The Fragments

From “Crucible”

Waking up restrained wasn't an unfamiliar state of affairs for Air Raid. If nothing else, he was a frequent...visitor to the medbay, and the medics had very quickly learned that if they didn't somehow force him to stay in their company, he had a distinct habit of slipping away from them before his time. So now Air Raid usually found himself awakening in the medbay more or less tied to his berth, like Gulliver amongst the Lilliputians. He'd resigned himself to it; it had even become somewhat...amusing.

The problem this time, though, was that Air Raid couldn't remember exactly what had earned him this particular trip to the medbay, which was somewhat disquieting...

…And this time there were quite a few more restraints than usual...

…And they were unusually and, in a few cases, painfully tight...

…And his arms weren't usually restrained above his head like they were at the moment...

…And he wasn't usually vertical...

Something might be very wrong here, Air Raid, my boy... his brain thought at him blearily, giving his consciousness a few judicious, pointed pokes here and there. C’mon, you! Wake up! Rise and shine!

"All right, all right…" his voice announced before he brought his optics online. It was hoarse, drowsy, weak, as if he'd been offline for a week or two and dust had gathered in his throat. "All right, Ratchet, I swear to Primus that I won't run away... Could you please just loosen these things a little bit?"

No one answered him. Air Raid could hear nothing nearby except for a faint electrical hum somewhere off to his left, and that was more subliminal than anything else. But more importantly than that, he suddenly realized that he sensed nothing from the other Aerialbots, which was something to which he was so unaccustomed that, for a moment, he froze. He didn't know what to do. Even on the few occasions that they had been physically separated from one another even by a great distance, the others — Fireflight, in particular — had always been a constant, subtle, yet very comforting presence in his mind, always there to depend upon, always there for whatever he wanted or needed at any given moment. But not now, apparently... A wave of panic momentarily overcame Air Raid before he consciously pushed it aside, though not without a shiver of foreboding.

Air Raid brought his optics online then, and found that he was alone. He'd never been truly alone in his life, and he could not say that he liked the feeling. Not at all. Nor did he like the room he was in, once he could actually focus on its features…or lack thereof.

Air Raid was quite obviously not in the Autobots' medbay. If nothing else, the walls -- to one of which he was attached like a pinned butterfly -- were not the warm, friendly reddish-orange that were the hallmark of Autobot Headquarters. Neither were they the depressing, cold purple-grey that, so he'd heard, dominated the Decepticons' undersea Headquarters. Instead, they were a flat, dark, forbidding grey. The words he'd spoken moments ago had echoed off them flatly, dully, as if they were made to absorb sound, to muffle it, rather than to reflect it. The dimensions of the room were tiny, as well. The lighting was dim, and it seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once, which only heightened the closed-in effect. As creatures of the open sky, Air Raid and the other Aerialbots tended to be a bit claustrophobic, so Air Raid overwhelmingly disliked the room where he'd found himself to be. He wanted out of it.

Now.

With a grunt, he tested the restraints – three of them, one each around his forearm, elbow, and upper arm – that bound his left arm to the wall. He yanked with all his considerable strength against them. Not only did the restraints not give a micrometer, but the hum off to his left became momentarily louder and quite a bit more menacing, and he was rewarded for his efforts to free himself with a jolt of electrical energy that zinged its way along the sensory circuitry in his arm. The jolt became stronger and the pain became more intense the more he pulled against the restraints. Yet still, he struggled, even as he cried out in pain against his will when it became too much to bear, until he realized that his struggles were, indeed, futile.

After that brief initial struggle, Air Raid stopped what he was doing and tried to remain very, very still, trying to collect his racing, panicky thoughts. Once he was marginally calmer, once the brief but intense flare of pain had subsided, he attempted to take better stock of his situation.

Air Raid looked down first, craning his neck as far forward as it would go, to find that he was, indeed, pinned to the wall. The floor of the room was at least a meter below his feet, and he was spread-eagled with his back against the wall. He was arched somewhat uncomfortably because of the jet parts attached to his back and, as a result, a nagging ache was already working its way through his body, something that he knew would only become worse the longer that he remained suspended as he was. The restraints were all that were holding him in place. There were five of thm on each leg, three on each arm. Plus, there was one across his chest, one across his midsection, and one across his hips. And they were all exceedingly tight, chafing at him where gravity forced them to dig into him, not leaving him much room to wriggle his way free of them. Air Raid slowly realized that he would have to break the restraints somehow in order to escape from...wherever he was... Craning his neck around, he peered at the restraint that was easiest to see, the one that pinned his left elbow to the wall, in order to try to assess its weaknesses.

The restraint was a wide band of metal, like a large bracelet, that encircled his arm and was attached to the wall by a short, thick, anchoring spoke. The entire thing looked to be made of the same metal that made up the walls, floor, and ceiling of the room. In fact, it looked to be a part of the wall itself. It wasn't bolted or welded to the wall as far as Air Raid could tell; it just appeared to have grown out of it. It had been perforated half a dozen times or so, the holes evenly-spaced along the circumference of the restraint. Bristling malevolently from each of those holes was something that resembled nothing if not a large spark plug. Attached to one end of each of the objects were three wires that eventually snaked their way to a small cube off to his left. It was the cube that was emitting the deep, reverberating hum that Air Raid felt more than heard. The other end of the object...

Air Raid squinted into the dimness, trying to see into the gap between the circular restraint and his squared-off arm. As he succeeded in doing so, he realized with a dawning, sickening horror that the other end of the object…a probe of some sort, perhaps…actually plunged through his metal skin, sinking into his arm he knew not how deep. He could just barely see the dried energon that had caked around the point where the probe or whatever the thing was had been drilled through him. A whimper escaped from around a jaw suddenly clenched in horror. He couldn't help himself.

Tearing his gaze away from the restraint around his elbow and focusing it on the floor below him didn't help much, either, because it only served to remind him that there were many other restraints littering his body, each of them liberally peppered with the same sort of probes. There were no less than three dozen of them, at least, in two neat rows, embedded across the width of his chest. One of them, he absently noticed, neatly pierced the center of the Autobot symbol emblazoned in the center of his chest.

It was all Air Raid could do to stay still, not to scream in abject, rising terror. As it was, his fear transformed itself into an inward, desperate plea for help.

Fireflight! Help me! his mind screamed in a flash of pure panic. The mental tones were strident, wavering unabashedly with pain and fear, and Air Raid was certain that they would get through to Fireflight, especially, if to no one else. Oh, Primus, somebody please help me...Please!

No one answered him, no matter how many times he repeated the plea. Once again, it was brought home to Air Raid with a resounding, crashing finality that he was alone...

Utterly and completely alone…

From “Dissension”

Bit 1:

One of the worst days in Ironhide's life started out peacefully enough.

His recharge chamber roused him, as it always did, half an hour before the crack of dawn. Actually anxious to start the day--for once--he fingered the interior controls of the stasis pod and the transparent cover above him popped open with a soft, pneumatic hiss. Ironhide sat up, hopped out of the pod, and stretched with a jaw-cracking yawn. He wandered over to the energon dispenser and ordered up his customary morning pick-me-up, a huge mug of extra strong energon. Moving over to his comfortable, well-worn couch, Ironhide sank down into its depths and snapped on his vidscreen. He sipped idly at his energon while he took a look at the humans' morning news broadcast, something that had become a bit of a habit over the years. Rural northwestern Oregon was a fairly uneventful place, however, and nothing on the news interested him much except for the baseball scores and the weather report. He was pleased to see that the Mariners had made the playoffs and that it was promising to be another unseasonably warm early autumn day.

It was only after this peaceful daily ritual was completed that Ironhide's morning rather quickly began to fall apart.

Strolling out of his quarters on the top floor of the first residential complex that had been completed in Autobot City, he took a lift all the way down to the ground floor, and almost cheerfully strolled out into the refreshingly cool, dim twilight of early morning. But almost as soon as he set foot outside, Ironhide was accosted by Grapple, who was panicking. Lately, it seemed that Grapple was in a perpetual state of panic, which was something that was giving Ironhide a perpetual headache.

Already, construction on Autobot City was somewhat behind schedule. There'd been some problems with Earth's unpredictable weather, and there'd been some problems with Earth’s equally unpredictable bureaucracy. In short, Autobot City faced the same normal stumbling blocks that slowed almost any development project of the size and complexity of Autobot City's construction. But now Grapple was reporting that his construction team--a liberal and eclectic mixture of Autobot and human architects, builders, civil engineers, and volunteer laborers--had already run out of several important building materials, and replenishments for these particular materials could only be procured from Cybertron. Rather than calling Cybertron himself, Grapple was merely passing the buck to Ironhide who, as the city's reluctant administrator during its construction, would be much more effective at cutting through the miles of red tape that a request for transfer of materials would no doubt generate.

At least, that's what Grapple told Ironhide now, as he hurriedly shoved a datapad, which displayed the beginning of an exhaustive list of the items that Grapple needed, into Ironhide's hands. Ironhide frowned down at the pad for a moment or two. He didn't exactly agree that his intervention would necessarily speed up the requisition process, but, as administrator, it was his job to deal with the bureaucrats. So Ironhide, despite his misgivings, told Grapple that he'd take care of it. He didn't look forward to taking care of it, however, since doing so meant that he'd be forced to deal with the vast Autobot bureaucracy on Cybertron.

And it had started out as such a nice day...

Ironhide sighed heavily as he and Grapple went their separate ways. Sometimes I think the Decepticons have the right idea, he thought rather blasphemously to himself. They killed all of the bureaucrats that they could get their hands on...

Muttering under his breath, taking his time in order to slightly delay the inevitable, Ironhide proceeded to the administrative building across town and slowly climbed the seventeen flights of steps up to his office instead of riding the lift. It took longer to climb the steps, after all, and would therefore delay his confrontation with the bureaucrats on Cybertron by still a few more minutes. When he finally got to his office, he puttered about for a half hour--straightening up things that didn't really require straightening, cleaning things that didn't really require cleaning, doing some meaningless paperwork that was a month overdue anyway--before he finally, reluctantly sat down at his desk and fired up his computer console.

The computer immediately beeped annoyingly at him, and its mellow voice enthusiastically announced that it had all sorts of messages in memory, just waiting for his perusal. Ironhide ignored them all for the time being and instead ordered the computer to open up a communications frequency to Cybertron, figuring that it was best to take care of his most distasteful task first. The messages could wait.
And wait they did. The computer beeped again a moment later. And then it began speaking in its breathy, disarmingly female voice--someone's idea of a joke, surely. It was a voice that had become universally known around Autobot City as "Marilyn," after Sideswipe had noted that the voice sounded a lot like a certain 1950s movie star. It was the voice that made Ironhide long for Teletran One's calming, solid tenor.

"All Autobot communications frequencies between Cybertron and Earth are currently in use," Marilyn announced. "Do you wish to wait?"

"Do I have a choice?" Ironhide growled rhetorically under his breath.

Marilyn beeped at him again.

"Your last voice input was unclear," it said cheerfully. "Please try again."

"I'll give you unclear, you stupid pile of microcircuits," Ironhide muttered.

"Your last voice input was--" Marilyn patiently tried to reply before Ironhide interrupted it with a fierce whack on the terminal's housing.

"YES, I WISH TO FLARGING WAIT!!" Ironhide bellowed at the machine, resisting the urge to smash it into a zillion tiny pieces.

"Thank you," Marilyn said complacently, unimpressed with Ironhide's display of temper.

Ironhide just moaned softly and proceeded to bang a clenched fist rhythmically against the desktop while he waited.

And waited... And waited some more...

It took over an hour to get the call through to Cybertron, the myriad vagaries of interstellar communications being what they were. Once the call got through to Autobot Central Communications, it took the ACC worker another half hour to reroute the call to the Urban Development Department, even though the UDD was in the very same building as the ACC, not several thousand light years away, as Earth was. And then it took the UDD receptionist yet another half hour to get Ironhide's call through to the Assistant Director of Material Resources, to whom Ironhide needed to speak in order to get the authorization for the transfer of the necessary materials to Earth.

After more than two hours on the line, waiting to be connected, Ironhide was in none too charitable a mood. He skipped the usual pleasantries and tersely told the Assistant Director who he was and what he needed.

