Chapter 27

"Admittance"

"What was your name?"

Hawkmoon didn't reply.

"What about your people?"

Kept her silence.

"Did you... did you have a family-unit?"

"Of a degree," Hawkmoon whispered. Then, "Yes. Yes, I had people I called family. Not... not anymore."

Cyberwarp gave her a sympathetic, if wary, look. She never knew when to stop being compassionate. Something Hawkmoon liked (correction: adored), but was ultimately not good where the cold, cold universe was concerned. "Who?" she asked. "Oh wait - you talked about an old friend way back, about... helping sort out a class, didn't you?"

Hawkmoon slowly nodded. "Dammit," she muttered.

"Was that-"

"Yeah."

"Who were they?" Cyberwarp asked after a moment's hesitation.

Hawkmoon offlined her optics for the umpteenth time. Looking at the two of them, with their expectant faceplates, wasn't working out for her. "Grumpiest guy I've ever met," she whispered, "and smartest too - in theory. He... he was the best Warl-... he was just the best."

"How did he...?" Nacelle started to ask.

Hawkmoon shrugged. "Gone same as the others. Just... removed."

"Removed?"

"I'm not supposed to be here."

"None of us are; Contrail-"

"No, you don't understand. I don't mean here as in where we are," Hawkmoon blurted, growing frustrated - and a little more desperate too. "I mean here as in when we are. This... the Tai are supposed to be extinct."

"... Extinct?" Cyberwarp echoed, horrified. "What do you-... The Hive?!"

"Yeah. The Hive." Hawkmoon scowled. "They kill the Tai."

"But the Tai are alive."

"For now."

"And you want to save them," Nacelle mused.

Hawkmoon shrugged numbly. Then gave the briefest of nods. "Sure."

"If Vector Prime really did have anything to do with this," Cyberwarp began to whisper conspiratorially, "then maybe she's supposed to be here. Maybe we all are."

But Nacelle didn't answer her. He was looking directly at Hawkmoon, optics narrowed - confused. "What about us?" he quietly asked. "What about... Cybertron?"

"I've never heard of Cybertron before... this." Hawkmoon stiffly gestured to herself.

"What does that mean? That we... what? Lived? Died out?"

"It..." Hawkmoon sighed. "It means no, you probably didn't make it."

"... Oh." Nacelle went still. "Tha- that's... not comforting."

"Lotta dead peoples in those Hive books we read. Too many to count."

"I said that's not comforting."

"Yeah, Nacelle, I fragging heard. None of it is comforting." Hawkmoon buried her faceplates in her servos. "Why do you think I'm the way I am? It's all fragging awful. Everything's dead or dying or undying, and it makes no sense, and it never fragging ends - never. Except for the things you love. They're... they're always the first to go."

"You must have been a soldier," Cyberwarp stated, subdued. "The way you fight and act and plan..."

Hawkmoon shivered. "You could say that," she murmured, voice muffled by palms and clenching talons.

"And you were... what, a demi-mechanoform?" Nacelle sharply inquired. "A cyborg?"

"A pseudo-synthetic lifeform," Hawkmoon corrected. "Artificial bodies for very real consciousnesses."

"Why?"

"Because we were afraid of dying. Of our cells decaying and our minds withering away." Hawkmoon winced. "We're not... we weren't like you. Our lives were... short, in comparison with yours and... and just about everyone else's. We were small compared to the others as well. Not that we knew it at the time, but still. We weren't as strong as we should have been. That's why."

"Because you wanted to be stronger?"

"Because we didn't want to die! I..." Hawkmoon vented. "I think. Memories... don't really survive the process. Or the resets after that."

"Resets?!" Cyberwarp flinched. Nacelle too. Hawkmoon gave them both a surprised look when it dawned on her - oh yeah, resetting was something akin to a capital offence to Cybertronians, sometimes considered worse than murder. It had only ever been practiced in the brutal feudal periods that came after the defeat of the Quintessons - and even then, not widely.

But humans had never considered it that way, had they? As long as the soul was the same, and the body still working, then Golden Age corps like Clovis Bray were happy to keep it going.

