Archive of Our Own ^beta

Long Haul bumped into him a week after they’d all been split up and sent to their respective slagholes. Swindle had seen a couple of the other guys here and there, but not close enough to talk to. He’d managed to do a little quick horse trading in the pen while they were all being assessed, swapping a few minor components he could live without and a bit of his energon ration for the trinchips that were the currency of the mine’s black market, and then he’d bribed the overseer making the assignments and got himself assigned to the lower scrap-sorting station on level 4—not a great post, most of the scrap was radioactive or slimed with toxins or sharp enough to slice armor or all three, but it was as good an assignment as he could swing fresh out of the pen. Nobody else had wound up higher than Mixmaster, at the level 6 refinery.

But Long Haul was carting a load of scrap right to his station, and after he dumped it in the bins, he transformed and handed Swindle a packet under the table. “Do something with it,” he said, and stomped off.

It was a solid ten-centimeter cube of top-grade trinium, already refined. The actual mining was under full-on monitoring from the second the stuff made it out of the tunnels, so Swindle had no idea how the Constructicons had managed to sneak this off the table, but that didn’t really matter. What mattered was no way had they given it to him unless Megatron had told them to. And that meant snagging it for himself and running instantly was out, even though all his frontal programming wanted him to do just that.

Most of the other Cons would’ve laughed at the idea that Swindle was a true believer. Most of the other Cons were slagging morons. Sure, he hated the whole slagging stupid war, he had zero interest in the great and glorious Decepticon empire of eternal scrap, he had even less interest in getting shot to hurry it up, and he damn well took every single opportunity to get his own tailpipe out of harm’s way. Sure. That was because he was smart. And because he was smart, he one hundred percent slagging believed, without the shadow of a doubt, that Megatron was gonna win the scrap out of this war, barring Primus or Unicron showed up from on high to get in the way, and frankly he wouldn’t count Megatron out even then. And no way was this place holding Megatron for long. It was going to barely qualify as a detour. The overseers up at the top had looked him in the face, and they’d still been dumb enough to try to use him, so they were all headed for a smelter. And so was Swindle, if he ditched Megatron. Anyway, it would’ve been stupid. Megatron was his own best ticket out of here.

He knew all that, but it took him half a day for his logic and strategy units to argue his core into submission anyway. He’d seen five other slaves slagged already, just while he’d been here. You couldn’t really make a safe trinium mine no matter what, but whoever owned this place wasn’t even trying. They’d just figured the cost of slaves into doing business and made sure they got a new shipment in on a weekly basis. Radiation bursts, sporadic quakes, vat explosions, gas venting—the list of ways to die in here was long and the opportunities were frequent. And the cube was more than enough trinium for Swindle to buy off his own restraining collar completely. He’d already worked out the going rates.

But then he’d still have to get out, and get off the planet, and his odds of doing that alone were just dumb.  He was absolutely better off taking this as a sign that Megatron was planning on bringing him along—and damn, he was logic-cycling again. He gritted his teeth and made himself slice off a small layer of the trinium and put the rest of it away into subspace.

Six hours later, Yordouk came back on duty. He was the third-shift overseer, and pretty new to the job. Swindle had pegged him for hungry after just a few days, and had even already given him a try: he’d slipped Yordouk one trinchip over the going rate to ask for an extra rest cycle. Yordouk had come through, and he’d even given Swindle the last dregs of the energon drip after he gave all the mechs on the shift their ration. The kind of guy he could work with.

“Hey,” Swindle muttered to him when he was turning in his log of sorted scrap. “Could you move this?” He slipped over the slice.

“The frag,” Yordouk hissed. He was a Gortrian, so everything came out as a hiss.

“It’s clean, I’m not a moron,” Swindle said. “Well?”

Yordouk eyed him, but it wasn’t a big enough piece to be completely improbable; Swindle could’ve found it in the scrap, in the pocket of some mech who’d gotten unlucky before he found a way to move a decent little score. “Thirty percent.”

“If it’s thirty percent of three hundred, sure,” Swindle said. “Come on.”

Yordouk scowled but only mildly. He was probably relieved: if Swindle had gone for a deal that bad on already-refined, he’d have had to suspect he was being set up. “Twenty,” he said grudgingly.

“This one time, cause you don’t know me,” Swindle said, and took his ration and went back to his little rest station.

Yordouk came through okay again: he gave Swindle a packet of 160 trinchips two days later, a little lower than the going, but in this case, that meant he’d had to get a new deal from his own trader; probably his own guy didn’t handle refined normally, but could swing it when it came his way. Swindle nodded, taking it. “Your guy solid?” he asked. “There might be more.”

Yordouk eyed him narrowly, but he had forty trinchips in his pocket he hadn’t had to work for, and nobody had come down from on high to shock his collar and dump him down to a lower level. The overseers didn’t bother being subtle. If they caught you, they dumped you, unless you had enough to bribe them. Whoever owned the mine was okay with the criminal networks on the inside; overall they probably kept things more stable, and all the skim they could manage had to be dregs compared to what the owners were raking in, assuming the owners weren’t just using the trinium themselves to build planet-buster starships or something. “You’ve been here a week.”

“I didn’t come in alone, did I?” Swindle said. “I really miss seeing my buddies, you know.” Then he slid over another slice and added, “Fifteen percent on this one. Or maybe it could buy me a cure for loneliness.”

Yordouk came through on that too, although not exactly in the ideal way: two days later he got a couple sorters dumped down to the labor levels and transferred in Soundwave—and Bumblebee, who eyed them both really confused, which no kidding. “Uhhh,” Swindle said. “I should’ve mentioned—”

“What, you all got bought together,” Yordouk said, which yeah, they had: both their ships had blown up together in the fight, so the same salvagers who’d found them had picked up the Bots floating right nearby too, but—

“Situation acceptable,” Soundwave interrupted.

“Huh?” Swindle said. But Soundwave looked at him and clearly meant it, so apparently it worked out fine for whatever Megatron had planned—and okay, sure, Megatron was planning to use the Bots; why not. Probably they would cooperate long enough to get out of here. They were crazy but not that crazy. “Okay yeah, we’re good,” Swindle told Yordouk.

“Not that I’m not grateful, but I’m not grateful,” Bumblebee said, still eyeing them both warily, soon as Yordouk left them alone in the rest area. “What are you after?”

“What do you think?” Swindle said. “Are you having such a great time here you don’t want to leave?”

“I don’t want to leave with you,” Bumblebee said.

“Oh, like you’re the one Bot we need. Buy a clue, will you? We need Prime, and maybe Ironhide. The rest of you losers are just the baggage.” He darted a sideways peek, but Soundwave didn’t say anything to shut him up, so Swindle figured he’d pegged it. “So? You gonna make yourself a little useful, be the go-between, or what?”

Bumblebee scowled, but didn’t say no.

Soundwave also gave him another six cubes of refined, twenty centimeters each this time. Mixmaster was working it. The stuff was better than what the actual mine was sending out. Yordouk’s six eyes all went blue when Swindle showed him the first one.

“Listen,” Swindle said, spinning the cube around on one of its razor-sharp corners on the table, every single one of Yordouk’s eyes following it. “I think we could maybe do some real business, you know what I’m saying? You don’t seem like the kind of guy who’s going to lose his head and wreck a solid thing.”

“I need to know where it’s coming from,” Yordouk said after a moment, but he didn’t look away.

Swindle shrugged. “I don’t even know that.”

“Yeah, but you know something,” Yordouk said. Which was fair enough. Swindle wouldn’t have gone for the deal himself in Yordouk’s place, not without more info. Dealing scraps and ore and the occasional lucky score was one thing, but this was the real stuff. The overseers caught them moving this, they were getting smelted, not dumped. But overall, Yordouk’s reaction was a good sign. You were always better off doing business with someone who was on the same page.

“My guy needs some reassurance to hook me up to the real money,” Swindle told Soundwave during their next sorting shift. “Worth giving him some.”

Soundwave inclined his head and said, “Two hundred trinchips.”

Swindle sadly handed the chips over. He’d only managed to score five hundred so far, and it hurt to see that much go just for a meet. Also there was only one reason a single meet would cost that much to set up, and it also explained pretty neatly where the trinium was coming from. “Maybe you should take Yordouk down?” Swindle tried.

“Negative,” was the only thing Soundwave said. He said it totally flat like he always said everything, but Swindle was still pretty sure the platefaced bastard was sniggering at him.

The very next day, Soundwave gave him a time, during their rest cycle right after Yordouk’s shift ended. “Go to the energon dispensary on the seventh level.”

“Great,” Swindle muttered. Going between levels was a great way to get caught by the patrols. But Yordouk could clear Swindle’s restraining bolt to go that far, and he could get his own cleared with some of the trinchips he’d been getting in his own share. He agreed after thinking it over. Another good sign: he wanted the big score enough to take a decent risk, without being stupid.

They got to the dispensary right between shifts. It was going through a reset and self-cleaning routine, and nobody was around. But the floor was already thumping, with heavy vibrations and a metallic rattle that Yordouk probably thought was the cleaning routine. “Well?” he hissed to Swindle, just as a massive shadow fell over the door and Megatron ducked inside—in all his glory and a little extra. And yeah, he’d been assigned to the actual tunnels. They’d mounted a massive spiked drilling rig on his shoulders, a whole row of toothy wheels to chew through stone, and smaller drills on both his arms for when he hit a vein. His armor was pink-green iridescent with trinium dust caught in a thick layer of protective coraslime. And he was pretty clearly in a really bad mood.

