Anyone with functioning reason would have anticipated that forming a weapon on an incarcerated field tech with whom he had already had one altercation could only incite the most serious of inquiries from the command element.

Of course, anyone with functioning reason probably wouldn't have formed a weapon on an incarcerated field tech with whom he had already had an altercation in the first place.

However, what logic would not tolerate, life did. Ratchet, who had indeed formed a weapon on Jazz in a jail cell, was therefore not caught by surprise, either by the sudden influx of mandatory legal forms to be filed, or by the inevitable string of hearings and dress-downs. Nor did he bother to ponder the nature of rational agency – he was too busy answering questions.

For the base's first lieutenant wanted the details about Jazz attacking him, and Flicksaw had several pointed questions about the use of medical pretext. A disciplinary board interrogated him about threatening Jazz, and the Prime himself called him in to explain Optronix's role in all of it. Barely had he weathered all the inquiries into the nature of 'the incidents', and the precise degree of responsibility he might or might not bear, than the neuropsych division and his assessment board had descended upon him to subject him to a battery of tests that had left him feeling rather thoroughly violated, to say nothing of sore – both of which were something of an accomplishment, given Barrage's tender mercies.

But all of that was to be expected, and since Ratchet was not an advocate of general chaos and lawlessness, he submitted to all such measures without protest and just focused on getting through the daily allotment of grind.

"You're sure you're okay about all this?" Amtek asked him at one point, during a pause in target practice.

"I'm fine," Ratchet answered, considering his own shot grouping – up twenty percent in accuracy. He frowned, even as Amtek's engine whined.

"You always say that."

"It's always true."

Except of course when it wasn't, though he wasn't about to talk about it; not with his squad mates, not even Amtek, who was decent enough company, even if not close.

For he could not but notice a certain patterned discrepancy in the week that followed his little 'encounter' with Jazz. Despite the seriousness of the inquiries he was faced with, after his first meeting with the disciplinary board, no one came to escort him to hearings.

There were no MPs insisting on bunking across the hall from him in the medical recovery wards.

He was banned from leaving the base, but his movements otherwise were no more restricted than they had been.

There had been a total of two minor inquiries into his new habit of ending his day on the targeting ranges, but once the MPs had confirmed with Flashflare that he was responding to medical advice, it was never an issue again.

Nobody blocked his comm line; he wasn't subjected to increased electronic access code security.

Where medical ethics were concerned, though Flicksaw's reprimand had been sharp, it fell short of being severe, which in Ratchet's opinion would've been entirely merited. But severity wasn't forthcoming. He seemed to exist under no real or lasting opprobrium. With the notable exception of his squad mates, no one avoided him, either in the halls or on the targeting ranges.

Indeed, of a sudden, he had mail: within twelve hours of tasering Jazz, he had about ten messages in his queue from various gunnery sergeants on base, all offering their expertise should he desire to improve his marksmanship. Within forty-eight hours of the "incident" in the cell, he had twenty more as the gossip line did its work, and the range sergeants made a point of stopping by to offer their professional advice.

Apparently, Flashflare had been right about the non-coms warming to him.

That was... disconcerting. So were the looks he was getting – even if, as Jazz had said, he was expecting them. His squad mates in basic in particular were eying him askance.

More than askance, really: if they had been dismayed before by his general inability to raise a weapon, they were furious now. Either they thought he'd been playing games with them, and Jazz had called him on it, or else they figured that he'd broken with his governing directive, and so ought to have no qualms about Barrage's exercises, and consequently were disgusted that he remained as incapable of firing on someone as before. Ratchet wasn't sure which it was, only that his explanation – that disruptive shock was in regular medical use for unsafe patients, and so hardly counted as shooting someone – had gone over about as well as a Decepticon air raid.

Well of course it had. None of the others were medics. They had no essential reason to object to the idea of matching threat for threat, force for force; they might not have been made for war initially, but that pacific directive wasn't built into them the way it was built into medics, and they'd all been modified anyway, some of them heavily. Like Torqueline, who probably should put in to outgrade to one of the Krex model tanks, or armored attack carriers – something! Before the patch-work upgrades backfired on him, preferably. Ratchet would even sign off on it, despite the risk to his own person a tanked-out Torqueline might pose on the practice grounds.

Point being, he couldn't honestly claim he didn't understand their hostility and confusion. He did. Ratchet, enduring the unfriendly looks each day on the shooting range, was quietly grateful most of them weren't violent in their contempt, that a few like Amtek were more disappointed than disdainful.