Bastards.

Hawkmoon shrugged again. "Not like I had a choice in the matter."

"That's... barbaric."

"Saying it was so doesn't change much, 'Warp. Things were fragged. Things are fragged." Hawkmoon stared at her servos, turning them over. "I'm... Sometimes I get scared it'll happen to me again. But then I get more scared that it won't."

"What do you mean?"

"Biological minds weren't meant for cold bodies. Sometimes... sometimes the subconscious realizes what's happened and, and, and thinks we're dead. Parts of us - the important parts, the parts that make us us - just... stop working. Not even a late reset will fix that."

"Primus," Nacelle mumbled. "And... you're going through that?"

Hawkmoon weakly shrugged. "I don't know. I don't know anything; I'm just here, trying to make the best of a royally fragged scenario."

"You're doing... pretty well?" Cyberwarp hesitantly told her.

"No I'm not."

"... Yeah, I don't know what to tell you, I'm sorry."

"You're always sorry," Hawkmoon huffed, a strained smile tugging at her lips. It died very quickly. "I'm sorry, 'Warp. I'm not... I warned you I would be... but I should have tried better. This can't have been a nice surprise. I'm sorry-"

"I understand," Cyberwarp replied, voice only barely wavering. "I can do that much: understand. I understand why you didn't say anything."

"Yeah, I was afraid of being dissected."

Nacelle made a face - then he nodded. "Yeah, no, that'd probably happen if it reached the wrong audials."

Hawkmoon paused. "Will it? Has it reached the wrong audials?"

"No," Cyberwarp said immediately.

"No," Nacelle agreed. "I'm in a foul mood, 'Moon, but like Pit am I going to throw you to the Insecticons. We're a trine."

"I should have told you both sooner," Hawkmoon softly admitted. She leaned back, wings brushing against the wall, pedes hanging over the edge of the bed; couldn't trust that her legs would support her weight, what with her mind ablaze with new horrifying realities and other, lesser-but-still-pressing worldly concerns. "But... I couldn't trust you before either. Couldn't trust anyone. Probably still can't."

"You're a deeply mistrustful person," Nacelle tiredly remarked.

"It's what's kept me alive. Universe has been out to get me and my people and my dog ever since I picked myself out of the grave."

"Grave?" Cyberwarp asked.

"Figure of speech," Hawkmoon lied.

"Wait, what about your 'dog'?"

"Another... look, I mean that everything was in danger. I didn't have a dog."

"What is a dog?"

"... Ok, look, it's like a kind of symbiote. But not metal. Just as I was like a Cybertronian once, but also not metal. Well... yeah, actually. Not originally."

"What were you doing," Nacelle suddenly asked, "that you were forced into a Cybertronian body?"

Hawkmoon hesitated. "Killing a dragon."

"A what?"

"A dragon, like-"

"Like a Predacon," Nacelle growled. "Yes, I'm aware."

"Wait, you know what a dragon is?" Hawkmoon inquired, confused.

"There's myths. Dangerous critters that live among the stars."

"Exactly!"

"And you were killing one?"

"Yeah. It..." Hawkmoon grimaced. "It killed me. I didn't... I didn't even have time to scream."

"And now you're a Cybertronian."

"Yeah."

"Fully?"

"Ye- what do you even mean?"

"Is your spark even there?"

"You know it is."

"I thought I did. How do we know-"

"I know," Cyberwarp confirmed. She glanced at him. "I know it's there. I know it's working. I know it's acting as it should. I know."

"Why-... oh." Nacelle looked away. "I didn't need to know that."

"You asked."

"Yes, and I'm regretting that."

"I'm starting to regret this entire conversation," Hawkmoon ruefully commented. She sighed and hung her helm. "Frag... I really do have to ask - are either of you going to tell anyone else?"

"No," Cyberwarp told her, her servos reaching up to frame Hawkmoon's faceplates. "We already told you we wouldn't."

"It would mean my life," Hawkmoon whispered back. "I only have the one now - and I've got... I've got so much to do before I go. So many things to fix."

"I know. I'm going to help-..." Cyberwarp frowned. "What do you mean, 'go'?"