"Ah," the Assistant Director said with a comprehending nod and a bureaucratic smile after hearing Ironhide out. "I'm afraid that's quite impossible."

Ironhide, however, had heard that line before. It was what bureaucrats always said the first time they were asked for something.

"What do you mean, 'quite impossible'?" he replied blandly, with impressive calm considering his foul mood. "Autobot City is a top-priority project, and I was just informed by our master builder that we need this stuff. I don't know what the hell half of it is, but we need it. All of it. Right away. It's my job to tell you this. It's your job to find the damned stuff somewhere and get it shipped the hell here. End of story."

The Assistant Director looked faintly bored. As a bureaucrat, he was used to being screamed at, after all, and Ironhide was still at the reasonable stage.

"Impossible means precisely that, sir. Resources are extremely limited. The initial allocation of materials that you received should have been more than adequate to complete the Autobot City project. If it was not, then the problem is yours to deal with, not mine. I suggest that you speak with your master builder and review with him or her the proper procedures for--"

"Proper procedures?" Ironhide interrupted, his veneer of calm beginning to erode quickly. "Proper procedures?!!" And then he caught himself, took a few deep breaths and continued with strained calm, "Look, I understand that resources are very scarce. And I know you guys up there do your level best to make sure that everyone gets what they need and no more. But that 'initial allocation' that you're so fond of wasn't enough to build a decent-sized bathroom for the humans, for Primus' sake, let alone a whole flarging city! And you damn well know it!"

"I know nothing of the sort," the Assistant Director replied, his bureaucratic smugness easily matching Ironhide's impatient belligerence. "All I know is that you received the standard allocation for an urban development project. No more, no less."

"Yeah, and that's fine and dandy. Except that we were supposed to get at least triple that amount. I've got the authorization right here," Ironhide said. He yanked a datapad out of a disorganized stack of datapads on his desk and waved it in front of the screen while the other pads clattered to the floor. "See, it's even got your Director's signature on it right there."

The Assistant Director looked unimpressed.

"Well," he said huffily, "if the Director has authorized an Special Exception to Regulation 427 Alpha, Section B12--which I doubt--then it was not subsequently communicated to me. You will have to take this matter up with the Director herself who, I'm afraid, is on vacation and will not be available for two weeks. Good day, sir."

And then the Assistant Director reached out to terminate the communication. And then Ironhide lost all patience, not to mention any last vestige of civility.

"Oh, no! You wait, and you listen to me, you goddamned slime-coated, mealy-mouthed, boneheaded...politician!" Ironhide fumed. "I've been sittin' on this damn line for over two hours waitin' to speak to you, and we will deal with this 'miscommunication' of yours right here and right now. We need these materials. I don't care how you do it, but you will get in touch with that Director of yours, wherever she is, and you will clear this matter up--personally!--and we will get those flarging materials before two weeks is up or I will flarging come up there and get them myself. You will not be at all happy if I do that. Got that???!"

The Assistant Director merely blinked at Ironhide, taken aback. He was used to being screamed at, but Ironhide was not screaming. Ironhide was calmly but vehemently threatening him, and the Assistant Director was not at all used to being threatened personally. He was momentarily dumbfounded, particularly because he had heard stories about this Ironhide, and knew that the Autobot warrior was known for uncontrollable berserker rages.

"Got that???!!!" Ironhide bellowed, meanwhile, still waiting for an answer from the bureaucrat.

The Assistant Director, goggling at the screen, gulped audibly.

"I'll do my best," he murmured, deflated.

Ironhide scowled and jammed Grapple's datapad with its grocery list into the computer interface, downloading the list of needed materials directly to the Assistant Director's terminal.

"You'd better do better than your best, you miserable, scum-sucking sewer vermin," Ironhide growled, "or I'll be seein' you very soon."

With that, Ironhide terminated the communication with a vicious jab of his index finger and then blindly hurled Grapple's now-empty datapad across the room, narrowly missing Wheeljack's head as he walked, unsuspectingly, into the room. Wheeljack let out an alarmed, involuntary yelp, making Ironhide look up from the computer screen at which he was still glowering.

"Now what the hell do you want?!" Ironhide demanded of the Autobot engineer.

Wheeljack froze in his tracks and cringed at Ironhide's tone.

"Sorry," he said, turning to leave. "I'll come back later, when you're in a better mood. Will fifty years be long enough, do you think?"

And then it was Ironhide's turn to cringe, rather guiltily.

"Oh, wait a minute, Wheeljack," he said more calmly. "I'm sorry; I didn't mean to snap at ya. I just got finished dealing with the flarging bureaucrats on Cybertron again, that's all."

Wheeljack turned around again.

"Ewwww!" he said comprehendingly, as he walked over to the chair across the desk from Ironhide's and sprawled himself casually across it, lacing his hfingers happily across his midsection. "Your bad mood's perfectly understandable, then. What's the problem?"

"Oh, nothing that you can help with, I'm afraid, Wheeljack," Ironhide replied. And then the corners of his mouth jerked upwards a bit in a self-satisfied grin. "Besides, I think I intimidated the bureaucrat enough to get what I want. So, what's up?"

Wheeljack narrowed his eyes at Ironhide and shrugged.

"You tell me," he replied, confused.

"What do you mean?" Ironhide asked, equally confused.

"Well, you messaged me yesterday and said something about wanting to see me this morning about something or other, didn't you?"
Ironhide frowned, then vaguely remembered sending a message to Wheeljack the day before, right before he'd hopped into his stasis pod for the night.

"Oh yeah!" he said. "But not till 10:00."

"It's 10:15," Wheeljack said ruefully. "Sorry I'm late."

"What?!" Ironhide exclaimed, jerking his gaze over to his chronometer and scowling at it as if it had betrayed him. "Well I'll be damned," he said wonderingly. "Time flies when you're miserable."

Wheeljack chuckled.

"That it does," he said. "So. What's up, Ironhide?"

Ironhide leaned back in his chair, lacing his fingers behind his head.

"I read that proposal you sent me the other day..." he began.

Wheeljack suspiciously narrowed his eyes at Ironhide again as Ironhide's voice trailed off. He automatically hated Ironhide's tone of voice, because when Ironhide began a speech in that casual, off-handed way of his, it invariably meant that he was going to tell Wheeljack that under no circumstances could he work on the proposed projects.

"Which proposal?" he asked warily. "Not the MiniBomb one!"

"Oh no," Ironhide said. "But I do really like that one! No, this was the one where you were rambling on about ideas that you had, ideas for future projects...?"

"I wasn't 'rambling on,'" Wheeljack said somewhat defensively. "I was brainstorming."

Ironhide grinned.

"Whatever," he said with a noncommittal shrug. "Anyway, I was reading it last night, and, well..."

Ironhide's voice trailed off again, making Wheeljack all the warier. He fidgeted in his seat, sitting up a little straighter, waiting for the axe to fall.

"And?" he prompted when Ironhide said nothing for a few moments.

"And something sparked my interest."

Wheeljack sighed, relieved, and slumped down in his seat again. Ironhide's interest was a good sign.

"What was it?" Wheeljack asked.

"What did you call it? A transponder or...or a...transporter, or something like that...?"

Wheeljack nodded his head enthusiastically.

"Oh, yes! The transporter," he said. "Well...actually, that's not my name for it, but that's the name they use..."

"'They?' Who's 'they?'"

Wheeljack shrugged sheepishly. "The guys on Star Trek," he said.

Ironhide would have rolled his eyes if he could have. Here he thought that this was going to be one of Wheeljack's more promising ideas...

"Oh no, not that damned show again!" he complained. "It's bullshit, Wheeljack! The whole thing's a product of one crazed human's lunatic imagination! It's not real! And if you quote one more of James T. Kirk's speeches to me, I'm warning you that I'm just gonna have to rip your head off."

Though his face wasn’t really an expressive one, Wheeljack still looked hurt.

"I know it's not real," he said quietly, defensively. "But this thing can work! I mean, I think I can make it work! I mean, the theory behind it is sound. Sort of..."

"Now where have I heard that before...?" Ironhide mused.

"No really!" Wheeljack asserted. "Really, it could work! Basically, the transporter works by converting a person or thing's component matter into phased energy, collecting it and storing the original pattern in a computer archive and then transmitting the energy and the pattern to the place you want to go and then reconverting the energy back into matter and arranging the matter according to the pattern of the original person or thing."

Ironhide looked skeptical, not to mention way beyond his area of expertise.

"Sounds complicated beyond words," he said doubtfully.

Wheeljack shrugged.

"Not really..." he hedged.

Ironhide snorted.

"And anyway," he said, "isn't that sort of like what Skywarp does? I heard that eats a hell of a lot of energy..."

Wheeljack shook his head vigorously.

"No, it's not at all the same. Similar outcome, maybe, but completely different strategy."

"Oh really?" Ironhide said, knowing that Wheeljack would now expound at length on the differences. He was a engineer; he couldn't resist lengthy explanations. Ironhide leaned back in his seat in preparation, getting comfortable for the long haul. And Wheeljack, as usual, didn't disappoint, punctuating his lecture with demonstrative hand gestures.

"See," Wheeljack said, hands flying in the air as he tried to explain the finer points of teleportation, "from what I've been able to figure, Skywarp teleports by creating a field that literally warps the space around him, bringing the point he occupies at that moment very close to the point where he wants to go. He moves that tiny bit across the warped space, then creates a neutralizing field that unwarps space and voila! He's moved a considerable distance almost instantaneously. The drawback is that, like you said, it eats tons of energy to warp and then unwarp space and, because of that, it can only be done across a relatively short range, and it's very tricky to teleport through anything other than empty atmosphere or, even better, empty space. Transporting, on the other hand, is slower, but it should use no more energy than a single laser blast per person or object transported and it could be used, theoretically, across almost limitless distances and through anything--planetary atmospheres, buildings...two miles of Pacific Ocean..."

"You mean down to Decepticon Headquarters," Ironhide said with a nod, suddenly catching Wheeljack's drift.

"That's the ticket," Wheeljack said, also nodding. "You catch on fast. All I have to do is figure out how to safely disintegrate a person cleanly enough so that he or she can subsequently be re-integrated..."

"Sounds like a pretty problem," Ironhide said.

"Ah, but those are my specialty," Wheeljack said confidently.

Ironhide snorted, only slightly dubiously.

"Well, it sounds good to me," he said, "although I'll probably kick myself later for saying that...Get to work."

Wheeljack bounced excitedly to his feet.

"I'll keep you informed," he said, turning to leave and heading for the door.

"You do that," Ironhide said as his office door slid shut behind Wheeljack.

Ironhide shook his head, amused. Wheeljack's boundless enthusiasm for insane projects always amazed him. Still, this insane project, if Wheeljack could make it work, sounded very promising. If he could make it work…and that was a big if. Then again, Wheeljack could be incredibly resourceful when it came to his pet projects...

Ironhide's attention was reclaimed by his computer all of a sudden, when it started beeping insistently at him again, telling him that he had an incoming communication. Ironhide half expected it to be the Assistant Director of Material Resources getting back to him about the materials that Grapple needed, so he put on an aggressively expectant face and punched the button on the panel that opened the incoming frequency. He was surprised to find Ultra Magnus' face peering out from the screen in front of him.

Ironhide tensed instinctively. Ultra Magnus rarely called him, except when something bad was happening or had happened or was about to happen. Ironhide half expected Ultra Magnus to announce that the universe was about to explode or something equally heinous, but then Ultra Magnus actually smiled, something that he wouldn't have done if disaster was imminent. Ironhide relaxed, leaning back in his chair and lacing his fingers behind his head.

"Hey, Magnus," he said amiably. "How the hell are ya?"

Ultra Magnus nodded.

"Fine," he said. "I have some good news for you."

"Hallelujah!" Ironhide responded brightly. "I sure as hell could use some!"

Ultra Magnus frowned, suddenly concerned.

"Is everything all right up there?" he asked.

Ironhide snorted.

"Oh, just fine and dandy! I love the smell of bureaucratic bull in the morning," he said sarcastically. Then he shook his head apologetically. "Aw, don't mind me, Magnus," he said. "I've just spent my morning dealing with mad scientists and smug bureaucrats, that's all."

