Bulkhead wasn't a slave like the rest of them. He was a Wrecker who'd been slipped in with the construction bots during the chaos when the Wreckers had hit Kaon. Apparently, there was some kind of Autobot plot underway, and they needed an inside bot for it.
The construction bots had noticed the stranger among them immediately, but they didn't turn him in for the simple reason that it appealed to their limited sense of humor that their Decepticon masters paid so little attention to them on an individual basis that they couldn't tell one of the construction bots had been freed and replaced with a Wrecker. Bumblebee, for his part, didn't care much, either.
In fact, his only problem with the Wrecker was Bulkhead's clumsy concept of how things worked in Kaon. Bulkhead worried constantly for Bumblebee's safety, citing both his small size and his blindness, seemingly not understanding that any slave unable to pull his weight would be punished or destroyed, and the last thing Bumblebee needed was attention being drawn to his limitations.
However, aside from that, there was an upside to the thankless task of working with titans. Bumblebee couldn't win any fights over rations, but that was less of a problem because construction held priority over other slave jobs, and thus rations were more plentiful. More significantly, Bumblebee was rarely singled out by supervisors for blame when things went wrong very often.
At first, this was because his services on the debris pile were so vital to progress. But then, once reconstruction began, it was because Bumblebee was in the main used as a tool. Massive construction bots would pick him up and place him somewhere, having him anchor a girder while they welded it, or hold up part of the frame in place of a piece of shoring. It was degrading, but it meant that if something went wrong the blame fell on whoever had put Bumblebee there.
However, his sense of loneliness deepened immeasurably. The miners hadn't wanted to be associated with him because he was constantly in trouble, but because they were bots of his type, Bumblebee had understood their capabilities, their limitations and, in a broad sense, the things that got them revved up. He didn't understand construction bots. Their world was not one of speed and desire for motion. Their strength was immense, but they were slow. They didn't seem to notice either of these things, and not infrequently tasked Bumblebee with holding up supports that were too heavy for him, leading to reoccurring injuries to his frame and his becoming the butt of their jokes, which always seemed to revolve around physical strength and how some had it and others didn't.
Knock Out was seldom around, though he apparently did have the task of distributing emergency patch kits as part of his duties. Bumblebee suspected he was around more often than it seemed, but didn't get the chance to speak. At least, not to Bumblebee. When he was around, it seemed like he spent a lot of time talking to Breakdown. Bumblebee couldn't imagine what Knock Out had to say to what the construction crews referred to in hushed tones as, "that paranoid bucket of bolts."
One thing about Knock Out spending time with Breakdown though, Breakdown's underlings were a lazy lot who'd take any excuse to slack off, and Breakdown's conversations with Knock Out were certainly such an excuse. And, when the taskmasters lazed off, the crews did too. Sometimes they could idle for as much as half a cycle, making just occasional shows of doing some kind of ambiguous work.
During one such day's construction, Bumblebee was tasked with holding a support in place. Because Breakdown wasn't paying attention, and his Decepticons were equally lax, the construction crews slacked off immediately. The problem was that Bee could only hold the support for a finite period of time, and the work didn't get done within that period. Eventually, inevitably really, Bumblebee lost his grip, as well as his balance and, as he'd been standing on a steel beam several feet above the ground, he fell. The support crashed down on top of him, and there was a rumble of a whole section of the structure starting to go down. The crew began to yell as the dust rose, scrambling to hold up the results of their labor, while Bumblebee struggled just to get out from under the support.
The Wrecker, instead of running to hold up the crumbling framework, instead picked up the support so that Bumblebee could scramble up and get clear before the whole thing came down.
But it didn't end there.
When the section did fall with deafening thunder that shook the ground, this gained Breakdown's furious attention, and he demanded to know who was responsible for this fiasco. Obviously, Bumblebee was put forward as the culprit. The Wrecker, not knowing how things really worked around here, protested, saying that Bumblebee had been the one holding the support, but the others had slacked off and left him hanging out to dry.
Breakdown flew into a rage at this, and every member of the crew got an electrical lashing that lasted until whoever was administering it got tired. When they were put up for the day, rations were withheld.
The construction crew oddly didn't turn on the Wrecker that night. As far as they were concerned he was one of them, being large and bulky and mindful of matters pertaining to building. Anyway, he'd been lashed as much as any of them, and had doubtless learned his lesson from that. But they needed something to take their anger out on, and that something was Bumblebee. Or would have been, had the Wrecker not once again opted to intervene. Apparently he never learned.
"Leave him alone," the Wrecker snapped. "He's done as much work as any three of you combined."
Angry and unreasoning, the crew then turned on the Wrecker, who at once proved his mettle in combat. He was trained to fight, and was in fact in possession of the ability to transform parts of his body into weapons. The construction crew was soundly thrashed and sent to sulk on one side of the cell by themselves, while the Wrecker and Bumblebee occupied the other side.
"You okay?" Bulkhead asked.
Bumblebee retorted, "Fine, but you'll only make more problems for both of us if you don't cool it."
"Cool it? Those bots were about to snap you in half," Bulkhead sounded astonished by what he perceived to be ingratitude.
"Sure, and what do you think they'll do after you leave?"
A stunned silence followed.
"You're not a slave like the rest of us," Bumblebee pointed out. "You have no idea how things work around here. You're one of those spies Breakdown is always worried about. And not a very good one at that. You'll either get caught or finish what you came here to do and leave in a few cycles. There's not a third option. And I'll still be here. With them."
"Not if I take you with me," Bulkhead said after he thought it over for a moment.
"Sure. A blind Cybertronian who can't scan a vehicle mode. You'd never get out of Kaon alive dragging me with you," Bumblebee snapped.
