Chapter Text
Chapter 1
She woke up when they turned onto the faux dirt road leading to the Bot entrance to NEST. Rubbing her face, she looked around. It was dark, so…late. “Everything okay?” she asked.
Optimus had gotten his radio functional somewhere south of Provo, Utah, and after that he’d been busy receiving reports and holding conference calls with generals and national security people. Kim, utterly exhausted and sore from the hours of tension, had fallen asleep.
“The situation is not currently in crisis.”
Ooooh. “That bad, huh?”
“There is rather too much flux for me to estimate the degree of ‘badness.’”
The entered the curving tunnel and Kim’s heart leapt. Home. Impulsively, she squeezed the hula dancer’s base.
The main assembly area was chaos. The new arrivals, who had traveled home alted as FBI sedans, transformed back to odd-looking mecha and were being corralled by Bulkhead and led back toward the ‘Bot commissary. The trucks bearing the unconscious Cosmos and the remains of the Decepticon attackers were being managed by Strongarm and Drift.
Optimus didn’t pause in the assembly area but swung directly to the right and followed the slight curve into the infirmary. He pulled up beside a repair berth that had been lowered almost all the way to the floor. Ratchet.
“Kim, you must get out now. Stand well away from me when I am in root form. If the patch on my gyros fails, I will fall.”
“Okay,” Kim whispered. “Good luck.”
Stiffly, clumsily, Kim climbed out of the cab. Optimus waited until she had joined June, who was waiting with Arcee halfway across the infirmary, before transforming and dropping to one knee beside the low bed.
Cybertronix didn’t vary much for individual vocal quality, and the sounds weren’t familiar enough to locate distance or location. The words warbled and crooned, rising and falling like splashes of water, but Kim could not have said which mech was speaking at any point.
Well. The audible part of the conversation would only be part of it anyway. Optimus had repaired some of his radio nodes: they would also be talking over the radio and glyphing one another.
“So, busy couple of days,” June whispered.
Kim blinked. How long had they actually been gone? Was it…Friday night? Early Saturday morning? So much for the Independence Day celebration. “Damn.”
“Have you eaten?”
“Yeah, the trucks and FBI escort kept having to stop at service stations.”
“I can’t imagine how awful it must have been,” June said.
Kim looked at Ratchet. He was hooked to external machines. There was a huge patch of dead nanites on his arm. “Things must have been just as bad here. Ratchet—”
June sagged slightly and whispered, “He’s lost almost a kilogram of protomatter. Unspecialized protomatter, so it isn’t like rebuilding a part, but…he really needs to have it cut out. His repair systems can reclaim and absorb the raw materials, but that’s slower and painful and it’s making him sick—although he wouldn’t put it like that.”
Kim closed her eyes. “He won’t let humans operate on his protomatter.” It wasn’t a question.
“No. He’s too scared. He barely let us work on damaged armor.” She took a deep breath. “They’re saying one of the ship passengers has a reputation as having been a really talented engineer before the war. He would have the technical skills….although maybe not the mods anymore.”
Kim frowned. “Which one?”
“Motion that Lifts Aside the Barrier to Success,” Arcee put in.
Kim frowned. Had she met everyone? Wasn’t there a name kind of like that? Kim sighed. “Hey? What is the direct translation of your name?”
“Merciless Death to Decepticons. Except it is euphemism for Decepticons that doesn’t translate.”
“Um, really?” Kim asked. Surely this was Autobot humor. “How, uh, does Merciless Death come out as Arcee?”
“Optimus wouldn’t let me. He said it gave the wrong impression. The glyphs—what happened to your phone? Did you run out of power?”
Kim sighed. “It was destroyed. By the electromagnetic pulse or whatever when the bridge collapsed.”
“Ouch. Anyway, the glyphs for that look a little like the English letters R and C.”
Chromia entered the infirmary from the direction of the bridge tunnel. “Enough, my Prime,” she said with a show of meek deference. “You must be seen to.”
He looked up at her unhappily, but Ratchet waved him away. He gave the beep that sometimes accompanied his dismissal of the trainees. Until this moment, Kim had assumed the beep was an expression of irritation or personal dislike.
With a hand under his arm, Chromia helped Optimus to his feet. “My motor capacity is not diminished, Honorable Advisor.”