He did wonder, though, that no one seemed to worry about Jazz in the slightest – indeed, he was getting the distinct impression that most everyone was amused, if not a little bit pleased, by the fact that he'd tasered him. Certainly no one was insisting Ratchet answer for the special ops tech, not even the Saanakaar contingent, who seemed to be a very tight-knit cohort.

Evidently, there was something about Jazz...

There had to be. After all, there could be no other explanation for how, ten days later, Ratchet ended up with nothing more than a pair of warnings on his file – one for a third class weapons violation, another for 'unfraternal conduct' – and a week's worth of medical scrap yard duty. Medical scrap analysis wasn't even much of a punishment, all things considered: granted, it wasn't pleasant sifting through broken, burned out parts and trying to determine which were worth reworking, while imagining all the different ways in which they might have come to be broken and burned out. But it was a useful, necessary, absorbing medical task, one that made good use of his diagnostic skills and his study of the munitions databases.

"I should think you would be pleased," Flashflare remarked, as the pair of them worked through the salvageable parts, repairing them for reuse whenever the next battle should find them.

"I'm doing salvage work with hand-helds," Ratchet replied, undertones grating on each other.

"Not to pun, but you are pretty handy with them," quipped his brother; "Enough practice, you might not know the difference."

Ratchet gave that the glare it deserved. "If it comes to that, you can strip me down for scrap because I'll have lost the ability to discriminate by then!"

"Ratchet – "

"You wouldn't risk using dead tools unless you had neural damage, Flashflare. Slagging hand-helds are anesthetic," he said disdainfully; "We know our own bodies and how they function and feel. I know how my patients feel to me when I treat them – it's my body and my transformation, and I don't need the fragging numbers on a screen to tell me a damn thing! With hand-helds, I'll likely end up burning a hole through somebody's chassis with a welder because I can't tell when the official safety regs aren't precise enough!" Flashflare chuffed, but then gave a dismissive trill.

"You'll adapt." And to Ratchet's disgruntled, vibratory hum: "All right, you'readapting, then. You're doing better on the ranges, aren't you?"

"And holding steady in the medically useless category."

"'Hampered' is not the same as 'useless.' And in any case, adaptation wasn't the issue, and you know it."

"What makes you think I'm not pleased with the verdict?" Ratchet asked after a moment.

Flashflare's undertones flared softly, and he flicked his lights as he scrutinized a carbon scrubber that looked borderline reparable. "What doesn't?" he retorted. "But if you want reasons, let's see... for one, you're stiff around anyone with command rank. Or any rank up from junior tech. Or who rotates through the MPs. For another, you're still running a couple degrees hotter than spec-norms, like you're constantly on edge. You are jumpier than usual. And – you can't possibly think this is salvageable." That last being addressed as much to the converter regulator Flashflare had picked up from the to-be-recovered pile as to Ratchet.

"Give me that," Ratchet ordered, holding out his hand for the part. It was rather in sorry shape, with a crack that wouldn't take solder, and hardly the most promising thing he'd pulled out of the fritz bin, but it also wasn't the worst. "It's as salvageable as that jerry-rigged excuse for a targeting array you passed for recycling."

"We make do," Flashflare rumbled, reciting the unofficial mantra of the Autobot medical corps.

"So I'm told," Ratchet replied, sourly. "Talk about 'hampered', just look at the lot of us – half of the base personnel are tasked with work they aren't adapted for, using improvised supplies that are subpar and numbers and quality!" He gave a sardonic flare of undertones. "And they wonder why the neuropsychs are so busy since the war began!"

Flashflare, who'd likely heard such complaints daily since getting his decals, and undoubtedly had complained himself, merely trilled patient acknowledgment, but no more than that. For a time, they worked quietly together, until Flashflare set aside the part he was working on.

"What's the problem, Ratch?" he asked, cajoling. "Come on, I'm your brother. We work together – slaggit, I work on you, that's got to count for something!"

"It's not that it doesn't," Ratchet was quick to assure him.

"Then what's your problem with command? Most 'bots wouldn't question a gift like that – which your sentence is, you know."

Ratchet revved gently. "This whole affair," he said quietly, and with feeling in every word, "is highly irregular, Flashflare, in every aspect."

"But it could've been worse."

"I'm not convinced it isn't."

His brother gave a worried little trill. "Because of your squad mates?"

"Because I don't trust the resolution," Ratchet answered, tension rife in the quiet of his undertones. "Not even with Prime's name on it." He shook his head. "If this is justice, there's a problem; and if it isn't, there's still a problem. Either way," he concluded darkly, "this isn't over."