Hawkmoon hesitated.

"As long as it's on your terms, is that it?" Nacelle drawled, suddenly angry all over again.

"I'm not afraid of it that way. I've done it before."

"No one's dying!" Cyberwarp quickly blurted, voice tinged with a touch of desperation.

Hawkmoon placed one of her own servos over that of Cyberwarp's, and then reached out to cup the other beneath the other femme's chin. She smiled, sadly. "So many people are going to die," Hawkmoon said in a low voice. "So many, 'Warp. We can't stop that - only stem the tide. If we're going to save anyone, we need to kill. We need to fight. Or... I need to fight. You both need to get back to Cybertron with the others, warn Vos, Iacon, everyone. Do you understand me?"

"I understand. And I don't care."

"'Warp."

"No." Cyberwarp straightened up - and dragged Hawkmoon off the bed, forcing her to stand too, so close that if they'd been human their breaths would have mingled together. "I'm not up and abandoning you. We're a trine - we're... I don't know what we are. You've been good and fair to me-"

"I've lied to you," Hawkmoon pointed out. "In a pretty big way, too."

"I know that. I've always known. You never made it a secret that you were keeping things back. You've always tried to be fair."

"Cyberwarp, stop. This isn't a game; this isn't some romantic-adventure fic-vid either." Hawkmoon grimaced. "This is war - bloody and real. Death is everywhere. Or it's going to be. People, more worlds - they're going to die. Die. What happened to Vale? That could happen again at any moment. Any moment! I'm not bringing you two along."

"But you'd submit yourself to it just fine," Nacelle muttered.

Hawkmoon looked at him. "I've been fighting the Hive for over a century," she bit out. "That may not be much to you, but it was my life. They've killed friends of mine - people I cared about, loved. They've been trying to kill me for so fragging long. Trying to do the same to my home as they did to Taluka. I know what I'm flying into, and you don't. That makes a world of difference."

"But that doesn't mean you get to-"

Hawkmoon's long-range electromagnetic sensors pinged - and pinged hard, so abruptly that her optics shuttered and processor stalled before she could even consider what it meant. Her building retort to whatever Nacelle had been about to say died in her vocalizer; she glanced at him and Cyberwarp, optics wide, and asked, "Did you feel that?"

Cyberwarp nodded. Nacelle took a step back and looked around, perplexed. "What... what was that?"

Another sensor - the one Hawkmoon relied on to avoid colliding with space debris during in-system transit - filled with data. There was a wave of something coming their way. The ship, the Prosperity Burns, was moving away, but it was there, coming fast, as if...

Something else piped up. Something deep in her chassis, right by her spark - coming online, interfacing with something else, something ahead, something the plateship was making haste towards. It was... it was the thing Contrail and Red Light had discovered, the... what had they called it? The 'Aperture Scrambler'? It was giving her veiled options, showing her... showing her where the bridge was headed, to a set of coordinates much, much farther into the Cyst Stars.

"We're moving through the Tai space-bridge," Hawkmoon announced, still no less confused - because that didn't clear everything up. Certainly not the massive influx of raw energy and electromagnetic radiation spreading out in all directions behind them. Or... didn't it? Maybe Taluka had blown up - that would have explained it. But there was no reason to, either. As devastating as the warmoon's collision had been, it probably hadn't been enough to completely destabilize the world.

"How do you know?" Nacelle asked.

"Because I'm taking a guess?" Hawkmoon lied. "The admiral said we were heading to Tai Prime via a... a 'Raven Bridge', so..."

The sensation of the space-bridge was weird - intermingling with foreign signals stemming from the unusual device wired into her. She could almost feel as they passed through realspace into the rip in the fabric of reality, briefly soaring through what Cybertronians called 'unspace' or 'the bleed'. It was alien, unnatural, playing haywire on her systems. It was a place of anti-reality, of otherworldly presence, and they drifted through near silently.

Because they had to, whether they knew it or not. There were things out there; she felt them in her spark more than anything else, with the flicker of her Lighted soul. Great whales and sharks of conceptual presence, swimming through the extraplanar realm and watching their little material existences pass through with idle interest.

