Chapter 1
"Spark"
/error: firewall breached/
/error: signal origin undetermined/
/scanning: concurrent/
/scanning: complete/
/analysis: unknown incoming transmission/
/content: unknown/
/scanning: complete/
/analysis: viral energy reading/
/urgent: effect unknown/
/hypothesis: hostile external viral assault/
/commencing shutdown/
/command overridden/
/error: mind core breached/memory drives endangered/
/commencing stasis lock/
/error: spark chamber breached/
/command overridden/spark endangered/
/error: system overriden/forced reactivation imminent/
/commencing reactivation/
/directive: unknown/
/goodbye/
She groaned as she came to. Her head rang like someone had knocked it about with a sledgehammer. She onlined her optics and looked around. Red sand everywhere. No, not red sand - particles of rusted steel, each one as slim and sharp as a shard of glass. That was her first surprise. The second were the alien glyphs rolling across her sight. A language file she didn't know she had automatically translated them for her.
/error: memory drives corrupted/
Lennox attempted to shoot to her feet, but she didn't know her own strength and weight. As soon as she was up, she tipped back over onto the bed of solid rust, though it couldn't have been farther from her mind.
OhcrapohcrapohcrapnononononotlikeBanshee!
She sifted back through her memory files, trying to find the leak, but she came away with... nothing wrong. The files were all there - from her revival in the last dying days of the Dark Age to the ragged aftermath of the Red War. Nothing was amiss. In terms of memory, that was. The same couldn't have been said for the rest of her mind. The presence of foreign files and coding alien in origin was probably the most alarming part. It couldn't have been more different from Exo programming if it tried.
That frightened her.
"The hell?" She blurted out loud. Her voice was... almost the same. Just like the new files, her vocabulator felt different. Her voice was more mechanical in tone. Inhuman. She reached up to feel for a difference, but she only managed to jab herself in the neck. Lennox pulled her hand back immediately. That hurt.
It didn't take long to discover the 'why'. Her fingers just weren't like normal fingers anymore. They were claws. Just like those cybernetically-grafted meathooks the Red Legion oh so loved. One of them was stained at the tip with a bright bluish liquid. The same digit she'd accidentally stabbed herself with.
"Ouch," she said for lack of any better word. The pain in her neck persisted in the form of a dull throb.
Her eyes lowered. The 'meathooks' were attached to a limb that was completely unlike her previous arm. For a starter, they weren't covered by sleeves. It was just bare plating painted teal, while the talons were simple silver. She followed the arm to a shoulder, which was clad in a tightfitting pauldron painted black. Past the pauldron, though, Lennox spied a rather alarming 'something else', and likely one of the contributing factors to her imbalance.
She had a goddamn wing. It was her third surprise. No, two wings. A single big wing and a smaller one below it. And a glance to her other side revealed the same thing. Two more wings, identical to the first pair. She distantly thought she must have looked like a cross between a dragonfly, a jet, and an Exo.
Lennox let out a hysterical laugh. She didn't care that it didn't sound like her. Everything around her was insane, so why not give in? But sanity was clingy and refused to let her go, despite the sheer ridiculousness of... everything about it. About her.
Lennox gave the rest of her body a cursory look. It was quite clearly not of Exo design. She was in possession of a streamlined humanoid form with wings. Most of her was teal in colour, like her forearms, but the thickest layers of metal plating - pauldrons, calves and feet, knee guards, and elbow guards - were black. On the opposite end of things, where the metal was thinnest, it was left silver. Her upper pair of wings, the larger ones, were black while the smaller pair were teal.
No clothes, though. That was weird. The armour plating looked - and felt - like it was attached to her proper, not worn.
The fourth surprise came when she realized she had a tongue. Some sort of metal contraption not unlike the human equivalent, but still very different. She used it to feel around and discovered pretty much nothing. Her mouth wasn't like that of an organic creature. "Weird," she mumbled. Her new voice still unnerved her.