Swindle gulped. “Hey, boss.” This was not his idea of a comforting encounter. He did his very best to make sure Megatron didn’t notice him when he was in a good mood.

Yordouk had gone very still, staring up. Megatron looked down at him with narrow optics. “I’m in charge,” he growled. “The supplies reaching you are untraceable. Betray me and I’ll obliterate you. Any other questions?”

“No,” Yordouk said, providing additional evidence that he was a sane and rational being.

“Good,” Megatron said. “Go wait outside.”

Yordouk went without hesitation. Megatron turned the cold look on Swindle, who tried not to cringe. “How much of the trinium can you move?”

“For currency, three quarteks a week, tops,” Swindle said. “A couple quarteks more in trade or buying favors. We put any more than that into the system, we’ll start changing the value, and somebody higher up than we want is going to notice.”

Megatron grunted. “We’re going to need more than that. At least ten times more. Find a way.”

“Um,” Swindle said faintly. “What…what are we buying?”

“When you need to know, you’ll know,” Megatron said. “Don’t let this become one of the occasions you get excessively clever, Swindle. My patience for the current situation is highly limited.” He turned and went thundering out again.

So that was great, Swindle loved knowing he was supposed to be clever enough to get a short-term thousand percent return on investment, but not excessively clever; that was just spectacular. He’d already been branching out, making a few deals, building a network, and he was doing okay, but it wouldn’t get anything like what Megatron wanted. And Swindle had no clue what he even wanted it for; they didn’t need that much to buy off their restraining bolts and bust out. Maybe if Megatron was planning to buy a starship for the ride home, but since when was he going to think twice about just stealing one, if one there was at all? Or maybe Soundwave had found out about something, some kind of extra protective cordon around the mine that they’d have to bust through? But Swindle hadn’t heard a whisper about something like that…

Swindle was still stewing over the unpleasant possibilities a week later, on his way back from level eight: he’d gotten Yordouk to hook him up with some of the gambling people. It was the best chance of a big score, but it was also the best chance of a quick and extremely unpleasant death if that big score either didn’t work out or wasn’t immediately followed by their departure. And Swindle wasn’t getting in with this crowd in the first place without spending a lot of the cash he’d already made to start with. The best opening he’d found so far was a regular shonto game with five or six medium-big players, and he was having to lose some serious chips to make nice, aside from the expense of buying out of his own shifts to do it.

He’d just lost another hundred fifty for the pleasure of having Gos Maddarlo smirk at him across the table and gargle how welcome he was at any of their games, so he was pretty steamed, and then as he was crossing the overpass that went through the big ventilation shaft from level nine, he heard Ironhide’s voice come up yelling out, “Optimus!” followed by a sickening crunch of metal.

“Oh, that was not a good sound,” Swindle muttered under his breath. He slammed on the brakes and transformed to peer over, and yep, Prime had just gotten himself half crushed under a load-lifter. Why, Swindle had no idea, until he saw the dozen small purple lizardy organics that infested the mine scurrying out from under him. At which point he still had no idea why, but it was for sure a classically stupid Autobot move. The overseer was a Sedragnia named Tarax he’d met a couple of times; she ran with one of the shonto players. She was glaring down at Prime right now with an expression of total disgust, which Swindle had great sympathy for personally, except then she said, “Total loss. Get him scrapped,” in bitter tones, and waved the cleanup crew in. They hauled the load-lifter off, without being careful, and one of them slid massive dragging hooks into Prime’s mangled legs. He was mostly out of things, but he twitched all over at that point.

“Optimus!” Ironhide howled, and left the line and tried to lunge for him. At which point his restraining collar jolted him and he went down flat. But, of course, he kept trying. He was crawling over the ground by inches, jerking and flinching as the collar went on stabbing his brain. It was gonna fry him completely before he got halfway, but was that going to stop him? No. No, it was not, and there would go both the Bots that Megatron needed for the plan he had to get them out of here, the plan that was gonna cost five hundred thousand trinchips to run, which meant the next plan down from that had to be worse.

“Oh, slag me,” Swindle said, despairingly. He really hoped he wasn’t about to be excessively clever. He jumped over the edge and flew down to the back of the smelting room. It was too hot on this level for his own cooling system to handle for long, that was why Prime and Ironhide with their crazy-ass armor were in here, but he could take it for ten minutes. He ran to the overseer at her station—she was angrily stabbing the console as she filled out the standard dead-worker form—and she did a major double-take, no kidding. “Hey, Tarax, remember me? Saw you at the game three days ago with Lixlix. You want a deal?” he said, jerking a thumb over at Prime. “Let me have him.”

“Are you kidding me?” she hissed back, until he flashed her the smallest slice of trinium he still had in his compartment: it was at least five times any score she’d ever had a chance for at her level; if she had a decent stash, it would get her out of the mine, or if she was ambitious, out of her shift and way up in Lixlix’s organization. Her eyes locked on it instantly. After a moment she said, “And what the slag do I do when my scrap turns up a hundred fifty tons short?” without ever looking away.

“You’ve got until the end of the week; I’ll get it to you,” Swindle said. “Anyway, what are you going to do when his buddies fritz their systems trying to stop it? Cause trust me, they will.” He jerked a thumb over at where Ironhide and now Cosmos were both still trying to claw over the floor in their direction: the trash hauler was dragging Optimus towards the metal shredders on the far wall. “You really want three lost mechs in a single day on your sheet?”

“Skvassat,” she cursed bitterly. “Fine! Take him!”

She held out a foreleg with a grasping pincer on the end. He dropped the chunk into it and then ran over into the path of the hauler, raising his hands with a handful of trinchips fanned out in one. “Hey, big guy, I’ll handle this one, huh?” he said, and held the chips out; it was enough to make the hauler shrug and drop Prime, grab the chips, and go back over to get the rest of the trashed lift-loader instead.

Cosmos and Ironhide both paused in their clawing progress, staring after the hauler with glazed optics, before Ironhide jerked his head round. “If you so much as scratch—” he started choking out.

“I coulda just let him get scrapped, huh?” Swindle said, feeling as bitter as Tarax over the whole damn thing. “Quit fritzing yourself and get back to work. Bumblebee will get you an update in a couple of days.” He bent down and heaved Prime over his shoulders with a massive effort. His antigrav unit was not gonna be happy about this.

Hauling Optimus Prime’s limp body over six levels without getting caught by anyone he couldn’t bribe, not to mention having to pay off the four people he could, was very much not Swindle’s idea of a good time. Then the second he dragged him into their rest chamber, Bumblebee wailed like a sparkling who’d just watched his carrier get smelted, and it took five loud minutes to calm him down and get it through his solid lead cranium that Swindle had just saved his buddy, information that Swindle would really rather have shared with Soundwave in a more carefully tailored way. “Look, Megatron doesn’t want him after all, we’ll ditch him, right?” he said to Soundwave a little desperately, after. “But, uh, otherwise…we’re gonna need to get a hundred fifty tons of scrap to pay for him.”

Soundwave just looked at him and didn’t say anything, but the next morning Swindle woke up and found him actually repairing Prime, which maybe hopefully please Primus meant that Swindle had only been just clever enough. “Dispensary, seven hours,” Soundwave said, without looking up from the work.

“Yeah, great,” Swindle said unenthusiastically. Suspense, just what he liked to add on top of mortal terror. He really wasn’t cut out for any of this slag.

He dragged himself down to the dispensary after his shift, fighting his own motivator the whole way, and he had to literally shut off a chunk of his sensory system and his optics to make himself walk through the door when he caught a glimpse of Megatron’s shadow already waiting inside. “What happened?” Megatron demanded savagely, wheeling around the instant Swindle came in.

“He—he got himself crushed by a load-lifter,” Swindle gasped out. “I thought—if you wanted any of the Bots, you’d want him, so I grabbed—”

“Yes, obviously, how did Prime manage to get himself crushed? He’s not normally a complete incompetent,” Megatron snarled, and Swindle almost went limp with relief realizing that Megatron was pissed off at Prime, not him.

“He wasn’t being incompetent, he was being a dumbass,” Swindle said. “He jumped in the way on purpose. There was a bunch of those lizard things—”

“The ones that live for ninety-five hours?” Megatron roared at him. Swindle shrugged helplessly: it hadn’t been him getting crushed to save the purple lizards. Megatron glared at him in speechless fury for another moment, and then threw up his arms—wincing in even more irritation when they clanged against the braces—and said aloud, “Of course he did. Why am I even surprised. How long to repair him?”

“Looked like a couple of days,” Swindle said. “But—I’ve got to get his overseer the replacement scrap. Otherwise she’ll rat us out—” Megatron growled wordlessly in rage. Swindle cringed down. “On the bright side, he’ll be off the grid after?” he tried, wavering. “His restraining collar’s been deactivated…”

“Leaving him with too much freedom to muck with my plan!” Megatron said. “He’s not going to want to cooperate on principle. And now that he’s loose, he’s going to be almost irresistibly tempted to go it alone with his own people. If I didn’t need him…” He ground his jaw. “Long Haul will get a load of scrap to the overseer. How close are you to getting the funds?”