Something grasped her pauldron. Hawkmoon onlined her optics and realized she'd zoned out - that Cyberwarp and Nacelle were staring at her with concern.

"-oon, say something!" Cyberwarp blurted.

"I'm fine, m'fine," Hawkmoon mumbled, still partially elsewhere.

Until, just as suddenly, they were through on the other side and the unmatter-stream of the Raven Bridge was closing behind them.

"I need to..." Hawkmoon sighed. There was... so much to do! "I need to prepare."

"What-"

"The Tai want to know about the Hive," she announced. "I need to tell them what to expect, but... I don't know much about the Tai either."

Cyberwarp gave Nacelle a pointed look. The mech grumbled. "Fine."

"Fine?" Hawkmoon asked, perplexed.

"Skydive and I were picking at their transmissions and local networks before you got here. Trying to see what we could find and add it into the datalogue."

"Ah. Did you find anything?"

"Some," Nacelle said after a moment's hesitation. "Their systems are very secure."

"Far from the primitive organics Cybertron expects, right?"

"Quite." Nacelle frowned. "Look, will you be alright?"

Hawkmoon just shrugged.

"We're not done talking about all this, okay?"

"I figured as much," Hawkmoon muttered.

"But we can..." Nacelle made a face. "We can help. We can. At least with this - if you'll let us."

"And even if you won't," Cyberwarp added, sparing Hawkmoon a stubborn, determined look. "No more secrets, okay?"

"I can't agree to that," Hawkmoon replied.

"Well, you will. You have to."

"No, I don't."

Cyberwarp narrowed her optics. "I'll convince you," she said with a strange sort of certainty.

Hawkmoon tore her own optics away and refocused on Nacelle. "So what can you give me?"

While the Prosperity Burns contacted the Tai's High Naval Command, Hawkmoon swept through every tidbit of mined data Skydive and Nacelle had chipped off the edges of the plateship's own internal database. It... was rather illuminating, if a touch lacking in parts - but that, Hawkmoon decided, would come later.

The Taishibethi ruled an interstellar empire of sorts - like the Cabal, except calling it an empire wasn't really doing it justice. It was more... a cross between constitutional- and absolute-monarchy. The official head of state of the Taishibethi Protectorate was the Tai Emperor Raven - whose bloodline had been in power over the Tai system since their early industrial age. Or it had been just the one Emperor for that entire length of time - the datafile was confusing on that count. Hawkmoon suspected the former; Taishibethi could apparently live for thousands of years, but they did eventually fall victim to the rigours of time, and they'd been part of an interstellar community of tens of thousands of years.

All Tai ancestors originally hailed from the world of Tai Prime - a temperate, ocean-dominated place dotted with archipelago-nations. According to the Tai, there had once been a barely-sapient species called the Abalon who lived in the depths of Tai Prime's largest sea trenches, who occasionally rose up to do battle with the Tai - and were presently extinct, having been wiped out by the Sun Emperor and the other Tai clans who hadn't sworn their subservience to her at the time. Their development into a space-faring race a little later on was in truth a strange thing - because it had been the Myods that had found them rather than the other way around. The Myods were, at the time, so far ahead of the Tai in terms of technology - and after their explorer fleets landed on Tai Prime and their shipmasters had met with the Emperor Raven, the Myods had sworn undying loyalty to the fledgling Protectorate for inexplicable reasons. Like the second Sun Emperor briefly taking on a Myod as a lover/consort/companion. Also very confusing there. She probably wasn't getting an accurate translation.

The Tai had exploded out into their local star cluster from there, riding out on fleets of Myod-designed starships, ducking through the warp-streams of their growing Star-Web to expand their borders and claim new territories for their Emperor. Each star-system was governed by its own sun-governor, who in turn answered to the Star-Court - a parliamentary collection of representatives from each client species of the Protectorate. In theory, they in turn answered to the Sun Emperor, but apparently she had a laid back approach to politics, which Hawkmoon could really get behind.

Politics was the fragging worst.