Ultra Magnus grimaced.

"Well, now that's a combination guaranteed to brighten your day..." he said sardonically. "Now how about adding one cranky Autobot leader to that list of things you have to deal with?"

Ironhide's eyes widened, surprised and slightly panicked at the same time.

"He's coming back?" was all he could think of to say.

Magnus nodded.

"I just spoke with him. He and his party are leaving Cybertron tomorrow. They should be here inside of a week. He wants to see Autobot City."

"That's...that's great..." Ironhide said weakly, trying to sound enthusiastic, a forced smiled glued to his face. Inside, however, he was panicking. Here they were, behind schedule, materials used up, replacement materials tied up in miles of red tape back on Cybertron, and now Optimus Prime wanted the grand tour? Ironhide's panicked thoughts must have shown on his face because Ultra Magnus frowned with concern again.

"Are you all right, Ironhide?" he asked solicitously.

"All right?" Ironhide echoed, dazed. "Oh! Oh, yeah, I'm fine. Just peachy. Thanks for the info... Listen, Magnus, I've gotta run, OK? Got tons of work to do. Talk to you later. Bye!"

And with that, Ironhide leaned forward, terminated the communication before Ultra Magnus could get a word in edgewise, and proceeded to bang his forehead against the desktop.

"AAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGHHH!" he yelled in frustration.

Then he abruptly sat up straight in his chair and began to corral his racing thoughts. He told the computer to contact the Assistant Director of Material Resources again, whatever his name was, and he didn't care how long he had to wait. Then he sent out plaintive messages to Huffer, Grapple and Hoist and some other key members of the construction team. Then he looked at the list of mail that the computer was holding for him. Then he groaned and bagged it all.

Ironhide flung himself out of his chair, and told the computer to flag him when it had reached the Assistant Director. Until then, he was going to pester Ratchet. It wasn't even 11:00 in the morning yet, but already he had the universe's worst-ever headache...

Bit 2:

Whenever Astrotrain found himself trapped within the confines of Decepticon Headquarters on Earth, he usually preferred to keep to himself. He didn't have a lot of true friends, and not all that many casual acquaintances, either. So it was just as well that he tended to be a loner by nature. In fact, the only other Decepticon whom Astrotrain could sometimes call a friend was Blitzwing, and that was only when he and his fellow triplechanger – the only other one on Earth, at the moment – weren't busy trying to rip out each other's throats. And that, actually, wasn't usually the case anymore. A few years ago, around the time when they'd both arrived on Earth, they'd been far more competitive – not to mention combative – than they were now. But both triplechangers had mellowed a bit, both settling a bit more comfortably into their expected roles. Blitzwing even tended to blend in with the crowd now, could often be found carousing in the Rec Room with other Decepticons of all vocations.

Not Astrotrain. He preferred to be antisocial. Yes, occasionally, he had to stay on Earth against his better judgment, and of course he had to play war with the Autobots every once in a while. But most of the time Megatron let him do what he did best: Cargo hauling. Solo. And, while doing that, all that Megatron asked of him was that he keep a keen audio sensor to the ground back on Cybertron. Or anywhere else that he went, for that matter.

So Astrotrain spent a great majority of his time alone in the vast void of interstellar space, ferrying energon and supplies and, occasionally, personnel between Earth and Cybertron or any of her far-flung colony worlds, gathering interesting tidbits of stray information as he went like some mechanical whale straining tiny plankton out of a vast ocean. He was one of the few Decepticons that could or would do the job. Even though most Decepticons could tolerate a few hours – perhaps even a day or two – in the absolute zero vacuum of deep space, not many of them were happily inclined to attempt it. Astrotrain, on the other hand, had been designed to do just that, to happily "suck vacuum," as most Decepticons contemptuously called unassisted extravehicular interstellar travel.

So it was something of an important job that he had, and Astrotrain thoroughly enjoyed it. Oh, he'd heard the disdainful whispers behind his back from some of the warriors, saying that he was somehow less than a Decepticon because he'd rather avoid the thrill of the chase and the glory of the kill, that he'd rather fly around alone in outer space than face down an Autobot. But Astrotrain didn't care. He did his job well, he was happy to do it, and he didn't particularly care what anyone else thought about him. That was one of the benefits of being antisocial.

As it was, he'd been on Earth far too long for his likings lately. There hadn't been much for him to do. There hadn't been much for anyone except the technicians and the engineers and the repair crews to do, in fact. Decepticon Headquarters and its staff were still recovering from that disastrous attack on an oil tanker convoy four months ago, a fiasco that had decimated a quarter of the Decepticons on Earth at the time. Headquarters had just recently gotten itself fully staffed again, and things were just starting to settle into normality. And of course being fully staffed meant that the Decepticons now needed to replenish some supplies – more mouths to feed, more bodies to repair, that sort of thing. And Astrotrain was never happier than when he got the call to make a journey to Cybertron, even if was just another routine supply run.

Astrotrain was, in fact, on his way to the main airlock just then, to begin just such a routine supply run. He was strolling through the corridors, taking his time, humming a happy tune to himself and minding his own business, as usual. He was thinking that maybe he'd make a pit stop on Delta Agma IV on the way to Cybertron, and catch up on the gossip of the quadrant. It had been quite a while since he'd done that and, besides that, there was a non-aligned, neutral bar there that served the best drinks in the known universe...

Smiling at the thought, paying no attention whatsoever, Astrotrain rounded a corner – and ran into Blitzwing. Or rather, Blitzwing ran into Astrotrain. Blitzwing's momentum knocked Astrotrain into the wall, while Blitzwing himself staggered wildly, tripped over his own foot, and fell face-first to the deck.

"Hey!" Astrotrain protested indignantly, nudging the fallen triplechanger with his foot. "Watch where you're going, you stupid drunk!"

Blitzwing said nothing, just laid there, face down on the floor, his arms and legs askew and twitching ever so slightly. It was then that Astrotrain got the faintest inkling that something was seriously wrong. Even when Blitzwing got roaring drunk in the Rec Room – which was rather often – he rarely got to the point where he couldn't walk in a straight line, much less to the point where he fell down and couldn't get up. And he never twitched like he was doing now. And now he was making incoherent noises, and trying feebly but unsuccessfully to push himself up onto his hands and knees. He flopped back down to the deck, still twitching. And then suddenly, he was still. But then he began wheezing horribly, like a human having a bad allergic reaction to something. Concerned despite himself, Astrotrain crouched down next to Blitzwing, maneuvered the other triplechanger's big, limp body onto his back, and stared down at him with concern.

"Blitzwing!?" he asked urgently. "You OK?"

Blitzwing gurgled, and then he opened his eyes.

Reflexively, Astrotrain yelped and scuttled back from Blitzwing in surprise. Blitzwing's eyes, like almost any other Decepticon's, were usually red – “Hellish red," as he'd once heard a human describe them. But now they were green, which was what had startled Astrotrain. A bright, blinding, totally unnatural shade of green. And they were pulsating, too, first bright then dim then bright again then dim again, at wildly irregular intervals. And Blitzwing's face was a contorted picture of agony. Astrotrain fought to suppress a shiver, but didn't quite succeed.

"Blitzwing, wh– what's wrong?" he asked shakily.

Blitzwing turned his head toward Astrotrain then, the first time that he'd acknowledged the other Decepticon's presence since their collision. He moved his mouth, but nothing came out. He tried again, and succeeded this time. Barely.

"Asht...Ast...Astro...train," Blitzwing managed to say, his voice slow, slurred, and barely above a whisper. "Help me," he said more clearly. Except that now stark terror showed in his voice and on his face. He groaned and then reached out to grab Astrotrain's shoulder with his right hand.

It was an effort for Astrotrain to control himself, to keep himself from jerking with horror out of Blitzwing's desperate grasp. And then he noticed suddenly that Blitzwing's left forearm, the one attached to the hand that clutched his shoulder, was damaged. It appeared to have five deep puncture wounds in it. Energon flowed freely from the wounds, and was now, in fact, dribbling down the front of his own shoulder. Astrotrain frowned at Blitzwing's wounds for a second before looking down into Blitzwing's frightened face again. It was unnerving to see a powerful Decepticon warrior so nakedly terrified, mostly because it didn't happen very often.

"Blitzwing, what's wrong?!" Astrotrain asked again, and this time his voice was louder than it had to be, as if sheer volume could somehow beat back the specter of death that was suddenly hovering all around Blitzwing. Astrotrain shivered at the thought, unbidden as it was. "What happened?"

Gasping, grimacing with the effort, Blitzwing pulled on Astrotrain's shoulder. Obligingly, Astrotrain leaned down closer to Blitzwing's face, so that he could hear Blitzwing whisper to him.

"Whatever you do," Blitzwing gasped fiercely, desperately to Astrotrain, "don't let them touch you."

Astrotrain frowned.

"'Them?'" he echoed dully. "Who them?"

Blitzwing opened his mouth to answer, but the only sound that came out of it was a piercing, throat-ripping scream of agony. Astrotrain flinched away from the sudden onslaught of terrible noise, clapped his hands over his audio sensors and screwed his eyes shut. He stayed that way until the noise ceased abruptly, as suddenly as it had begun. Astrotrain found that the silence was almost as deafening as the scream that had preceded it. Cautiously, he opened his eyes to look at Blitzwing.

The other triple-changer was utterly still now, his body contorted, and frozen in a grotesque pose of agony. His legs were drawn up into his midsection, his arms were bent at the elbow and pulled tightly into his chest, his fingers hooked like claws. Worst of all, his face was frozen in a silent, terrified scream, mouth agape, eyes wide. His eyes, Astrotrain realized with horror. Primus, his eyes! They were wide open, and they were no longer that bizarre shade of green. But neither were they a normal, healthy red. In fact, they were a dark, foreboding grey, devoid of light and colour.

Devoid of life.

Astrotrain swallowed a yelp of panic, knowing what he had to do.

Five minutes later, precisely when Astrotrain should have been happily leaving Decepticon Headquarters to embark upon his supply run, he instead bolted in a blind panic through the doors of the repair bay, a lifeless Blitzwing tossed carelessly over his shoulder...

Bit 3:

Skywarp rematerialized lying face-down in complete darkness, which was almost as disorienting as the teleport itself had been. He had never teleported before without first calculating to the nanometer where he would reemerge from the warp, and without meticulously calculating to the microsecond when he'd reemerge from the warp, as well. The latter had become a custom once Skywarp discovered that the biggest downside of his ability to teleport was that it was often an extremely disturbing experience that left him feeling drained and disoriented for a moment or so after the trip was completed. So he had learned that when calculating the trajectory and timing of a warp, it was wise to figure about fifteen seconds of recovery time into the equations. He used those seconds to first remember who he was and then to regain some semblance of equilibrium before he had to act. However, he hadn't had the luxury of a few seconds to perform all of those calculations before initiating this latest teleport. He had just done it, cold, which was something he'd never done before.

Then again, he'd never been attacked without provocation by a fellow warrior before, either.

Skywarp lay still for a few moments, not at all sure where he was. He scanned his immediate surroundings and listened intently, trying to figure out his location. Wherever he was, it was quiet and pitch-black and he was apparently alone. At least, he didn't hear anyone or anything moving, or any voices nearby, and his sensors picked up nothing. The air was cool and still, if a bit stale, and he thought he heard the muffled whir of computer thinking to themselves not far away. He sighed, pushed himself up onto his hands and knees, and then sat back on his heels, unconsciously rubbing at his right forearm.

Skywarp frowned into the darkness, experimentally flexing and clenching the fingers of his right hand. His right arm was no longer engulfed in pain or partially numb, but it didn't feel quite right, either. His whole arm was tingling and his wrist was throbbing painfully where it had been punctured. Skywarp suddenly decided that he wanted to see the damage.

"Lights, half intensity," he croaked, his voice astonishingly hoarse and weak.