“Uhhh,” Swindle said. “It’s—it’s tricky, I’ve got to—the people who’ve got access to that kind of money are pretty cautious about letting anyone in, and they’ve already got plenty of trinium, I can’t rush it too much—”

“Enough excuses,” Megatron said. “Find a way. You’ve got one more week. And keep Prime on the rails.” He stalked out.

Oh. Oh, that was just—that was fantastic. Keep Optimus Prime on the rails? Him? And the worst part was, Megatron wasn’t stupid, so it wasn’t like he didn’t know that Swindle had zero ability to keep Optimus Prime on any given rails, roads, or garden paths available; he just meant that he was going to be slagging mad if Prime did go off, and Swindle had just become target number one if he felt like venting some of that anger by actually slagging somebody.

He went glumly back up to the sorting station, where, sure enough, Prime didn’t even have his legs all the way back on yet and he was already sternly telling Soundwave that the Autobots weren’t going to have any part of Megatron’s plan until they knew exactly what it was and could be sure it wasn’t going to hurt innocent bystanders.

“What, you mean the innocent slagging bystanders in this mine who are all gonna be slaves here the rest of their extremely short and unpleasant lives, possibly including us?” Swindle yelled, when he came in on it. Prime actually paused in the lecture and turned around and stared at him. Normally Swindle also tried to keep Optimus Prime from noticing him, because getting noticed by Prime usually meant a world of hurt for any Con, but slag all of this for junkyard scrap, and anyway the dumbass couldn’t actually stand up right now.

“I’m not even joking, what is wrong with your logic unit? Did you know those stupid lizards you saved with this stunt die in less than five days? Yeah, that’s right,” Swindle added to Bumblebee, who was also staring at him, “your boss jumped under a load-lifter and got himself turned into scrap to save ten freaking lizards smaller than my foot who die in ninety-five hours. Pretty slagging noble, huh?”

“Neraadi individuals die in ninety-five hours, after they spawn,” Optimus said. “But their species passes memories down generations, and their lineages have been running for countless millennia. I have had ongoing conversations with them across six generations, each one adding new insights and ideas to the discussion without interrupting—”

“Oh, just shut the hell up!” Swindle said. “You know, even if I wasn’t a Decepticon for a million other good reasons, I’d be one just to not have to put up with this slag all the time.”

“Hey!” Bumblebee said, giving him a shove. “You shut up! Just because you Cons don’t care about anybody but yourselves—”

Swindle shoved him back; he could take freaking Bumblebee. “Slag you! You were squealing like the world was gonna end when I dragged him in here, you gonna tell me that you’d have been thrilled if that’s how your boss went out, saving ten lizards, leaving you and all your pals stuck in here to mine trinium for a bunch of slavers until you die? And you,” he wheeled back on Prime, who was looking a bit bemused, “you were okay doing that to your own people? Oh, but you need specifics on Megatron’s plan. I’ll tell you what Megatron’s plan is, it’s we get the hell out of here! You got a better idea?”

“I’m sure that Megatron’s plan involves getting himself out of this mine, along with at least some of the rest of you. You’ll forgive me if I don’t assume it would actually result in our escape as well. Megatron’s plans have a way of serving his interests,” Optimus said dryly.

Which was a reasonable point, if that was as far as you thought about it. You’d think a Prime would have a little more going on in his strategic unit. “Yeah, okay, sure; they do,” Swindle said. “So if his plan involved us splitting up along the way, or you guys putting together some major piece of the puzzle and just handing it to us, would you ever go for that? No, you wouldn’t, because you’re not complete idiots, which Megatron knows, so that’s not gonna be the plan. And yeah, maybe the plan does involve ditching you somewhere once things get easier, but so what? You’ll still end up closer to getting out than you would without us.”

Bumblebee folded his arms. “I think maybe we’ll do better just going it alone.”

“Oh, really, you’ll do better alone. Right. I’d like to point out to you that we,” Swindle made a back and forth to Soundwave and his own Decepticon symbol, “have you guys outgunned and outnumbered, not to mention Devastator in our pocket, and even so, the best plan Megatron could come up with for getting us out includes you.” And five hundred thousand trinchips, ugh. “So for you guys to get out of here alone, you,” he turned and stabbed a finger at Prime, “would have to come up with a better plan than the guy who has spent the last thirty thousand vorn kicking your afterburners.”

“You wish!” Bumblebee said.

“We’re not the ones who had to flee the freaking planet, laser brain,” Swindle said.

Bumblebee was gearing up to try and argue that fairly obvious point, but Optimus held up a hand to stop him. “It is all too easy to destroy mindlessly,” he said, sounding tired. “If you consider it an achievement that Megatron has reduced our planet to ash, there is little point arguing over our relative success.”

Swindle cycled his optic backlights rudely. “What’s my considering got to do with it one way or another? I didn’t want Cybertron slagged. But Megatron wanted it, and he sure got it, didn’t he?”

“What, Megatron wanted to turn Cybertron into a total wasteland,” Bumblebee said, sarcastic.

“Uh, yeah?” Swindle said. “Like he said he did? In all those speeches? I will burn every last Autobot city to the ground and fill their mouths with the ashes et cetera et cetera?” They were both staring at him so taken aback that Swindle took a fast look just to make sure Soundwave wasn’t giving him a signal to shut up, because their reaction almost made him feel like he was spilling a secret or something. “Did you think he was just saying it? Because I gotta point out, he said it a lot. I went to like thirty of those rallies back when they were still giving away free energon, and it wasn’t like the party line changed at any point.”

“You’re saying Megatron—deliberately—” Prime looked like half his brain had gone offline to try and cope with the crazy far-out idea that Megatron had done literally what he’d said he was gonna do. “But—why? Not to conquer Cybertron, but to level it completely— What possible reason could he have had?”

Swindle just shrugged. What difference did it make? “I don’t know! Maybe he really didn’t like the architecture, who the slag knows! The point is, what Megatron wants, Megatron gets, so maybe pull the cleaning rod out of your dorsal port and decide if you want to get out of here or not, because if you aren’t gonna play along, you can go dig up your own scrap, or just throw yourself in the smelter for all we care!”

Prime just sat there in total silence for a good ten minutes. Finally he said, in a low voice, “I want to meet with him.”

“Pick first,” Swindle said, folding his arms. Soundwave had paused on the repairs—because yeah, no kidding, why waste the slagging time—and Swindle knew a good negotiating position when he saw one. Prime stared at him with those big sad blue optics like Swindle was kicking him in the side, but sucked ports to be him, Swindle would totally kick him in the side before having to go tell Megatron that Prime wouldn’t even sign on. “You can’t go meet him until we’ve fixed you up, and after we’ve fixed you, someone’s gonna have to take you down, because your chances of making it down on your own without getting caught are nil, and Megatron’s gonna have to buy out of a shift for the meet. And if you think we’re spending one trinchip more on your sorry tailpipe while you’re getting all high-and-mighty on us, after we already saved your aft, you are dead wrong.”

#

Of course, as a reward for his top-notch negotiating skills, guess who got to be the one to take Prime down. And not down to the energon dispensary, oh no: he had to take him down to the slagging tunnels, probably because Megatron was so mad that he wanted to make Prime slog all the way down there, which fine, Prime deserved it, but Swindle didn’t! But he was getting it anyway. He had to pay out a bunch of bribes and they had to get doused all over with coraslime themselves—ugh—and then walk through ten kilometers of ragged tunnels too uneven to drive in, until they finally got to Megatron down at the end of a brand-new one. Getting there was like something out of a nightmare defrag: the claustrophobic tunnel dark around them, the walls trembling and the thunderous drilling snarl going, massive plumes of greenish corrosive steam erupting from the coolant being sprayed on the drills, and Megatron himself in the middle of it, a monstrous gleaming figure looming up out of the clouds. There was a crowd of the purple lizards scampering all around his feet, filling up collecting baskets with the shards of the reddish crystals that got churned up along the way; a couple of them looked up at Prime and bobbed their heads at him as they ran past, so hey, at least he had become a hero to all purple lizardkind, good for him. There were five boxy shielded drones lined up waiting for ore.

Megatron kept drilling for about ten minutes after they got there, not stopping until he’d uncovered a good hundred meters of the trinium vein he was following—a big beautiful one as wide as Swindle’s hand. Then he shut down all the equipment, taking his sweet time: he picked off a dozen worn-out teeth from the drill and dropped them into the scrap box that one of the drones was carrying, then fitted in replacements that one of the others handed him. After he was done, he took a triple-sealed container of what looked like six astroliters of energon out of the compartment of yet another drone and drank the whole thing down to the dregs before he tossed the container into the scrap box, and finally turned back to face them. “Well?” he said flatly.

It wasn’t like Prime hadn’t had enough time to think about what he was gonna say, but he just sort of stared at Megatron and engaged his vocal unit three times without actually getting anything out. Swindle was actually grateful for the time, because he used it to very carefully maneuver himself behind Prime and out of the ring of light from the tunnel lamps mounted on the rig. Megatron’s optics were glowing really red by the time Prime finally blurted, “We’re willing to collaborate on an escape as long as it doesn’t mean killing innocents.”