Flashflare gave him a look, but let it go in the end, for which Ratchet was grateful. For it had required no special prescience to conclude as he had: he had already begun to be aware, in the past few days, of a certain silvery presence lurking about. He had no idea what penalty Jazz had been given, but whatever it was, it had apparently left him enough freedom to stalk hapless medics.

And "stalk" was the operative word. Ratchet, intent on solving some puzzle, or distracted by his own lingering discomfort after a long day on the practice grounds, literally catching flak from teammates, would catch a sudden, bright flash of silver out the corner of an eye or the trailing edge of some joke told just a little too loudly, and look up to find Jazz on his way to somewhere else, occasionally with company. He never caught the other staring, but just the fact that he caught him at all smacked of ostentation. A very calculated ostentation, one that paraded as a kind of paradoxical subtlety, to be sure, but clearly, the special ops tech wanted Ratchet to notice him despite the sensor dampeners Jazz obviously was using, or he would've kept more of a distance – it wasn't as if he didn't know how, of that Ratchet was quite certain.

Which meant he probably ought to expect round two to occur in the near future, much as he didn't much care for the notion, and particularly not for the notion of being driven into it like a drone on a track. The reasonable response would probably be to bring the matter to someone's attention – Flashflare's, perhaps, who would likely advise him to talk with the base's first lieutenant again, or the MPs. They would deal with Jazz, if it became necessary – that was their function.

Yet he wasn't going to. Not that he was a usurper of others' functions, but their initial clash had given him a measure and an insight, and he wouldn't have walked into a cell and formed up on Jazz if he'd thought the MPs or base lieutenant had any more sway with Jazz than ice did with fire. His study of Jazz's record after the fact had simply confirmed him in that belief, for nothing in his file, which had a long and amazingly diverse list of disciplinary actions tagged to it, suggested the 'bot had any particular fear of punitive measures.

So he wouldn't be going to the MPs. The MPs didn't have a place in this. Not yet.

Thus despite a healthy wariness, he was beginning to contemplate the idea of taking the bait and confronting the 'bot himself when the Decepticons hit Nova Cronum.

The distress call came blaring in one night, an hour into a fierce firefight on Praxus's eastern perimeter that had sent the Autobots stationed there scrambling for cover. Whoever had sent that call out had put it on the Autobot all-call channel, and for a few searingly clear seconds that signal had sung like a siren: just enough time to give a call-sign, identify the threat and a direction, before it abruptly cut out.

Ratchet and Flashflare, who, like all the other back-line medics, had been shuttling parts to and from inventory and prepping medical stations in anticipation of the inevitable Praxus casualties, looked at each other in dismay, then over at Quickstart, who'd been working with them.

"Damn," Flashflare swore. "Wonder if Praxus was a feint. Maybe they've been aiming for Nova Cronum all along!"

"Isn't it a bit much to make an entire city a feint?" Ratchet asked skeptically.

"You'd be surprised," Flashflare replied, even as Quickstart said:

"Flicksaw just changed ward assignments to handle the jump in casualties," he reported to his colleagues, whose intra-optical-projection HUDs had begun flashing a personnel alert. Quickstart gave a soft chirp, then looked at his brethren: "He's stripped the mediate triage wards – pulled the techs out to assist in surgery so he can spread the rest of his surgical rotation out."

"And we get to hold down two triage wards, just the three of us," Flashflare said, vents flaring, then tagged Ratchet with a comm laser. "Looks like you're with me – let's do a final check of ward six."

Ratchet's engine revved on the back of a minor surge of energy that came of a rather heat-soaked anxiety. But he vented the warmth and quickly banished the feeling – there was no time for it, as he obediently followed Flashflare down the hall towards their assigned ward.

The final check of ward six proved uneventful, happily, and Flashflare painted it blue on the medical hub – ready to receive.

"We should still have about fifteen minutes before we start taking in casualties from Praxus," he judged, and tipped his head towards the door. "Let's hit the commons while we have the chance. With Nova Cronum on the line, and all of us spread thin, we'll need all hands for as long as we can run."

That turned out to be a wise recommendation. Ratchet was hardly a novice, and knew in many ways what to expect when a major civilian center was hit, but before, he had been one of the civilians. He had worked an overloaded ERB that still had enough medics to fully staff every station if it skimped on rotations.