The Tai made it look a little cool, though. The Tai's current leader on the eleven-member Star-Court was their Marooner Arch-Admiral Virutes. The Myod's was High Tribunal Iizuun, and like all her mollusc brethren she was devoted to each and every decree passed by the Taishibethi. Likewise, there was a strange collection of creatures called the Verunlix who opted to align their intents with the Tai almost every time the Star-Court was deciding on anything, and they were apparently what the vulpine-silhouetted orb-thing Hawkmoon had seen in the helm was - and the stolen information concerning them was alarmingly sparse. They were sacred to the Tai for some reason, and their population was 'fixed' - meaning they could not reproduce, nor could they truly die.

It was a head scratcher, and it left Hawkmoon more confused than when she'd started.

The other races of the Protectorate's union were easier to comprehend, mainly because they were more strange-biological-aliens as opposed to extraplanar-entities-possibly-made-of-shadow-and-dark-matter-dust. The cuttlefish-centaurs aboard the plateship with the Tai and Myods were called the Iurphins, and they were apparently the nicest, most generous and charitable, and overall most helpful sapient species in all the galaxy. They lived in communal 'schools' like fish, were entirely plankton-eaters, and were chronic workaholics. The Tai, understandably, adored them and had all but adopted them into almost every aspect of Taishibethi life - helping them develop while enjoying the benefits of hiring a tireless, determined, and socially-adaptable workforce for a variety of labour-intensive tasks.

There were the wasp-like insectoid Eechariik who for the most part led very private lives, resided in nest-subnations led by mother-queens, and had an infamous reputation for producing through exile a high amount of skilled outlaw-gunslingers, which the Tai navy were eager to poach and add to their various standing defense-militias.

The amorphous helium-filled atmospheric jellyfish of a methanic gas giant called the Uui made excellent clerks. They were the fourth alien species discovered by Tai, after the Myods, Iurphins and the bestial Meex (in short: bad-tempered lizard-bear-bat people) and had integrated almost seamlessly into the Protectorate. The Tai had to insist they choose one of their own for the Star-Court eventually, just to make things fair for them; the Uui were easygoing and lax, and always, always polite - which made them susceptible to being taken advantage of, what with their distinct lack of personal ambitions. In truth, most of them were utterly content to drift along in their planet's stratosphere and drink in more radiation-rich sunlight, but a few had been convinced to take up habitation elsewhere for the purpose of supporting the Protectorate through simple accounting. Because they were really good with numbers.

Hawkmoon developed the sudden urge to go see one of the floating jellyfish-mathematicians. For no other reason than 'just because'. It would've made for a nice distraction.

"The Tai are really afraid of the Hive," Nacelle remarked after a long strength of silence. He passed over his datapad; it was filled with panicked call-transcripts datamined after the destruction of Taluka.

Hawkmoon nodded absentmindedly. "They should be," she muttered.

"Wow."

"What?"

"What you just said. That's… really intense."

"It's the truth.

"Doesn't make it any less intense."

There was a bleep from the doorway. Cyberwarp straightened up, walked to the terminal by the sliding door, and announced, "It's that Tai you were talking with."

"Doesn't much narrow it down," Hawkmoon replied.

"The one who took the sword I..." Cyberwarp trailed off, lost in thought.

"You mean Ikitri?"

"Yeah. Yeah, Ikitri!"

"I need..." Hawkmoon looked over the datapad in her hands - she wasn't finished with the latest file, covering another species called the Ferrelum. "I don't know, just a couple of moments, keep him busy."

"But how-"

"Tell him we're naked in here."

"But we don't... Fine, give me the language files."

Hawkmoon sent them over. Cyberwap shook her helm in exasperation and opened the sliding door - partially. "We're naked in here," she said, sounding annoyed.

There was a long pause on the Tai's end. "But... you don't wear clothes anyways," Ikitri pointed out, flabbergasted.

"Yup. I know"

"What are you... I need to speak with Hawkmoon."

"Tell him I'm not here," Hawkmoon hissed, optics skimming down the scrawl of stolen intelligence as fast as she could manage. The Ferrelum were a species who originally resided on a low-g moon with a thin atmosphere. Their bodies were heavy and bulky to act as a form of ballast, but they also had retractable flaps on all six limbs capable of briefly allowing them to soar. Sorta. Glide pathetically, but glide all the same.

