NOTES:
Written as part of the Transformers Big Bang 2023; crossposted from AO3. This is a text-only version. For related art, check out the AO3 posting or AnluzDom on Twitter. Now, on to the story...
Kaon: built over the smelters, home of the Pits, center of industry in the southern hemisphere. While the Quintesson Occupation crushed the rest of Cybertron, the warframes of Kaon fought and bled to defend their homeland. After the Occupation ended, Kaon stood proudly while the rest of the planet floundered in the absence of their technorganic masters. Though districts all across Kaon had been bombed to rubble, the great forges beneath the shelled-out surface still burned bright as ever. No Quintesson had ever set tentacles within the city limits and lived.
Even now, four vorns after the ceasefire, army recruitment ads lingered on billboards throughout Kaon. The poster mech was a ground assault unit with two anti-air cannons rising over his shoulders and one foot planted through a vanquished Quintesson's brain module. Clad in the blue and green hues of a mid-ranking soldier, this mech could have been any one of the countless warframes stationed here. He was nobody famous—not the revolutionary Sentinel Prime of Iacon, not the indomitable Winglord Aerogel of Vos, not anyone whose name a random citizen would know. Despite all this, his gore-splattered visage called to the most primal depths of one's spark.
This was the working mech's hero. A symbol of the populace. Someone whom the average Kaonite could follow into battle and share drinks with after a hard-won victory.
A grounder, as beholden to gravity as everyone else.
For all its strengths, Kaon was not a city of fliers. Perhaps that explained why the rooftop of the Kaon Museum of Military History had a remarkable lack of surveillance.
The smog overhead was thick enough that the night sky still held a diffuse glow from the city's light pollution. The museum itself was dark and closed to visitors during the off-shift. Once ground security drove out of sight, Hardtop parked the getaway shuttle behind a rooftop billboard. Swindle hopped out of the shuttle and looked up. A yellow optical band as large as his entire frame glowered down at him, pixelated by the proximity of the military recruitment ad. The poster mech had a blast mask instead of a face.
"One orn, that's going to be my ad rising over Kaon," Swindle vowed. When that obligatory photoshoot arrived, he would give the city a smile. Smiling always made the customers feel at ease, and happier customers paid better.
Hardtop emerged from the shuttle, arms piled full of climbing gear. His hands and feet were wrapped in sound-suppression foam for additional stealth. He had the same base frametype as Swindle, but they were otherwise distinct: Hardtop had a darker color palette, wore a visor over his optics, and carried a scatter blaster on his right arm where Swindle preferred to go unencumbered. Swindle and Hardtop had stuck together, thick as thieves and reasonably competent as thieves too, ever since their shared activation in the same production batch. Where their brethren had drifted away to pursue more conventional careers, Swindle and Hardtop had put their talents to good use in this far more lucrative line of work.
Hardtop glanced at the billboard text overlay and scoffed. "'Cybertron needs YOU.' Sure they do. For cheap cannon fodder. We ain't falling for that scam again."
"Army pay's got nothing on going freelance," Swindle agreed, turning away from the billboard. There would be plenty of time to make idle dreams into reality later on.
Ventilation chimneys across the rooftop provided cost-effective airflow and temperature regulation to every part of the museum. One of those chimneys led to the prize: a back-room storage vault loaded with Quintesson technology salvaged from the Occupation and ensuing warfare. Those items were deemed too dangerous for public viewing—precisely what Swindle's clients would pay a premium to acquire.
According to an inside contact, the front entrance to this vault had over seventeen separate security measures, spanning from low-tech trip wires to advanced spark signature recognition systems. By contrast, the ventilation system on the rooftop had a simple closed-circuit alarm. Hence the rooftop approach.
Swindle activated the holoprojector on his left arm. A translucent schematic of the museum's architecture appeared in front of him. After studying the map for a moment, Swindle highlighted the vault in blue and traced the vents back to their location. The planned route was almost a straight vertical line.
"That's the one. Second chimney on the right." Swindle indicated their point of entry on both the map and the roof.
