Chapter 29

Soundwave, howling wordless rage, lunged at Vortex with every last scrap of power in his tall frame. The copter's faceplates already bore dents from Soundwave's fists, and energon dripped from his leg where Frenzy had stabbed him with his scalpel-tipped spear.

Vortex flung Frenzy's limp form to Swindle, who cackled with amusement, and held the symbiont upside down. Soundwave spun around, intending to assault Swindle, but Steeljaw appeared on the bridge at that moment. Without hesitation, the cat launched himself into an attack on the much larger mech with every bit of his famed ferocity.

Soundwave, veteran of many battles that included Decepticon infighting, whipped Jazz's energon dagger from his subspace and leaped at Vortex. The Decepticon interrogator had clearly expected Soundwave to go directly to Frenzy's defense rather than leaving that fight to Steeljaw. He barely managed to fling an arm up. The dagger hissed through Vortex's comparatively light-weight armor like red-hot steel through grease, and bit deep into his arm strut.

Behind him, there was a crack as a small, light mech was chucked with strut-breaking force into a bulkhead. Not Frenzy; Swindle was cursing at Steeljaw and Soundwave could hear a four-beat stride as the quadruped jumped back at Swindle. Soundwave absently kept track of the fight with hearing alone; Steeljaw fought without speaking, but Swindle was cursing Steeljaw and Soundwave. Out of the corner of his eye, Soundwave saw Frenzy's unconscious frame on the floor. There was also more energon smeared on the decking than Frenzy and Steeljaw possessed together.

Conclusion: Steeljaw was more than holding his own and had probably severed a few of Swindle's major energon lines.

He spared very little processor power for that, however, trusting the cybercat's capabilities and loyalty. Vortex was bigger and a better fighter; Soundwave needed to take him down quickly, before ...

"KILL!" Brawl bellowed as he barrelled into Soundwave's back. Soundwave's last conscious thought was panicked concern for the symbionts, before his head hit the decking.

Frenzy woke to the realization that he was not alone in his head, and not in a good way.

"GET OUT!" He screamed aloud at the alien, hostile, presence. Errors scrolled across his vision, along with extensive visual snow. He couldn't see. He couldn't hear.

He could feel his firewalls falling.

Frantically, he tried to keep them up, He wrote new defenses as fast as he could, but he was being invaded by a mind that was faster than his own processor. For every wall he built, the enemy took two down. For every trap he designed, the enemy sprang it without damage and then distracted him with false attacks and overwhelming assaults of garbage data. He was losing ...

Vortex, he recognized, and the copter laughed.

A hand stroked his interface panel, promising more than just a mental assault. As if a 'mental' assault could only be considered 'just' anything. Never in his life, not even as a slave, had Frenzy endured an attack like this. His mind was his and he could feel the interrogator downloading his memories, his data, his thoughts and feelings ... Vortex knew it all, ranging from his love for Steeljaw to his deep loyalty to Prime.

He'd failed. They would be killed, he and Soundwave and Steeljaw. A bitter sense of defeat and terrible guilt threatened to choke his spark right out.

~Kid, kid, I'm with you!~

Ratchet.

Ratchet was there, feeling every bit as frantic as Frenzy was.

~Can you take yourself offline?~ Ratchet suggested, mental voice far calmer than his spark felt. ~You can't let Vortex know about our plans.~

~He's locked me down! Can't access my autonomics! And he knows, he knows, he knows already, he knows ...~

~Slag.~

The copter cackled happily. Frenzy mentally wailed as he lost control of his motor functions, his vocalizer, and then his very memories.

Soundwave woke with a jolt to find he was trussed hand and foot in Astrotrain's brig. Frenzy's terror was hot and frantic across the bond. It felt as if his symbiont was in fear for his life, or worse. His combat protocols came online. He didn't have access to his own autonomics and couldn't force them offline. They took power from his processor, and he needed to think, not fight right at this minute. He needed to get free first.

Pulse. Pulse-pulse-pulse. Pulse-pulse.

It only took him a nanoclick to recognize the feeling in his spark as coming from Ratchet, and a moment longer to realize that Ratchet was trying to communicate with him. Morse code.

VORTEX HAS FRENZY AND STEELJAW WENT INTO VENT DUCTS STOP

He shuttered his optics, summoned his concentration because thinking was hard when Frenzy's panic was making him frantic. He replied,

UNDERSTOOD STOP

Ratchet answered,

FRENZY IS BEING HACKED CAN YOU HELP HIM STOP

He could not, not tied up while in a cage of energon bars.

TIED UP IN BRIG CAN STEELJAW FREE ME STOP

STEELJAW WILL TRY BUT YOU ARE BEING WATCHED STOP

He remembered Steeljaw's ferocity. It would make sense for the crew to watch Soundwave's position for Steeljaw to appear. Likely, the symbiont would be captured or offlined if he tried to rescue Soundwave.