"She's not here," Cyberwarp repeated.

"But I can hear her," Ikitri pointed out.

"I think she just wants some time."

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"Yes."

Cyberwarp half-turned around. "He's giving you time. Just had to ask normally, you realize."

"I know!" Hawkmoon rushed through the final segments - the Ferrelum were pacifistic herbivores and overly talkative. The Tai employed them as negotiators and diplomats where sweet-voiced Taishibethi were unwelcome, particularly in the practice of disarming dangerous splinter-factions and insurgent forces. The only issue was organizing a habitation for the great ptero-elephants - they were big, breathed different air than most other species in the Protectorate, ate a lot, and wearing tight, insulative biosuits made them irritable. Apparently they were claustrophobic. Finished, Hawkmoon set the datapad aside, vented once and stood right up.

"Was it worth it?" Nacelle whispered.

Hawkmoon shook her helm and twisted her lips. "Nope." She joined Cyberwarp by the door, opened it up completely, and offered Ikitri a veiled, cool smile. "Hi."

Ikitri gave her a strange look. "You're naked, apparently."

Hawkmoon hesitated.

"Please be aware that we can give you clothes if you want some."

"Oh, yes please," Hawkmoon sighed, relieved. "I know there's nothing really to see but it's so weird walking around like this."

Cyberwarp nudged her with her elbow

"I mean, it's perfectly fine to be around in nip, 'cause we're robots and we have natural armour," Hawkmoon alleviated. She was rambling. Came with being nervous, paranoid, the works.

Ikitri blinked. "What?"

"Ah, nothing. What're you here for?"

"To retrieve you," Ikitri explained, shaking off the confusion. "We're docking with Pharin Station, but there's a shuttle waiting to take us to the capital planet-side."

"Where?"

"Khadai-Viis, life-garden of the Imperial Palace." Ikitri spared her a piercing look. "You should be honoured. Never before has a mechanoform walked in the light of our Sun."

"... Riiiight." Hawkmoon glanced at Cyberwarp, and then Nacelle behind them. "What about-"

"All your kin are coming."

"Do we have a choice?"

Ikitri opened and closed his beak. The feathers lining the back of his next rustled - some quills standing up on end. "No," he told her. "The Emperor was informed of your... presence within the Imojelum system. Your fate is for the Star-Court to decide."

"But... Admiral Jehennes-"

"Jehennes is no longer an admiral," Ikitri snapped out. He fingered the hilts of his sheathed foldblades. "He is to be tried for treason and sacrilege first, before your kind get your turn."

Hawkmoon tried and failed to resist the urge to blink in surprise - optics shuttering off and on. "What?"

"You would do best to follow." Ikitri turned on his heel and started marching. The sight of armed Myod supertroopers in the hallway behind him was more than enough to convince Hawkmoon to begrudgingly comply. She hurried to catch up.

"Ikitri, what- What happened?" she urgently asked. "Why-"

"He destroyed the Imojelum sun," Ikitri hissed out - looking straight ahead.

Hawkmoon slowed. It all pieced together - the explosion of electromagnetic energy, the vast movement of raw matter... a spontaneous supernova.

But how-

It wasn't impossible, Hawkmoon darkly recalled.

The Tai were a little more like the Cabal than she'd given them credit for. Nicer at a glance, but - destroying suns? That wasn't a power many could flaunt.

"Frag," she swore.

Ikitri glanced at her. "He doesn't believe in leaving them anything," he muttered. "Not even the slumbering embryo of an unborn god."

"... Okay, what the frag are you on about?"

The Taishibethi home-system was filled with the trickling whisper of an interconnected web of linked planetary servers chock full of uploaded information and various communications systems. Like a more advanced form of humanity's VanNet, but nowhere near the level of development and intuition as Cybertron's Teletraan system - but that wasn't exactly a fair comparison, given that Teletraan owed much of its success to the fact that the denizens of Cybertron were basically walking supercomputers given their own initiative and ability to reason.

