The Diego Diaries: Here we go. 7 (296) (Edited)
-0-Out there in the deep darkness of space
A big fleet was flying together silently, their malevolence proceeding them almost like a shroud of death. They had been in the sector, the one the humans called Delta Quadrant exploring the region for materials, fuel sources and allies. They had come across a malignant species, the Borg and had triumphed over them in every encounter.
They were as numerous as the grains of sand on the beaches of the insect world that had trumped his masculinity by holding him like some dissected specimen for nearly an entire vorn. Megatron had been captive and unable to move but he had been able to see and reason. The horror of it had changed him, the anger it generated fortified and guided him. He was going to regroup, gather allies he could trust and come back. He would not only wipe the species of that planet from the universe, he would break that world into dust particles. No one would know that human insects had ever existed.
No one would know of his humiliation.
He had entered this quadrant of the galactic map and encountered the Borg, a bio-mechanical cybernetic life form that was created out of the broken bodies of organic beings. It was as massive as any force he had ever seen, massive in the way that viruses were in a host body. Endless numbers of individual beings with no thought other than to obey the queens that commanded them met them in waves like some malignant ocean.
He had already killed six of them, their femme leaders. Their bodies, what little they had were no match for his fists and weapons. They had come at him arrogantly demanding that he submit to assimilation.
Submit.
Never.
He would never bow his knee to anyone so long as he lived and he planned to live a very very long time.
Glancing sideways, he saw his son standing nearby watching the forward view port and the eventual appearance of more Borg ships with feral optics. They would engage, destroy nearly everyone, take aboard a queen if she were among them and he would allow his son to learn the hard lessons of war that he had learned in the gladiator pits of Kaon. He would give his son the pleasure of killing the queen himself.
Galvatron stood by the weapons station, his optics focused on space ahead of their fleet. It was soon going to be filled with the strange bio-mechanical beasts that they had been hunting with gusto for some time now. It had been exhilarating, the hunt as well as the slaughter. They had bypassed any number of worlds chasing the Borg. He wasn't aware of what they offered if anything. He just knew that standing with his atar, hunting the enemy and crushing them was joyous.
Megatron considered the oncoming fleet that was now appearing on their sensors. They were a wily foe, one that had learned to adapt with each encounter. Their hive mind was learning but it would not be enough he considered. Nothing they could do, no combination of tactics would be enough to save them. They just didn't have the same degree of firepower and armor that the average Cybertronian possessed. They would lose. His son would learn. It was a win-win for Megatron.
-0-Elsewhere
She paced nervously in her command sphere, the connection to the other four queens, new ones derived from the old clear and busy. She could feel the unease among the Hive, the warrior elements uncertainty over their ability to defend their empire.
It had never been like this before. They had never encountered a species that could not be swayed, destroyed or assimilated. This species had elements of unbelievable exceptionalism, something that almost verged into a godlike sense of unholy wonder for the queen. She had never met a species in all the eons of her long life that had been so perfect. They would add incredible distinction to the Hive but for one thing. They weren't organic. Nothing about them could be assimilated.
They were animated and sentient, intelligent and ruthless. Their bodies displayed nothing of an organic nature. They had in the course of searching through their vast incomprehensibly enormous databases only a couple of mentions of this marauding species. They were as ancient as the universe. They lived on a planetary type so rare it was mythological … a metallic planet. There were tales of gigantic beasts among them that could devour whole planets. Almost all species that encountered them feared them deeply. They were war like and dangerous. Now they were hounding their footsteps with the intention of complete destruction or domination.
Nothing in her thinking could conceive of either happening. The Borg dominated, everyone else cowered. This species would too when they configured the right combination of actions and personnel. Then she would preside not only over the destruction of this group but of their entire benighted species. They could not be allowed to live and raise the specter of coming at them again. She would see to it personally.
-0-Cybertron
Soundwave sat in his office working out the reconstruction of his home world. It was very slow, the lack of energon the biggest hold up. He had gotten a call from Paragon and had set up a meeting. Paragon had said he could be of assistance in helping him rebuild hinting at sources of energon he would be willing to share. He sat back in his chair and considered that. He already knew that Prime had endless sources of energon, possibly of a very high quality and it would appear Paragon did as well.
If there was energon on planets in systems, it was also usually found in the broken fragments in the range of that system. It would appear that Paragon had gotten lucky. He stood and walked to the window staring out at the dark streets of the Decepticon city that had remained their headquarters even now. It had been repaired as far as his line of sight could reach. Beyond that, not so much.
He had heard rumblings of an organized opposition and it worried him. He would have to increase the energon available to the workers and others who lived here to make sure their loyalty was to him and not any other war lords that decided to take him on. Right now, he was sure that their loyalties were to their own survival, not his. Without him he calculated, the survival of the still resident population could become even much more difficult than it was right now.
