Title: In Search of a Cause

Author: Dragon of Dispair (dragonofdispair)

Continuity: Bayverse (crossover with Guardians of the Galaxy)

Rating: T

Characters/Pairing: (currently unrequited) Bluestreak / Prowl, Sixshot

Warnings: Nothing as yet. Violence and plug'n'play and/or spark interfacing may come up in later chapters.

Summary: In which Prowl and Bluestreak save the galaxy from both Decepticons and Unicron. You'd think the galaxy would be grateful, but instead Nova Corps keeps trying to arrest them for war crimes. Go figure.

OR: A buddy-comedy version of Indiana Jones IN SPAAACE! but with two giant alien robot war criminals instead of a gainfully employed archaeologist-looter. Because Decepticons are totally the same as Nazis and Bluestreak is still a morality pet.

.

.

CHAPTER TWO

.

.

Either I'd been less than diligent about remaining under cover, or some passing satellite got lucky. I'd just settled down for a half-joor of recharge before we took off to find Sixshot. Bluestreak and Shiny were chittering back and forth to each other like a pair of mating birds while the drone continued repairing the dents and dings I'd taken during my chase through Xandar City earlier. It was surprisingly soothing to listen to…

PROXIMITY ALERT! TARGET LOCK!

Motor systems booted, then combat, then tactical. A sequence that saved lives when evading a target lock.

With a curse, we scattered. I summersaulted into my air car form and rocketed upwards. Shiny, still popping dents in my hood armor, made an audio-piercing shriek as it ended up lodged in between my engine and my landing struts on my undercarriage. The missile followed me, the target lock still engaged. That was good; the alternative was that it was going to hit our energon converter and that thing was slagging irreplaceable.

It was also very, very bad.

I took off towards the Nova Corps ships I could now clearly see coming at us from orbit. I'd have liked to lead the missile back to them, but slag, it was faster than I was, so instead I ducked down into the trees, weaving between them and they exploded behind me. Wooden shrapnel peppered my aft. A second explosion heralded Bluestreak's, ah, emergency deactivation of the second missile with one of his own. Then I swerved back upwards to meet our attackers. I needed to meet them, needed to give Bluestreak the chance to pack our converter and the cubes of energon we'd been stockpiling. I flipped on my lights and sirens; I wanted their attention.

"Let me out! I want to help! Help help help. I help!" Shiny chittered, wiggling to try and free itself. I didn't have the attention to spare to shift the strut to release it, but it'd free itself when I transformed. "STAY AWAY FROM MY PROWL!"

I dodged laser fire and missiles. Nothing got so secure a lock again as I closed the distance. Or maybe they'd only had the two missiles? Didn't matter, as long as I didn't stay still enough to be targeted. I wanted to be in close. As an air car I had no weapons, and the ships - single person fighter-crafts; about the size of a large seeker - were much bigger and more heavily armed than I was. So I shot strait through their formation. They scattered, turned to follow, as I transformed.

Free fall.

For a moment, I was weightless, inertia carrying me upward and gravity dragging me down. Perfectly balanced between the two, I spun, targeting. Two pulse-cannon blasts to the engine of the closest sent it falling away in flames as I painted another, further away, with the green dot from my TAG. Two of Bluestreak's missiles slammed into it a klick later.

Then I was falling, falling through their scattered formation and I twisted, spraying acid pellets into various parts and pieces of several more. Then I was below them again and with a command to my transformation sequence, I slammed back into vehicle mode exchanging my weapons for my repulser lifts. I had their attention.

This time Shiny ended up magnetized by it's tiny feet to my rear bumper, where it screeched a constant stream of invective at the ships attacking us and pulled tree-shrapnel out of my undercarriage.

Two down, thirty to go. And more coming. I snarled as a laser blast tore through my exoskeletal force field and scorched my hood.

"SLAG-SUCKERS!" Shiny screeched, scurrying over my plating to get to the new injury, which was a decidedly odd sensation. The first time the drone had done this, I'd been afraid that the thing was going to get flung off and Bluestreak was going to kill me for losing his new pet; now I just continued maneuvering, swinging around and ramming through one of the ships. "I'M GOING TO SHOVE YOUR WINGLETS INTO YOUR AFTERBURNERS!"

Seriously? Glitch.

"Packed!" Bluestreak called, and a moment later I heard the sound of his engine joining the battle. We drove in formation for a moment as I chirped a plan at him and he acknowledged, then we angled away, picking our targets.

I gunned my engines, chasing one of the star-shaped ships up, and being chased by a dozen others. Laser blasts peppered my aft and Shiny cussed at every one. My target went strait up, accelerating to exit the atmosphere. Friction heated my shields and plating, but I couldn't follow, not without a few a klicks to warm up my exit jets and calculate a launch vector, but I didn't need to. I transformed, spun in that moment of weightlessness again. One of the ships following me exploded from the pulse shots, another angled away with acid eating through its cockpit window. The third - directly below me - tried braking but only managed to not kill us both when it slammed into me, jarring me down to my struts. Ow…

But I'd planned on the impact and latched onto the ship, digging my claws into its armor. It jerked and spun and tried to dislodge me, and with a snarl shot the cockpit glass twice, then punched through the acid weakened bubble. I grabbed the squishy and tossed it aside.

Without its pilot, the ship began to fall. It and I spun crazily, evasive maneuvers I could not have intentionally replicated. Shots rained around me, the other pilots trying to bring me down and kill me. Most missed, or hit the larger starfighter I clung to. Some sizzled against my shields; others penetrated to my plating, each setting off a new wave of binary-code threats from the repair drone clinging to my armor.