Swindle pried off the chimney's rain guard and removed four screws from the protective grating. Hardtop looped a thin wire between the grating and the frame to trick the alarm system out of registering any interruption. They each grasped one side of the grating, lifting it away to reveal the vertical rectangular shaft of the ventilation duct. For most Kaonites, it would have been difficult to stick even an arm inside the duct. For mechs of Swindle or Hardtop's size class, however, it made a tight but manageable crawlspace.
Hardtop dropped the pile of climbing gear beside the chimney. He tied one end of the towline around his torso while Swindle anchored the other end to the roof with magnetic clamps. Hardtop slung a cargo net over his shoulders and readjusted the foam wrap on his hands. Meanwhile, Swindle picked up the slack in the towline between the anchor and Hardtop, looping the unused length into more orderly coils.
"Ready?"
"I was built ready. Riches, here I come." Flashing a roguish grin, Hardtop hopped down into the duct.
The scatter blaster on Hardtop's right arm jammed against the narrow entrance, stopping him up short despite the slack in the towline. He tried to rearrange his limbs, but the blaster—a modded cannon, really—was long enough that he could barely bend his right elbow. No amount of awkward contortion helped. With the blaster equipped, he could not grip the metal walls using the electromagnets on his right hand. Despite this restriction, it was obvious that he fully intended to jam himself down the duct one-armed, magnets operational or not.
"What do you think you're doing, buddy? We've been over this. It's a stealth job, not a shootout. Take the gun off before you sprain something. Repair costs are coming out of your paycheck," Swindle said.
"Cheapskate. Fine, we'll do it your way." Hardtop braced his shoulders and feet against opposite sides of the shaft to support his weight. He unlatched the blaster from his arm and handed it up to Swindle. "Toss that down to me if anything happens."
This time, Hardtop fit into the duct without any issues. Swindle lowered the towline incrementally while Hardtop stabilized himself using the electromagnets in his hands and feet. The foam wrapped around his limbs muffled the sounds of climbing to dull thumps. Scattered reflections flitted across the metallic interior of the duct as Hardtop descended.
"Switch off your biolights. You're lit up like a disco mech," Swindle hissed after him. The neon lights blinked once in assent, dimming until just the pale glow of Hardtop's visor was visible, reflected fourfold across the rectangular walls.
Hardtop's full weight wrenched against the towline with a loud clank. Swindle reflexively magnetized his feet to the rooftop, but the sudden increase in traction threw him off balance. He lurched forward, nearly falling into the hole as he crashed down on all fours. Bracing an elbow against the edge of the ventilation duct, he swept his leg around to pin the towline beneath a knee. Once he had that secured, he leaned over the duct and peered into the darkness.
"Hardtop? You alright down there?"
Hardtop's headlights flashed. He dangled just below the end of the duct, one hand magnetized to the vault ceiling. His dark silhouette filled the narrow duct entrance, blocking Swindle's view of most of the vault contents. His headlight beams swept across the chamber beyond, tossing up glimpses of a sizable open space. Hardtop spun slowly on the end of the towline, pushing his electromagnets against the ceiling to orient himself. An impressed whistle trailed up.
"Better than alright. You were right, Swindle. We struck the jackpot! After this job, we're set for life," Hardtop chuckled. He released his grip on the ceiling and looked up, visor bright. "Quick, lower me down."
Swindle obligingly fed in the towline handspan by handspan. The line went slack once Hardtop reached the ground. With Hardtop no longer blocking the duct, Swindle could see a slice of the vault contents illuminated by the cone of Hardtop's headlights.
Streams of light swept across the chamber, revealing expensive items littering the floor or nestled within dusty exhibit cases: weapons, scientific instruments, and military equipment of both Quintesson and Cybertronian design. Swindle tallied up the estimated resale value and triple-checked the numbers in amazement. Hardtop was right on the money. Swindle's contacts on Monacus would pay out the manifolds to get their hands—or chelipeds, tentacles, whatever—on precisely these items.
"Can't believe the army just left all this good merch to collect rust in storage," Swindle said. "Such a waste. The Quints have been gone for vorns now. This stuff isn't getting any newer."
Hardtop laughed. "Couldn't agree more." He tugged on the towline, hooking it to a cargo net stuffed with loot. "First load's ready. Take it away."