NEGATIVE HAVE STEELJAW ASSIST FRENZY THEY CANNOT HACK ME I WILL TRY TO ESCAPE STOP

Ratchet's spark spiked with fear before the communication resumed.

UNDERSTOOD JAZZ ASKS WHAT HAPPENED STOP

VORTEX ATTACKED FRENZY MOTIVE UNKNOWN JEALOUSY OR SUSPICION BOTH POSSIBLE STOP.

He shuttered his optics again, remembering the sheer shock of that attack. Always before, he would have sensed the aggression before the attack happened. He'd kept a careful optic on, and focused his telepathic mod on, the more dangerous Decepticons such as Vortex. Because he couldn't sense their intentions they'd managed to surprise him. He honestly didn't know what the motive was. Did they suspect he was a double agent, or was this simply a power play? It didn't really matter now, if Frenzy was being hacked. They knew he'd effectively defected to the Autobots, and was helping them.

Frenzy was absolutely terrified. It was hard to think with Frenzy's fear so overwhelming. He wanted to run to Frenzy's rescue, but he couldn't. When he experimentally flexed his wrists and tried to snap the chain around his arms he determined it was more than strong enough to hold him. Duryllium, he thought. Normally, prisoners were held with stasis cuffs, but perhaps they didn't have any.

He tried to think. He needed to get free.

Duryllium conducted electricity very well. Unfortunately, so did his armor. Soundwave eyed the energized bars for a long moment, calculating his odds of remaining functional if he tried to cut the chains with an electrical arc. His most critical systems were grounded and not likely to be damaged, but the pain would be overwhelming.

Frenzy's terror, what was happening to Frenzy, was worse than any possible pain he could experience.

Soundwave rolled over, gritted his denta, and pressed his chained wrists against highly energized bar.

His motor functions seized. Pain jolted through his frame. His vision fritzed out. His clamped his jaws together to swallow back a scream because he could not disable his vocalizer due to his damage. He could smell hot metal as the chain welded itself to the energized bar.

With frantic strength, he yanked on the bar.

The red-hot weld between the chains and the bar broke. The bar remained in place. The chains did not snap.

Fans howling, he lay there and took stock of the damage to his frame. He couldn't feel his hands. His visor was burnt out ... slag. Now he couldn't even understand English, or the frantic morse-code pulses that Ratchet was sending to his spark. Slag slag slag slag.

Slow clapping alerted him to the fact that he wasn't alone. He jerked his head up and glared daggers through his darkened visor at the approaching mech, Onslaught. Onslaught said something in Cybertronian. He didn't have a prayer of understanding it, so he simply rolled to a sitting position with his hands behind him and his knees bent to his chest and stared back coldly.

Brawl entered the brig behind Onslaught. Onslaught slapped a hand on the sensor that powered down the bars. Brawl stomped into the cell, and kicked him without any preamble or warning. The blow was delivered with stunning force, denting the armor over his hip. A less heavily fortified mech might have suffered a fractured femoral strut from that blow.

Soundwave caught Brawl's foot with his elbow when the mech tried to kick him again. He flipped his elbow upward and, to his gratification, tipped the mech over backwards. Brawl fell against the energon bars which, unfortunately, were no longer energized.

Soundwave twisted onto his side and kicked out with his bound feet with every last bit of power he could summon. His feet connected with Brawl's face, shattering his optics. He lunged, pinning the mech down with one knee to his throat and the other on his chest. Soundwave was still bound, but Onslaught was too slow to react. Without regret or hesitation, Soundwave shifted his weight and drove the armor of his knee into Brawl's face plating. He was large enough, and heavy enough, and his knee was pointy enough, that the damage was immense. The substructure of Brawl's features were shoved into his cranial vault, smashing his processor into scrap.

Both Brawl and Onslaught went rigid, and then Onslaught crumpled to the ground with a small cry. One of the bad parts of a gestalt bond was that if you took one member of the gestalt out, you disabled all of them for a fairly significant amount of time.

He felt sudden relief from Frenzy. Vortex was also down.

He'd done it. At least temporarily, he'd saved his symbiont.

Astrotrain rumbled menacingly from a speaker in his small brig. Clearly, the rebel leader was aware that something had gone wrong. Soundwave glanced up at the speaker, and then shrugged at a surveillance camera. He crawled awkwardly out of the cell to Onslaught's frame. The mech was out cold, and likely would be for hours. Soundwave knew Onslaught kept an energon blade in a magnetized sheath inside the armor of his leg. It took a moment, but he managed to free the blade and then cut through the chains around his wrists and ankles. He was free.