A weapons hatch on Chromia’s left hip briefly opened and then snapped shut. June frowned. “She’s sure pissed at him,” she whispered.
Arcee nudged her sharply. “Hush.”
Instead of stepping toward the empty repair berth, Optimus turned toward the corner. “I will see Fixit as well before we begin my repairs.”
“He is sedated,” Chromia said, but she did not attempt to interfere with his movement.
Kim had not noticed the active pallet—squashed into a rectangle only slightly broader than a twin bed and chin-high to a human—in the corner. Optimus, with a show of graciousness, allowed Chromia to spot him as he crouched beside it. “Ms. Madsen?” he said softly.
Maggie? From her position, Kim could not see her. But she could hear the answer. “They’re saying—Sir, they’re saying he might be fixable?”
“Yes, Ms. Madsen. It will take a little time, but Fixit will be repaired. If he wishes, he can be upgraded.”
“Can he—can we wake him up? I’m sure he—It was only because he thought he couldn’t be repaired that he was so upset. It would be all right now--?” Maggie—Maggie at the bridge, cool and sharp and confident, Maggie who did impossible math in an alien language and never batted an eye—was begging. Kim felt slightly ill.
“Perhaps so,” Optimus conceded gently. “But the damage has compromised his cognition. For him to function effectively, he will need to have his processing priorities re-allocated and his drives re-partitioned. It is agreed that he will receive such alterations most…easily from me. But right now, I am too damaged myself to perform such maintenance.”
Whatever Maggie answered, Kim didn’t hear it. Optimus said, “He is experiencing no pain. His systems are running continuous repair cycles. He is receiving and properly processing energon. There is no cause to fear for his wellbeing or grieve for his suffering.”
Whatever Maggie answered, Kim didn’t hear.
Chromia shifted slightly. “Beloved Comrade,” she said pointedly. Optimus allowed himself to be pulled to his feet and guided to the waiting repair berth.
“Whoops,” June whispered. “I guess that’s me.” She dug a pair of rubber gloves from her pocket and put them on.
“Piece of cake,” Arcee said. “We’ve rehearsed this so much you could do it in your sleep.”
“Kim, you can’t come,” June said, producing a paper mask. “He’s going to open his inner seals. His repair systems can clear specks of dander or condensed moisture, but—”
“No, it’s fine. I don’t do repairs. I’ll go up to the shelf.”
It should not have been a surprise when Chromia lifted away part of Optimus’ helm: she knew that most cognition happened in the torso and most sensory processing happened in the head. But still, seeing part of his head slide away, seeing circuits and clusters of connectors behind his face—
The alienness of it was disorienting. For a moment she couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe—
A machine. A computer.
Kim screwed her eyes shut. Person. He is a person. They are all people.
She had seen the inside of torsos. Why would the inside of a head be such a horrible shock?
Friend, he’s my friend. He’s made of circuits. I’m made of meat. It doesn’t matter what we’re made of.
He was her friend and he was letting a half-trained organic perform surgery on him—
Kim forced open her eyes and made herself watch. June was using tweezers to pluck invisibly small somethings from Optimus’ circuitry and replace them with invisibly small somethings from a box Arcee’s blue unit was holding. Arcee’s Pink unit was holding a tablet through which Ratchet appeared to be watching and (although Kim was not close enough to hear much of it) giving brusque advice.
This will fix him. It doesn’t matter what it looks like. This will fix him. Optimus had lost nearly half his sensor inputs in the energy wave that had destroyed Kim’s phone. He had been blind and deaf in information channels Kim didn’t even have. And it had hurt. And the repairs he had made had been rushed and tenuous, and under pressure they had failed. We got home. He’s getting help. It doesn’t matter what it looks like from my perspective, because this will help him.
Hell of a time to be ethnocentric. Or bio-centric. And if this is happening to me, after being here more than a month, how will other humans react?
***
The whole procedure could not have taken ten minutes. As soon as they were done, Optimus placed himself in a repair cycle. Still and dark on the medical berth, he looked…turned off. Not dead, Kim reminded herself. When they die the chromeonanites fail. He’s still gloriously colored. He’s fine. He’s sleeping.
She climbed down to join June. “How’d it go?”