He had to meet with Paragon, do what he had to do to start energon supplies coming home and keep his guard up. He was very good at that. Being quiet and unreadable was a good tactic. Paragon had been an early study project of his. He had learned that bot very very well. It wouldn't be as lopsided as it seemed when he arrived to meet. Paragon hadn't had access to him as much as he had of Paragon. His spies and taps were everywhere. He gathered information even from Megatron without being detected. He knew his foe well even as his foe knew little of him. Soundwave was determined to be the winner in their encounter.
Walking to his desk, he sat in Prime's chair, the one that Megatron had brought to him from the Residence. It was big even for him, an acknowledgment of the changes a Prime went through upon gaining the Matrix. He would beat them all and restore Cybertron. He would make that happen, then turn his attention to the rest of the galaxy. Cybertron would rise from the ashes of this long dark defeat and once again the universe would quake at the mention of their name. He, Soundwave made it his vow.
-0-Autobot City, Mars
They sat together working out the latest intel as the leading edge of the next migration was making itself known beyond echoes. They would be retrieved through space bridges, brought from where they were to the city that way. In a few joors, a flight of Seekers would be taking off to go to where they were and alert the city and her reclamation mechanisms about what they were facing.
"We have enough housing ready to meet the needs of nearly 350,000 individuals now. We are working around the clock," Jetta said as Magnus nodded. "Our material output is sufficient and our teams are in the groove. They have the system down pat. Even the factories are organizing materials and parts in pallets that are designed to be taken by different groups to their specific location and job."
Prime nodded with relief. "That's good news," he said. "We might have to house some in community rooms and around the city if this comes as fast as it seems. I would prefer not to do that."
"You and me both," Jetta said sitting back.
"Ratchet?" Prime asked.
"We are go. It will be nice to use the planet as our platform. Instead of being there, we can be here and utilize the facilities directly rather than transferring sick and wounded from their vessel, to ours, then here. All around win for us I think," Ratchet said.
They discussed security, supply lines and all the enormous steps that had to be taken to make this reclamation smooth. As they did, they were filmed. Whether it made it into Platoon was anyone's guess. But it would be the first episode where Optimus Prime would be shown doing what he did best, leading his people through the quagmires facing them.
-0-On Earth
Paris, France
They walked along the leafy city street hurrying away from their designated targets. They had all dropped off their part of the bombs that would be detonated, melting away afterward into the early evening. The expert who was at the small apartment putting it together would fade away himself. He would get far away, then make a cell phone call. It would trigger the bomb and a huge portion of a beautiful neighborhood would be in pieces. That the Defense Minister of France lived across the street would not be lost on anyone.
Berlin, Germany
The bombers finished and left, the big hulking pile of explosives stacked in a room of an apartment enough to level the building in which it was housed. It was in a nice neighborhood of hipster business types and upscale mid level government workers in the defense departments of the country. When the bomb blew up, they would feel the love in the cratered stone walls of their own homes.
London, England
The walk from the West End was leisurely as the bombers left behind their own contribution to the alien problem. The bomb had been gathered, constructed and wired to detonate when the call to it was made. The bombers blended into the mass of happy young people who were out and about on the town at the coming of evening. They themselves would be long gone when the explosion would ring out.
Los Angeles, California, USA
The stadium had been infiltrated and the bomb gathered, the bits and pieces carried through the sewer lines, then the underground tunnels that were a part of the big facility. A stadium built once upon a time for the Olympics where the youth of the world would gather for peaceful competition would be the site of an explosion that would bring down one large portion of an entire side wall. The bombers would be back in Nevada before it would commence.
Toronto, Canada
The bomb would be ready for the synchronized set off and would decimate the area around the Air Canada Center. They had planned their actions carefully, the expertise available to them by special operations soldiers in their midst, both active duty and retired the clincher. They would not be around when it happened. They would merely dial their number and it all would go boom.
-0-At the same moment in five different countries
They dialed their phones and waited. Five different big bombs went off and five countries were shocked out of their sense of comfort and safety. Five different groups walked away taking their phones with them. They would be destroyed and the bombers out of their respective countries before any net could be dropped over them. No one would know who they were.
-0-At the table in the Ops Center, Autobot City, Mars
Prowl rose and walked to the console to get the details himself. His monitoring of the information flowing into Ops Center had alerted him to something new and bad. He gathered it, considered it and turned from Red Alert to walk back to the table. He sat and handed a datapad to Prime with the information he had personally routed to it himself. Prime read it and put the datapad down, his expression grave.
Ratchet picked it up scanning the data, then handed it on and waited as the others read the news.
"Frag," Blackjack said glancing at a pensive Prime. "Bombs. How cowardly can you get?"
"Five countries. All of them signatories of Autobot treaties," Magnus said as he held the datapad. "They are attacking us at the heart of our alliances."
Prime nodded. "MECH and the armed resistance has thrown down the gauntlet. Now its in our court."
"Then we bring the rain," Ironhide said grimly.
-0-TBC
05-06-13