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, Irani Rael

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.

Notes: So… um… holidays, writer's block (this chapter killed me), and finally getting Guardians of the Galaxy from Netflix… Happy New Year!

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CHAPTER FOUR

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We didn't expect to catch up to Sixshot in the Vudu Shaa system. We- I'd made some wrong guesses about his route and we'd wasted too much time searching systems the Decepticon hadn't passed through. Thus we'd expected to follow his trail into the inner system, sample the various reports of destruction and mayhem that inevitably trailed in his wake whenever he passed through an inhabited system, then follow the trail out of the system and start over.

We didn't expect to jump into a quiet system occupied by a Nova Corps fleet. Fraggit.

Still, it didn't change the parameters of what we had to do; it just made it more difficult in practice and, ultimately, less likely that our quarry was still in the system. Bluestreak and I separated, flittering out of formation on brief flares of maneuvering jets, and he chirped a pair of purely ballistic courses into the system to me, glyph modifiers indicating which was mine and which was his, and we allowed ourselves to fall in towards the interior of the system.

I knew Bluestreak would be frustrated at being unable to talk, but he's a professional and he held to the radio silence. I'd make it up to him later.

In cometary forms, it's difficult for even another of our own kind to distinguish us from just another piece of system debris except at extremely close ranges unless we maneuver; the Nova Corps ships glided out of our way, just as they would any other dense metallic meteor.

Difficult did not mean impossible.

Bluestreak's targeting solution pinged my communications at the same time as Sixshot's "Gotcha!", and I barely flipped away from plasma blasts originating from the nearest starblaster.

And onto the Nova Corps ship that had just fired on me, where I transformed and clung to the gaps in his armor by my claws.

I felt the other's engine snarl, the vibrations traveling up my arms, right as everything dissolved into pure chaos. Startled by our actions, the other starblasters buzzed us indecisively, uncertain about firing on me as I clung to their apparent ally. I tore at him, and he spun, trying to throw me off. We both snarled soundlessly, vibrations that screamed from my hands and feet where I was attached, but died when exposed to vacuum. He refused to give up his disguise, just yet, surrounded by potential enemies; I refused to let go. I did damage, I know I did, but had torn through little more armor when -

"Prowl!" Targeting solution showing exactly from where the danger was coming.

- Bluestreak's warning cut through the battle focus. One of the starblasters had gathered its courage to fire and I launched myself away from the disguised six-changer in time for him to take the blast meant for me. I folded myself into cometary form and shot through the brave pilot's ship and into the center of the fleet.

I tried to keep track of Sixshot. I really did. But well… without an IFF signal being broadcast or a close-in spark scan it's almost as difficult to identify one of us in a disguise form as it is to find us in cometary form. I had Bluestreak's view of the fleet as we dodged and wove around laser fire, cursing Primus and our luck as hits sizzled against my shields, but we both had enough other things to worry about to keep track of one starblaster in a fleet of a hundred.

Like surviving.

I snarled again, this time to be heard or felt by no one but myself. Frag. Space erupted into a maze of laser fire that was becoming impossible to avoid; shields would not last forever.

"Bluestreak," I commed as I slammed through another ship, the impact jarring my frame down to my core, even as I left the starblaster a flaming wreck behind me. My claws and ramming frame were the only weapons we had up here. Cometary forms were meant for space travel, not for space combat. Bluestreak was helpless. And eventually Sixshot was going to tire of pretending there were only two sides to this battle and come after us. "Calculate an entry vector."

Because he was faster and more accurate than I was when it came to vectors, velocities and gravity. It was time to take this someplace we could fight back. The ship I was about to ram slowed and spun out of the way; I refused to be deterred from my target and transformed, catching the wingtip with my claws and started tearing.

Despite the erratic movement of the ship I clung to and his own dodging and weaving, Bluestreak chirped a course to me less than a klick later; I spared the Xandaran inside a nasty death in space and launched myself away, folding into cometary and rocketing towards the planet. I allowed gravity to take me as I felt the planet's magnetic field pull me into a spin. Bluestreak was only a few meters in front of me.

Atmosphere hit like a solid titanium wall, and once again my world became fire.

During my off-world rotation when I was still part of Praxan Foreign Affairs, more mechs died during atmospheric entry than ever did by enemy fire. Cometary forms were designed to withstand it, but that only gave a mech a fifty percent chance of surviving it when a mistake was made; it was a singularly deadly experience. Too shallow an angle to the ground, and the stress of falling at near-terminal velocity through the thick blanket of atoms would burn through shields and plating and struts and the spark would die in fire, flaring as bright as a sun for a split second as you journeyed to the the Well; too steep and you'd hit the ground with enough force to vaporize even our fully metallic bodies (and probably lower the planetary temperature for vorns until the dust settled).

Could you be charged with accidental genocide if it was posthumous?

I hadn't even double-checked Bluestreak's course; I trusted his calculations, but there was always a chance. I didn't doubt him, but atmospheric entry always made me contemplative of my own mortality. Undeniably large as we were compared the average organic, with a destructive potential that could be measured against their armies, we were dwarfed by the oasises on which they evolved. Physics did not forgive, and right now we were utterly at its mercy.

IMPACT!

For a klick, my sensors were so scrambled I couldn't even tell that I'd survived. Automatically, vents, first small ones, then larger ones, opened all along my sides, venting heat into the air around me and drawing in the mixed nitrogen, oxygen and methane in to cool my body. About the time I was cool enough to consider transforming was when my sensors finished rebooting and I realized I wasn't dead after all.

But If I stayed in this crater long, I would be.

I unfolded from my cometary form and loaded the saved specs for my air car form, folding back down into the smooth black plating almost instantly. Bluestreak had landed almost a kilometer to the magnetic south; Sixshot, who I would have expected to take off out of the system now that he'd successfully pulled us off his trail again, was instead causing trouble and destruction in the nearest city. News reports and distress calls drummed against my comm system like pebble-sized meteors against cometary plating.

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(tbc...)

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