“I used to wonder what it was like to be a surgeon,” she answered, stripping off the gloves. “Ugh.” She shuddered. “To answer your question, though: well. It went well. And he’s less sassy with me than with Ratchet. That’s something.” She sighed. “He’s going to be fine.”
“What was that disagreement at the end?”
“He wanted to set the shutdown for ten hours. But Keller won’t be here for sixteen, so Chromia guilted him into setting the repair program for that.”
Kim frowned. Ironhide had said it was a fifty-hour repair. “Is that enough?”
“No. Well. It might be enough for stabilizers and full radio spectrum. Listen, he won’t be awake until late tomorrow afternoon. There is nothing you can do now. I’m still under the nursing rules—I’m mandated twelve hours off now, so I’m going home to go check on my son and get some sleep.”
Kim, instead of heading right to the Cold War hallway, went over to the short, plump, yellowish pillar that was Fixit’s active pallet. “Maggie?” she called softly.
“You don’t have to whisper,” she answered dully. “You won’t wake them. Humans just hanging out aren’t a threat priority. And you couldn’t wake Fixit.”
“I’m so sorry. How are you both doing?”
Maggie stepped out of the shadow. She was in jeans and sneakers, her hair half down and her make-up gone. “Prime was right,” she said shakily. “He’s better off unconscious. It was horrible when he was awake. I just….”
“He overheated?” Kim asked tentatively.
“The bridge feedback—we couldn’t keep up with the subspace fluctuations through the interface. He jacked in and turned off his safeties. He overheated so badly he off-lined. He’s lost ….” She topped and turned back to the pallet.
“I’m sorry.”
“They cry. Did you know that, Kim? Mecha cry.”
“They—what?” Cry? How could they? Crying was so organic, so biological. And it made no sense from a design standpoint. Why would they build that into themselves? “How could they--?”
“It’s a horrible sound. A wailing, a keening….It’s jarring, like twisting wet wool, but…it’s so full of grief….”
“They cry….” Kim whispered. She had taken it for granted, she realized, that it was something she would never have to watch these informants do. What could it possibly mean, that they cried? Had they learned it from humans? In just four years? Was it part of the language pack? But they turned off the tone and expression features when the emotions were upsetting. Could it be a glitch—running a human body language pack by accident? Could he really be crying?
Kim gaped. How could it be real?
Maggie, oblivious to Kim’s confusion, produced a ragged tissue and blew her nose. “When he woke up and found out he couldn’t work at the bridge anymore--” she cleared her throat. “He just fell apart.”
Kim stepped closer, put a hand on her shoulder. “He really likes it? Working at the gate?”
“No, he--we need him! Kim, he isn’t armed. He doesn’t have the power systems to sport weapons. He’s too small to pass as an earth vehicle. But if he can’t work the bridge station, someone else will have to. Someone who could be fighting or searching for energon, that’s why he—Oh. You probably don’t know.”
“Don’t know what?”
“When he found out…that so much processing power was gone…he did the calculations on how much –how much he’d have to speed up the processors that were left to keep—and then he started to do it, but he was hooked to a monitor and Arcee told him to stop. He couldn’t—there was no chance he could manage the heat from that. But he did it anyway. And Ratchet was in such bad shape by that point, and nobody knew what to do. That’s when they called me. I begged him to stop, but—Chromia had to come in and put an override on his internal systems.”
Kim tried to picture that. She tried to picture having control over how her brain worked and then being locked out of it.
“That’s when he started crying,” Carly whispered. “He refused energon. There’s other damage too, from the heat. He needs to heal but…. I couldn’t get through to him at all. That’s why he’s sedated, he’s on an energon drip….”
“Oh. Fuck.”
“He’s not—he’s not thinking clearly, obviously. It’s—It’s a lot of trauma. Prime is probably right; his operating systems have to be absolutely rooted right now.”
This was so awful. Kim looked at Fixit laid out on the pallat. Most of his form was above eye level—the pallet’s small surface area meant it couldn’t drop any lower. “Listen, Maggie. You can’t do anything for him right now. I’ve got…well, canned stew in my room. And beer. Not good beer, and not a lot of it but…anyway, you should come and eat something.”
She shook her head. “I have to be on duty at seven. I should go home and try to get some sleep….”