Swindle reeled the bundle up through the ventilation duct, careful to avoid bumping the contents. After unpacking the cargo net, he dropped the towline back down and went to inspect the new acquisitions. There were three Quintesson disruptor cannons, one energon sword, and a plain hardware security key. Swindle picked up the key. It was lightweight and flimsy, a rectangular data card barely bigger than the palm of his hand. One end had a transformable plug adapter designed to fit the top three most widely used data input port configurations.
Who would pay market price for a random hardware key when every convenience shop in Kaon sold them by the dozen?
"Use your head, Hardtop! Grab the valuables first, not just random junk. We're on a tight schedule here," Swindle called down, waving the key over the ventilation duct entrance.
Hardtop walked into view and looked up. His headlights momentarily went dark as he crossed his arms. "I am using my head. That key was right in the center. It's gotta be valuable! What if it unlocks Vector Sigma?"
The glyphs on the front of the key read: PhaseLock Pro 3.1 by CyTeX Incorporated. There were also a few decorative squiggles running across the edges. The backside had an inscription: Made in Kalis.
Swindle scoffed. "This thing, a relic of the Primes? Not a chance. This is your everyday consumer-grade security key. Two, three hundred credits at best."
The information the key unlocked might be useful, but selling information was a trickier business than selling goods. Information came in two flavors: the sort everyone wanted, and the sort one individual in the whole galaxy would pay a fortune to acquire. Swindle preferred the latter case, of course, but matching a single piece of information to a single customer required considerable patience. He stuffed the key in a subspace storage compartment, resolving to examine it for clues when there was time to burn. For now, he picked up the Quintesson disruptor cannon and loaded it into the shuttle.
By the time Swindle finished packing the cannons and sword away, Hardtop had another cargo net full of items ready for Swindle to pull out of the vault. Rocket launcher, two beamer rayguns, and a Quintesson anti-gravity support column. Swindle happily added them to his running tally of active inventory. The rayguns alone were worth over two hundred thousand credits apiece.
Hardtop sent up four more cargo nets' worth of items, each more impressive than the last. Swindle stashed all of the reappropriated goods in the shuttle. Real-time price estimates scrolled by on his internal displays, soaring with every item added to the collection. The sum total was almost three million credits—a phenomenal profit for a single job. As soon as they sold off this haul, Swindle would be the richest mech on this side of Cybertron, with Sentinel Prime coming in at a close second. Hardtop would be third—after he repaid that thirty thousand credit debt he still owed Swindle from their last job.
Inside the vault, Hardtop made a surprised noise. "Whoa, this key is way shinier than the other one. It's covered in those fancy Iacon glyphs and everything. This one's gotta be for Vector Sigma—oops—"
A wire snapped, the ping razor-sharp as it echoed up through the ventilation duct.
All around the building, floodlights flashed to maximum brilliance as the security alarms shrieked. Swindle threw himself flat against the rooftop, minimizing the target area for anyone who might be inclined to shoot at him. Yellow paint made for memorable branding during sales, but amid the muted grays of the Kaon skyline, memorable was the last thing he could afford to be.
Hardtop's scatter blaster still laid beside the displaced ventilation grating. Swindle crawled over on his elbows, keeping his head down, and snagged the blaster with one hand. It fit neatly on his right arm, socketing into the unused weapon mounts as though it had been designed precisely to spec. Targeting protocols sensed the new integration and activated, registering the projected range and area of effect of the scatter blaster with a visual overlay.
Swindle rolled upright and crept over to the edge of the rooftop, using the bright glow of the recruitment ad as cover.
Enforcers swarmed across the roads five stories below, coordinated like a horde of monochrome scraplets. The first wave of enforcers peeled off to set up roadblocks in the surrounding streets. The second wave transformed and charged toward the base of the museum. A few enforcers hung back to sweep headlights or portable searchlights over the sides of the building, looking for signs of a break-in.
One enforcer pointed his searchlight at the roof, directing the beam at the parked shuttle. Others quickly noticed the shuttle and pointed as well, chattering to each other over encrypted comms. A smaller ground-pursuit unit sprinted toward the museum and jumped, latching onto the wall with powerful climbing magnets. While the small enforcer scaled the vertical wall, the rest of the crowd spread around the perimeter, angling their searchlights to better illuminate the shuttle.