I didn't care. I extended a networking cable from my wrist and plugged it into the ship's computer. It took a klick for the plug to reconfigure to fit the port - a klick I spent frantically counting the rapidly decreasing distance to the ground - then my systems synced. Yes. Hello there. No AI; that makes things easier. Firewalls? Um… no. Let's just get rid of those. Access codes? No time. Let's just erase your operating system… loading new system… rebooting… maneuvering thrusters online… navigation online… primary engines - there!

Engines gunned, shooting a jet of flame from the exhaust vents, and the star shaped ship rocketed towards space, rapidly achieving escape velocity. At the edge of my sensors' range, Bluestreak and his own captured ship did the same. I rerouted all my available power from my weapons to my shielding. I couldn't deploy atmospheric entry flak-armor without releasing my grip on my hijacked starfighter and transforming to cometary. I could only hunker down to reduce drag, channel every drop of power I had to my shields. and pray to Primus it was enough.

My world became heat. Fire flickered over the energy field. Camouflage nanites burned away. Metal armor softened and annealed. Wires melted. There were enough alerts on my HUD from my cooling system to double as an entertainment district's advertising. I couldn't see. There was nothing on my sensors but fire, and all I could do was hold to the course I'd laid in.

Then atmosphere became space and heat was replaced by blessed cold. I tossed away the ship, sending us careening in opposite directions, where it crashed into one of the ships that still chased me. To my left, Bluestreak released his lift, its original pilot secure and none the worse for his role in our escape. Scared shitless, or maybe unconscious from the G's, but none the worse.

He chirped his status to me: minor injuries only, most of them related to our unorthodox orbital launch. I chirped mine back: the same, but with the the addition of some shrapnel wounds and laser scoring on my armor. Neither of us had injuries to our transformation circuits or interstellar drives, so together we triggered the sequence that would shift us into our tough, heavily armored and shielded cometary forms. Most of the Nova Corps ships were still pursuing, struggling against the g-forces we'd pulled to launch, but some were buzzing around shooting still. Cometary forms were nearly indestructible though so we ignored them, accelerating further away from the planet to keep from being overwhelmed.

At ten G's of acceleration, they fell behind quickly. Inertial dampeners could only compensate so much, and a Cybertronian could withstand G-forces that would turn even a biometrically enhanced organic into paste.

Shiny sung softly to itself, the warbles and beeps vibrating down its appendages and into my plating, unbothered by either the uncomfortable launch to orbit or cold vacuum. Whatever race had originally built it had built it to be a tough little drone. The meaningless melody was the same one it sang whenever we were traveling and was becoming as familiar as my own sparkpulse. It scurried across my plating repairing everything it could reach, and in a few joors, Bluestreak and I would maneuver closer together and allow the drone to repair "his Bluestreak" as well.

"So Prowl," my communication system crackled to life, "Were there any other maybe-Autobot sightings in that data you collected? 'Cause I'm curious. No one's heard from any of the gestalts in a long time. I wouldn't be surprised if the Protectobots have managed to pick a planet and blend in all this time, but the Aerialbots should have popped up at least once. I hope they're okay… Wanna play a game? We can play a game. I spy with my little radar sweeps something that's -"

"Me."

"What? How'd you know?"

"There's nothing out here but space rocks, Shiny and myself. With so few options, ninety-six percent of the time you choose me for the first round. When you are referring to me, sixty-four percent of the time you use the adjective 'grey'," the outer plating of cometary forms were alway grey, devoid of easily damaged chroma nanites, "Twenty-two percent of the time you use 'metallic'. And ten percent of the time, when you wish to be extremely difficult, you use the word 'moving'."

I refrained from mentioning the remaining four percent, when he used the word 'beautiful'.

The comm line buzzed as Bluestreak giggled. "Okay! So now it's your turn. What're you going to make me guess?"

I did a radar sweep. There really was nothing out here. We were above the elliptical plane of the system so there really was nothing except a single comet and a couple of meteors. There was, of course, Xandar's star, but the rules of this game had been agreed upon dozens of vorns ago: only things that were within a radar sweep were usable options.

Finally I chose the comet. It had a higher than average heavy metal content. "I spy with my little radar sweeps something that's metallic…"

And that's how we left Xandar behind. We had no reason to stay. This entire amusing side trip had been for the sole purpose of tapping the Nova Empire's vast network of information. I'd needed an updated star map and the reports of recent Cybertronian activity, and the Nova and Kree Empires had the best of both in this part of space (Well, there was Asguard, but well…).

We spun up our FTL drives as we entered what could be called "interstellar space" - space too far from any inhabited part of the system to bother patrolling or protecting and free of any system-related debris - three breems later. I chirped the jump calculations to him, and we triggered our FTL drives.

JUMP.

Sixshot had evaded us before, but now we were back on the hunt.

.

.

(tbc…)

.

.

ummm… yeah. those are Battlestar Galactica FTL drives, cause… reasons. Sufficed to say, transformers can copy anything they want to. The BSG FTL can be put on vehicles the size of a medium transformer (Cylon Raiders are only about the size of Jazz in his cometary form, and both these bots are larger), and still has some serious limitations I might use later.

And swinging back to drawing inspiration from Battletech: This version of Prowl's tac-net works like a mech with multiple C3 Command Units, which can connect to other units that have C3 Slave Units (which in this 'verse, an equivalent system is part of a Cybertronian's standard combat systems) to share targeting data. I played some large-scale (company or larger) combat games using C3 networks, long range sniping units, and some heavy scouts with TAGs. It's pretty brutal. If you play Battletech, try it. It's pretty brutal. It makes hitting targets at very long ranges incredibly easy, and that's how I'm picturing Prowl and Bluestreak operate in combat: Prowl gets in close and his tac-net tracks all the targets he's in combat with, and Bluestreak uses that targeting data to pick off his targets.