"Oh, I dunno about that," Bulkhead mused. "We Wreckers are pretty good at gettin' in and out."
"Like you got us out of trouble out there today? If you hadn't stepped in, I'd've taken the punishment for the whole crew and been done with it."
"But that's not fair. You didn't do anything wrong," Bulkhead objected.
"Life's not fair. That's the first thing you learn in the Pit," Bumblebee told him.
"You're really not gonna let me try to get you out of here, are you?"
"And have us both get killed? What's the point of that?" Bumblebee asked. "The crew will get over it. By tomorrow, they'll have forgotten all about me." He sighed. "Just like everyone else has."
"What do you mean?" Bulkhead wondered.
"I've got a friend working for the Decepticons. He said he'd find a way to fix my optics, but it seems like he's got better things to do now. Like get in good with Shockwave and hang out with Breakdown."
"Sounds like a real jerk to me," Bulkhead observed.
"What else was he supposed to do? Stay in the Pit until we both rusted? What good would that do?"
"What good is he doing now?"
Bumblebee was getting really tired of talking to bots who asked questions he couldn't answer.
The Autobots would have characterized it as retaking a city and freeing it from the oppression of Decepticon tyranny. The Decepticons called it theft of Decepticon land and property. These fundamentally opposite views led to a siege that lasted for cycles, and which pulled the best and most experienced fighters stationed at Kaon into it, among them Skyquake, Starscream and his Armada of Seekers and, eventually, a very disgruntled Shockwave for logistical and technical support as well as field repairs that every Decepticon hoped and prayed they would never need.
Shockwave might be the best scientist in the Decepticon ranks, but that was no guarantee of the type or quality of care a wounded Decepticon falling into his single-eyed view would receive. Shockwave was prone to treating his patients like his lab animals and, so long as his results continued to find favor in the optics of Megatron, he could get away with it indefinitely.
Meanwhile, Kaon remained well-guarded at the perimeter, but in places like the Pit and surrounding construction areas, the story became quite different. Young, barely trained Decepticons, who had yet learned nothing beyond the cruelty they'd been shown as slaves took the reins and indulged their every whim and took their thirst for vengeance out on those in their charge.
Deprivation and beatings soon became rampant for any or no reason, and the rhetoric so carefully designed to turn slaves onto the Decepticon cause virtually disappeared. Overwork was a given, accidents were deadly and inevitable. Slaves were assigned at virtual random and then reassigned whenever their new masters got tired of them. They spent more time in transit than getting anything done, shuffled from one end of the city to another, sometimes multiple times a cycle.
This was when Knock Out truly came into his own, though he would not realize it until later. He had to not only monitor Shockwave's experiments and make adjustments as he'd been instructed, but also found himself presented with dozens of broken bodies every day, not to mention the dead ones. The unruly young Decepticon guards were often as not so careless and reckless that they became injured themselves in collapses, brief riots, or accidental fires, so Knock Out treated slave and Decepticon alike, as well as having many corpses that he was expected to process and loot for spare parts.
He had a stout assistant in Breakdown, who had a gift for restoration, but was also vitally strong, and therefore able to hold hysterical patients as well as put a stop to any slaves attempting to use circumstance to attack Knock Out and escape. Many of them attempted this, as they mistook him for Shockwave as they had never seen him before. Nobody had told them Shockwave was away. Even if they'd known, they had no reason to think Knock Out any less mad.
In truth, Knock Out did begin to lose it a bit. Long hours, ungrateful patients, disrespect from the Decepticons he patched, it all started to wear a bit thin until one day his nerve circuits finally simply snapped and he planted a scalpel in the optic of a rather obnoxious patient. He didn't even know at the time if they were a slave or a Decepticon, just that they were mouthy and ungrateful.
The screams that followed were oddly satisfying.
As it turned out, he had stabbed a fellow Decepticon. This got him a completely unwanted and totally terrifying audience with Megatron, who had stopped briefly at Kaon to rearm before joining the siege. The Decepticon leader was enormous, intimidating, and furious. Knock Out had never been more certain that he was on the verge of being dismantled than he was in that moment.
But then a strange thing happened. Megatron recounted Knock Out's list of successful operations, as well as Shockwave's report, which spoke of Knock Out in surprisingly positive terms. Knock Out had been convinced up to that point that Shockwave hated him.
"We have much need of your innate talents, Knock Out," Megatron said in a low purring growl. "Therefore I shall overlook your recent… misstep on this occasion. In fact, with the siege growing prolonged, Shockwave has suggested that you be granted some liberty to conduct experiments of your own on a limited basis. And… I agree. Tell me, Knock Out, what ideas do you have percolating in that questionable brain pan of yours?"
And so Knock Out told him. Nobody had ever been interested in hearing about the many ideas Knock Out had every day, the questions about the limits and possibilities of Cybertronian biology in combination with technology. In fact, Bumblebee had found most of Knock Out's theories rather disgusting on the face of it, and he'd claimed to wonder about Knock Out's sanity just for coming up with such abhorrent ideas. But Megatron listened with intense interest for quite some time.
"Very well, that will do," Megatron said finally, cutting Knock Out off with a dismissive wave. "You will make a short list of the experiments you wish to conduct to submit for Shockwave's approval. And you'd best send it efficiently. Shockwave does not like to have his time wasted or be kept waiting."
"Oh, yes, Lord Megatron," Knock Out tripped over the humbling sentence, trying not to let his eagerness get the better of him and make him look bad. "And may I request that Breakdown be assigned to me as a full-time assistant? Patients can be rather… hysterical at times, and if I am to conduct surgical experiments-"
"Very well, you may-" Megatron's interruption was then interrupted by an explosion outside.
The Wreckers had just hit Kaon again.