The computer immediately obeyed him, and the lights came up, softly illuminating Skywarp's surroundings. It was a small room in which he found himself, and it was half stuffed with a dozen computer workstations interspersed with thick, tangled masses of power feeds and computer guts. Skywarp realized that he was in a computer maintenance room, where the innards of the main computer could be easily accessed to allow for repairs and upgrades. To prevent tampering and sabotage, it was also a high security area, usually occupied only by security-cleared computer techs. In fact, he himself didn't have clearance to be there. But Skywarp's teleporting mechanisms didn't often take the time to read "Keep Out" signs, and, besides, Skywarp was glad that he'd chosen, completely at random, a deserted room in which to rematerialize. The isolation allowed him to recover his wits in privacy.

He slowly got up off the floor. He stood, swaying in place as a wave of dizziness came and went. He almost forgot until he put a little weight on it that his leg had been damaged moments before he had teleported. Looking down at his leg now, he could see where Ramjet's laser had ripped out a disturbingly large chunk of the outside edge of his left leg, just above his knee. He'd be walking with a pronounced limp for a few days...

And then Skywarp looked down at his right forearm, the one that Firestrike had punctured. The five ragged holes in his wrist hadn't healed over yet, which was odd because his arm had been damaged at about the same time as his leg and his leg was already half-way healed. But the wounds in his forearm were still dripping energon freely and copiously, some circuitry exposed and sparking every once in a while. Grimacing, Skywarp slapped his other hand over his forearm and glanced around the room in search of something with which he could cover the wounds until they healed, but he didn't see anything. Shrugging to himself, Skywarp limped over to the nearest chair and plopped himself down into it. Leaning back, he cradled his damaged arm across his midsection, thinking hard.

Skywarp realized quickly, however, that he hadn't the faintest idea about what to do next. He didn't know who he could trust or in whom he could confide. What he did know was that Firestrike had been on Earth for a little over three months now, and if he had been...attacking people all that time, then he could have Inducted damn near everyone by now. And Skywarp wasn't even sure if the Inductees knew that they had been compromised. He looked down at his arm, which still wasn't healing, and wondered if he himself had been compromised.

He didn't think so. He felt normal, at least. But then, that might be the idea...Skywarp snorted out loud, shattering the silence of the room around him. Now wasn't the time to start second-guessing himself. He had to assume that he was all right, that he still had and that he would keep his free will, that he could still do something about Firestrike and his plans. But first he had to think of what, exactly, he was supposed to do. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, rubbing meditatively at his still-tingling shoulder and arm.

"Skywarp! Where the hell are you, damn you?!"

Thundercracker's gravelly voice shattered the silence again, and Skywarp jerked upright in his chair, staring wildly around himself until he realized that Thundercracker's voice had come over his comm. Skywarp opened his mouth automatically to answer, and then stopped himself.

Primus! Skywarp thought to himself. What if Thundercracker is one of them?! He had to admit that it was at least a possibility. After all, Firestrike had seemed normal enough when Skywarp had first spoken to him. So who knew if Thundercracker was still in his right mind? Then again, Skywarp knew Thundercracker better than he knew anyone else in the universe, and if Thundercracker had been Inducted, then he'd notice.

He hoped.

"Skywarp!" Thundercracker's voice yelled again, and this time he sounded as if he was about to have an apoplectic fit. "Dammit, 'Warp, if you're dead, I'll kill you!"

Skywarp, still debating whether or not to answer, frowned at Thundercracker's non sequitur. And then he found himself wondering if Thundercracker would be so concerned about his well-being if he'd been Inducted. And then he wondered just how Thundercracker knew that he was in trouble. Curiosity overcame caution, and Skywarp finally answered.

"TC?" he said hesitantly, resisting the impulse to whisper. "Shut up, will ya? I'm here."

Thundercracker's sigh of relief was audible even over the comm, and Skywarp smiled.

"Are you all right?" Thundercracker asked.

Skywarp sighed.

"Sort of, I guess, all things considered," he mused and then, unable to contain himself any longer, he announced, "Primus, TC, do I have some news to tell you! But not over the comm..."

Thundercracker snorted.

"Join the club," he said wryly. "Can you come to the repair bay?"

Skywarp hesitated. The thought of walking out into that corridor where any of the probably hundreds of Inducted could see him filled him with dread.

"Um, not really," Skywarp finally answered. "I'm in a wee bit of trouble."

"So what else is new?" a wry female voice interjected exasperatedly, and Skywarp immediately recognized it as Nightingale's. He chuckled.

"Love you, too, Nightingale," he said sarcastically to the medic before continuing in a more serious tone. "Look, can you guys track my comm signal from there? To tell you the truth, I'm not exactly sure where I am. But I think I'm safe here…for the moment..."

There was a pause, but the comm channel remained open. Skywarp imagined Thundercracker and Nightingale exchanging amused glances at his expense. Oh, if they only knew...!

"All right," Thundercracker's voice finally said. "I think we've got you locked down. Nightingale and I will be right down. Stay put."
Skywarp sighed with relief and slumped back into his chair.

"Consider my butt superglued here," he said wryly. Thundercracker didn't answer, but that was only because he'd already closed the channel. Smiling, Skywarp felt better than he had since he'd agreed to meet with Firestrike. The cavalry, he thought, was coming...

Bit 4:

"C'mon, c'mon!" Thundercracker muttered frantically to himself. He was getting desperate. "The damn place has gotta be around here somewhere!"

Thundercracker's frantic search for the Autobots' new city wouldn't have been so difficult if Firestrike's goons hadn't toasted his entire navigational system. Databanks, computerized guidance systems, navigational scanners--all of it gone in an instant, zapped by a huge power surge sent coursing through his navigational subsystems by a strategically-aimed laser blast. It had overloaded and destroyed just about everything in its path.

For quite a long while after that power surge, Thundercracker had had no idea who he was, much less where he was or in what direction he was heading. He hadn't even known if he'd been flying in a straight line or merely circling, searching the same few square kilometers of Earth's surface over and over again. It all literally looked the same to him, after all, because he was flying with only his optical and audio sensors intact. A strategically-aimed missile had knocked out most of Thundercracker's other scanners at almost the same moment that his navigational systems had been fried. The two strikes had severed Thundercracker's access to a huge chunk of his on-board databanks, most noticeably the gigabytes of on-board navigational data that he carried, the very data that allowed Thundercracker to precisely triangulate his position at a nanosecond's notice, no matter where he was on Earth--or just about anywhere else in the known universe, for that matter. That was a comforting ability that he had taken for granted all his life, one that he'd never fully appreciated--until the precise moment that he'd lost it, of course.

But his ability to know his place in the universe, so to speak, was gone now, at least until he could get a few scanners fixed. And so Thundercracker, having nowhere else to go and having no idea how to get there even if he did, was flying around in what to the casual observer would appear to be complete aimlessness. Except that it wasn't aimlessness, because Thundercracker had a definite destination in mind--namely, the Autobots' new city. It was just that, given his current woeful condition, his lofty ambition to find the city and charge in where any sane Decepticon would fear to tread was beginning to seem like an impossible quest because he was experiencing something that had never happened to him before.

Thundercracker was lost.

Totally lost.

And it was a terrifying, frustrating experience.

He knew that the Autobots' city was nestled in a small valley somewhere in the Cascade mountain range, in northwestern Oregon, because that part of his databanks hadn't been fried. Thundercracker also knew that he had been somewhere over northwestern Washington state when he had lost his ability to navigate the easy way. So that meant, theoretically, that he had to go almost directly south from where he had been in order to find the general area in which the Autobots' city was hidden. Thundercracker had known that, but at the time, with no guidance systems, he hadn't been able to determine which way was south.

But then, out of the blue, Thundercracker suddenly remembered that it was basically a galactic constant that the sun of any given planet set in the west. (Not that he'd ever actually forgotten that minor fact, of course. It was just that on Cybertron, with its absurdly dim, apparently tiny primary, solar navigation wasn't exactly the most common form around. Thus, Thundercracker hadn't thought of utilizing it right off the bat.) Checking his chronometer--which, thankfully, was still working--Thundercracker had seen that it was almost three in the humans' afternoon, local time. Which meant that Earth's sun was on its downward arc, heading toward sunset. Which meant that it was heading toward the west. Which meant that, using that information, Thundercracker had finally been able to figure out which way was south.

With a sense of cautious, restrained jubilation, Thundercracker had adjusted his course accordingly off of his then-current westerly one. But that had been more than four hours ago, and Thundercracker had yet to see anything that looked even remotely like an Autobot-built city. He flew slowly in a careful search pattern over square mile after square mile of relatively deserted Earth landscape, staying low to the ground, keeping his forward velocity down to bare minimum since he actually had to see what he was looking for in order to find it, since he could no longer electronically scan the surface of the planet for miles and miles around him. When he'd started out, Thundercracker had thought that his search pattern was impressively thorough. But now, hours later, Thundercracker just had a distinct, sinking feeling that he had ventured much too far south. He was just waiting for the deserts of California to appear before him...
Thundercracker was just thinking about turning around and heading back north to start his search all over again, when he spotted a jagged ridge of mountains in front of him, off in the distance to the southwest, at the very edge of his visual range. They looked, Thundercracker thought, a lot like the little mountain range that sheltered the new Autobot city. Either that, or, in his exhaustion, he was simply deluding himself into thinking that it looked like the right place...

Either way, Thundercracker's energy reserves were getting much too low for comfort. They were, he discovered, even lower than he might have expected. But then, Thundercracker realized that he hadn't started out the day fully energized to begin with, what with everything that had happened at Decepticon Headquarters in the past thirty-six hours or so, including his and Skywarp's abrupt departure from Decepticon Headquarters. And the rather one-sided firefight with Firestrike's warriors not long after that had taken a lot out of him, too, of course.

For a brief moment, Thundercracker returned his attention to the ridge of mountains in the distance, trying to determine whether or not he'd have the energy to make it over the distant, jagged peaks. He sighed as he realized that it would be a close call, either way. He'd either just barely make it, or just barely not make it. The latter possibility wasn't a pleasant thought, but Thundercracker didn't really have much choice in the matter. Crashing into the mountains or crashing elsewhere was still crashing, after all. And that was never fun. Sometimes--or at least every time he was faced with an imminent, inevitable crash landing--Thundercracker heartily wished that his alternate form wasn't an aerial one. He definitely wouldn't miss crashing into things, out of control and at high speed.
He sighed resignedly, collecting himself.

"Here goes nothing," Thundercracker murmured to himself before he banked slightly toward the west. He carefully accelerated toward the ridge of mountains, trying to strike a balance between panicked recklessness and judicious energy conservation, all the while keeping a watchful sensor on his energy reserves.

Thundercracker approached the mountains as cautiously as he could, wishing for once in his life that he could be as preternaturally silent and stealthy as Nightwind could be. He was quite sure, after all, that the Autobots' city--if he had actually managed to stumble upon the place--would have some type of perimeter defenses up and running by now. He didn't want to think about the trouble into which he might be charging headlong...

Twenty minutes later, Thundercracker managed to crest the top of the mountain ridge, missing the craggy, snow-dusted peaks by mere inches. He continued on, breathing a sigh of relief, and dropped down, flying deliberately low in the hope that he wouldn't be noticed as quickly as he might have been otherwise. Alert as he was for any alarms his presence might sound outside, Thundercracker was startled when warnings started to blare inside his own cockpit, warnings that his energy reserves were down to zero. But the sudden view below distracted him from even that deafening noise. He gasped at what he saw spreading out beneath and in front of him.

Thundercracker had, of course, seen the images that Laserbeak had recorded of the Autobots' new city, but those images hadn't prepared him for the actual scale of the place, the actual impact that the city made from above. It was, in a word, huge. About a quarter of it was already completed, and stood gleaming in its newness in the twilight. The rest of it was in various stages of completion. In some areas, the outline of a future building was simply marked with a sketchy foundation, while in others a skeletal infrastructure had already been erected. Still other areas of the city looked to be almost completed, distinguishable from the truly completed sections only by their darkness. The completed areas of the city were floodlit, the spotlights carefully aimed in order to highlight the stark angles and sweeping curves of the buildings, all of which somehow seemed to flow together to create a breathtaking whole.

