly free mech would recognize. "Yes." Onslaught's bitterness was the kind that soaked in and dried into defeat. It wasn't the sort of defeat that could be fought. Blast Off should know; she'd done her share of fighting before giving up.
Onslaught stood on the beach, visor narrowed as he fought it. Still trying. In a distant corner of Blast Off's mind, she pitied the mech.
[* * * * *]