Megatron glared at him, and then he turned and banged a fist on top of the last drone, which opened up and was full of massive silvery chunks of unrefined trinium. He pulled one out the size of his head and tossed it in his hand like a ball. “Well, Prime, you’re out of the restraining system now. So you can take this straight up to the top level, and bribe the guards up there to let you out and give you a sack of trinchips. Wait for the next pirate ship to come in, buy passage for yourself back to Cybertron, and then you can get out scot-free, without any stains on your armor. You’ll even probably be able to take back a significant portion of territory before I get back myself. But you’ll be going alone.” He held it out. “Do you want it?”

Prime didn’t make a move for it. “You know I don’t.”

Megatron nodded and tossed it back inside; the drone shut on it. “This mine has been drilled past any reasonable structural tolerance, and the overseers have armed the drones with energy weapons. When, not if, we end up fighting, we’ll set off a dozen tunnel collapses and multiple glixin gas explosions at least. If you couldn’t work that out for yourself, now you know. Stop wasting my slagging time and decide. Are you staying in here to die, or are you getting out with us?”

Prime paused and said quietly, “Megatron, I’m not a fool. I recognize that we can’t escape without creating a dangerous situation in this mine. But there’s a difference for me between innocent bystanders getting caught by accident because the slavers who run this mine are trying to keep us as prisoners by force, and our killing those same innocents through direct action. That is my line. And I know that it’s not yours. So if your plan is going to cross that line, then you’re better off saying so now. Because when it comes up to that line, we’ll stop anyway. And do our best to stop you while we’re at it.”

“In case I haven’t mentioned lately, I’d very much like to shove your fuel pump down your throat,” Megatron said. “It’s not any line that makes any sense. If we have to blow a smelter fuel depot to get out, does that count? What if there’s a guard on it? Will it be all right as long as you don’t know the guard is there? How the hell do you expect me to know where this magical line of yours actually is?”

“We’ve been fighting one another for a long time,” Prime said. “I think you do know where my line is. You just don’t like it because it’s inconvenient. And yes, it does shift based on the immediate circumstances. So will the rest of your plan, if it’s any good. Deal with it, or leave us out.”

Megatron ground his jaw so hard he could probably have chewed open a decent chunk of tunnel himself, and abruptly he turned and actually did pound some of the wall out with his fists, a dozen blows that shook the whole place. Swindle cringed and covered his head as best he could as dust and bits of rock rattled down against his armor like hailstones. Megatron finally stopped and stood there with his shoulders heaving before he turned around again. “Fine,” he spat. “But understand this, Prime: your little yellow friend is going to be right next to me throughout this operation, and if we get halfway and you do suddenly decide that your magnificent conscience won’t let you go any further, I promise I’ll rip his cranial unit off his body in front of your face right then and there, before you get the rest of us all killed. You’re going to know exactly what you’re choosing, instead of getting to pretend that some unforeseen miracle is going to save you from having to pay. So? Are you with us or not?”

So then Prime stood there with his fists clenched and jaw grinding away behind his faceplate. This was exactly where Swindle had always wanted to be, stuck down in a trinium tunnel with the two of them both so pissed off they could probably smelt ore with their emotional circuitry. The lizards had all run away, so they were sentient, and even the drones had hunkered down.

“Very well,” Optimus said flatly, after a minute. “What’s your plan?”

“I’m not sharing the details until we’re closer to execution,” Megatron said. “You’d blab them out the instant anyone put a gun to the head of some random slave, much less one of your own. It’s going to be at least another tenday before we’re ready to move. For now, the plan is to avoid getting yourself turned into scrap, if you can possibly manage that onerous task. Try to make yourself moderately useful.” He turned and thumped the drone full of trinium and told it, “Follow him,” and pointed right at Swindle. “Now take that to Mixmaster. And find some way to use Prime being off the grid.”

“Uh,” Swindle said, darting a look at the drone. “Aren’t you gonna miss quota?”

Megatron snorted. “If I do, the overseer will spread the shortage over the rest of the miners in this sector. Or he’ll end up like his predecessor.”

He turned and started in on the trinium vein with the arm drills, ripping fresh chunks of ore out and dumping them into another one of the drones. Actually, the speed he was working, he probably wasn’t going to miss quota. It was amazing he wasn’t setting off glixin explosions; Swindle squinted and realized Megatron had some kind of intakes on his arms and was sucking up the gas as fast as it could come out. He had to be burning it for fuel and purging the sludge. Swindle jerked his head to Prime, come on, and headed down the tunnel with the filled-up drone trailing him. Prime stood there in the tunnel another moment hesitating, but it wasn’t like Megatron could’ve even heard him over the drills, so finally he turned and followed too.

At least Prime took the make yourself useful part to heart. Once they got out into the main access shaft and there was enough room, he transformed and had Swindle put the drone in his trailer, and then he shunted the whole thing into subspace. When they ran into a patrol on the way up to the refinery level, the guards looked up at Prime with all the lights on his restraint collar very noticeably dead and didn’t even hold out a hand. “Thanks, guys, buy yourselves a drink,” Swindle said, and tossed the captain a couple trinchips anyway, because he might be alone next time he ran into them.

“Ooo, shiny,” Mixmaster said gloatingly, when they handed over the drone and he pulled out the chunks of ore. “Megatron’s really getting the good stuff, isn’t he. When I think what we could build with this grade of trinium, it makes my spark hurt, having to give it away.”

“Yeah, you want to suggest to Megatron we stick around and he keeps digging it up for you, you do that,” Swindle said. “Got any more refined?”

“Yes, yes,” Mixmaster said, and transformed and popped out five big gleaming perfect ingots, fifty centimeters long. Okay, honestly, it made Swindle’s spark hurt too. Even just one of the things would’ve been worth ten million galcreds on the open market, easy. He wasn’t sure he was gonna be able to move even this much of it after all; most of the stuff in circulation around the mine was low-grade crap by comparison.

“Okay, come on,” Swindle said to Prime, stuffing the bars in his own compartment. “Let’s go see what I can turn up.”

“Swindle,” Optimus said abruptly, while they were driving down, “why did you become a Decepticon?”

“Why do you care?” Swindle said warily.

“You understood, all along, that Megatron sincerely intended to destroy our entire society,” Prime said. “And you claim that you didn’t want that yourself. Why did you join him, then?”

“Oh, I don’t know, could it be maybe I didn’t want to starve to death in a ditch?” Swindle said. “None of you guys were going to be sharing energon with neutrals once things got really tight.”

“You could have joined the Autobots if you opposed Megatron’s goals.”

“I’d just as soon take starving in a ditch if I wanted to die,” Swindle said. “You’d already lost the war by the time I had to make the call.”

“You’ve been a Decepticon since the twelfth vorn of the rebellion,” Prime said.

“And I cut it as close as I could,” Swindle said. “Tenth to last wave of recruits. That was the last one you could get into without paying and get a decent slot. You know how much it cost to get into the last wave, when the famine was already going? Crazy money, and all of those poor bastards went out as cannon fodder in ten thousand years or less.”

“But—why did you think we’d lost?” Prime said, sounding bewildered. “I wasn’t even Prime yet. The Decepticons only held Polyhex, Tarn, and Vos.”

“Megatron started out with nothing but his own spike and your side started out with everything; five hundred thousand years later he’d already taken three city-states, and you’re asking me how I knew you were gonna lose?” Swindle said. “I don’t know what to tell you. You didn’t notice you were losing?”

 Prime said after a moment, low, “We’re all losing, Swindle. That’s what I noticed. All the territory Megatron took was devastated before he ever raised his banner over the scorched ruins. I still don’t understand how he can have done it deliberately.”

“You know, that’s your problem right there,” Swindle said. “This whole understanding crap. How are you ever gonna understand Megatron? I’ve known him seven million years, I don’t got a clue. Onslaught can figure out what he’s gonna do sometimes, but why? Forget it. The guy came out of nowhere; he’s got to be some kind of crazy experimental model. Who even knows how his brain works? Meanwhile you—I don’t even know, what did you do before the war?”

“I was a dockyard supervisor.”

Swindle stopped short and gawked at him so hard that Prime added, dryly, “I was rebuilt.”

“No kidding,” Swindle said, still staring. “Which dockyard?”

Prime had to pull it up from archival data before he answered. “Frontoria Lines, in Iacon South.”

“Huh,” Swindle said. Then he asked, “Hey, did you know Slideway Lor?”

Prime paused and said a little bemused, “He was my senior supervisor.”

“Good guy. I did business with him a few times,” Swindle said, more than a little bemused himself. He’d actually sent Lor a quiet tip to stay home the day Megatron had hit the place. Crazy. But it did kind of make sense when he thought about it. Prime wasn’t anything like the high-caste assholes who’d run Cybertron before the war. You wouldn’t have caught those guys laying themselves out for purple lizards. “I knew the place. Nice neighborhood. So you showed up for work shift every day, made a good living, had pals, time off, place of your own to recharge, probably an oil bath once a week and detailing six times a year?” He nodded to himself even as Prime frowned and didn’t disagree about any of it. “Then one day somebody overhauls you and shoves the Matrix of Leadership in your chest, and now you’re the Prime and everyone on the planet’s supposed to bow when you speak. And you’re gonna figure out Megatron? Do yourself a favor and skip it. Just go straight to what’s actually happening and figure out what it means for you. That’s what I do, and that’s why I’m still here, and I’m planning to keep being here even after Megatron smelts you down for throne room decorations. Uh, no offense,” he added belatedly, cringing internally in alarm as he remembered too late he was talking to Optimus Prime. He didn’t know why he was letting his mouth run away with him. Nobody really asked him for his opinion these days, apparently his vocal unit had dropped its filtering subroutine or something.