Had Thundercracker been in better condition, energy-wise, he might have taken the time to scope out the city a little further. He would have found it to be a slice of comfortingly familiar mechanical architecture plopped down in a totally alien, organic environment. As it was, he was merely searching frantically for a relatively safe place to land. He needed to find a spot close to the city, since he didn't have the energy for an extended hike, but not too close to the city, or else the Autobots would be on him in no time, perhaps before he could prepare to defend himself, if it came to that.

Thundercracker snorted, amused at the thought. Ya mean, he bitterly corrected himself, when it comes to that. He wasn't stupid, after all. He was keenly aware that he was galloping boldly into enemy territory, and he was quite amazed that he was still apparently going unnoticed. Luck--or something equally obscure and fickle--was apparently on his side, for once in his life. So, before his luck decided to run out, Thundercracker returned his attention to his hasty search for a relatively safe landing spot, finally noticing a small clearing not too far from the city itself, near a small lake that shared the mountain valley with the city. Decisively, Thundercracker banked west and headed for that clearing. Or at least, he tried to bank...

Apparently, in that brief instant, Thundercracker's luck had abandoned him. A final, appallingly loud bleat from his warning systems indicated that his energy supply was history. His emergency reserves were completely gone and what he had left would keep him active and conscious for only a few more minutes at the most, assuming that he spent most of those minutes sitting very still, and not doing much of anything else--especially not flying. Suddenly, Thundercracker's engines cut out, part of an unfortunate energy-saving subroutine that was irrevocably burned into his operating program. Any Decepticon with a grain of sense in his head, after all, would have stopped flying around the instant that the initial warnings had begun to sound. But Thundercracker, at times, could be terribly stubborn, and he'd decided to keep on flying. Now, it was apparently time to pay the piper for that decision.

"Uh-oh," Thundercracker murmured to himself as the signature racket of his engines abruptly ceased, and his immediate environment suddenly became eerily silent except for the whooshing of the wind as it whipped around and past his aerodynamic jet form.

In a blind panic, Thundercracker checked his emergency energy reserves. He discovered that he had a tiny bit of reserve power left in his retrothrusters, enough to slow his descent a bit, perhaps enough to slow himself down enough that he would survive his eventual impact with the Earth or the city or whatever. But he had no lateral maneuvering thrusters. They, too, had been destroyed by Firestrike's warriors. At the time, Thundercracker had thought it of little importance. After all, maneuvering thrusters were really useful only when gliding. And Thundercracker never needed to glide because, he had arrogantly thought at the time, he was always in control of himself, with energy to spare.

Now, of course, Thundercracker was eating those arrogant thoughts. Without engine power or maneuvering thrusters, and barring any sudden gale-force winds that would blow him off-course, Thundercracker was doomed to smash into whatever was literally in front of his nose--which, at the moment, happened to be a very tall, very solid-looking cylindrical building of some sort on the outskirts of the Autobots' city. And there was precious little, if anything, that he could do about it.

As he realized the hopelessness of his situation, a kind of surreal calm suddenly descended upon Thundercracker. He watched, transfixed by abject terror perversely mixed in with a kind of calm detachment, as the fateful Autobot building loomed larger and larger in front of him. He thought about transforming, but realized it wouldn't do him a shred of good because his momentum would still carry him into the building, and his robot form wasn't any more likely to survive the impact than his jet form was. He was, in fact, probably more likely to survive if he stayed just the way he was. So transforming would just be a waste of what little energy he had left.

Thundercracker's situation was hopeless. Strangely, though, in those few seconds before almost certain death, he felt nothing but peace and an odd sort of contentment. Odd that he had never imagined his life ending in the way that it was apparently going to end. After all, if the crash didn't kill him, Thundercracker was quite certain that the Autobots would cheerfully finish the job. But he never imagined that he'd have the luxury of watching Death approach and wrap its claws around him. The seconds seemed to stretch out infinitely as the building in front of him grew larger and larger. In fact, time seemed to pass so slowly that Thundercracker, insanely, began to feel impatient with the whole process of violent death. He'd always thought that death would sneak up on him from behind, so that he'd be oblivious to its approach, and that death would claim him quickly, in a blaze of glory. That was how he wanted it. Quick, clean, and--most importantly--painless. But then, he'd often been informed that he couldn't always get exactly what he wanted...

Almost as an afterthought, Thundercracker fired his retrothrusters. The little burst of braking thrust that they provided slowed him down considerably, and the abruptness of his deceleration disoriented him for a few milliseconds. For a fleeting nanosecond, Thundercracker thought that he had somehow managed to dodge the building, that he was now heading up into a dull grey sky. That painfully brief delusion ended, however, when he realized that it was the same dull grey building that he was headed for. It was just that it was now so large in front of him that it filled his entire field of vision, limited as it was by damage. His deceleration had insured that he would hit the building a little lower down than he'd first anticipated, but he would still hit it. In the last few milliseconds before the inevitable crash, Thundercracker bled all of his remaining power, such as it was, to his structural integrity fields in the faint hope that they would buttress his jet form's infrastructure, prevent it from being ripped apart upon impact, and thus, perhaps, keep him alive.

Insanely, Thundercracker laughed out loud in the face of Death as he smashed into the Autobot building. Somehow, his incoming trajectory had been altered by just the tiniest bit. He'd spun around slightly to the side because his port side retrothruster had cut out shortly before his starboard side one. Thus, his nose wasn't forced to absorb the entire initial impact--which was a good thing because he wasn't someone like Ramjet, who was designed to more easily withstand head-on collisions. Instead, the area of impact was spread out over his whole starboard side, which lessened the severity of the collision by at least a few orders of magnitude.

Still, the initial impact was devastating. Thundercracker was at first aware only of a loud, resounding crack, followed by the sickening squeal of metal being crunched and wrenched and scraped and torn apart. He heard the brittle tinkling of shattering transparent aluminum. He also heard, dimly, the startled shouts of voices--Autobot voices--far below him. And then, like a wave crashing against a rocky coastline, the pain hit him. It was jarring in its intensity but oddly refreshing at the same time, since the fact that he could still feel pain reminded him that he was still alive. Thundercracker felt a modicum of relief replace part of the all-consuming panic that had taken hold of him. But the sensation of relief was short-lived.

Thundercracker ricocheted off of the first building, spinning laterally, out of control. With a deafening crack, his tail end whacked into another building across the street from the first one that he'd crashed into. The impact crunched his aft end, nearly shearing it off completely as it ground itself into the unyielding face of the building. And then, his momentum finally spent, Thundercracker plummeted straight down toward the ground, which was still several dozen stories below him.

This time, there was no altering his course. The ground spun up toward him with appalling speed as he spiraled down nose-first and then smashed into the Earth. He bumped and spun along the ground for a few hundred meters, like a stone skipping across the surface of a pond, before finally coming to rest in the middle of the street in a crumpled, smoking heap, upside-down on the top of his jet mode.
Insanely, the last thing that Thundercracker managed to pick up on the one external audio sensor that, against all odds, still worked was Optimus Prime's sickeningly familiar voice...

"Woah..." Optimus Prime's voice murmured in an awestruck, almost reverent tone.

And then Thundercracker's suddenly painful world abruptly disintegrated into soothing nothingness.

Bit 5:

Jazz was prowling claustrophobically around the ventilation shafts when he heard a soft, reverberating groan from somewhere in the distance behind him. He froze instinctively before he realized who it was that was making the noise. Apparently, Starscream had awakened himself, without Jazz having to serve as an alarm clock. Jazz briefly wondered why, and got his answer when he idly checked his internal chronometer. He was startled to discover that almost seven hours had passed without his even noticing it. Jazz had simply lost track of the time while trying to get at least a vague idea of where he was. Which was an impossible task, he now realized, but at least the effort had killed seven hours and cured a fit of terrible boredom.

Hastily, Jazz backtracked to the large intersection of ventilation shafts where he'd left Starscream. By the time he found his way there, Starscream was already sitting halfway up, critically inspecting the makeshift repairs that Jazz had managed to make on his maimed side. Jazz watched Starscream for a moment.

"You're not planning on suing me for malpractice, are you?" Jazz asked lightly as he watched Starscream poke gingerly at the hole in his side.

Starscream didn't answer for a moment. Idly, he plucked a loose length of burnt-out circuitry out of the gaping hole, held it up to his face, and squinted at it for a moment before he shrugged and tossed it nonchalantly against the wall of the ventilation shaft.

"Why?" Starscream asked noncommittally, as he went back to probing his wounded side. "Afraid I could prove my case?"

Jazz snorted.

"I would think," he replied with a grin, "that you'd have a tough time finding a lawyer who'd agree to represent your case."
Starscream looked up at Jazz then, an amused half-grin on his face.

"Oh, I wouldn't bet on that," Starscream said airily. "A little intimidation can work amazing wonders. Especially when it's a human that you're intimidating."

"I'll take your word for it," Jazz sighed. "And I'll start saving my pennies, just in case..."

"Where are we?" Starscream asked suddenly, ignoring Jazz's attempts at levity.

The grin fell off Jazz's face.

"I was hoping that you could tell me," Jazz said honestly. "I've been prowling around this place here for hours while you were snoozing, but I can't make heads or tails of it. I mean, did you guys deliberately set out to build a place so confusing that no mortal person would be able to figure out how to get anywhere?"

Starscream snorted.

"Yes," he answered succinctly. "And as for me...I'm afraid that my memories of the last hour or so before I...I..."

"Passed out," Jazz supplied. "You passed out. Just admit it, will you?"

"Before I passed out..." Starscream conceded with a glare at Jazz. "...Well, my recollection of that time is none too clear."

"Gee," Jazz said sarcastically. "I wonder why?"

Starscream smirked at him, but didn't answer. Jazz sighed resignedly.

"Well, if it's of any help," Jazz said, "the last designation plate I saw said that we were on Level 14, and we originally came from that direction," he added pointing down the shaft that led off to the relative southwest.

Starscream stared off down the shaft that Jazz indicated.

"Level 14," he murmured thoughtfully to himself. "Level 14..."

In his mind's eye, Starscream conjured up the mental blueprint that he had of Decepticon Headquarters again, tried to pinpoint exactly where he and Jazz were. It took him a few moments, but he figured it out--and he was surprised to discover that he and Jazz were practically sitting on top of a large storage bay which, at the moment, was not in use as far as Starscream knew. But the corridor running outside of that bay had an emergency ladder at the end of it, one of a system of emergency ladders that were put into use whenever the power failed or the lifts were inoperative--which seemed to happen a lot, lately. This particular ladder ran all the way down to Level 17, the level that he and Jazz needed. All they had to do was make a hole in the floor of the ventilation shaft, and they'd be home relatively free. Assuming that no one was in the storage bay and assuming that the ladder system wasn't currently in use, of course. Starscream was surprised that he hadn't noticed it before. The path was risky, of course, as everything had been so far. But it was the best chance that they had, at the moment, which outweighed the danger.

Starscream grinned wickedly and scuttled backwards a bit, shunting some of his dwindling power supply to one of his laser rifles, kicking it up to its highest power setting.

"What are you doing?" Jazz asked worriedly. "I don't like that look on your face. You're not planning any more games of chicken, are you?"

Starscream shook his head, and waved a hand at Jazz.

"Move back," he said. "I'm going to make a hole in the floor."

Jazz stared at Starscream as if Starscream had just turned green and sprouted antlers.

"Why on Earth would you want to do that?" Jazz wanted to know. Starscream gave Jazz the condensed version of his plan, after which Jazz announced, "You're outta your mind, Starscream!"

Starscream just nodded calmly.

"So I've been told many times," he said off-handedly. "But have I steered us wrong yet?"

Jazz shook his head and had to admit that, indeed, Starscream had done well for the two of them so far.

"No," Jazz said with a drawn-out sigh. "I...guess you know what you're doing," he added reluctantly.

"Then scoot back, will you?" Starscream said, making annoyed shooing gestures. "You're sitting right where I want to shoot. Unless, of course, you want me to vaporize you along with the floor...?"

Jazz grinned wickedly.

"Still trying to get rid of me, are you?" he asked sarcastically.

"Oh, I wouldn't dream of it!" Starscream replied with equal sarcasm.