“Okay. You can have my bed. I slept half the way home from Wyoming. I should write down what I can before I forget.” Hell. Fieldnotes. “And maybe take a shower.”
***
The shower in the Cold War barracks was so relaxing that Kim almost regretted giving her bed away. So…It was a good thing she had. She couldn’t sleep on these fieldnotes. She was already forgetting, and so much had happened.
She dressed in the sad, grey locker room and went downstairs to the office corridor. It occurred to her then that she might want to check on Max. Everyone had been busy for a couple of days. She hadn’t seen Slipstream around.
Max was meowing, but there was food in her bowl and water in her little fountain. Kim noticed absently that at some point more cat toys had arrived.
She scooped Max up and held her against her body. Just a few minutes, she told herself. Not that she could count minutes—she had no phone to keep track of time. Where was she even going to get a new phone? And could anyone but Ratchet modify it for ‘Bot channels? And even if she had a phone and it was modified, the glyph app was Bumblebee’s pet project, and last time she’d heard, Bee was stuck on another continent waiting for a cargo flight home. Maybe Jazz had a copy?
Max meowed again, and Kim opened her mouth to speak to her, but the words that came to mind were, Oh, Max, it’s all so awful, and no, once she started that she wouldn’t stop.
She rubbed Max’s ears, kissed her on the top of her head, and resolutely went out to the mezzanine. There was so much to write down, now, while she remembered. The most precious parts were her interactions with the mecha who had just landed. You didn’t get a second chance at a first contact. Right then, with the English lexicons barely open and the body language modules still zipped, their thought processes and statements were nearly ‘pure’ Cybertronian. It was the closest she would get to their native communications.
There might be other new Cybertronians to speak to someday later. Or there might not.
She settled on the battered mezzanine couch and wrote all she could remember of her impressions. Springer (surely, he couldn’t have been named for his color, though it was the bright green of new plants) had moved with firm, large steps; no hesitation, no long pauses for scans. Blur had been quick, obviously. And even through the inflectionless delivery of a mech with no English paralanguage subroutines running, excitable. And he had repeated words sometimes, just piled them on top of one another. Kim seemed to remember that Earth AIs (as primitive as they were, so there may be no commonality here) did that when communicating with each other.
The conversation with Tenacious Pursuit of Useful Information she recorded in as much detail as she remembered. What had he said, word for word? How had he told them to begin the field repair?
What did she remember of Singer of the Cosmos? Nothing, really. Carly and Epps had been inside him. She would have to ask….
Chapter 2
She woke confused: where was the deep thrummm of Optimus’ torque engines? Had they stopped? Why would—?
She was on the couch on the balcony at home. They’d made it home last night. Oh.
She sat up and rubbed her eyes—and froze in surprise. There was a thing perched on the edge of the balcony, twined over and around the banister. It was rainbow-colored. And it had optics, which were focused tightly on her. Kim cleared her throat. “Hello.”
“You are not Carly,” the rainbow mech stated.
“No. I’m Kim.”
“Good day, Kim. I am pleased to encounter you again.”
There was some vocal inflection, but not a lot, and there was no regional accent. Without taking her eyes off the multicolored Autobot, Kim reached for her notebook and wrote that down. “I think you must be Tenacious Pursuit of Useful Information,” she said.
The head nodded once, a mechanical, economical motion. “After consulting with the lexicon, I have shortened it to Hound.”
“Um, Hound has a really broad, I mean, what specifically….” She trailed off, unwilling to say out loud, you don’t mean to say we are to call you dog, surely?
“Yes, English is very difficult. ’Hound’ in the sense of partner-symbiote creature that seeks out that which is missing or hiding. The term is also used to mean ‘to pursue relentlessly.’”
“Oh.” Dog, then. Okay. “Welcome to Earth, Hound. You’re very pretty.”
“Thank you for the compliment.” He thrust out an arm, which promptly turned a gleaming black. “What color is this?”
“Black,” Kim answered at once.
The arm dulled to a blunt matte. “Now?”
“Still black.”
The next four changes were all black. On the last one, though, Kim added, “Well. Sort of greenish-black.”
