The Past: 73 Years Ago
. . .
With a great lurch, the Harbinger exited from the space bridge, the large vortex closing soon after. Unfortunately, Shockwave's calculations were not all too correct, as they came out much further away from the planet than they had anticipated.
"Well, that's just great," Blackout said as he looked over the navigation charts, seeing that they were much closer to the 6th planet in the solar system, as opposed to the destined 3rd.
"Oh come on, it's not that bad," Airachnid said from the pilot's seat, as she steered them in the direction of their target planet. "This at least gives us a little bit of time to go over our plans."
"Plans for what exactly? Shockwave said it himself, it's been thousands of years since any Decepticon used this planet for anything. We don't even know what to plan for." Barricade said from the co-pilot's seat.
"Yeah, what if somebody's come along and colonized the place? Like the 'Squids or something."
"I highly doubt the Quintessons would come out this far into space," Barricade said.
"Whatever we run into, lets just hope none of Shockwave's weird experiments he warned us about are still running around." Airachnid said.
"Yeah, an army of resurrected beast-formers is one of the less desirable things we could run into." Blackout said, as he stood up and made his way out of the cockpit. "I'm heading down to the engine room. We didn't have much fuel when we took off, and I'd rather like it if we didn't end up stuck drifting through space."
. . . . .
"I thought you said we were going to make it?!" Airachnid shouted over comms, as she did her best to keep the Harbinger steady during their entry into the target planet's atmosphere.
"No, I said we have enough fuel to make it. If I had known about the damn meteor shower, I would have been more specific!" Blackout yelled back into his commlink over the roar of the engine room, as he did his best to keep the ship from shutting down entirely.
"Didn't you say you learned about engineering from your sire?"
"I said he was a mechanic, not a spaceship repair-bot!"
"Now's not the time for arguing, you two!" Barricade called out, as he used one of the ship's turrets to try and blast away the larger oncoming space debris. No matter how many he shot down, it seemed that the only thing he was doing was putting on a spectacle for the natives down below. And now that they knew about a developing race, they couldn't just land anywhere.
"A big one hit the thrusters, I don't think the ship'll make it in one peice. Or us, if we stay on board when we hit the ground. I'll see you both at the escape pod." Blackout said, as he finished doing all he could. He stumbled his way out of the engine room, holding himself up against the way to keep himself from falling over.
Back on the other end of the ship, Airachnid set the navigation computer to "land" the ship in a remote location, far away from any native settlements. As she began to exit the cockpit to get to the escape pod, she saw as Barricade ran past her, going back towards the cockpit.
"What the Pit do you think you're doing?"
"Trust me on this one 'Nid, you'll be glad for what I'm about to do. Just go!"
Reaching the main console, Barricade set to work translating what their sensors had picked up on radio waves to be one of the planet's native languages, and broadcasting down a crude distress signal for where their escape pod will crash down at.
Racing down the halls of the ship, he made it to the single escape pod, that was just barely large enough to fit all three Decepticons. Jumping inside, he closed the hatch behind him, and slammed the large button labeled "EJECT" and the pod jettisoned out, and began its descent to where Barricade had plotted it to land.
"Hope you aren't claustrophobic or afraid of falling from orbit, because this ride is about to get a whole lot worse!"
Something fell from the sky that night, and for once in human history, it had been something other than meteors or assorted space-junk. It had been a message, from something, or someone beyond the stars, followed by multiple crash sites around the U.S. Most of which had been nothing more but shrapnel and debris of metal, that most likely came off of the big one that crashed down in Nevada.
But the message they received told them that, whoever theses aliens were, they weren't going to be on the ship, and instead sent them the area where they themselves would be coming down at, roughly 30 miles North of Roswell, New Mexico.
Driving up to the hastily put together barrier to keep out the prying eyes of the public, the black car came to a halt. A set of soldiers walked up to the car, and before they could say anything, the agent rolled down the window and showed their high-level clearance badge. The guards then backed away, and the agent drove on in past the military's setups, and stopped once he got up close to what he came here for.
Stepping out of his car, the basic personnel backed away as the well-dressed special agent walked forwards towards the large, smouldering canister that lay embedded in the desert sand, a small impact crater surrounding it, the setting sun faintly shimmering along the less damaged metal.
With a loud hissing sound, the soldiers tensed up, and watched as a section of the pod moved, transformed even, open. Slowly emerging from the smoke and steam, three enormous figures stepped forth, standing in silent observation of the humans around them, their puny guns aimed up at the giants.
The one stood off to the right, a white and black one with four eyes, slowly raised up their arms as if to surrender. "Uh, hi there? I guess this means you all got my message. Are you the one in charge?"
The special agent stepped up closer, pulling out his badge and raising it up to the alien arrivals. "Special agent James Fowler, of Sector Seven. My organization keeps tabs on things that are not necessarily of this Earth, including yourselves. And you might be?"
"I am Barricade of Praxus, and with me are Blackout and Airachnid. We are members of the Decepticon Resistance Forces."
"Resistance forces? Resisting what might I ask?"
"The Autobots," Barricade said, as he knelt down, and took out a holographic projector, and played footage from their war, showing the brutality of the Autobots' warfare. "We Decepticons are fighting an uphill war for freedom, and have nearly been driven from our homeworld of Cybertron, and the Autobots have already taken many other worlds. This planet, Earth as you call it, has been slated to be the site of a refugee ship of our high command once we can no longer hold ground planetside."
Agent Fowler pondered this information, as he kept watching. "So tell me Barricade, could these Autobots be expected to come after Earth?"
"Not anytime soon, no. But this world is within range of other Cybertronian colonies, and should those fall, there's no doubt they will find their way here next." Barricade said, subspacing the holo-projector.
"You three cant just stand out here forever, the locals will start showing up soon. Any chance you have a way to conceal yourselves?"
"Heh, yeah, you could say that." Barricade said. The three Decepticons looked around their immediate area, searching for new alternate modes. Blackout settled on a fairly primitive looking cargo-copter, but thankfully large enough to accommodate him. Airachnid scanned one of the many army motorcycles lying around. And Barricade decided on using the car agent Fowler had driven in with.
With their scans complete, they transformed into their new Earthly alternate modes, much to the surprise of the soldiers around them. Especially agent Fowler, as he was left staring at a police-styled variant of his own car.
"There is a top-secret weapons testing base under construction the next state over, near to where your ship crashed down. That's where you will stay until we can sort all of this out."
"Whatever you say, sir. Just lead the way."
Walking back to his car, agent Fowler signaled over to the on-site personnel. "Get the alien's craft onto a truck and bring it back to Homey Airbase. And get this area scrubbed, I don't want anybody to catch on what happened here."
As Fowler began to drive off the site, with his alien arrivals in tow, he made sure to have some of the army troops follow along just to make sure these Decepticons didn't try anything.
The soldiers and specialists got to work making sure it looked like nothing exciting ever happened here. Except for a lone busted-up weather balloon, to help with the cover story.