Jazz chuckled, amused, and then he shuffled backwards a few meters. Starscream, meanwhile, aimed his laser rifle at the floor and fired. The sound of Starscream's laser fire was deafening as it reverberated off the walls of the ventilation shafts and acrid smoke filled the ventilation shaft as the metal that made up the floor was heated to its melting point and then its vaporization point. Jazz covered his visor protectively with one arm, and waited the unpleasantries out. He was quite certain that the whine of continuous laser fire was going to drive him crazy or deaf or both when, abruptly, the sound ceased. Jazz uncovered his visor cautiously. Starscream was sitting back on his heels, admiring his handiwork. He looked slightly nervous, as if he fully expected a lethal dose of laser fire to suddenly erupt through the newly-created hole in the floor. Jazz couldn't exactly blame him: If their experiences so far had taught either of them anything, it was that Firestrike was just full of nasty surprises.

After a moment's wait, Starscream crawled over to the threshold of the brand-new hole in the floor and, leaning forward slightly, cautiously, he peeked down through it. As far as he could see, no one was in the storage room below them. He sighed and then glanced up at Jazz.

"Here goes nothing," Starscream said with a cavalier shrug. He scooted around a bit and sat himself on the edge of the hole in the floor, ignoring how hot the edge of it still was. Then he jumped down and landed with a clang below.

"Well?" Jazz called down after a moments, when Starscream didn't say anything.

"It's clear," Starscream reported. "Come on down."

"...You’re the next contestant on The Price is Right!" Jazz sang out merrily, unable to control himself, while he maneuvered himself around to jump down through the hole.

"What?" Starscream inquired, frowning back up through the hole in the floor.

"Never mind. Bad joke," Jazz said, and then he jumped down through the hole. After he landed, he marvelled again at how wonderful it felt to actually stand up straight. He had been beginning to feel like the Hunchback of Notre Dame in the shafts...

Jazz looked around himself curiously while Starscream restlessly prowled the confines of the room like some predatory creature, searching for anything that might be useful to them in their quest. Weapons would be nice considering that Jazz was unarmed, but that, of course, was too much to ask. Starscream did, however, find several lengths of pipe piled in one corner of the room. He picked up one piece and hefted it. It was heavy but not too heavy, and of a good length; not too long, not too short. Starscream grinned to himself and walked over to Jazz. Starscream presented the club to Jazz, as if it was the Congressional Medal of Honor.

"What's this?" Jazz asked, frowning, as he took the proferred pipe.

"What do you think it is?"

"Looks like a pipe to me," Jazz answered with a nonchalant shrug.

"No, no, no!" Starscream protested. "You really have no imagination, do you? Now this, this is an incredibly low-tech but incredibly effective close-range weapon. Trust me, I've had recent experience with them..."

Jazz just kept on frowning.

"Oh, yeah, sure!" he said doubtfully. "This'll be real 'effective' against guys armed with lasers, flamethrowers, missiles, and photon grenades."

Starscream snorted.

"Trust me, where we're going, that will be a more effective weapon than one of these," Starscream said, tapping his left laser rifle with his right index finger.

Jazz didn't look convinced.

"If you say so," he said with a sigh.

"I say so," Starscream replied with a nod. "Just don't get any bright ideas about conking me over the head with that thing..."

Jazz grinned wickedly.

"Oh, I wouldn't dream of it," he said, mimicking Starscream's sarcastic tones of a moment before.

Starscream sighed exasperatedly.

"Let's get outta here," he said. Then he turned on one heel and walked out of the storage room, taking pains to glance nervously up and down the corridor when the door swished open before stepping out. Clutching his makeshift weapon, Jazz followed the Decepticon, thinking that if he got out of this mess alive, he'd kiss the ground that Autobot City stood on, and never leave it again.

From “Nature’s Fury”

Bit 1, Rattrap:

So I get to start the story again, eh? How come I always gotta to be the one that starts the story?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Chopperface. I know. Because I have the biggest mouth. But you know what they say, don'tcha? A big mouth is a sign of a big—

What's that, Fearless Leader? Get on with the story? Awwww, man! You sure know how to ruin a guy's fun, don'tcha?

So all right. I'll get on with the story... Once upon a time, there was—

Now what, Optimus? I'm telling the story, ain't I? OK. Fine. I'll do it the boring way. Primus forbid that I should make this—oh, I dunno—interesting or anything.

I heard that, Chopperface. Don't think I didn't. I'm just not gonna dignify it with an answer.

Yeah, yeah, I know, Optimus: "Shut up, Rattrap."

But if I shut up, I can't tell the story, now can I?

Now why are you glaring at me like that, Optimus? What, do they sit you all down and teach you how to do that glare in command school or somethin'?

Whoa! Geez, sit down! OK, OK! I'm tellin' the slaggin' story here...

"OK, try it now, Rattrap," Rhinox's strained and frustrated voice said over the base's communication system.

Dutifully, I punched a few buttons on the panel in front of me, careful not to upset the card game on the panel next to it. The computer was into me for half a mill, something that was rarer than a nice cool day, lately. So I wasn't going to let anything upset that game. True, it wasn't like there was real dough at stake or anything...but it was the principle of the thing, y'know?

So I punched the pretty little buttons on the environmental control panel and in response, it whirred halfheartedly. It grated. It groaned. It even sparked a bit for good measure. And then it went completely dead, just as it had dozens of times before over the past several days, ever since that lightning strike had hit nearby, shorting out a large number of the base's systems—including, for a few very tense megacycles, all of the defensive systems, including the autoguns and Sentinel. It was kind of a kick the old bird when she was down thing since, between that lightning strike and the second Big Crash, it just hadn't been a good last few weeks for the old Axalon...

"No go, Big Green," I announced to Rhinox for the tenth time. "Whatever ya did down there, that wasn't the prob."

"Slag it all!" Rhinox muttered over the comm, and I heard what sounded like a large fist impacting with the floor or the wall...or maybe with Optimus Primal, who was keeping Rhinox company. Either that, or our vaunted Fearless Leader was micromanaging poor Rhinox; it was hard to tell which.

"We'll keep looking, then," Rhinox added with a long, resigned sigh.

"Have fun!" I said, overly cheerfully.

The only sound I heard was a rare growl from Rhinox before he cut off the commlink.

Grinning, I leaned back in my chair and turned back to my card game. Thankfully, that program hadn't been damaged. And, in fact, almost everything else had already been repaired, except for a bit of structural damage here and there and some of the base's internal scanners and, of course, the environmental controls. They were stubbornly refusing to work no matter what Rhinox did, it seemed. Now, if we'd been out in space like we should've been, the environmental controls would've been among the first systems to be repaired, artificial gravity and breathable air being the beautiful things that they are. But stuck down here on this Primus-forsaken planet? It wasn't like they were so important, really. We had plenty of real gravity down here. Too much of it, actually. And we had plenty of air to breathe, too—ungodly hot though it was right now. We just had no air circulation, temperature control, or filtration.

And it had been a hot stretch of days since that lightning strike. Twelve of them, to be exact. The inside of the base felt like the inside of a giant oven that had been set to charbroil. Tensions were high and tempers were short because of that. Well, Dinobot's temper was short regardless, but besides that... Even Cheetor was snippy. Cheetor was never snippy. Profoundly annoying, yes; snippy, no.

But hey! We could all live with a little snippiness, right?

Hah! Try telling that to me...

Personally, I was just thankful to be alone up in the command center rather than down in the bowels of the ship with Rhinox and our almighty Fearless Leader. They were crawling through access tube after access tube, searching for the short or whatever it was that was keeping the environmental controls deader than a drained power cell. It was sort of like looking for a needle in a haystack, and I didn't envy them at all. At least up here, I had the roof hatch open, which let in a bit of a breeze. Hot though it was—even now, in the early evening hours, not long after sunset—it was better than nothing... With a sigh, I settled into my card game again as I waited for the next frustrated communication from Rhinox to try the environmental controls again.

Wouldn't ya know a stasis pod would pick that exact moment to come crashing down to join us all in our misery? The sensors started beeping frantically at me, just as I was about to play a hand that would earn me another twenty grand. Cursing, I stood up and went over to what was normally Cheetor's panel except that the kid was down in his sweltering quarters, trying to get some sleep.

Heh, good luck, kitty-cat...I mused as I settled myself at Cheetor's scanner console. Fingers dancing over the keypad, I saw on the screen the telltale energy signature of a stasis pod as it tore through the outermost layers of the upper atmosphere and began to take a dive toward the planet's surface. I watched its descent for a few kliks and then I stabbed the comm button on the panel with a forefinger, opening up a channel to Optimus Primal.

"Yo!" I yelled. "Banana Boy!"

I heard a gasp and a resounding thud over the comm and then Optimus Primal's voice growled out an annoyed "Ow!"

I grinned, imagining the Big Bad Bossmonkey's head smashing into the ceiling of the low-clearance access tube.

"Beatin' some sense into yourself there, Fearless Leader?" I commented innocently.

I heard a long-suffering sigh before I heard Optimus Primal's voice again.

"What do you want, Rattrap?" he asked. Rather exasperatedly, I thought. And here I was with something important to tell him! Such respect I get, y'know?

"Well, I just thought ya might like to know that we've got a stasis pod comin' on down for a visit. And it looks like it's gonna land in Lucky Sector Thirteen."

"Now?"

"No!" I replied sarcastically. "Next month. Of course now!"

I heard an exasperated sigh over the comm, waited for the lecture...and it didn't come! Too bad... Instead Optimus just mildly asked,

"Who's available?"

"We-eeeel...Tigatron's on the other side of the world, practically. Probably somewhere cold, if he's smart. I'm up here. You and Rhinox are down...well, wherever you guys are. Cheetor's trying to catch some shut-eye since he's been quite the little insomniac lately. Rebound was swearing like crazy and poking around down in the medbay, last I heard from her. And Chopperface should be lurking around here somewhere. Unless he decided to go kibbutz with his Pred buddies or somethin'."

"Call Dinobot and Rebound up to the command center," Optimus said, apparently deciding to ignore my editorial comments about our resident Predacon, much to my disappointment.

And then, when I realized what he had just said, I almost fell out of my chair I wanted to laugh so bad.

"You...you, uh...You're sure that's such a good idea there, Optimus?" I asked, barely managing to keep disbelieving laughter out of my voice.

"Why not? Rebound's a medic—"

"A shrink, ya mean," I interjected.

"Same. Difference," Optimus replied testily, apparently annoyed with me, as usual. "Besides, who better to send out after a stasis pod that might be damaged and the occupant a little...confused? And Dinobot'll be good back-up for her."

"Uhhhh..." I said hesitantly. "Don't know if you've noticed this or not, Fearless Leader, but...uh...weeeeeell, Chopperface don't exactly play real nice with the lady headshrinker. If you know what I mean."

"Oh, I've noticed all right," Optimus Primal answered ruefully. "But he's got to learn to get along with her. We're too small an army to be able to afford petty differences between us."

I heard Rhinox snort over Optimus' comm.

"Tell that to Rattrap," he muttered.

Now I did laugh.

"Heeeey! I resemble that comment, Rhinox!" I called into the comm.

I heard Optimus Primal sigh exasperatedly. Again.

"Just call them to the command center, Rattrap. I'll break the news to them. I'll be up as soon as I can pry myself out of here."

"Oooookaaaay," I said as I closed the commlink and then muttered to myself, "Now this I gotta see..." before I opened the comm again, this time to the medbay...

Bit 2, Rebound (AKA The Dreaded Fan Character):

One of the worst stretches of days in my life started out normally enough.

I was just minding my own business. Going about my tasks. Stuffing my brain with medical minutiae. I'd been trying to ignore how stiflingly hot it was in the medbay—in the entire base, for that matter—when Rattrap's summons to the command center came over the comm...

But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here, aren't I? A little background, I think, is necessary...

Moments before Rattrap's summons and the reason behind it irrevocably interrupted my otherwise relatively peaceful little life, the doors to the medbay parted with a calm, quiet hiss. The person who'd caused the doors to open, however, was hissing rather loudly. And he certainly wasn't calm. As usual...

"There is no need for this, Rebound!" my patient angrily informed me, without preamble. As I turned my chair toward him, he planted himself just inside the door to the medbay, pulling himself up to his full, rather impressive height and standing at rigid, almost military, attention. It was as if I was some general back on Cybertron who had called him on the carpet, and not just your "friendly neighborhood headshrinker," as Rattrap had been quick to christen me.