They did green after that. It was mesmerizing in a way, to be on the other side of a Munsell test. Green faded into yellow, and then they went back and did it again for green fading into blue. About three minutes into blue, Kim threw a linguistic monkey-wrench into it and said, “It depends on what language I’m thinking. In English that is blue. Or you could specify royal blue, because we subdivide. In Russian, though, different blues aren’t both blue. That’s ciniy.”
There was a pause.
“You imprecisely divide light frequencies into colors, but different culture groups recognize different categories?”
“Yep. You ready to run away from us yet?”
The mech seemed to deflate. Parts that had been projecting up now had a decided downward slump. “I was told your people were very like us.”
“In a lot of ways, we are. But not color. For one thing, our optics aren’t as sensitive as yours. And for another, we have no way to calibrate them.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah,” Kim said. “Even we can’t pretend our relationship to color makes logical sense.”
Hound reached one arm out, the tips of the claw at the end transforming to reveal pressure pads and chemosensors. That was all the warning Kim had before he ruffled her hair with the tip of a digit the size of a large man’s fist.
It was a shock, how quickly he moved.
It was a shock, after weeks of mecha touching only for transportation, to experience tactile curiosity.
It was a shock, years after deciding to specialize in post-industrial societies, to be pawed by an informant who had never seen a person like her.
Kim managed not to flinch. She managed to breathe.
Hound gently prodded her scalp. “What is this fluff? It appears not to be clothing. Am I using that word properly, clothing? Is this some kind of sensor array?”
“No. I mean, yes, it grows out of my body. It isn’t clothing. But it isn’t a sensor. It’s just hair.”
“For warmth? It does not seem particularly efficient.”
“Um. And sun protection.” Kim sighed. “Really…It might be we selected for it because we liked the way it looked.”
“It must take substantial energy to grow…. Is vanity a priority for humans?”
“Um.” Kim said.
“Will contact active sonar harm you? This information is not in the specifications for your species.”
“Um…I’m not sure….”
“I have asked Jazz. Hmmm.” The hmmm was articulated with thoughtful seriousness.
Kim batted experimentally at the very large servo tapping her stomach. “It’s considered polite to ask first.”
The hand withdrew, the face stretched a little closer. “Ask what?”
“Permission for touching. Have you got internet? Search terms: body language, kinesics, personal space.”
“Hm—Oh.” There was a long pause and then he tickety-beeped. “I had no idea!” There was another long pause.
Kim said, “If you have the internet, can you look for the public duty roster? Do I have any meetings?”
“Yes, you have missed two meetings with an individual designated Special Agent William Fowler.”
“Oh, hell.”
“The next one is scheduled for eleven minutes from now.”
“Ooops.” Kim shoved her notebook into her (now filthy) canvas field bag. “Gotta run.”
“May I come with you?” Hound asked earnestly.
“I’m not sure you’ll fit. Probably. Do you have to be somewhere else?”
“I am currently running background applications in preparation for a three-stage transcan. This can be completed anywhere.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
His legs were too long and jointed in too many places. His face was two huge eyes and a lot of sensor arrays not at all arranged in a way reminiscent of a nose or mouth or ears or a mohawk. Well. This would be interesting.
***
They didn’t make it to Bill’s office. Going the other way, he ran into them when they exited the tunnel. “Where the hell have you been?” he groused.
Kim made a face. “Completely out of touch because my phone was destroyed.”
“Completely out of…. Well get another phone!”
“The last phone was modified by Ratchet. I guess I could order a phone. If commerce is still working. Is—is everything out there in the world still….?”
Bill sighed. “More or less. If the airwaves stay clear, we can start to bring back air traffic tomorrow. The stock market is expected to open as usual on Monday. The popular theory at the moment is that the Earth’s magnetic field sort of hiccupped. It’s been acting weird lately—they tell us its overdue for a flip and might invert or something in the next thousand years.”
“Is that what happened?” Kim asked.
“Nope.”
“The electromagnetic disturbance was not a natural event,” Hound said.
Bill sighed again. “Who’s your friend with the failed camouflage?”
“This is Hound. Hound, this is Agent Fowler with the FBI.”
“Failed camouflage. That is a humorous proposition. You are very funny.” Hound bent his legs in all the wrong places and crouched down. He reminded Kim of a huge rainforest frog. “The Federal Bureau of Investigation seeks information on criminal activities. Are criminal activities ongoing in this location? Or have Decepticons been categorized as criminals?”