The museum alarm shut off. After that continuous shriek, the quiet was so absolute that Swindle reset his auditory suite just to make sure it wasn't malfunctioning. He shifted slightly. His armor rasped against the rooftop.
One enforcer spoke, voice artificially amplified. "YOU ARE SURROUNDED. SURRENDER OR WE WILL OPEN FIRE."
The enforcers present were all first responders: a mix of heavyweight suppression units and streamlined pursuit vehicles. Grounders, every last one of them. Good. Swindle was disadvantaged in sheer strength and alt-mode speed, but he had a getaway shuttle. They didn't. His escape route was still secure.
Metal scraped behind Swindle, and he twisted around. Hardtop? It couldn't be. The sound was too far away. Beyond the ventilation duct. Beyond all the chimneys.
Tap. Tap. Louder scrapes and clanks carried up from the enforcer climbing up Swindle's side of the building. The enforcer was halfway to the top, swiftly approaching the parked shuttle. He had left his entire flank open and unguarded, unaware of Swindle crouching beside the billboard.
Swindle charged up Hardtop's scatter blaster and opened fire.
A perfect hit. The enforcer fell.
The rest of the ground-level enforcers drew weapons, but Swindle had already ducked back. Plasma zipped in below him, near enough to superheat the air, but the edge of the roof shadowed him from direct weapons fire. The enforcers were too close to the museum to have an effective angle on the rooftop; their shots either struck the side of the building or flew too high to pose any real threat.
A plasma bolt punched through the billboard, nearly clipping his leg. Swindle rolled sideways, pivoting to regain his footing in the same motion. An enforcer had climbed up the opposite side of the building while Swindle was preoccupied. The new enforcer clung to the cusp of the roof with one arm, brandishing a cannon with the other.
Swindle returned fire with the scatter blaster, but the enforcer ducked behind the edge of the roof to evade the shot. Switching tactics, Swindle dashed toward the shuttle. Shots clipped at his heels, close enough to warp the paint. He hid behind one of the shuttle's landing fins.
Inside the vault, Hardtop sent a short-range comm burst. "Was that my blaster? What's happening out there? Pull me up!"
The anchored segment of the towline twitched as Hardtop yanked on the other end. Further away, the muzzle of a plasma cannon flashed. Swindle ducked just in time, and the shot deflected off the shuttle wing. Vibrations shuddered through the hull and into Swindle's shoulder, making his armor rattle. He stuck a foot beyond the shuttle wing and tried to make sense of the distorted reflection. The enforcer now had both arms and a leg slung over the edge of the roof.
"Hang on a moment. I'm trying not to get shot here," Swindle sent back.
"Shot? What—who's shooting at you? I'll kill 'em." The towline pulled taut as Hardtop started climbing.
"There's enforcers all over the roof. Don't come up."
Hardtop climbed faster. The towline scraped and squealed against the frame of the ventilation duct, drawing the enforcer's attention. In the reflection on Swindle's foot, a glowing muzzle swiveled around to aim at the towline anchor.
"Hey buster! Over here!" Swindle stuck his right arm out from behind the shuttle, scatter blaster firing before he had a confirmed target lock on the enforcer. With the wide conical spread of the scatter blaster, any shot in remotely the right direction would do the job. The enforcer shouted and tumbled off the edge of the roof, screaming all the way down.
Another plasma bolt flew in from the side, shattering the anchor. A second enforcer! The broken end of the towline zipped toward the duct, dragged down by Hardtop's weight on the other end. If the towline fell in—no. Not on Swindle's watch. Sacrificing his cover, Swindle dove for the loose end of the towline, grabbing it with both hands.
"Hurry up!" he sent to Hardtop. The second enforcer was already stepping onto the roof, cannon at the ready, and Swindle was a sitting target. At this distance, even the worst marksmech couldn't possibly miss.
"Hands in the air, thief," the enforcer said.
"Excuse me? Who're you calling a thief?" Swindle hauled on the towline with both hands. It nearly dragged him in as Hardtop climbed.