I stood up and calmly regarded my reluctant visitor for a rather long moment.

"That's your opinion, Dinobot," I answered him evenly. My arms were folded across my chest, my back as rigidly straight as his was, my chin haughtily raised, my eyes narrowed and glaring. I was, in fact, perfectly mirroring Dinobot's own stance. I was as insistent as he was. And I had an advantage in that I was quite used to dealing with recalcitrant patients, while he apparently didn't have quite so much experience dealing with stubborn and demanding headshrinkers. "It doesn't happen to be my opinion," I continued. "I read in the log that you nearly got yourself scrapped two weeks ago."

"I am...fully recovered, I assure you."

I scowled at him doubtfully for a moment.

"Oh really?" I answered sarcastically. "And why is that? Because you spent a few hours of quality time with the miraculous CR chamber afterwards? Oh, that's just peachy! Marvelous! But you know as well as I do that that contraption's not perfect. It's meant to keep people alive, to get them on their feet again. It was never meant as a long-term replacement for a fully-trained medic like me."

"That is your opinion, Rebound," Dinobot growled, deftly turning my words back on me as he pointed one accusatory, clawed finger in my direction. "We have managed perfectly well without you for quite some time."

"Well, wonders never do cease, do they?" I retorted sarcastically. "But I'm here now, so just sit down and shut up, will you?"

Dinobot just glowered at me for a long moment, red eyes narrowed to angry slits, while I sighed exasperatedly.

I really don't know what had possessed me to call Dinobot down to the medbay. Oh, what I'd told him was the truth, of course. He'd very nearly been killed, according to Optimus Primal's log. I knew, of course, that the CR chamber did indeed do its job very well. But, as I'd pointed out to Dinobot, I also knew that it wasn't infallible, that it could often leave minor undetectable damage unrepaired and that that minor damage, if left unrepaired, could very easily amplify itself and snowball into major damage at the most inconvenient times. To say nothing of the fact that the CR chamber was never designed to effect repairs on organic systems and every one of us now had our fair share of that, whether we liked it or not...

Of course, I myself had never had to treat organic damage, either, but I found myself having little choice in the matter. In fact, to tell the truth, my personal area of expertise was studying and healing mental wounds, not physical ones... That was the main reason that I had signed on with the Axalon in the first place. I had exchanged a private psychiatry practice that was certainly lucrative but that had also become a bit...repetitive¼for the excitement of exploring the galaxy and the responsibility of making sure that the ship's crew stayed sane while doing so. As a bonus, the Axalon's mission also offered the sheer freedom of escaping the faction tensions back on Cybertron that space exploration offered. It was true that back on Cybertron, I had by choice been neutral all my life. And I had to remain neutral since I had patients of all factions. And it was also true that faction tensions weren't nearly as bad as they had been during the wars, but the old loyalties never seemed truly to go away, regardless. They were always there, lurking beneath a thin veneer of civility, and it was wonderful to get away from their long and demanding shadow. The crew of the Axalon, after all, had been all Maximal.

But my primary reason for signing up for the Axalon's exploratory mission was that I had always wanted to study the effects of long-term space travel on the Cybertronian mind, and I'd thought that the Axalon's exploratory mission would be the perfect opportunity to do so. Of course, I was never actually able to conduct that particular study, due to some rather unforeseen circumstances...
Instead, I found myself suddenly plopped smack into the middle of an even more...interesting...situation. My "crewmates" were very intriguing people, after all. Each and every one of them, it seemed, had twists and turns in their psyches, all of which were fascinating to explore. It was an endeavor that would have easily kept me occupied for years. And, at times, each and every one of them had displayed at least one of those psychological twists for all to see, which was something guaranteed to attract my professional attention.

Besides that, of course, the psychology of war is an infinitely interesting thing in itself. Of course, studying the psychology of war from a safe distance and actually being plopped against my will into the middle of a rather private war are two very different things¼but it was still interesting. Then again, in the short time since my reactivation, I had invariably been too busy to do anything besides attempt to blow a millennium or two of dust off of my knowledge of physical medicine in between spurts of cleaning up the mess of injuries that invariably resulted from all-too-frequent skirmishes as best I could. Either that, or I found myself in the bizarre position of playing warrior-woman myself, which was utterly ridiculous. I mean, I could fire a laser at a stationary target with the best of them, but when it came to combat...well, as they used to say on Earth, "That ain't the way I swing." I would rather leave fighting and killing to those who know how to do it a lot better than I do. Which meant that, since my reactivation, I'd pretty much been left to hold down the fort, as it were—just me and good old Sentinel—while the boys went out and did their macho, shoot-'em-up warrior thing.

Of course, that "warrior thing" usually resulted in one or more of the Maximals shot up to the point that they were banging loudly on death's door, CR chamber or no CR chamber. So I found myself not only having to brush up on medical skills that I hadn't used in a very long time, but also suddenly having to deal with the bizarre oddities of half-cybernetic/half-organic physiologies. But I was learning, spending every available waking moment since my reactivation almost two weeks before communing with the Axalon's computers, trying to absorb everything it knew about diagnosing and treating organic illness and injury while at the same time brushing up on Cybertronian physical medicine in general. It was, quite simply, a Herculean task, but I was chipping away at it, day by day, slowly but surely.

In any event, I'd read that Dinobot had suffered some severe damage at the hands of the Predacons recently. And I also knew that he was without a doubt the Maximals' best and most skillful warrior—even if he was a Predacon. It would be...inconvenient¼to lose his considerable martial skills at a time when they would be needed most—like during a Predacon attack. So I had taken it upon myself to make sure that Dinobot was, indeed, as fully recovered from his most recent brush with death as he claimed to be.

Or at least, that's what I told myself...

The truth of the matter, of course, was that Dinobot simply fascinated me. Oh, not in any physical sense, certainly. It was pure professional interest. His typical close-mouthed, standoffish, overly-aggressive demeanor completely exasperated me, of course, but at the same time... Well, I simply felt an intense need to pry open Dinobot's skull and sort through his central processor with a fine-toothed comb, so to speak. I'd sensed so many twists and turns in his psyche in just the very limited time that I'd known him that it was truly amazing—and, for a psychiatrist, truly alluring. He was a Predacon—and a particularly aggressive one, at that—who'd chosen to live amongst and fight alongside a group of far more pacifistic Maximals. That, in itself, made him a most interesting case study. It was fascinating to watch him fight almost daily against his own innate nature, to watch him struggle to adjust to a new way of thinking—even though he would, of course, emphatically deny that he was adjusting, much less struggling. And there were still other levels to his labyrinthine psychological makeup, as well, levels the surface of which I hadn't even scratched. And I wanted to scratch them in the worst way! I found myself making stupid excuses to talk to Dinobot—which, since he never wanted to talk about anything, only served to push him further and further away from me, of course.

Not that I wasn't used to dealing with that, mind you. A universal axiom seems to be that psychiatrists, regardless of species, make non-psychiatrists nervous. Especially non-psychiatrists who would prefer to keep their private lives to themselves—which seemed to be a dead-on assessment of Dinobot, from what I'd been able to tell. It was as if others felt that I was always seeking to psychoanalyze them, that they could never have a normal conversation with me without second-guessing everything that they said to me. Which was patently untrue!

Well…except in Dinobot's case, that is... And I suppose that he'd sensed my ulterior motives—He'd have to be a blind idiot not to do so, after all, and Dinobot was certainly not that. Aloof and pig-headed and overly-aggressive and thoroughly exasperating he was, but he was no idiot. And I suppose that those ulterior motives of mine made him very wary of me, to the point that he completely avoided me if at all possible. Then again, it seemed to me that Dinobot avoided everyone if at all possible, so maybe I was just taking things a bit too personally...

But...Just this once, summoning Dinobot to the medbay wasn't at all a pretense on my part. I had merely been reading Optimus Primal's official logs from the past months, everything between the Axalon's crash and my own reactivation. I still chuckled over the fact that, even in his odd and demanding situation, Optimus still took the time to keep up the official ship's log every day, even though I wouldn't exactly call the Axalon a ship anymore... Old habits die hard, I suppose, and perhaps recording the log was a way for Optimus to hold on to fading hopes of a miraculous rescue from the clutches of the strange planet that we now inhabited—me, the Maximals, and Megatron's small band of Predacons. Whatever the case, I found the logs very informative, a great way to "catch up," as it were.
And of course I'd run across Optimus Primal's accounting of the Maximals' attempt to persuade the Axalon to fly again, using stardrive parts pilfered from the Predacon base, scant days before my own reactivation, and also of the terrible damage that Dinobot had taken during the course of that whole fiasco. And I was simply worried about the pigheaded ex-Predacon's health. That was all. Really. Honestly. And it was a simple thing, really. A few moments of his time. A few scans. That's it, and then I'd be quite satisfied. Little did I know, of course, how much resistance I would encounter. But, then again, considering who we're talking about here, maybe I shouldn't have been so surprised...

Oh, look at me! Babbling away again. I'm supposed to be telling a story here, aren't I? I suppose I should get back to doing so...
In any event, Dinobot had just opened his mouth to fire off a no doubt scathing reply to my...request...that he sit down, shut up, and submit to my medical demands when Rattrap's voice came floating over the comm.

"Yo, Shrinkaroo?" the rodent said without preamble.

Momentarily, I closed my eyes, and heaved a long, ragged, and exasperated sigh. It was a constant amazement to me, how many nicknames for me that Rattrap had devised that included the word "shrink" in some form. Damned annoying, it was. This one, of course, combined "shrink" with a reference to my recently-acquired kangaroo alternate form. There seemed to me no limits to the rodent's dubious creativity...

So if there was one thing that Dinobot and I had in common, it was that Rattrap got under both of our skins very easily, although in my case, I didn't take it nearly so personally as Dinobot did. After all, I realized that Rattrap's flippancy and irreverence were mere defense mechanisms and that his particular brand of defense simply clashed with Dinobot's brand. Still, Rattrap's names were annoying, no matter how many times I told myself that Rattrap had a reason for using them. I opened my eyes to see Dinobot regarding me with an almost amused expression on his face.

"Hey, anybody home?" Rattrap said before I could do anything but glare at Dinobot.

I sighed again.

"Yes, Rattrap?" I finally answered. "What do you want?"

"There you are!" the rat exclaimed, apparently ignoring the short and impatient tone of my voice. "You seen Chopperface lurking down around there, by any chance? I just can't seem to find that overgrown lizard anywh—"

"I am here, vermin," Dinobot growled, answering for me.

"Oh," Rattrap responded, sounding momentarily nonplussed, as if surprised that Dinobot was in my presence. "Well, good. 'Cuz Bananaman wants to see yous both up in the command center. Like now."

I exchanged a long speculative glance with Dinobot before answering for both of us, "We're on our way, Rattrap."

For some reason, Rattrap laughed, as if in cheerful anticipation of something...which made me just the slightest bit worried...

"See ya!" Rattrap answered before unceremoniously cutting off the comm, denying me the opportunity to grill him any further.
And then for some odd reason, I quirked a grin over at Dinobot, who was looking as irked as I felt.

"Saved by the vermin, huh?" I said ironically.

Dinobot snorted...and then almost smiled, wonder of wonders.

"Remind me to thank him," he said before turning on his heel and marching out of the medbay.

"Oh, I'll make sure of that, Dinobot..." I murmured to myself. After all, Rattrap might be irritating to me, but he customarily irritated Dinobot far more profoundly than he ever annoyed me. And there was a small mean streak in me that just loved to play the two of them off each other...

Chuckling to myself in anticipation, I stepped out of the medbay to follow in Dinobot's wake to the command center...and promptly got plowed by Cheetor...

Bit 3, Optimus Primal:

Bitingly cold winds battered at me from all sides and all directions, making flying itself, much less navigation, difficult. Hailstones the size of my first tore into me with the force of a round of ammunition fired from a machine gun. Somewhere in my mind I knew that it was shortly after daybreak here in Sector Thirteen, but judging by the near-pitch blackness inside the storm, I was hard-pressed to believe it. The only light seemed to come from the sharp knives of lightning that slashed silently through the clouds around me. The bolts superheated the air and produced deafening cracks of thunder that rang in my audios for long moments after they faded away, only to be replaced by the next clap.