He tucked the energon blade into his subspace - unfortunately, he'd been liberated of the weapons that Jazz had given him - and swung a long length of the chain experimentally. It was a weapon of sorts that gave him more range than the blade.

Astrotrain was yelling at him.

Soundwave ignored him for the moment, though Astrotrain had drones that were perfectly capable of defending the shuttle from intruders even if his crew was incapacitated. The drones were kept in the hold, however, and would take a few minutes to reach his location.

He burst into the hall, and ran right into the Reflector triplets. For one brief moment his protective carrier instincts tried to online. The triplets were small enough that his instincts tended to see them as symbiont-like, though they were actually one mech with a split spark - somethin akin to split spark twins, though more closely tied together. They were one consciousness with three bodies, and most considered them a freak of Primus. The lack of a complete spark had stunted their - his, technically - growth.

The closest triplet raised a blaster in his direction.

Soundwave swung the chain hard, catching the triplet in the optics. He dropped the blaster, and Soundwave dove for it. He didn't bother to try to keep his balance; his vertigo was as bad as ever. He just seized the blaster and hit the ground in the same motion, rolled, and aimed a blast in the general direction of the closest frame's spark.

All three triplets screamed and collapsed. Probably not dead, but badly wounded. He decided not to kill them - it might have been his hard coding speaking, but they weren't much of a threat, were not pathologically evil, and might be convinced to support peace later.

Astrotrain was howling in rage at him.

He heard the distinctive rumble of drone treads. Astrotrain's internal defenses were headed his way. He lurched to his feet just in time to see Steeljaw drop out of a ventilation duct.

Steeljaw shouted something unintelligible but sharp and commanding at him. His guns bristled up from under his mane, and the cybercat crouched, bracing himself against an expected recoil. Soundwave instinctively flattened himself back to the deck with crash of metal armor against metal flooring. Steeljaw fired over his head just as a drone appeared through a doorway behind him.

The drone disintegrated. Steeljaw's concussion blaster flung fragments of drone through a bulkhead, piercing Astrotrain's hull. The shuttle screamed obscenities at them - Soundwave didn't need a translation to know when he was being sworn at when Astrotrain used that tone.

Soundwave's vents clamped tight, sealing his internals against the explosive decompression. For a moment, all he could see was fog. Moisture condensed and froze on his optics. He ripped the nonfunctional visor from his face and frantically wiped the frost away from his optics as wind whipped around them.

When he could see, he looked for Steeljaw. The symbiont was clinging to the decking nearby, claws wedged into cracks in the floor's steel plates. The wind was so strong it threatened to blow the smaller, lighter, mech right out of the breach in the hull. The triplets and the drone remnants had already vanished. Steeljaw was covered in frost; everything was covered in frost as humidity in the atmosphere rapidly froze with the lowering of the air pressure.

The sound of the wind screaming out the hole dropped in pitch, going lower and lower as the air pressure continued to drop. And then there was silence as they stood in vacuum. Soundwave felt his oxygen tanks, necessary to catalyze energon, automatically engage. He had four or five hours of oxygen - less if he was supporting symbionts, too. The symbionts only had a few hours, though Steeljaw had a few extra tanks.

Steeljaw wiped his face against his leg to clear the frost from his optics. He blinked several times, then wrote in the frost on the floor, "Frenzy!" and an arrow pointing up the hall.

Soundwave pulled himself to his feet, and ran. Though he could feel the vibration of his feet, there was no noise as sound was not transmitted in a vacuum. Astrotrain, blessedly, was silent though probably not out of commission by a long shot. The shuttle was designed to operate in hard vacuum. The hull breach was no doubt painful, because any significant damage registered as pain, but it was not crippling. The atmosphere was merely for the benefit of his passengers.

Steeljaw bounded ahead of him, still bristling with weapons. They reached a door that was locked. Deep gouges, dents, and blast marks indicated Steeljaw's attempts to break through into the med bay.

Soundwave pointed up at the nearest ventilation duct. Steeljaw shook his head in frustration. Apparently, he couldn't access the room through the ducts.

Soundwave was just about to try his own luck with kicking the door down when it slid open. Frenzy stood there, expression hard. Behind him, Vortex stood, swaying, optics unfocused.

Soundwave wrote in the frost, "Slave coding?"

Frenzy nodded grimly. Soundwave could put the dots together from that point. When he'd taken Brawl out, Vortex had gone down as well. Frenzy, connected to him via a hard link, had promptly won the battle of minds that was the Cybertronian version of hacking. He'd promptly installed the nastiest restrictive coding he had in his mental library of scripts and turned Vortex into a stumbling zombie before forcefully rebooting him with medical codes.

Another of Astrotrain's drones appeared in the corridor behind them.

Vortex leveled a blaster at the drone and destroyed it.