Bill turned to Kim and raised an eyebrow. Kim shrugged. “He’s serious.”
“The FBI is involved so that when some county sheriff starts reporting cars doing things cars don’t normally do, we can say, ‘Nope. Already looking into that. No big deal. Nothing to see here.’ Just think of us as a layer of making-life-easier.”
“It was Bill who arranged for the trucks,” Kim said.
Fowler fixed Kim with a dark look. “I don’t suppose you’d care to give me a report.”
“What, now? Washington State was fine. Nothing unusual—no Decepticons, no energon. When we were getting ready to bridge home it exploded, destroyed my phone and knocked out Prime’s radio. We got a map and started to drive back to Nevada. We rendezvoused with Ironhide and Carly, and then a space ship crashed in Wyoming. Speaking of, I’m beginning to think you left out some things when you explained the job, Bill. Spaceship crash investigation wasn’t in the interview.”
“Hey! You can’t expect me to detail every single fringe benefit, now can you?”
Kim made a grumpy noise which, echoing in her own ears, reminded her embarrassingly of Ratchet. “Anyway, Carly and Epps were fantastic. They were—damn, Bill. If Ratchet tries to fire these, I’ll—“ Kim took a deep breath. “No. Just no.”
Hound nodded, a broad movement that seemed to involve several extra neck joints. “The human repair team was unexpectedly adept. I had only estimated my chances of survival at seventeen percent.”
“How are the repairs holding?” Kim asked.
“Quite well, thank you. I am scheduled for a physical reformat in four days. The scars from the injury will be purged then.”
Bill brightened. “Oh, hey. Have you picked an alt mode yet?”
Kim pulled out her notebook and took frantic notes: the process for picking a first Earth alt was a precious find, but she still didn’t know enough about cars to follow the priorities.
***
In her hurry, she hadn’t had a chance to really look at the bridge on the way to Human country. On the way back, she stopped and stared. The consoles had been disassembled. Part of the floor under the alcove had been taken up and all sorts of impossible technology had been taken out and scattered in piles. Drift had half-climbed into the ceiling and a silver-and-red mech Kim didn’t know seemed to be coiling crystalline thread on a spindle he held on his hand.
Pierre and Maggie were unpacking and mounting a stack of human -made computer monitors. “How are you doing,” Kim asked them softly.
“Could be worse,” Maggie said shortly.
Pierre shrugged. “The output gate that is keeping Fixit from trying to repair his damaged processors is holding. It is something.”
“I don’t understand,” Kim said. “Isn’t repairs a good thing?”
Pierre shook his head. “His nanites are not able to repair processors. They are very complex, even by mech standards. If he tried….”
“If he tried, he would waste energon,” Maggie said bitterly.
Pierre laid a hand on her arm. “If he tried, he might deplete other systems trying to scavenge raw materials. And other parts were spoiled by the heat. If his repair systems could not be diverted, the damaged parts would have to be removed. Fixit is pretty small. The only one with the mods to do that besides Ratchet is him,” he nodded toward the silver and red mech.
“Who is he?” Kim asked. He was, she estimated, larger than Jazz, but smaller then Ironhide or Bulkhead.
Pierre made a small face.
“It depends on who you ask,” Maggie answered. “’Either Violent Removal of Difficult Obstacles’ or ‘Motion that Lifts Aside the Barrier to Success.’ And he’s either an infamous engineer or a commando.”
“Infamous…Engineer?”
She shrugged. “Jazz tried to explain it. I wasn’t listening.”
Pierre glanced over at the working bots and frowned. Kim made a mental note to ask him about it later.
The two mecha weren’t talking. Kim wondered if they were glyphing.
***
She needed a phone.
She could go to town and get a phone. She could get two—one to put on a human phone carrier and use as a regular phone and the other just for ‘Bots.
She could go to town and get a phone. In her car. Which might not start, it had been in storage so long.
And asking for a ride—Now? When everyone was so busy? Bumblebee, one of her usual rides, was in South America somewhere. Bulkhead? She hadn’t seen him. He might do it.