Her back twitched and one of her wings moved. She wouldn't have noticed it if it hadn't brushed against the fine layer of rust on the ground. She felt that. More than it, actually. As soon as her focus was on it, she felt a presence flowing against them. A light gale coming from her left.
Lennox nodded, pretending she understood. "Right, wings are sensitive."
It took a few minutes to learn how to move them. When she had that down, of course she had to try flapping them. She was left sorely disappointed.
"What's the point in wings if they don't even work?" She muttered darkly. "This is absurd. Hey, Gecko, come take a pho-"
Then it hit her.
Gecko was gone.
And she was dead.
"Oh." The confusion melted away as an endless abyss of sorrow muscled its way in. "Oh Gecko."
Lennox sat there for quite a while. When being sad lost its charm and anger became the more appealing emotion, she forced herself to her feet - toeless metal boots more like - and got a feel for how her new body balanced. The wings were light, despite being quite sizable, and didn't throw her off quite as much as she previously imagined.
The next step in Operation: Kill the Worm was to find civilization - or, more likely, the dead equivalent of civilization. A spaceport would have been most ideal. The red rust carried off in every direction, but the faint outline of a city loomed up ahead as a grey-brown mass of blocky structures and needle-like towers across the horizon.
Lennox sighed and readied herself up for the long hike. In a body that wasn't her own. Without Gecko.
It was shaping up to be a very bad day. Her worst yet - and that was saying something.
It only further deteriorated. Her bad day turned into an awful one. Some of the rust got in under her armour and the feel of it scratching at her inner plating was horrible. She didn't dare use her claws to pick at it. Not after poking a hole in her neck with a talon.
Claws were tricky, Lennox had found. She discovered within herself a newfound respect for the Fallen.
It only got worse when the rust found its way into her vents. She didn't even know she had vents. Not until they were clogged up. The awful day became an unbearable one when the winds picked up and tossed more rust right at her. It was like being hit with the full force of a concentrated hailstorm. Still, she carried on. Sometimes she figured that Gecko would sort her out when they left the desert behind, but then she'd remember he was dead and get sad all over again. It was a cycle of cursing and half-hearted sobs that she thoroughly despised. The only thing she hated more than that was the Worm. And, oh by the Traveler, was she was going to make him suffer.
Lennox walked on and on, and when she thought her joints couldn't take more rust, the city was right there. It was so close - and yet so far. Walls had been built up to keep the rust outside. It was smart. And her death sentence.
"Ah crap."
So Lennox continued walking, this time parallel to the wall in hopes of finding an entrance. But there was no entrance. Not for miles and miles of wall. Eventually it became too much and she fell face-first into the rust, internal systems failing.
That's it, she thought dimly. That's me done in.
A new line of code scrawled across her sight.
/error: external oxidization exceeding nanobot limit/infection imminent/
/commencing stasis lock/
"Oh no, come on, this isn't-"
/disengaging stasis lock/
"-fair!"
A harsh light shone in her optics. Lennox blinked rapidly. She felt... different. The rust in her plating was gone. The ground beneath her was different too. Gone was the sea of red particles, replaced by a smooth slab of steel.
Someone stood over her. Like her, the figure looked like a meatier Frame with an Exo-like head. It had a blockier body than hers, painted in red and white. Its fingers were blunt, not like the claws she had, and it possessed no wings. The glaring light came from an object clutched in one of its metal hands.
"You're up!" The figure cheerfully exclaimed. "Finally! That's good. That's very good. Would you please follow the light?"
Lennox hesitated.
"The light, please."
She followed the light with her optics. She was unarmed and not quite accustomed to her current body, but her claws were sharp and undoubtedly capable of-
"Yes, keep following. You're very lucky, you know that? I've never seen such a beat up chassis as yours."
A few dents and scratches, nothing more. It hadn't felt quite so bad.
"Can you speak?" The other... being (not human in any case) inquired.
Lennox cleared her vocabulator. "Yes."
"Good. Good! That should clear this up." The figure leaned over her. "What the frag were you thinking?! Hiking through the Sea of Rust is suicide!"