But Prime just said, even more dryly, “None taken. I’m sure you only meant tasteful decorations.”

Swindle snorted a laugh. Optimus Prime had a sense of humor, who woulda guessed.

They took an airshaft down to level eight. Swindle flew down himself but had to wait while Prime let himself down on a grappling hook in stages. It only took him five minutes longer, actually; you had to hand it to the Bot, he could really move. Just bam, in went the hook, he practically flew down the wall in huge swooping leaps, barely touching; when he hit the end of his line, he just dug his fingers into the wall and held on with one hand, flipped the hook loose and pulled it back into his grip, no fumbling, and did it again. It was kind of unreal, how easy he made it look.

Watching him come sailing down like he’d been practicing made Swindle’s opportunity module suddenly sit up and take notice. Because okay, the truth was, after seven million years he did know a little about what made Megatron tick. He thought the idea over while they climbed back out of the shaft and started driving down the tunnel again. It didn’t seem like a big risk; probably it wouldn’t pay off, but hey, if it did, it would be a hell of a win, and if it didn’t, he didn’t see how it could possibly come back to bite him.

“Hey, Optimus, you know, about that,” he said.

“About what?” Prime said. “Megatron smelting me down?”

“Yeah, see, don’t get me wrong, Megatron does want to smelt you down, but I’m thinking maybe I should mention—you do get, he only wants to smelt you down because you keep getting in his way? It’s not personal or anything.”

“You can’t imagine how comforting I find that,” Prime said, very dry again.

“I’m serious here,” Swindle said. “Don’t tell anyone I told you so, but he thinks you’re top notch.”

Prime paused. “He…what?”

“Yeah,” Swindle said. “Whenever you show up on a raid, it takes the heat off. Megatron never gets as pissed when we miss our targets if you’re there. And he’s always on about how you’re glitched whenever you pull one of your stupid hero stunts, but—maybe I shouldn’t tell you this, but he reviews those mission logs a whole bunch more than the rest. That time you got Grimlock to throw you on that big orange bridge to hold it together until it could get repaired, he sat in the command center and watched you hanging on to the thing for like all twenty-three hours you were stuck on there.”

Swindle left it there. It was good not to overdo things. Even as it was, Prime literally didn’t say a word for ten minutes. Swindle could almost see the steam coming off his processor. Actually he really could: there was a thin line of white smoke coming out Prime’s exhaust pipe.

“I—don’t understand,” he said finally. It came out kind of plaintive.

“Well, like I said, good luck with that,” Swindle said. “But you know, if you’re maybe reconsidering the whole war thing in the light of how, uh, you’re losing it anyway, I could maybe float an offer past Megatron. See if there’s a deal to be made.”

“A deal?”

“Yeah, you know, a deal,” Swindle said. “Where we all stop trying to kill each other? I’m just saying, in case you thought that Megatron was really committed to sticking your head on a pike. That part, that’s just trash talk. He threatens to rip Starscream apart three times a week, he doesn’t mean it. Hell, you know the amount of crap he puts up with from that guy? He’d make way more concessions to get you on board.”

“To get me on board for—the Decepticon conquest of the galaxy?” Prime said, his voice rising.

“Well, if you had a chance of stopping it, that’s one thing, but you don’t, you really don’t. Megatron wants to invade some planets, the planets are getting invaded no matter what. You want it to happen with Starscream in charge of the landings or you?”

“You think that I would lead the invasion of a planet full of resisting sentient beings?” Prime said, going even louder. “Swindle, I’d die first.”

“Well that’s gonna be really comforting to the millions of civilians that Starscream will slaughter without thinking twice,” Swindle said. “I bet they’re sure gonna appreciate you dying nobly on their behalf instead. Except for how you’ll be dead so they won’t know about what you did, they’re just gonna know they’re all getting slagged or sold off to the slave markets.”

“And I’m meant to imagine that Megatron would avoid doing those things if I agreed to help him?” Prime said.

“Sure, why not,” Swindle said.

“What?”

“You think Megatron cares one way or another?” Swindle said. “Thundercracker doesn’t like it when we hit those places where humans make their sparklings, he flipped out over it completely the one time we did it by accident. He was yelling about it for an hour. Megatron came out of the command center and told him to cool his jets and gave him penalty duty for a month, but then he also told Soundwave to reprogram the basic mission parameters so we don’t hit them anymore. And that’s for Thundercracker. I’m telling you, if you put something on the table, he’ll look at it.”

“Absolutely not,” Prime said flatly.

Swindle shrugged, philosophically. “Okay, suit yourself. Tell me anytime if you change your mind.”

Prime didn’t say another word for the entire rest of the trip down, which meant if nothing else, Swindle had tied up his processor with the idea instead of him coming up with ways to mess around with Megatron’s plan. That chalked up one big point in the victory column, far as Swindle was concerned.

They made it down to the shonto game without any problems. The other players all looked up at Optimus in silence, and all their bodyguards got twitchy, but Swindle had lost enough money that they didn’t instantly make a fuss. But this time, he didn’t lose: he won three rounds in a row, modestly, which he figured was enough to make clear to the smart ones that actually he could’ve been winning the whole time, without pissing off any of the dumb ones. He was hoping that the combination would go a way to getting him somewhere, if there was somewhere to get, which he was even more hoping there was, since otherwise he was screwed.

It worked out as well as he could’ve hoped. After the game, Tarax’s boss Lixlix managed to subtly get him off to a side for a private chat. “Very lucky lately, my friend,” she said. “Two kinds: one runs out, one you make. Maybe yours is made.”

“Hey, I try,” Swindle said. “And I try to make luck for my buddies, too.”

She nodded. “Yes. I hear this about you.” She jerked her chin towards Optimus. “Maybe they make luck for you too?”

“When they have a chance,” Swindle said, and she nodded.

“Maybe I have a chance to give them,” she said, and slipped him a set of coordinates on a low frequency channel.

It took an hour to get there, through a long and completely deserted set of tunnels and chambers on the processing levels: obviously abandoned when the vein this way gave out. But as Swindle and Optimus got closer, Optimus said, “There are increasing vibrations and heat in this direction. We are coming to another active portion of the mine.”

“That don’t make sense,” Swindle said. “They pay enough for fresh workers that scavengers came thirty light years to make the sale. Why would they have two separate mines running, or good as?”

But he heard the noise too, soon enough, and by the time he got to the coordinates and another Sedragna met him, he was hearing more than that, he was hearing cheering, a loud and roaring crowd, and then she took them through a narrow tunnel into a small chamber overlooking a massive, carved-out pit, the sides lined with tiers and tiers of seats around an arena floor, and on it a big-ass Frentian dragon was doing its best to rip apart an even bigger nine-armed thing that Swindle didn’t even recognize.

Lixlix was waiting. She gestured to the pit, and they stood watching until suddenly the nine-armed thing managed to get two limbs wrapped around the dragon’s neck and strangled it.

One look around showed Swindle entire stacks of kilo trinchips getting swapped around just in the stands around him. Lixlix said, “Three months, usually, before we invite anyone into the arena. Not worth letting in stupid newlies. But maybe worth letting in you. Maybe worth… helping you sponsor a fighter. Yes?”

She nodded towards Prime—who predictably was standing on the edge of their balcony with a stern frown on his face, saying, “This is a grotesque waste of sentient life.”

“It sure is,” Swindle said, glaring at him. “Yeah,” he said to Lixlix. “Let’s do it.”

Optimus turned, still stern.”I will not participate in this—”

“Yeah, yeah, dump it in your waste pan,” Swindle said. “Not him,” he added to Lixlix. “But don’t worry. I got just the mech for the job.”

#

He thought it was such an obvious slam-dunk that he didn’t even slow down going into the tunnels. He half expected Megatron to tell him good job, except apparently for no reason he could see, Megatron suddenly got pissy over the idea of fighting, like it was beneath him to do it for an audience or something. “One score is all we need,” Swindle said desperately, backing up, his hands raised. “I swear, Megatron, one fight, that’s it. I’m gonna take the entire arena. I can back it with the refined trinium and make every bet there is, cause none of them are gonna know I’ve made the others, I’ll lay the escrow with a dozen different bookies, and after we rake in the trinchips, we don’t even gotta move any of the trinium itself to get the money. We can just keep it. Mixmaster’s got ideas—”

“I don’t care what his ideas are!” Megatron snarled, taking a looming step; apparently even the prospect of keeping fifty million galcreds’ worth of trinium wasn’t enough to make him feel better.

Swindle gulped. “I tried to get him to do it!” he squeaked, jerking his head towards Optimus, which wasn’t actually true, but it was good enough to prompt Prime to throw his two cents in.

“You are proposing to murder an innocent being in order to obtain funds,” Optimus said. “Not only will I not do it, I will not stand by while—”

“While I do the dirty work?” Megatron said, cutting him off savagely. “Don’t make me laugh. That’s what Autobots are best at. Make your bets,” he snapped at Swindle. “And get me my cannon.”

“They—they won’t let you have energy weapons in the—” Swindle said, wobbly.

“Of course not,” Megatron said. “But you’re going to get it and have it ready and waiting. We’re making our move as soon as we have the funds.”