The storm that had been in the distance as I'd flown from the Axalon was directly upon me now, making my rescue mission a decided bit more difficult than I had anticipated. And I was keenly aware of the fact that my position inside the storm was a dangerous one... But the towering, grumbling line of thunderstorms had stood between me and the place where Dinobot and Rebound had been when they'd disappeared. And I wasn't about to fly hundreds of kilometers out of my way to skirt the storms when I instinctively knew, deep down in some shadowy, primitive place in my mind that perhaps belonged to my gorilla beast form, that my two comrades were in immediate and terrible danger...

I was having serious second thoughts about the wisdom of such heroics at the moment...but there was nothing to be done for it now. Already deep in the heart of the storm, there was no other option but to fly on through to the other side and continue with my self-imposed mission. So I did just that, determinedly grinding my teeth together so hard that a dull ache soon began to radiate out from my jaw.

After about twenty more cycles of anxious flying, I suddenly burst out of the storm, breaking out into the clean, fresh, though hot and humid air on the other side of the storm front. Just like that, as if I'd crossed some invisible threshold. Behind me, the storm front towered over me, black and churning and flashing with lightning, muttering and rumbling across the sky like a stomping, cursing giant, heading in the direction from which I'd just come. But in front of me, dawn was painting thin, pastel fingers of color across a clear, lightening sky. It was quite beautiful¼until I looked ahead and below and saw the damage that the storms through which I had just flown had wrought. What I knew was a river—the one in which Rebound and Dinobot had been standing when their signal locators had stopped functioning—was down there, snaking across the landscape¼except that now it looked more like a huge lake of chocolate milk, it was so swollen and the water so brown with mud. It had not just overspilled its banks; it had created new banks. The tops of what had been thirty-meter-tall trees just barely poked above the roiling surface of the water.

From high above, it didn't look as bad as I knew that it was, though. And in fact, from high above I could see what had caused the flood and I realized with dread that it wasn't just the storms. Not directly, at any rate...

The river below me originated in the remains of a huge, ancient impact crater. The impact that had created the crater had also, by splintering the rock layers just above the water table at the bottom of the crater, created a spring. And over the intervening thousands of years the new spring had halfway filled the old impact crater, forming a deep, clear, seemingly-placid lake. But since then the combination of wind and water had worked together to erode the walls of the crater, slowly but inexorably eating away at them from both within and without, steadily weakening them.

Unbidden, I suddenly recalled our initial survey of that crater lake. Rhinox had pinpointed it as a potential danger zone not long after the Axalon's crash, so he and I had gone out to check it out. I was suddenly remembering Rhinox scowling prodigiously, waving a scanner around, and announcing that that the most porous of the rock walls of the crater, the one through which the fledgling river seeped as a tiny creek, would eventually crumble from erosion, that the river would eventually and catastrophically flood when the water held in the crater lake dumped suddenly into the little creek that, further downstream, became a large river. But upon further study, Rhinox had estimated that such a thing wasn't likely to happen for a thousand years, at least, and we had no intention of still being on the planet in a thousand years.

Still, I remembered being thankful that the river that began in the crater was not the river above which the Axalon sat... Of course, I hadn't counted on having two of my team in the river when the crater decided to crumble, either... The guilty notion that I should have anticipated the danger and kept Dinobot and Rebound away from this sector at all costs, stasis pod or no stasis pod, began to gnaw away at me...but I pushed it hastily aside. Guilt would do nothing to help me find Rebound and Dinobot, wherever they were...

Apparently, the periodic monsoonal rains that the area had been receiving ever since we'd crashed on the planet had hastened the crater’s erosion and had moved the schedule of the predicted flood up by a drastic margin. I could see where the weakest wall of the old crater had collapsed under the pressure of the monsoonal rains that had, judging by the remains of the water line on the three intact walls of the crater, almost filled the old crater to the brim. The break in the fourth wall looked like a jagged, gaping wound in the crater's side and the water was still gushing freely and copiously out of it, crashing around the remains of the crumpled crater wall and rushing downstream, picking up mud and huge rocks and debris as it went. I could only imagine the size of the initial flash flood, as the forefront of that initial wave of water from the crater lake had rushed its way downstream—and right over Dinobot and Rebound.

As I pushed horrendous images of drowned, mangled bodies out of my mind, I realized that the water level in the river was still rising, realized that even if Dinobot and Rebound had managed to survive the flash flood, they were no doubt still in danger. I altered my course to follow the swollen river downstream, swooping lower, flying slowly above the almost-submerged treetops in the hopes of catching a glimpse of something that looked like Rebound or Dinobot...

An almighty flash of blinding light a long moment later was my first indication that I was in serious trouble. The second indication was the noise—a sharp, deafening but sickeningly familiar crack followed by a pulsing rumble that I could feel in my infrastructure and that seemed to go on forever. The third indication was the panicked messages that my diagnostic computer began to bleat at me, warnings that my body had just absorbed a mother lode of electrical energy that was much more than it could possibly handle and that, as a result, my systems were rapidly shutting down as my body tried desperately to shield what it could from the huge power surge that was coursing through me. The fourth indication was the fact that the jets on my back suddenly cut out and I began to plummet out of the sky. The fifth indication was that the ground was swirling up to meet me at a dizzying speed that promised still more major damage when it did finally meet up with me. Ffter that, I ignored as superfluous any further indications of trouble.

I began to tumble helplessly, out of control, toward the ground below as pain continued to tear its way through every last circuit in my body. But as I fell, the only thought that persisted in my mind was that I had flown unscathed through the very heart of a huge line of thunderstorms only to be tagged by the storms from ten kilometers away. It was as if the storm was irritated that I'd escaped its clutches unharmed and had lashed out at me with a well-aimed finger of lightning in a last-ditch effort to unleash its fury upon me. Even in my pitiful condition, the irony was not lost upon me. In fact, as my body slammed into the ground, I was still chuckling insanely at the ironic way that the universe worked...

From “Paybacks Are a Bitch”

Bit 1:

With one leg tucked under herself, Dr. Sarah Livingston used the other to restlessly spin her chair, watching indifferently while her cluttered lab blurred around her as she spun. Her visitor was taking forever to arrive, was already twenty minutes late. That was a definite rarity for him. She wondered what could be holding him up, but she knew that there was no way that she could find out. He'd arrive eventually, she knew. He always did.

Sighing to herself, Sarah stopped spinning her chair and instead stared at her computer screen, chewing ferociously on her lower lip as she glowered at the data that was scrolling lazily across it. Without thinking about it, she picked up the carton of half-eaten Chinese food on the corner of her desk and began listlessly poking at the dregs of her lunch with the pair of chopsticks that had been sticking out of the container. She'd eaten half of what was left by the time her intercom finally buzzed, several minutes later.

Sarah pounced on the button that activated it and, in her best booming, Dr. Frankenstein-ish voice, addressed her intern in the other room. "Speak to me, Philip, my faithful minion!" she intoned.

"He's here!" Philip announced in an insufferably cheery voice. It was a voice that was heavily laden with the aristocratic British accent that clashed so horribly with Sarah's lazy Texas drawl. Philip ignored, as usual, Sarah's habitual dramatics.

"Well, it's about freakin' time!" Sarah declared. "Send him on in here, then!"

"For God's sake, Sarah, he's still down at the front gate! And you know that the gorillas in Security are going to take approximately ten years to clear him. They always do."

"You'd think they'd get it through their thick skulls that he's kosher by now. It's not like anyone else could, like, pretend to be him or something, for pity's sake."

"Yes, well, the gorillas weren't hired for their brains, you know," Philip informed her.

Sarah chuckled.

"How true. Well...send our guest on in here when he gets up here, Philip."

"Will do."

"Now get back to work, ya loon," Sarah said, and then stabbed at the intercom button with a broken-nailed index finger, cutting off Philip's amused chuckle.

Sarah sighed and launched herself up out of her chair. She began to pace around her cramped, equipment-stuffed lab, impatient as always. She straightened her hopelessly rumpled white lab coat as best she could as she paced away the minutes and unconsciously tightened the ponytail that held her long hair away from her face. Finally, she dropped herself back into her chair again with a weary sigh, forlornly slouching down into its comfortable, well-worn depths. You're pathetic, Livingston, she silently scolded herself. It's like you're waiting for a blind date or something.

She was still chuckling to herself at that thought when the doors to her lab finally cracked open, and its two halves retracted into the wall. The hydraulics as usual wheezed pitifully with the effort, and the left half of the door – also as usual – got stuck halfway back into the wall. Fortunately, her visitor had gotten used to shoving it all the way back into its frame, after years of regular visits. And it didn't take all of his strength to do so, as it did for Sarah or any of her "minions."

"Welcome to NanoGen Technologies!" Sarah chirped at her large guest as he ducked his head and hunched his shoulders to clear the doorway. "We design today the medical miracles of tomorrow," she added, parroting the company slogan. "But God forbid that we should spend a few bucks to fix a door or two," she added ruefully.

"I could perhaps find someone who could fix that for you," Sarah's visitor offered, glowering at the doors as they trundled unsteadily shut behind him.

"Ah, charging to my rescue as usual, my friend! S'OK, though. I get my exercise fighting with the damn thing. How y'all doin', Perceptor?"

The Autobot scientist nodded. "I am very well, thank you, Dr. Livingston," he said.

Sarah rolled her eyes at Perceptor's idiosyncratic formality. Try as she might, it was a habit of which she had not been able to break the Autobot scientist during the three years that they'd known each another.

"It's Sarah, Perceptor!" she corrected wearily. "How many times do I have to tell you? 'Dr. Livingston' is my father. He's two floors down, wrestling with a fax machine, last I saw him..."

"My apologies, Dr. – er, Sarah."

"Much better," Sarah replied with a grin. "Take a load off, why don't ya? I think I've got something here," she said as her fingers began to peck at the keyboard of her computer.

"Already?" Perceptor asked, hastily turning to pull out the Autobot-sized chair that Sarah kept tucked in one corner of her lab, just for Perceptor's visits. He settled himself into it and rolled it across the floor, positioning his chair next to the young human's chair. "Only two days ago you were...what was the phrase you used…? ’Spinning your wheels and going nowhere fast?’"

Sarah grinned, her eyes sparkling, bloodshot though they were.

"Yeah, well," she said with a nonchalant shrug, "why'd ya think I called you in the middle of the night last night? The amazing 'Girl Wonder' strikes again."

Perceptor chuckled at that. It was true, after all, that Sarah was nothing more than a "girl" in many ways. She was only twenty-four of the humans' years old and she was tiny even for a human, barely five feet tall. Blonde-haired and blue-eyed, with the sickly pale skin of a lab rat who didn't often see the sun, she could only be described as physically delicate. But she had a brain that even an Autobot would envy. She held no less than three doctorates, an M.D plus doctorates in pathology and mechanical engineering. And, along with her equally brilliant father, she was the founder of NanoGen Technologies. Hers was a successful and rapidly-growing medical nanotechnology firm which was dedicated to designing and manufacturing microscopic machines which could perform many varied tasks within a human body, from repairing genetically- or structurally-damaged cells to regulating deteriorating bodily functions to attacking invading viruses and bacteria to destroying cancerous tumors.

The latter was Sarah's current crusade, had been since a rare bone cancer had claimed her brother's life at far too young an age eight months earlier. And, as Perceptor had learned, when Sarah was on a crusade, she became a frightfully determined creature. She disguised her sometimes-relentless drive with a notoriously disarming and capricious sense of humor, but Perceptor knew all too well that her drive was always there, lurking just under the surface. When Sarah hatched an idea, she latched onto it. When she saw information that she could use, she used it.

That relentless determination was, indeed, the very reason that Perceptor had come to know her in the first place, three years earlier. Sarah had seen reports on the news about the Autobot scientist known as Perceptor, and she had realized that, as a scientist and a living machine himself and as a member of a technologically-advanced species, he might have some insight into the direction that she was envisioning for her company. So she had drive