She slowed passing the infirmary. Fixit’s pallet had risen to Arcee’s waist level and she was fussing with something. Arcee wasn’t fond of being shifted to medical work.
Ratchet was still and inscrutable on his repair booth, probably shut down.
Optimus—
That berth was empty. What the hell? Was it late afternoon already? Kim wasn’t hungry enough to have missed lunch by a few hours.
I need a watch. One of those watches with hands and goddamn gears. A watch that you wind.
She had meant to be there when the repair cycle ended. Possibly that was silly. But she had wanted to be there.
Walking a little more quickly—the computer in her room would show the time and she was getting kind of hungry—she turned the corner into the vast vault of the assembly room, and nearly tripped over her own feet. It was full of mecha. Jazz, Chromia, Windblade, Ironhide—There was Optimus standing by the balcony. And Slipstream (she hadn’t seen him since she got back) standing next to the scowling Jetstorm. And Strongarm, pacing.
None of them were talking, although the room was not silent. The quiet clicks and swishes of agitated mecha blended together in a soft purr of noise. Ironhide had disassembled some kind of missile launcher and was cleaning the parts. Optimus, his arms folded and head bowed, might have been a statue.
Kim stumbled to a stop and blinked at them. Then, slowly, she resumed her course toward the steps. A deep blue (almost black) and white mech Kim didn’t know started toward her. Jazz stepped lightly in his way. Neither of them said anything aloud. Kim forced herself to keep walking toward the steps.
There wasn’t a standard procedure for this: if all your informants were doing the same thing, was the good idea do exactly what they were doing? Or was it absolutely vital to not do what they were all doing? Kim climbed the steps slowly, weighing her options.
She sat down on the little landing half-way up.
She put her hands on her knees and leaned against the railing and breathed. Being quiet? She could do that. She sat. She breathed. Slowly, she glanced around at the gathered mecha.
They would know she was nervous. Kim tried to be less nervous and just wait.
Were they just waiting? Or was this a meeting?
“Now just hang on,” Jazz said suddenly. “We’re all acting like we know how the humans are going to take it. We don’t.”
Cliffjumper said, “The statistical models—”
Ironhide stood up. “Jazz is right. We’re rotten at predicting what humans will do. And we got us a human right here.”
Oh, hell.
Springer, large and verdantly green, said, “How do we transmit data to Humans?”
One of the huge screens flicked on. It showed the Earth. There were lots of lines scrolling across it. Kim stood up. Changing her position did not make the picture more comprehensible.
“The propagation of the electromagnetic disturbance follows this line of deployment,” Springer said. The voice he had chosen was confident with a slight mid-western accent. “You will notice the dispersment is very thorough.”
“Ya skipped a step,” Ironhide said. “Kim, one of the things we’re trying to figure out how to tell Keller is that Megatron arrived in a big ship last Wednesday night.”
Kim gripped the railing. “He’s not—you all said he might be dead?” She glanced at Optimus, but he was still focused on the floor between his peds.
Softly, relentlessly, Ironhide continued. “He’s not dead. Springer’s team followed him from Cybertron. He spent a year there raidin’ databases and breakin’ into old archives. And then he returned here and released four times ten to the twenty-fifth joules into the Earth’s magnetic field.”
“That’s…it doesn’t seem like a very effective attack,” Kim said into the waiting silence. “I mean, was anybody even killed? And it’s already dispersed. Hasn’t it?”
There was a long, uncomfortable pause. It was Optimus, finally, who broke it. “Kim, it was not a coincidence that our bridge staff kept misidentifying the disturbance as sunspots. Some of those specific wavelengths of interference are well known on Cybertron. They are a common hazard during the solar maximum—roughly, every three-hundred and seventy-three years.”
“So he went home, went on a wild research binge, came back and dumped a whole lot of energy into the Earth’s atmosphere because—what, he’s homesick? Was it ambiance?”
Optimus, at last, focused his optics on her. “The direction of his research implies that he wishes to influence the Earth’s production of energon,” he said heavily. “It was Jazz, analyzing the files brought by Cosmos and the others, who noticed the pattern. Mr. Keller will be here in three hours. And I will have to tell him that the Decepticons have set their sights on Earth. We are not picking off strays or abandoned malcontents. We are facing an invasion.”