Or, perhaps, not such a zombie. Frenzy was good at hacking. He was only limited by his small processor. He just couldn't crunch data as fast as a bigger mech. His past experience at hacking had been limited to drones and AI computers, but that didn't mean he didn't understand the theory for controlling mechs themselves very well.

Soundwave would have vented a sigh of relief if not for the lack of air, and for the sheer amount of turmoil in Frenzy's spark. His symbiont was not okay, but he was victorious.

Vortex, presumably at Frenzy's prompting, produced their weapons and several packs of insulating foil and oxygen tanks from his subspace. He also gave Frenzy a handful of data cubes. Soundwave collected his weapons, but made sure the symbionts had the foil and oxygen. He could last longer in unprotected orbit than they could if they had to abandon the dubious shelter of Astrotrain's frame.

Frenzy moved with purpose, clearly on a mission, towards the bridge. Vortex, optics still unfocused and features slack, followed. Steeljaw, bristling with weapons, walked behind him. Soundwave brought up the rear, laser blaster gripped in his hand and alert for more drones or Decepticons or for any sign that Vortex was overcoming Frenzy's work.

~Got it!~ Frenzy informed Ratchet, sounding triumphant. ~Two assholes, nicely under my control.~

~Are we having a bit of a power trip, bitlet?~ Ratchet, very relieved that Frenzy was regaining his snark along with his control of the situation, teased.

~Watch it, doc. I've got Astrotrain and Vortex both under my control.~

~Hah. I've taken down worse than the pair of them.~

~I'm not sure if that's scary or reassuring, given that we're family now.~ Frenzy sounded amused.

~If it's any consolation, you scare me sometimes.~

~That makes me feel tons better, Docbot. It's always wonderful when you frighten your own bondmates.~

~I'm not sure if you're joking or not. Ah - How's Soundwave doing?~

~You probably know as much as I do. He doesn't appear to be injured, but we can't communicate with him very well without the visor. It's fried. He feels okay, though, just residual pissed-ness at Vortex. If he feels angry to you, that's why. He and Punch are dismantling the bombs as we speak.~

~Good. Let me know when the nukes are defused.~

~I'll go check on them now. Steeljaw has control of the bridge.~

He found Soundwave in Astrotrain's weapons bay, up to his elbows in a uranium bomb. Soundwave was working by the light of his optics and a hand-held torch clenched in his teeth. Astrotrain was quiet, furious ranting silenced by both the expedient use of what Megatron had euphemistically termed obedience coding, and by the vacuum that engulfed them.

Frenzy's systems were already running hot as he struggled to dump heat via inefficient radiant cooling.

"Are you injured?" Punch asked. He was guarding the door against, presumably, the handful of Insecticons left functional. Bombshell was a significant threat until proven otherwise, and they didn't know where he was.

The remaining Combaticons, save Vortex, were locked in the brig and only beginning to rouse. Vortex was only on his feet because Frenzy had force-booted him. The Stunticons had abandoned ship - Wildrider was already an Autobot prisoner and the other four were in communication with him over their gestalt bond. Optimus had promised them amnesty if they surrendered. Frenzy hoped they'd take Optimus up on it. They were really nothing more than overclocked sparklings and they deserved a chance at a normal life.

He reported over the comm, :Broken tibial strut, broken humeral strut, buncha dents and snapped tension wires. Nothing life threatening. Steeljaw tack-welded the busted struts back together. Ratchet can fix 'em proper, later.:

:How are you still standing?:

:Too pissed off to slow down.: He jerked his chin over his shoulder at Vortex, looming like a blank-eyed zombie behind him. :Fragger tried to hack me. I won. Vortex never trusted us from the beginning - it was all a ruse to get intelligence on what the 'bots and Starscream were up to. Astrotrain believed us, but Vortex is just a paranoid asshole.:

:Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you,: Punch replied, with a snort of amusement over the comm. :He wasn't wrong to mistrust you.:

:Well, no.: Frenzy affected a shrug he didn't feel. :I suppose not.:

Soundwave finally extracted the chemical explosive from the weapon, rendering it inert. The U-bomb worked by the simple and rather frighteningly reliable method of using a high explosive to slam two chunks of enriched uranium together. He sub-spaced the explosive, and then leaned back into the bomb casing to retrieve the uranium.

~We're good, Ratchet. Bomb defused.~ Frenzy reported, as soon as Soundwave retrieved both pieces of uranium. He handed one chunk to Frenzy and kept one for himself. With both pieces in separate subspace pockets, there was no chance of an inadvertent criticality event.

A dull whumph echoed through the ship.

Environmental controls failed. They floated off the floor, and the distant noise of the fans that circulated the shuttle's atmosphere quit.

~Uh, Ratch? You guys shooting at us? Because I'd really appreciate it if you'd let us, like, GET OUT OF ASTROTRAIN before you blow him up!~