“What, straight out of the arena?” Swindle said in confusion, wondering what Megatron was thinking. The whole area around there was abandoned and probably steaming with gas. Not that he was gonna say so, since Megatron’s optics were brightening again.

Fortunately, he had somebody along to piss Megatron off so he didn’t have to. “Megatron, the area around the arena is abandoned,” Optimus said. “The tunnels on the higher levels will be full of glixin gas and impassable.”

“How lucky for me I’ve got you here to tell me these things, Prime,” Megatron said. “Why don’t you assume I’ve forgotten ten thousand things more about trinium mining than you’ve ever known, and stop wasting my time. You’ll be with Swindle. As soon as he has the credits in his hands, you get him back to Soundwave, and then get Soundwave to the command center. You’ll collect the rest of the Decepticons along the way, as well as your pathetic rejects. And you make sure the Constructicons are in the stands during the match,” he added to Swindle.

“No,” Prime said flatly. “Do you think I’m a fool, Megatron? You’re planning to set off a glixin explosion in those tunnels deliberately, aren’t you? You’ll get the distraction you need, but everyone in that arena will die, along with countless others—”

“Shut up,” Megatron said. “Everyone in that arena will be there hoping to watch me die for their entertainment. If I did want to slaughter them all, I would. But unfortunately, I need them as much as I need you, and I’m equally happy about it. You’ll do as you’re told.”

“I will not,” Optimus said stubbornly. “What are you planning to do with those people, if not kill them? How many of them will you crush to achieve our escape?”

“What the hell is your problem!” Swindle snapped at him. “They’re all gonna die anyway! We’re not gonna bust out the entire goddamn mine!”

The second the words came out of his mouth, Swindle froze as his strategy unit caught up to his mouth, hideously too late. There was an icy, flat silence behind him, and Prime was staring at him, and then lifting his head to stare at Megatron instead.

“You don’t want to escape,” Optimus said slowly. “You want to seize control of the mine yourself.”

Oh, frag Vector Sigma and all the Primes. Right. Yes. Of course Megatron wanted a trinium mine of his very own. And he needed half a billion enercreds in liquid currency to hack the entire central database, not just deactivate their codes. Probably Soundwave had already run the hyperspace-based processing time it would take to break the encryption, and the Oortplon hive he’d used for the job was just waiting for the payment to release the quantum spacetime pocket and hand him the results. As soon as he was in the command center with the actual machine he needed to hack—and Megatron couldn’t get him there, because he and Devastator were going to be down in the depths making everyone else around fall in line for the big revolution. Which was why he needed Optimus Prime.

Megatron ground his jaw audibly. “Your insight amazes me,” he snarled. “Yes. I’m taking the mine. And you’re going to help me, or else I’ll leave your Autobots’ slave collars active, and they’ll all be fried when the mine owners trigger the defensive crash sequence.”

“You’ll turn this mine into a slaughterhouse,” Optimus said.

“It’s already a slaughterhouse,” Megatron said. “Next you’ll complain to me that the overseers will be killed and the owners will be impoverished. If you have a rational objection, make it, otherwise stop bleating.”

Prime was totally silent for maybe ten solid minutes, enough for Swindle’s early warning systems to start aggressively reminding him of all the reasons why standing around in a trinium tunnel was a bad idea. Finally Prime said, low, “If I could believe that you really were going to free the slaves here—”

“I’m more likely to accomplish it than you are,” Megatron sneered.

Prime paused and then said abruptly, “Very well, Megatron. So long as your goal is to disable the control network and lead the slaves in a takeover, we’ll stand with you. However, you will have Soundwave release the other Autobots’ slave collars first, before he releases you. Otherwise, I’ll stop him doing anything else whatsoever. And if he attempts to reactivate the control systems once you’ve secured the mine, we will stop him.”

“Do you think I’m an idiot?” Megatron said. “Release you all, while I’m still in a slave collar, and then you’ll just let me finish taking a trinium mine?”

“A trinium mine with no one to work it isn’t going to do you a lot of good,” Optimus said. “So you have my word that as long as you keep your word to release all the slaves, we will let you have it. I’m prepared to take that risk to gain their freedom.”

Megatron’s optics narrowed. “Fine,” he grated out after a moment. “Now get out of here, and get ready for the operation. How soon can you be ready?” he demanded, turning to Swindle.

“Five nights,” Swindle said. “Lixlix is setting up the fight, getting the word out—”

“You have four,” Megatron said, turning away, which was what Swindle really needed, so that was good.

None of the rest was. Being in the middle of a violent mine slave rebellion was not Swindle’s idea of a good time. Optimus might not realize just how right he was about the whole slaughterhouse thing, but Swindle sure did. No way wasn’t this mine crammed full of countermeasures for just this kind of thing. This was going to be very, very bad.

#

Optimus stayed silent the whole way upstairs. When they got there, he briefly told Soundwave that he knew the plan now, outlined the conditions he’d given Megatron, and then went off to a corner, where Bumblebee followed to try to talk him out of letting Megatron have a trinium mine. So at least one Autobot around here had a working logic unit.

“Optimus, you can’t trust him,” Bumblebee said desperately.

“I don’t, Bumblebee,” Optimus said. “But Megatron’s plan offers the only hope I can see of freeing all the imprisoned sentient beings in this mine. We will be vigilant in case of any betrayal, but we have to try.”

“But—if you let Megatron take the mine, he’ll build all the Decepticons a set of trinium armor and make them invulnerable!” Bumblebee said even more desperately.

“You aren’t unreasonable to fear what evil Megatron might do with a trinium supply,” Optimus said. “But if we were to let our enmity stand in the way of accomplishing a great good, we would be committing an evil ourselves. We cannot pass up this chance. I was reluctantly prepared to simply escape because I could see no way for us to liberate this mine and its prisoners. But with Megatron and Devastator and Soundwave on our side, we very well may be able to do it. The risk will still be great, both to our lives and our cause. But we have to try. And if Megatron does attempt to betray us and enslave the miners himself, we will do our best to get in his way.”

Which of course Megatron was gonna do, and then Swindle would be right in the middle of two firefights at once. Right, okay. That wasn’t gonna happen if he could help it.

“Hey, I told you, didn’t I?” Swindle said to Prime, later that day, after Bumblebee had sulked off to his sorting shift.

“What?” Optimus said.

“Oh, come on, you think Megatron wants to free a bunch of slaves?” Swindle said. “Of course he was planning to have Soundwave lock everyone back down five seconds after he got hold of the place. Instead he’s gonna let them all go, just because you made that your bottom line. And that’s for one operation. Still don’t believe me he’d make you a deal you could live with? Or was that just scrap you were feeding Bumblebee back then, about not letting enmity stand in the way or whatever. If you just got down off your plinth and made Megatron put a leash on it, you’d probably save billions of sentient beings.”

Optimus stared at him. “Do you expect me to believe that Megatron was sincere in that promise?”

“Who cares about sincere,” Swindle said. “You’re so hung up on this idea that you gotta be able to trust him. Well, sorry, you can’t. Doesn’t mean you can’t make a deal. You made one today. It’ll stay good up until you’re not giving Megatron anything he wants anymore. So give him something else he wants. Here, how about this: if he helps you get all the slaves off the planet, you’ll help him hold the place.”

“Hold it—”

“Against the freaking merc army that the owners are gonna send to take their mine back,” Swindle said. “Soon as we take it, Soundwave will put out a long-range call for backup, but it’s gonna be tight. You and your team stick around and fight with us, that’s gonna be worth a lot more to Megatron than hanging on to a bunch of squishy slaves. You get the idea yet? Megatron doesn’t trust you any more than you do him. He knows you want him to go down, so he’s gonna ditch you soon as he’s got what he wants out of you. But he knows your word is good. So keep giving him your word to do the next thing before the first one finishes, and he’ll stick with you. Am I getting through here?”

It turned out that he was, because Prime sat there for a while and then said, “Very well. Tell Megatron that in exchange for his assistance in helping all the slaves fully escape offworld, we will help him hold off the mine owners, at least until Decepticon reinforcements arrive.”

Swindle felt pretty pleased with himself for about thirty seconds and then realized that he’d just made a deal for Megatron that Megatron might not want. Swindle thought it was a good deal, but what the hell did he know, maybe Starscream and the rest of the crew were already halfway here. And he couldn’t go talk to Megatron until the next morning, which meant a whole cycle fretting, and then he had to go talk to him. At least Megatron still needed him to make the bets, but Swindle was still cringing when he told him.

Megatron stared at him. “Prime offered to help us hold the mine?” he said flatly.

“He’s nuts about getting all these flesh things off the planet and safe, you know him,” Swindle said evasively.

Megatron was starting to get a dangerous glint in his eye. “What aren’t you telling me, Swindle,” he said softly, murderously.

Oh scrap. Swindle groped wildly for the first idea that came to mind and blurted, “Nothing! Prime just told Bumblebee they didn’t have a chance to save the slaves without you, he was all on about how you were their only hope. Bee got all upset about it, too. He even said—” Swindle shut his mouth with a snap.

“He said what?” Megatron said.

“I don’t want to piss you off,” Swindle said. “Bee was just shooting off at the mouth, that’s all. It don’t mean anything.”

“Out with it.”

“He just… he thinks… Prime’s into you,” Swindle said, very fast. Hell, maybe the idea would tie Megatron up the way it had tied Prime up the other way around.