But though Iacon's ERB was receiving patients out of Nova Cronum as well, still, the military ERB was taking far more wounded than it could truly handle – just because there wasn't really a choice. With aerial teams flying wounded in from Nova Cronum on top of military med-evacs from Praxus, he barely had time to think, and the idea of stepping away for a quick break and refueling or a little sensory relief went up in the smoke and broken bodies of two blasted cities.

And although technically he was Flashflare's subordinate, with only two of them working an overcrowded triage ward, they could afford no neatly hierarchical division of labor. From the first, they'd simply split the bay, with Ratchet taking one side and Flashflare the other, both of them patching armor, staunching ruptured fluid lines, and jerry-rigging neural cabling or bracing damaged support structures to hold just long enough.

Incoming, Flashflare advised, a moment before blinding magnesium floodlights and the core-rattling thrum of several dozen hoverpods by the bay docking doors announced the arrival of yet another small fleet of air lift field techs with their patients. I've got a rad leak or something worse over here – can you take these?

Just tell me their converters are intact, Ratchet sent back, as he grabbed a ripped energon line above the tear in both hands, transforming his left hand into a clamp to stop the leak. His right hand he ran back up the line to the injector. When he failed twice to make the clamp transformation on his right hand, he snarled a curse, then simply squeezed as tightly as he could, releasing and reforming his left hand so he could reverse the injector valve. His patient's engine gave a pained, stuttering whine as systemic pressure spiked, but Ratchet cleared the tube, cut circulation, and pulled the damaged line with little concern for how unpleasant backflushing energon lines felt. He grabbed an undamaged line and quickly set to work getting it in place, even as he told Flashflare: Send them my way. If you've got a rad leak, you've got bigger problems than my patients do.

Not that his patients didn't have serious problems. Ratchet paused, leaning as unobtrusively as possible on the edge of the berth's frame, peripherally aware of the red-lined readings on his holoscreen correlating with what he teeked in the scan of his patient's motor cabling and central neural column. He checked his chronometer: fifty-three hours. He'd been on shift fifty-three hours, and he honestly had no notion when that might change.

His current patient alone would need hours of work. Energon damage was never pretty though at least it wasn't usually fatal. His own hands ached from the energon that inevitably got past the chemical rinse medics used to give the volatile stuff something to bind with other than their own armor and tensors. Flexing stiff fingers, he considered trying to clear some of the hardened, energon-corroded dross from around the neural column, but after a moment rejected the notion. Even without the minor damage to his hands, he couldn't truly feel what he was doing with a hand-held the way he did when he was the plasma-cutter. Factor in that even some of the tool-transformations he could normally do were giving him problems, and...

"You'll hold," he muttered, and locked his patient into stasis. No point in making the poor 'bot suffer more than he already had. As the berth's shock frame swiveled upright and retracted into its row of life racks, support monitors swiveling out and blinking to life, he turned his attention to the new arrivals and began directing the DC teams and air lift field techs towards life-rack berths on his side of the bay.

"What do we have?" he demanded, as the med-evacs hauled the most recent disasters towards him. Already, his sensors teeked some seriously unstable and unhealthy signatures and EM readings; the victims were missing armor plates and limbs, had heat warpage, buckled structure, and shrapnel punctures, and even having been recently up to his elbows in someone's damaged converter and fuel system, the free-flowing energon was strong enough to sting in overtaxed chemoceptors.

"Gunnery platform crew," the lead medical field tech reported brusquely. "Their shield overloaded."

"Cluster munitions?" Ratchet ventured to guess, as he helped lock one of the hapless 'bots into a berth frame, told the computer his model, and watched support monitors snake over him.

"Mark Four Nova class clusters," the tech specified. "Blew their mount, too: the cartridge exploded – "

"And that, plus the bleed from the shield, overwhelmed their safeties and ignited their own personnel-mounted munitions," Ratchet supplied the grim conclusion. That explained the explosive back-blow and internal burn and shredding he was seeing on the remains of limbs, and he assumed anyone with a ventral or dorsal gun mount either hadn't survived the initial blast or else had been declared unsalvageable by the primary triage team.

"Exactly," the tech replied, and held out an arm so that Ratchet could link up through exposed ports. "Transferring triage sit-rep."

"Received," Ratchet said after just a moment. The tech nodded, flashed a salute, then he and his brethren headed out to return to the killing fields. Ratchet stood still a moment, digesting the triage codes and matching up profiles with the 'bots laid out before him. Damn, but this was going to be messy! Not a slagging one of them are standard build any more, he thought, resigned in his disgust.

"Get me energon lines," he told one of the DC techs. "And if we still have any of the Trin-series neural cabling, bring that, too – Dag-series if you can't find any. Cabinet oh-two-seven."