For a moment, Kim couldn’t breathe. At last she managed, “How many more are coming?”
“That is what we are trying to explain. They are already here. And they mean to either stay or strip this planet to bedrock before they leave.”
“But—how many more ships? When?”
Everyone was looking at her. Kim was familiar enough with mecha now to read confusion in their posture. It was Cliffjumper who said, “There are no more ships. The Nemesis is the last of the dreadnaughts. There’s maybe fifteen, twenty guys here on the ground, forty more on the Nemesis. He has no base on Cybertron. This is our chance to finish him.”
“At what cost?” Optimus snapped. Chromia stepped into his overlapping range and he subsided.
Ironhide said, “Our best chance to defend the humans is to defeat the Decepticreeps. And now that we have some idea what they want, we can figure out how to do that.”
“All due respect sir,” Strongarm said, “Our hypothesis about their objective is ridiculous. They can’t possibly, seriously expect….” She trailed off under the heat of Ironhide’s stare.
Kim said, “So…they can’t increase energon production? It’s going to fail?”
There was another long pause. Jazz finally said, “It’s kinda hard to say. Increasing energon formation….might actually work.”
For a moment, the weeks-long puzzle of energon twisted through her mind. What was it? Why was it appearing now? And if Megatron could make more—abruptly, the image of a giant space ship rose up and blotted out that curiosity. “They’re going to attack.”
“They haven’t, though,” Ironhide said, and he was smiling. “They won’t. They take overt action and Earth’s governments stop bickering and get serious. The Decepticons can’t take us all on at once.”
“Megatron does not care about casualties,” Optimus said wearily.
Kim shot him a worried look. “Um. So is this bad news or good news?” she asked in a small voice.
The new indigo and white mech took a step toward her. This time Jazz didn’t stop him. The new guy looked at Kim for a long moment and said, “Hound is right. These creatures are unfathomable. If we can’t predict human thinking, Megatron won’t be able to either. He’ll think of them as dangerous beasts. He will not take them seriously.”
“He will think nothing of slaughtering them by the millions,” Optimus said.
“As he has thought nothing of slaughtering us,” And oh, that was Springer, the new flier. “But these organics will fight. They are tenacious and determined.”
Kim felt a wave of warmth and realized her hands had started shaking. “Wait,” she whispered. “Wait.” She rubbed her face. “They think…they can make more energon form on Earth? And that’s—it’s got to take some time, right? And they—They can’t just nuke the planet to glass from spite. Can they? They need the planet….”
Kim had spoken very quietly, but a short, shocked silence followed when she finished. All the mecha were looking at her again. Chromia finally said, “No. Of course they cannot use such high yield weapons. That sort of electromagnetic disturbance would disrupt the harmonics they expended so much energy to create. They can’t ‘nuke’ anything. And they can’t afford the risk that the humans might.”
“Oh.” So good news, then. Kim sank down to sit on the step. “That is what we were all thinking. I mean, it was what I was thinking. And I think—but we don’t talk about it. There’s no point. But why were they still here? What could they want?” She laughed weakly. “Not just to wipe us out and be done with it. So hey.”
The indigo and white one leaned down over Kim, his optics flickering from wide to narrow focus. “Is it malfunctioning?” he asked.
“I don’t know about Keller,” Kim said. “I don’t know him very well. We had lunch at the same time in the DFAC once. But Lennox is going to be – my god, just to know what they want! To be able to make some kind of strategy. Lennox is going to be so happy.”
“It does not understand,” the indigo and white one said.
Kim looked up at him and managed not to laugh. “I understand. I’m just not capable of being more scared then I already was. What’s your name?”
“Mirage.”
Mirage. For a moment the word threw her: all of the guesses and panics and hopes about the Decepticons she had been trying not to think about—that they might just give up and leave Earth and that they could decide at any moment to destroy human civilization as a way to deprive the Autobots of allies and the terror of thousands of years of war stretching out generation after generation of tiny human lifespans—Those had been mirages, and now, suddenly, here was reality.
Here was reality where maybe humans could fight. Maybe.
“It’s nice to meet you,” Kim whispered. “I need to go do human things now.” She collected her filthy and mostly-empty bag and retreated unsteadily to the Cold War office block. She made it to the restroom before she threw up.
~TBC