Summary: No-War, No-Factions AU. Festival of the Five: They were two stars circling a single gravitational point. One driven by faith, the other by desire. They came together only with the blessing of the Guiding Hand, and when they did all of Cybertron was caught in their orbit. They weren't destined for each other, but as Primus said: There is destiny, and then there is destiny.
Warnings: Sexual Content, including one (mild but detailed) tactile interfacing scene. Cannon-typical violence. Alien Religion and various issues thereof.
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Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory
Part Four: Festival of Adaptus cont…
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… The race did not start on the best note for Mirage.
He was happy to say he wasn't last across the starting line, but when the artillery-mech fired the signal into the sky — "GO!" bellowed Prime — he, along with the other civilians, were relatively slow to start compared to the almost startled acceleration of those military entrants.
Mirage and sixty others all threw themselves into their alt-forms and roared into, or around in the case of the flyers the nav buoys keeping them perilously close, the route to the tube-highway.
The first part of the race was down Praxus' main highway, almost a strait shot out of the city. The rest was underground, chosen by the priests to equalize the inherent advantages and disadvantages of various frametypes. The course was twisted, branching and treacherous. Navigation buoys marked the boundaries — anything within them was free to travel over, under or through — and emergency beacons dotted the pathways.
This was not a race to be take lightly. Every time it came up, mechs died.
Fifty cars jockeyed for the best position to enter the highway from the street leading away from the stadium, and the real race began. With Prowl's analysis of this part of the route, Mirage managed to make up a bit of distance and be among the first ten grounders to enter the highway.
Even with his split-second lag at the start, Mirage's alt was exquisitely built for the Praxan highway. The tunnel brought them over the city's the local streets, lights from the high towers flashing all around. With his lack of ground clearance every crack in the metal was agony at this speed, but his low profile meant he wasn't impeded by the wind sheer in the tube. Combine that with a lightweight frame and a massive engine for his size… though not an entertainment-subcaste racer, Mirage was built to drive fast and his construction was some of the finest on Cybertron. Perhaps one of the few things he might feel inclined to thank Phantasm for these orn. He found himself copying the ten flyers of various frametypes: use this initial segment of few turns and fewer obstacles (though the flyers had to deal with the difficulty of flying dangerously close to the highway itself) to gain himself as much distance as possible while his alt mode was still an advantage.
He wasn't that far ahead of the other fast ground cars. Three others — including the heretic, he was displeased to note — trailed only slightly behind him.
The four-car pack scattered — two accelerating, two slowing — when a midair crash sent a seeker through the tube highway and into a support pillar. One of the laggers gunned his engine and jumped the gap through the hail of glass-shards; the other had to stop. No one behind them was going to be jumping that. One accident had just cut over forty entrants off from the rest of the race.
The heretic tried shoving the purple military scout car, who snarled and shoved back. Mirage shifted gears and took off, jumping the next gentle rise and nearly crashing himself into the ceiling; when he landed with a grunt of pain the other two had given up their shoving match for pure speed.
They were coming up on the end of the highway section. Mirage hadn't kept up with the aerial pursuit outside the tube but when weapons fire flashed — two rotary-mechs having a difference of opinion on who should enter the tunnel first — he noticed.
With a snarl he braked, almost crashing all three of them when the others chose to accelerate to avoid when the missile hit the side of the highway.
The structure crumpled around him, not so much leaving a hole like the seeker had as a network of cracks that started breaking apart. Glass splintered. Rivets twisted and screamed as they were stretched to the breaking point. Metal melted and splashed and fire buffeted him. With a curse Mirage threw himself out of alt-form and through the breaking glass. He tumbled free of the failing structure and landed on the ground with a strut-breaking impact.
According to his chronometer, he'd only blacked out for a second. A diagnostic revealed a dozen crumpled armor pieces, some torn wires and tubes, one hydraulic joint that had lost pressure but was already refilling, lots of scorched paint, and a surprising lack of deeply embedded shrapnel. Mortilus and Adaptus bless. He'd come through that remarkably uninjured. He'd need a medic when this was over, but he'd survive. A nav scan revealed the buoys and he was both still technically on the course and only a short distance away from the tunnel entrance. His unconventional shortcut had paid off then — it would be at least two breem before the others would circle back from the designated highway exit.
He had a few inbuilt weapons — a pair of arm blades and a EMP pulse rifle — but he scooped up a largish shard of glass and subspaced it anyway as he turned away from the highway.
The ground here was rough so he stayed in primary as he did his best to jog toward the tunnel. Rubble shifted beneath his feet — one unexpected drop folding away beneath him; he barely caught himself before he fell — and he was almost cooked by the steam from a pressure valve he hadn't noticed it decided to go off, but he made it to the tunnel without incident.
He passed the pieces of a helicopter (one of the two fighting above? Possibly, but probably not) who'd tried entering the tunnel in alt and clipped his rotor on the edge. Smoke still rose in lazy drifts, but no light flickered in what was left of the chassis. That was either a very good sign — no fires — or a bad one — no spark. Either way there was nothing he could do for him; he was still above ground so medics would already be on their way and there were no emergency beacons until they were inside the tunnel. Mirage moved on, into the dark.
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Adaptus, Mirage thought, was certainly in a pissy mood for some reason. The lights flickered and he spotted the culprits just before they skittered away shedding impressive arcs of lightning. Battery Mimics. Chewed into the power conduits of the lights that had been installed for the race and drained them. He switched on his headlights and heard the mimics stop, and skitter toward, then away from him obviously attracted by the light but wary.