"I-"
"Why the Pit didn't you fly out? Hmm?"
"I can't fly." She tried frowning. It was easier with her current form than with an Exo face.
The other... metal person, for lack of a better term, made the mechanical equivalent of a snort. "Don't try that with me. I had a look at your flight systems. They're still operational."
Lennox hesitated. "Flight systems?"
"Very cute." The other guy snarked. And it was a guy. He sounded masculine, in a mechanical robot sort of way. Somehow. She wasn't quite sure how she figured that. "Oh, you Seekers are a laugh."
"I don't... What's going on?"
His entire demeanor shifted. "You're serious."
"Where... Where am I?"
"Stanix. A far cry from Vos, I know, but beggars can't be choosers. How are your memory banks looking?"
Lennox tensed. She didn't want him, didn't want anyone, anywhere near her memories. "Why?"
The other robot reached to the side and procured a datapad dotted with alien symbols. "Let's have a peek... Oh. Oh dear."
"What?"
"Your memory drives are..."
"Are what?!"
He looked suddenly uncomfortably. "Memory drives are corrupted. Sorry. I'll see if I can trace the-"
It was then that she saw that the datapad was connected to a cable that led directly to a port in her arm, where her plating had neatly folded out of the way. With a flash of motion, she ripped the cable away and backed up on the metal platform. "Get out! Get out of my head! Out!"
"I..." He bowed his head. "Alright. I'll be downstairs if you need anything. Just... try to remain calm."
The very moment he left the room, and the door slide closed behind him, Lennox curled up into a ball. Panic and rage and misery ripped through her like a shock blade.
Some time later, she managed to pry the door open and walk, with some difficulty, down the aforementioned stairs. There was a kitchen area, of sorts, below. A metal table had been set up in the centre of it all, surrounded by metal chairs. And sitting on those chairs were more metal people.
Lennox was hardly quiet. Her body was strange; she couldn't control it with any degree of confidence. They looked up as the sound of heavy, clanking footfalls reached them and saw her there, halfway down the stairs. There were four of them; the guy from earlier, two more similarly-sized mechanical beings, and a smaller version that looked like a cross of the two latter robots.
"What's happening?" Lennox croaked. It was a bad dream. It had to be. She was going to wake up and find Gecko alive. Find Cayde and Sundance alive. Otherwise... She didn't want to think about otherwise. Otherwise was reserved until all other options were exhausted - and otherwise didn't have a happy ending.
The metal man from earlier slowly stood and grimaced. "While you appear to be in stable condition, your memory cores are... corrupted. How much can you remember?"
Lennox hesitated. "I don't..." She didn't want to say anything. She didn't know these people. "Where am I? Who are you?"
The metal man paused. "My designation is Complexius. I'm a medicinal physician."
Complexius? Lennox frowned - or she tried to, in any case. Her new face was expressive, but the process of actually using it was alien to her. What the hell kind of name is that?!
The other two of comparable size stood. The first to speak was slightly more streamlined than their compatriot. "I am Phosphora," it, she, said. She looked to her as-yet-unnamed partner. "This is my sparkmate, Overwatch."
Overwatch dipped his head in greetings. Lennox was left no less confused.
"And this," Phosphora said proudly, laying a hand on the shoulder of the short metal person, "is Daybreak. He is our creation."
Daybreak smiled at Lennox. There was an uncertainty in it. Confusion and worry, just like the ones offered by the others.
"I d-don't-" She stumbled back, almost losing her balance and falling down the stairs. She quickly made her way down. Overwatch stepped forward and offered his hand, but she ignored it. She wasn't helpless. Just Lightless.
Lightless. The pain of it would never cease, of that she was certain.
"Do you need to sit down?" Phosphora asked. Concern dripped from every word. Lennox didn't want concern.
She wanted Gecko.
AN: An AU I thought up a while back and spent months imagining. This is a mesh of both lore from Destiny (upon which I will be strictly by-the-book) and Transformers (which will be a little looser).