Arcee found their third day in Polyhex relatively peaceful with so many Decepticons staying aboard the ship. Even Long Haul was kept too busy hauling scrap metal off planet to complain about anything else, and for the first time, she found some sympathy for him.
"How big a smelting furnace do you guys even have up there?" she wondered as he came back down for his fourth load.
He sighed. "You've never been on a team with Mixmaster, huh? He's converted a fraggin' engine! I'm just hopin' I'm down here when he finally blows everythin' the way of Unicron."
She gave a genuine laugh. "Good luck with that."
He huffed slightly, but rolled away without further grumbling, and she felt like they might have made a breakthrough… for about five seconds.
"How am I expected to drive over this?" he bellowed. He had encountered a large chunk of scrap metal in the middle of the track. "Why isn't the road being maintained? Or do you expect us to do that too?"
She went back to dancing the fine line between courtesy and subservience. "The road was checked prior to the start of the work cycle, as we do every morning. That scrap must have fallen off your previous load—I suggest you talk to Scrapper if you need further assistance securing your cargo."
Stubbornly and pointedly, Long Haul waited in vehicle mode, but Arcee stayed where she was. In the same situation, Springer might have been affable enough to toss the scrap back in Long Haul's cargo himself to save the Constructicon the bother of transforming. Arcee would struggle to lift it into his dump bed, and Long Haul was well aware of that—yesterday, she had assisted with some debris clearing, and Long Haul had griped at her for moving too slowly until, embarrassingly, Springer had intervened. He was bigger than any one of the Cons, and for him they fell in line.
To her relief, Long Haul didn't wait for Springer to break this stand-off. After a minute, he transformed to robot mode just long enough to sling the scrap into his dump bed as he returned to vehicle mode. He rumbled away, and Arcee sighed out her frustration. Things were going well, she reminded herself. The ceasefire was holding.
Clearing a bar of not shooting at each other didn't give her a sense of achievement. Cybertron's social structure was very much in flux, right now, as the Autobots figured out the new hierarchy. Privately, Arcee was nervous that her past history with Hot Rod, now Rodimus Prime, would colour perceptions of whatever position she ended up in, with other Autobots assuming he'd favoured her—at her most anxious, she worried that he would. She had hoped this mission would be an opportunity to prove her own merits without Rodimus' involvement. So far, so disappointing.
At least it wasn't just her. The Decepticons ignored Steeljaw as if he were a non-sapient pet, and they openly mocked Wheelie's behavioural quirks. Neither Wheelie nor Steeljaw seemed concerned by this treatment, and they had volunteered to monitor crypt activity today while she and Springer scouted other areas of Polyhex and Rewind took a few hours in a different underground system: he was attempting to catalogue the hard drives that had been discovered in the ruins of Shockwave's tower.
Rewind was the only Autobot other than Springer who the Decepticons accorded basic courtesy, but then again, he was more lax about rules than any of them. Instead, he was genuinely excited by the opportunity to compare the Autobot historical data with the Decepticon perspective of events.
Arcee couldn't match Rewind's enthusiasm, but once Springer took his shift on check-in duty, she made the most of the quiet day. Being on the surface was a breath of fresh air after so much time underground: she got in some decent drive-time, and life with Decepticons was starting to feel… normal.
'Normal' wasn't the same as 'successful'. She was making an effort with the Decepticons, so why wouldn't they meet her halfway? If they were serious about this alliance, shouldn't they be pandering to all the Autobots here?
The peace was over by the next day when it appeared to be all hands below ground to install the crypt infrastructure. Even Hook came down for the first time since the Decepticons had arrived, bringing with him various components for the environmental control system. Arcee had had some practice dealing with all the other Decepticons now, but she had yet to interact with Hook, which made it all the more awkward when her scanner protested his baggage.
"I'm getting elevated radiation readings," she told him with brisk neutrality.
He looked down his nose at her. "Of course. UV-C is a standard feature for an ECS." When she hesitated, mentally translating the acronyms, he sneered at her. "This is why I hate talking to laymen. It's an air-purifier. Check the plans—if you're able to read them—it's all been approved by Perceptor."
On principle, she made him wait while she did indeed check the plans, though his constant tutting did nothing for her concentration. Long Haul came down before she had finished and added his own grumbles over the delay.
"Fine, Hook, you're clear. Long Haul, just be grateful for the rest."
"This stuff's heavy," he whined. He was in vehicle mode, and his dump bed was loaded well beyond recommended capacity. "It's all right for you, takin' a couple hundred pounds in your fancy bucket seats. You got no idea what it's like bein' a cargo carrier."
"Uh-huh. Well, if you're bringing cargo down instead of up, it's got to be checked."
"And then I'll spend the rest of my day holding it in place like a freakin' bracket while somebody else does the drilling. Used to be I got to spend my time blastin' you guys."
"Those were the days, huh?"
Her sarcasm clearly wasn't pronounced enough, for Long Haul sighed in agreement. "Those were the days."
By the gate, Springer was making no attempt whatsoever to hide his amusement, but when he caught the frustration on her face, he gallantly weighed in with a change of topic. "You're the fifth Constructicon down. Is Mixmaster staying in orbit today?"
Long Haul snorted. "He's been grindin' on all our receptors, singing to his precious experiments. He can have the ship to himself today and no-one'll care if he blows it up."
"Y'know Dirge is still up there, right?"
"Oh! Uh, yeah, yeah. Forgot." Long Haul's expression might not be visible in vehicle mode, but his tone was definitely shifty. "He doesn't say much… easy to lose track of him."
Arcee met Springer's optics, and he shrugged. There was something Long Haul wasn't saying, but Dirge's whereabouts were unlikely to be a security risk. "Clear," she said reluctantly, and Springer waved the dump truck through.
"Our satellites will pick up on it, won't they?" she reminded herself as much as Springer. "If Dirge tries to go anywhere else on Cybertron?"
"Going on what we've seen of Dirge, I'd sooner believe he's thrown himself in with Mixmaster's smelting," Springer remarked. "I can double-check Long Haul's story with Scrapper, I guess." He sounded unenthusiastic, and she felt a guilty pang over her own paranoia.
"Don't worry about it. Scrapper's bound to say the same thing. You sound like you could do with a break from being a responsible adult."
His frown was replaced by the more familiar grin. "Don't let Magnus hear you call me that. He'll have you off duty pending a psych evaluation."
That got a laugh out of her. "After four days of this, that might be a good idea for the lot of us!"