It did: Megatron just stood there totally blanked like his emotional coprocessor had no clue what reaction to generate. “Have you fried your logic circuitry?” he said finally.

“Hey, I didn’t think it!” Swindle said, which was very definitely true. “But Bee went on about how Prime was being dumb, jumping on the chance that maybe you meant it about letting the slaves go, and how he was always agreeing to make deals with you, no matter how many times you go back on it,” he threw in, because that was even true, come to think of it.

Megatron looked even more confused as his databanks handed him that piece of external confirmation. “That’s the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever heard.”

But his emotional register had gone from enraged to doubtful. Swindle spread his hands wide and gave a helpless shrug, trying hard not to quiver with relief. “Look, I just said I’d take you the offer. It sounded like a good deal to me, not that I’m a great judge or anything—”

“Of course it’s a good deal!” Megatron snapped. “This mine is the property of the Solaris Confederation. They’ll be here in force in three days.”

Swindle almost shrieked out something extremely unhealthy, like, have you lost your fragging mind, and just managed to gulp the panic temporarily down. “Sounds like we could use the help, then,” he said, trying hard not to squeak.

Megatron just stood there brooding for at least fifty end-to-end processor cycles, trying to create a rational model in his brain for whatever Prime was doing. Finally his primary motivator kicked in, preempted the whole train of thought for his own practical goal, and he snapped, “Tell him he has a deal. And that he’s an idiot.” Then he turned and stomped out, obviously still seething, and headed back down to the mining levels.

Swindle crept shakily back up to the sorting station, desperately trying to think through cycling panic. This was even worse than he’d imagined. He really had no idea what Megatron was thinking. The freaking Solaris Confederation. They’d send a slagging dreadnought and blast them all from orbit in fifteen minutes. Even if Soundwave got hold of the planetary defense satellite net, they couldn’t hold out against that kind of firepower for long, whether Prime and his buddies pitched in or not. It was insane. Maybe trinium exposure was starting to mess with Megatron’s strategic unit or something. And the chance that Megatron was gonna change his mind was nil. Not once he’d dug into a plan this far. He’d just bull his way through somehow and leave a heap of smoking rubble behind him.

A heap that was going to include Swindle’s corpse if he didn’t figure a way out for him.

#

He was so busy panicking for the next two days that he didn’t notice anything weird going on, up until the prelim rounds. Those had been top on his list of problems until Megatron had just shoved a much bigger problem ahead of them: okay so maybe it wasn’t just one fight to get somebody into the main ring, that made sense, right? Once it had become clear to him that Megatron didn’t like the idea, Swindle had figured he would let Megatron get used to it for a little while before he introduced the concept of the opening rounds which didn’t really count since they weren’t life or death or anything.

Still he strategically took Prime down with him when it was time to break the news, because for one thing Megatron probably wouldn't waste being mad at him while Optimus was around, and for another, if he did, there was maybe some chance that Prime would stop it if Megatron tried to rip his arms off. The guy saved lizards, after all.  

That turned out to be a great plan in one way, which was when Megatron had him up in the air choking with corrosive gas coming in his intakes, Prime reached up and caught Megatron’s arm, and Megatron absolutely did drop him and turn on Optimus, and then Prime said, “If you don’t want to fight, you shouldn’t have to. We’ll find another way.”

Which was so obviously stupid—what did Optimus think Swindle had been doing all this time, counting his clock cycles?—that Megatron did stop being mad at Swindle and got mad at Prime instead. “Try not to be a moron,” he hissed, and then dumped Swindle to the ground and looked down at him coldly. “Two rounds, tomorrow, third shift.”

“Yeah, okay,” Swindle croaked out. “And—you know, boss, we want the odds long, so—”

“Shut up, Swindle, before I change my mind about disassembling you into spare parts,” Megatron said.

He wasn’t any happier the next day when they came to get him, so Swindle didn’t dare give him any last minute hints. He was pretty worried that Megatron was so mad he’d just slag the ring and everyone in it just to blow off some steam, and then forget about decent odds; no one would even take a bet against him at all if he took the lid off. But on the way to the ring, Optimus popped out with, “I’m sorry.”

Swindle had been trudging along glumly in their wake, not paying much attention to either of them, but that got him. I’m sorry? What the hell.

Megatron's reaction was about the same as his, with a side order of suspicion: he eyed Prime sideways. “For what?”

“That you’re about to do this,” Prime said.

“If you’re about to start whimpering at me about finding some other way, spare me,” Megatron said. “I don’t care in the least about killing some miscellaneous pit fighter.”

“I know,” Optimus said. “That’s why I’m sorry. Because you don’t care.”

He sounded like he meant it, was the loopy thing. “Are you feeling sorry for me?” Megatron said, sounding fascinated. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Optimus, but I’m on the verge of winning this war.”

“I hadn’t noticed, actually, until recently,” Optimus said. “Because I saw so little worth in what you are winning that I couldn’t conceive it was your actual goal. And yes, I am sorry for you. To care is what gives our existence meaning. Even you do care about something—but as far as I can tell, only for the hollowness of victory. And that means your life is impoverished.”

Swindle gave some serious thought to making a break for it before Megatron reacted to that one, but apparently Prime was so far out into intergalactic space that Megatron didn’t actually get mad. Instead he went for a moment of silent astonishment, and then he suddenly snorted and said, “Tell me, Optimus, what do you think of shard pop?”

Prime paused and then said incredulously, “Are you actually proposing an equivalence between enjoying shard pop and caring for other sentient beings?”

“Oh, I’m not equipped to have that debate with you,” Megatron said. “But Rumble and Frenzy certainly are. I’ll make sure that once you get back to your sorting station, they’ll oblige you. At great length and volume.”

After a moment, Prime said dryly, “Well, under those circumstances, my life certainly would be impoverished by the inability to care for shard pop.”

Megatron actually laughed; probably it took him by surprise too, finding out Prime could crack a joke. “I don’t have regrets, Optimus. They’re pointless anyway. You on the other hand don’t seem to have goals. It’s hard to get anywhere if you don’t know where you’re going.”

“I like my company, and I like the road,” Optimus said.

“Will you still like it when it heads over a cliff?”

“At least I won’t have started at the bottom, if it comes to that. And I wouldn’t count us out yet if I were you.”

“I’ll wait until I have a trinium mine to do that. Why are you offering to help me get one, anyway?” Megatron made it sound casual, but Swindle nearly froze. If Prime blew his cover, without even meaning to—

But Optimus just said, calmly, “You’re not going to get a trinium mine, Megatron. Given the scale of this operation, there are only three possible players who could own it. Even if it’s the Ellortians—”

“It’s the Solaris Confederation,” Megatron snapped.

“Even better. At best you’ll hold it for as long as it takes for the dreadnought to get here.”

Yeah, no kidding. Of course, Megatron liked getting that analysis from Optimus about as much as he’d have liked getting it from Swindle. He ground his jaw and said through his teeth, “Then why are you planning to stick around?”

“However little chance you’ve got of hanging on to it, you’ve got more with us than without us—”

“All the more reason for you to leave—”

“—which is why you’ll keep your word and actually let the slaves go,” Prime finished. “Otherwise, you’d reactivate all their slave collars as soon as you’d secured the mine controls.”

Megatron’s optics narrowed. “And when the dreadnought shows up, you’ll make a quick exit?”

“We’ll stick it out as long as you do,” Optimus said. “I’m pretty sure you know you can trust me, Megatron. I don’t suppose it’s ever occurred to you to keep your word on principle?”

“Not once,” Megatron said coolly.

Prime sighed faintly.

“And you should know better than to count me out,” Megatron added. “Don’t be so sure I’m not coming out of this on top.”

Optimus gave a small huff. “Megatron, I won’t count you out until I’ve seen your disassembled components go into a smelter with my own eyes, and even then I’ll probably spend the rest of my existence waiting for you to somehow show up again.” Megatron eyed him sidelong and Swindle had to choke down a half-hysterical giggle: Prime wasn’t blowing his cover, he was throwing on a couple layers of camouflage on top of it.

“I’d take any bet you want to offer that you’ll make it out of here,” Prime went on. “And that there won’t be much of a mine left after you’re through, for that matter—and I’m even more happy to help you with that, now I know it’s owned by the Solaris Confederation. But your appetite’s always bigger than your cannon. Even if that is saying something.”

“I’m flattered,” Megatron growled. Swindle nearly giggled again: Megatron was trying to sound pissed and not managing it, so he halfway meant it.

Anyway, that broke his bad mood before they got to the ring, and then it turned out that no hints had been necessary: Megatron knew the score better than a bookie. He made it look like he won his first prelim on serious effort, when he could’ve crushed the Lonamin Scrambler with one hand, and the second one, he made it look like he’d squeaked under a killing blow—the Morarch’s best swing would’ve maybe scratched his paint a little—on a desperate and lucky slide, and he even came out of the ring limping a little for effect. He hadn’t washed off his last layer of coraslime, and it was grimy with dust and grit from the walk. The whole performance said loud and clear that he was a decently strong miner without much fighting experience who knew the odds were he only had a year in the tunnels in him, and he was willing to throw it in the ring instead and take a shot. Somebody who could put up a pretty good show for one of the top rankers, keep the stands happy without being a serious threat to win. It was as sweet a setup for a fighting con as Swindle had ever seen. He had a date for the main fight and seventy thousand trinchips of bets before Megatron even left the ring.