The enforcer shot Swindle point-blank: a stun blast, meant to disable rather than damage. Every motor and servo in his frame seized. He toppled to the side, towline flying out of his suddenly lax grasp. It disappeared into the vault as Hardtop fell, bouncing off the duct walls and cursing all the way.
"Hey, what gives? That hurt! And now the towline's in here with me. I'm stuck," Hardtop shouted over comms.
Swindle's comm suite was unresponsive. His vocalizer spat static. Through a fritzing optical feed, the pixelated enforcer moved closer. Swindle triggered an emergency system reboot, forcing electricity through overdriven circuits. Every sensor and receptor flared with incandescent pain, tearing a groan from his vocalizer. He lifted Hardtop's scatter blaster just as the enforcer leaned in with a set of stasis cuffs.
His scatter blaster was not set to stun.
The enforcer crashed backward, a ragged hole carved through his torso.
Swindle crawled upright. Pain wormed through his cables and relays, but he dismissed the damage alerts floating across his field of vision. Cost-benefit algorithms assessed his options as he surveyed the area. Where one enforcer climbed, more would surely follow. Swindle could not hold off an entire platoon. The towline was inside the vault alongside Hardtop, and Hardtop's electromagnets were not strong enough for him to climb vertically without external support. Three million credits' worth of merchandise was already loaded onto the shuttle.
"I stashed another cable in the shuttle. It should be long enough to reach. Toss me an end," Hardtop said.
The shuttle. Yes. Swindle limped forward, moving stiffly on limbs that wanted nothing more than to fold under his weight. There was indeed another cable in the cabin. There were also two more enforcers climbing over the far edge of the roof, cannons primed.
Three million credits. A sizable sum. Even more sizable if he didn't split it sixty-forty with an assistant.
"Swindle, did you find that spare cable yet?" Hardtop asked.
Swindle dragged the door shut and started the engine.
"Why do I hear shuttle engines? Swindle? Swindle! You better not bail on me—"
Swindle plunged the flight controls forward, launching the shuttle into the air. Hardtop's short-range comm signal faded out into garbled static, lost amid the background comm chatter of the city.
On the ground below, two massive warbuilds appeared amid the swarm of smaller enforcers. They were anti-air units with vertical turret setups. That sort of artillery could easily target any ship above the skyline. Luckily, Swindle wasn't going up. He was going down. He angled the shuttle into a steep dive, skimming the surface of a roadway and then veering into the underlayer access shaft beneath.
The world darkened as the shuttle descended through the shell-like layers of Cybertron's crust. Surface lights waned in the gloom of the underground. In their absence, other light sources appeared: the dim biolights of factory laborers, the soft glow of energon pipelines running up to power the city, and the pale tracks of hazard indicators dividing safe pathways from no-entry zones. Beneath the surface, orderly buildings and roadways morphed into a crystalline tangle of cyber-alloys shaped by time and natural forces. The ambient temperature rose as he flew closer to the manufacturing basin with Kaon's famous smelting pits.
Six levels down, Swindle guided the shuttle to a stop and transmitted a coded signal. The air in front of him rippled and darkened into the sleek profile of a Courier-class starship designed to prioritize speed above all else. This starship, which Hardtop had named the Margin after winning it in a bet, was easily five times the length of Swindle's shuttle—massive enough that parking it atop the museum would have crumpled the roof beneath its landing spurs. Hangar bay doors at the Margin's rear unfolded in response to Swindle's remote command, revealing an empty parking spot inside. Swindle docked the shuttle and disembarked.
The Margin's autopilot subsystems were set for a quick escape. All Swindle had to do was press the start button. Stealth systems activated first, cloaking the ship. To anyone outside, the Margin would appear to have vanished. From the inside, the world beyond the windows dimmed and gained a slight shimmer indicative of the negative-refractive cloaking mechanism. The engine bootup sequence hummed through the deck beneath Swindle's feet, and the Margin gracefully lifted into the air.
The programmed route led horizontally beneath Kaon, weaving between structural supports and suspended roadways in a pattern intended to throw off any potential pursuers. At the outskirts of the city, the Margin angled upward, rapidly ascending until the open sky appeared overhead and the full liftoff sequence catapulted Swindle into space.