"Yes, sir."

"Slagging cross-purposed upgrades," he muttered, even as he found his priority two and dove in, trying to map what damage had done to non-standard organization.

He'd managed to stabilize his first patient and was moving on to the next when Flashflare commed him urgently:

Do you have any catalytic pumps?

I had to use mine on some poor slagger who stepped on a Helix mine, and I'm going to run out of Trin-series cabling over here.

Fraggit, we've got a problem, was the response.

Your runaway rad readings are that bad?

Flashflare didn't answer him directly, but Ratchet caught the post on the medical hub, which, along with its brethren from other wards, scrolled down the side of his HUD with amber intensity:

Logistics, this is ward six. I've got four code twos rapidly approaching code one status: I've got damage to Tri-hyd internal power units; it looks as though the barrier between circulation and processing was breached. They've got heavily irradiated fragments cycling through their systems, causing temperature spikes and degraded system self-regulation. We need a set of catalytic pumps to deal with the effects, now!

Logistics, ward two. I've got a line of 'bots who need a set of conductor replacements to keep power flow going, and all I have are old Travex units that won't get the post-Travex model code threes through to reconstructive surgery. They're set to run too hot t–

This is ward six again. If I can't get the chemical reaction from the radiation under control, it's going to be a chain reaction that will –

Logistics, this is ward four, Darklight calling – I've been waiting on a resupply of converter calibrators for the last hour –

We understand the gravity of the situation, the 'bot on Logistics' comm replied, overriding everyone in short-tempered red-lined glyphs. We will resupply as we are able, and in order of priority.

Across the room, Flashflare slammed a fist into the wall, on the pretext of "coaxing" a balky, overheated scanner to work.

Are their internal rad-shields intact? Ratchet demanded, seeing in his mind's eye a horrific vision of the chaos that the failure of those shields would cause. Flashflare and anyone who'd had touch contact with them would have immediately to go through decontamination, they'd have to isolate a quarter of the ward, and they'd have to tag everyone who had been treated by the contaminated medics or been within range of them for more than an hour.

They're intact, Flashflare confirmed, but before Ratchet could give vent to relief, added darkly, but we're not getting those parts. If we've got them anywhere in Logistics, they're going straight to the surgical wards or maybe even back to Iacon.

If they've got a breach to those power units, and irradiated Tri-hyd fragments that've broken loose are being processed through their energon lines, they're not going to last to surgery unless we get those pumps, to say nothing of anything else we need! Ratchet protested.

I know, Flashflare replied, grimly, and Ratchet, sensing the pull of frustrated resignation in the other, growled softly.

They can't expect us to keep these 'bots alive and functioning on will alone!

No, they don't, was the unsettling response. Then: I'm initiating isolation procedures on our four code twos and mandating decontamination for anyone who has touch-contact with the affected systems going forward.

Ratchet hissed through his vents. You're writing them off.

It's a triage ward, and I'm fragging well going to write up the field techs who brought them in – they should've tagged them unsalvageable, Flashflare replied flatly, though with manifest unhappiness. But after a moment: Give Logistics another try for me, will you? Send your list in as well and update as necessary. Do the best you can; I'm going to try to insert shielding and isolate their cores – that'll buy them a few hours.

With that, Flashflare shut his comm line off before Ratchet could so much as acknowledge the order. Not that he cared for such formalities at the moment, consumed as he was with the burning question: How to shake supplies free of Logistics? They weren't responding to triage, and Ratchet didn't much feel like trying to repair badly injured soldiers while having a running argument. He particularly didn't want to have that argument if he was going to lose. Ratchet glanced around the room full of patients, in varying states of disrepair and disorientation, and came to a decision. Flashflare might not like it; Logistics would probably hate it, but he didn't care – he was, after all, just following orders.

"You, and you – yes, you two," he beckoned a pair of 'bots with cracked, burned armor, and shredded weapons systems, but whom his scans ranked as walking wounded. The moment they limped into range, he grabbed the nearest by the arm, found an uplink port and connected, ignoring the other's twitch of surprise. "I'm deputizing you as EMTs," he informed them. "Medical inventory is sector two dash six. You give them this list – filename Triage 6 – and you get what I need if you have to bribe the Logistics crew to do it. I don't care what they tell you – get it done," he ordered. "Go!"

"Yessir," they said, and credit to them, limped away without argument. Pain, he thought darkly, as he began moving towards his next patient, the great motivat –

And then a shock wave slammed into him on a boil of noise and static.