Hawkmoon temporarily zoned the distractive sensations out as she waited in the hangar - a different one to that where the Seeder had punched in and killed Vale. She was grateful to a degree that the Tai had considered that and moved them elsewhere. The Aurorus was still back there, though, and the Dartwings with it. She had to argue for a short while with Ikitri to get permission for the Dartwings to join them with the Aurorus in transit, and it took time, but she got there in the end. The Taishibeth was being very tight-lipped about everything - and not just where Jehennes or Ikitri's talk about star-gods was concerned. The marooner-captain was being even more difficult than usual, restrictive, almost confrontational. It might've had something to do with them being so close to Tai Prime, or even that his orders had seemingly come directly from the top, but - it was what it was.

Quell arrived last, with Swiftsear and Sandstorm no less. The two of them were standing, awake, but they were swaying on their pedes and their optics were dim; they were obviously in a lot of pain. Neither of them spoke. Hawkmoon didn't think they were much aware of what was happening - just overcome with the frightening, agonizing absence where Vale used to be.

The reminder wasn't great on her either. A Seeker had died. One out of the thirteen sent the way of the Cyst Stars, yes, so practically speaking only a fraction of the entire formation, but it was still a person. And... not encouraging. That even a trained Cybertronian - massive, powerful, adaptive beyond belief - could be killed just like that. By Hive.

It didn't fill Hawkmoon with much confidence.

"Are you ready?" Ikitri sharply asked, voice clipped.

Hawkmoon gave him a nod. She didn't trust herself not to offer anything short of a scathing retort. She was not a calm, collected person, and it weighed on her.

The shuttle was readied - a massive, antiquated submarine-esque thing that looked like it had come straight from some ancient Tai war with the Abalon. Hawkmoon boarded, encouraging the others to do the same without any hassle, with Quell and Skydive helping their dazed formation leaders into the ship's hold. Ikitri still waited, though. Hawkmoon, growing impatient, asked, "Is there really anyone else-"

"Yes. Them." Ikitri looked ahead.

Hawkmoon followed his line of sight and wished she hadn't. Kirtir and his/her guards were ambling along, with a cuffed Jehennes walking between the Myod pair, and with them floated the self-aware Verunlix orb. Hawkmoon remained as still as she possibly could as it floated inside with them, and pinged the others with a subtle warning.

Didn't stop Northwind from exclaiming, "What the frag-!"

"Leave it," Hawkmoon snapped. "Just... leave it."

The Verunlix glanced at her - it's fox-like form within the crystalline surface twisting and stretching, the two weak torchlights that were its eyes turning her way. "Lost one," it whispered.

"What do you-"

"You are very bright."

Hawkmoon stared at the thing. "What does that even mean?"

The Verunlix said nothing and floated on - deeper into the ship. Kirtir followed it, flashing Hawkmoon a knowing look, and then they and Jehennes were past. More guards took up positions around the former admiral. At last, Ikitri stepped aboard, shrieked a confirmation ahead to the ship's crew, and the ramp leading out folded closed. Hawkmoon made to lean against the hull - but then the wall behind her turned partially transparent, parts of it animating images of what its visual-sensors picked up on outside, becoming a viewport of sorts. There wasn't much to see, just hangar and more of the plateship's admittedly decent architecture, but when the shuttle braved the nothingness of outside...

The sight was almost spectacular enough to make her forget about the Verunlix in with them, about the Hive coming to destroy it all, about the lack of humanity anywhere in the galaxy at their present time. Almost.

Pharin Station hung above them, massive, a fattened silver cylinder glittering with lights, with notches in its side for the Prosperity Burns and countless other colossal plateships to dock halfway inside. It was the size of a small moon, utterly monumental, but what lay ahead was even better - a world. A living, breathing, rich world as opposed to Taluka's ash-and-sand landscapes. It was Tai Prime, miniscule what with the distance between it and Pharin Station, but it was incredible. It...

It looked like Earth, with all the blues and specks of green.

Hawkmoon felt very, very homesick.

AN: Huge thanks to Nomad Blue for editing!