The tunnel was slow going. A ground frame needed to pick his way across and down. Mirage dove through a space where some mech had shot apart an enormous fan that didn't so much block the way as threaten to crush anyone trying to pass that way. The new hole didn't make it less dangerous, but gave him more of a margin of error. Any air-frames passing this way would have even more trouble due to that mech's interference and it was quite frankly a miracle there wasn't a pile of tattered frames there. Beyond the fan, the tunnel was a mess of dangling tubes, giant manipulator arms throwing sparks as they tried to fulfill a function that was no longer needed. It was slow going for any grounder. Wasn't any better for a flyer. They didn't have to climb, but any real speed and a crash wasn't just probable but inevitable.
A monument to that very fact, the cave in had three seekers buried in it. Some of the first to enter the tunnel, they'd obviously hadn't truly appreciated the dangers of flying full speed down here.
He heard one of them groan in pain. He couldn't stop and help — he wasn't physically capable, even if he didn't have a race to run — but he looked around and after a moment found the closest emergency beacon and hit the activation button. That would give the race search and rescue teams a place to start looking.
"Shoulda just kept going," a voice growled out from the dark. A blaster charged and he dove for cover. Lockdown, the heretic. The green mech didn't fire, just stalked forward, footsteps making hollow metallic sounds as he came closer. Mirage allowed himself to fade from view, and edge away from cover, perpendicular to the heretic's path. "Gotta admit, after that missile, I didn't expect to see you again. Thanks for making it interesti—what?"
He'd just reached Mirage's cover and seen the noble wasn't there. Prowl's dossier said that Lockdown didn't do as well when someone turned an ambush back on him. This close he could see the tell tale burns of surviving a close encounter with Sunstorm's alpha ability and only his training kept him from giving his position away by chuckling. Though he hadn't won, two Festivals of Mortilus were littered with opponents who'd underestimated Sunstorm's deadly ability. Light didn't sound that dangerous until he let loose and suddenly you were facing off against the corona of a star.
He had to believe the seeker had survived the heretic. If so, then Sunstorm was somewhere ahead of him, most likely.
The mech narrowed his optics and started scanning the darkness around him, Mirage gave him that, instead of dwelling on how impossible this all was. He didn't give the mech the chance to search him out though. He struck, and, again because of Prowl's info, he knew just where to strike.
The glass shard — construction grade and sharper than any metal blade — went right through military armor and shredded his T-cog and the hydraulic connections in his hip-assembly. Mirage didn't wait for him to recover; he left the shard there and threw himself into alt form, shimmering into view as he did so, and fishtailed as he accelerated out of there. Blaster shots followed him, one scoring a nasty line across his fender, another blowing out a tire. His undercarriage shrieked and sparked as he rode the rim away.
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The tunnel curved back toward the city.
Sunstorm was still out there somewhere; the relief when he'd first seen him had been immeasurable. Mirage hadn't passed any mangled remains that could be the yellow and orange seeker since then, and every once in a while he saw light — sunlight — flicker down one of the side paths, the roar of his engines echoing around the tunnels. Despite their differing modes of travel, they were probably going nearly the same speed as they made their way through the treacherous paths.
Mirage had only killed one Battery Mimic. Given that he could occasionally see Sunstorm's light to the side, he guessed the majority were making the seeker's life difficult, which was fine with him.
The tunnel opened up into a vast energon processing tank, raw energon still flowing through from the pipes, collecting at the bottom half of the cavern, then draining away. He searched out the pathways he could take across — swing on that cable, land on that pipe, keep his balance as he crawled across it to that ledge, hug the wall until he reached that gap and then make a jump for the platform on the other side — but with Sunstorm right behind him it would take far too long.
Weapons' fire and a snarling seeker engine had Mirage pressing against the wall, invisible.
A Battery Mimic squealed, arcing lightning into a power conduit, causing the offline lights to flicker slightly, and then falling down into the liquid energon with a puff of blue smoke. Sunstorm followed, more cautiously, stopping less than seven inches from Mirage.
While the seeker paused, plotting his own route through the tangle of cables and pipes that stretched across the pool, a plan formed in Mirage's mind.
Heel-thrusters fired, plating shifted and the jet hung there for a timeless moment, light flickering over his form and fire coming from his thrusters. A vision of beauty and perfection to Mirage's optics that he would have liked to bask in. Instead he lunged just as the jet leapt forward. Fingers dug into a seam and the acceleration nearly ripped them from their sockets before he fully got his grip and wrapped himself around the jet.
Sunstorm screeched in surprise skittering forward and momentarily tangled with several wires that spanned the pool. Light flared bright enough to burn and more of Mirage's plating bubbled and melted where they touched, but he was spared the brunt of the assault by his own alpha ability, the light bending around his invisible form.
Then they were across, their less than controlled flight crashing them into the far wall.
Working by touch (since his optics were just starting to melt from the radioactive assault), Mirage found an access port and snicked a data cable home. He wouldn't try this on anyone else, but he still had Sunstorm's passwords from before Optimus became Prime and — I apologize for this — Still so beautiful, Herald — he sent the seeker into medical stasis. The burning light cut out abruptly. Four breem of unconsciousness. According to Mirage's navigation, the race would be over one way or another by then.
Blinking in the darkness, and realizing his optics probably weren't going to fully recover on their own, he looked around for a place to hide the seeker. He didn't want anything to happen to Sunstorm and there was no way to know if there was anyone behind them who'd take the chance to finish off a helpless opponent. He couldn't move him far. Sunstorm was much heavier than him, especially in alt. He settled for blasting the cover off an air vent with Sunstorm's own weapon and shoving the jet inside.
His diagnostic didn't agree, but none of his injuries were fatal so Mirage turned away and made his way further down the tunnel. The beginning of the climb back to the surface should be near.
He hit the nearest emergency beacon for Sunstorm just in case as he limped his way past.
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tbc