Optimus was frowning disapprovingly the whole time, but the kind of disapproval changed during the fighting. It wasn’t like he didn’t know that Megatron could’ve won the fights with one arm removed, so he obviously realized that Megatron was playing the crowd, but not even he could’ve been prissy about that, Swindle figured, and he wasn’t. On their way back, he kept looking over at Megatron, and right when they reached the junction where Megatron had to split off and go down, Optimus abruptly said, “You’ve fought in this kind of ring before.”

Megatron snorted as he hauled up the panel covering the access shaft, overriding the lock by, well, just busting it completely off. “I spent a hundred years as a gladiator in the Arena at Tarn, Prime. This is energon driblets by comparison.”

“Oh, no wonder,” Swindle said under his breath. Also, slag, a hundred years? He was pretty sure gladiators in the Arena had mostly lasted three, if they were lucky. He wondered why Megatron had been so pissed at having to fight. Maybe he’d gotten sick of it or something.

But Prime said, sounding confused, “But gladiators were—” He stopped.

Megatron paused in the mouth of the shaft and turned slowly around, his eyes glowing red enough to reflect from the faceted stone walls. “Go on,” Megatron said softly, viciously.

Prime was staring at him. “Disposables,” he crackled out.

“That’s right,” Megatron said. He was smiling. Swindle backed away, trying to plaster himself into a nook in the wall as Megatron took a step towards Optimus. “You’ve been losing the war to a disposable. Your world has been crushed by a disposable. Why, Optimus, you seem surprised! Did you think I learned how to mine trinium in a simulator?”

He laughed with a sharp edge to it. Prime was staring at him with his optics pulsing faintly like his brain had gone into diagnostic mode. Megatron just smirked at him. “My turn to be sorry for you now, I think. It must be quite distressing to realize that a Prime has been losing spectacularly to a mech who isn’t even legally sentient. But then, what you Autobots mean by that word is anything small and pathetic and weak that needs your help. It doesn’t apply to mechs that you need to dig up your mines or build your cities or fight your wars. And certainly not to anyone that might threaten you.”

He turned around and stalked to the shaft and disappeared into it, going down. Prime just stood there without moving, trembling faintly, for a long time after he was gone.

#

“Did you—know?” Prime said: the first thing he got out, maybe halfway back to the sorting station.

“That Megatron was a miner?” Swindle said, distracted; most of his brain was still desperately cycling around in loops from Megatron on one hand and a Solaris dreadnought on the other. What the hell was he gonna do? If he tried to take off before the match and screwed the op, Megatron would for sure track him down and slag him. Onslaught wouldn’t lift a diode, either, not if Swindle pulled a stunt that bad. He was useful, but he wasn’t that useful. Somebody else could be modded to fill in for Bruticus. But if he didn’t take off before the match, there was no way to get off before the dreadnought showed, and— “Nah, but it all makes sense. I remember there was a big trinium mine deal that went south not that long before the revolution started. A lot of big players lost a lot of money. Way out of my league, but I heard whispers about it. They had the whole thing set up on Ferthia Minor, sweetheart deal with the indigenous fleshlings. We ran the Ferthians off, the locals gave us the mine. Shoulda worked out great. But it was only going for maybe a hundred years, and then it all got shut down and classified and the investors lost everything. They howled for hearings, but the Senate basically told them to go slag themselves. Something big went wrong. Guess it was Megatron.”

Optimus was listening, but when Swindle finished, he said, “No. Did you know? About disposables?”

“Huh? Know what?” Swindle said confused.

“That they were—sentient,” Optimus said.

Swindle shrugged. “Yeah? Half the Cons are disposables. Vortex and Brawl were frontline troops. Most of the Seekers, too—Screamer and his trine were the only officers who flipped, apart from Shockwave and Onslaught. The Constructicons were a demolition unit. You didn’t know?”

Prime sucked in a shuddering breath. “They’re all—? But— When? When did you learn—”

“I dunno, after I joined up?” Swindle said. “They don’t talk about it much, but you hear enough stuff to get the picture.”

“The picture.”

“Yeah,” Swindle said. “I mean, that’s how the rebellion got started. Megatron and Soundwave figured out how to bust up the blocks between disposables’ personality units and motivators, so they didn’t just follow orders anymore—”

“Blocks?”

“Sure, why’d you think disposables did all the scutwork? And like a million Seekers just flew right into enemy fire in the Ferthian war—”

“I thought—” Prime said, crackling with static. “I thought—”

“That they were all drones or something?”

“You didn’t?”

Swindle shrugged. “To be honest, I never really thought about it before the war. What difference did it make? They were doing the work, and I didn’t have to. Not my problem. You didn’t even find out after you became Prime?”

“But—Our records from the Senate—Teletran One’s archives,” Optimus said. “All military Decepticons are classified as—officers—” His voice wobbled up and down. “The miners—I was told the mining drones—were hacked by—”

“Yeah, well, they were, just they’d been hacked at the creation factory to start with,” Swindle said. “No offense, but I really don’t get how you didn’t know. Didn’t you ever, I dunno, recognize any of them? Heck, wasn’t Ironhide a mining supervisor?” Then the thought occurred to him. “Hey, how’d he make it out, anyway? First thing most of the miners did was trash their supervisors.”

“He—he—cared for his mining drones,” Optimus creaked out. “He personally maintained them—and refused to—to routinely scrap them—for new models. He felt they should be treated with respect—"

“Oh, like pets or something? So they gave him a pass when they headed for the surface? Smart guy,” Swindle said, nodding and tapping a finger to his helm. Prime flinched. “Now I think about it, I guess it does make sense. All the Cons except the Seekers got a rebuild pretty much first thing, for the antigrav. I sure can’t tell that Astrotrain used to be a long-range hauler, and I used to see those going by my office ten times a day. And yeah, you ran a dockyard, but you can’t tell that the Bruiser class ’Cons all used to be—”

Prime dragged in a harsh grinding intake, stopped short, and sat down in the corridor. He put his head in his hands and just sat there processing for half an hour. Swindle tried to nudge him along a couple of times: no use. Which left him standing around with too much time to just stand there and process uselessly himself about how he was gonna die soon, and he was starting to think about going on alone when Prime finally took in another noisy intake and pushed himself up. “Proceed,” he said, very quietly.

He didn’t talk the rest of the way up, and once they made it to the sorting station, he went over to his usual corner and just sat down again, slumped. Bumblebee trotted over and Swindle overheard him saying, “Optimus, listen, I know you want to set everyone down here free, but you gotta see we can’t trust the Decepticons—”

He stopped, because Optimus held up a hand sharply and said, “Don’t,” and his voice was thrumming with something just short of rage. He almost sounded like Megatron.

Swindle paused as his desperate logic unit grabbed onto that and linked it up with the last few days of data, and generated a completely slagging insane idea that was still the only one he had.

#

“Listen, Boss, I gotta tell you, maybe, uh, maybe you want to rethink using the Bots,” Swindle said the next day, over the sound of the drilling. “Or at least Prime.”

Megatron paused and turned around with eyes flaring. Swindle had come down on his own, he hadn’t even told Soundwave he was going, and he backed up hurriedly when Megatron took a couple steps towards him. “What’s that?” Megatron said silkily.

“He’s defective!” Swindle blurted. “I mean, really defective. He didn’t know.”

“Didn’t know what?”

“That disposables weren’t really, you know, drones. He said some scrap about Teletran One’s archives being full of junk the Senate put in there, like all the Seekers were officers and miners were just drones that you hacked, that kinda thing. He got all weepy about it. And then he practically took Bee’s head off for trying to slag on you again. He actually said something about how your cause was just.” Oh, he hoped that wasn’t too much. “I don’t know, I think maybe Bee’s right and he’s glitched about you.”

Megatron paused with a totally blank expression as he loaded that data in, and Swindle held on to every one of his random number generators with his intakes suspended, hoping. But it didn’t even take that long, probably because Megatron had already spent all that processor time trying to make some kind of rational model out of what Swindle had been telling him about Prime—which this new piece of info handled just fine.

“So,” Megatron said thoughtfully, his optics glowing, “the last squirming Senators lied to their own precious new Prime before I finished exterminating them. I should have considered…if he’s sincere about this mania for protecting all sentients…” He turned abruptly to Swindle. “Stop bleating like an idiot. This isn’t a problem. It’s an opportunity. Prime’s gettable.”

Swindle fought hard not to whirr in relief. Megatron was going for it. “Gettable, boss?” he said, and it wasn’t an effort to make his voice go wavering up and down like he was incredulous.

“That’s right,” Megatron said. “And you’re going to help me get him.” He brooded for a moment, then said, “Arrange another match. A reasonable challenge—are there any Myrkidan gladiators?”

“Yeah,” Swindle said. “But we won’t be able to rake in the cash in the big ring if people see you fight for real—”

“Yes, we will,” Megatron said. “Make it private, and invite in a handful of key people who control significant fractions of mine personnel. Let them make their own bets alongside us. We’ll need voluntary workers for the short term if we’re letting the slaves go: so, we’ll make their bosses rich. And make certain that Optimus knows that I’m fighting the extra round to compensate for freeing his precious slaves.”

“Anything you say, boss,” Swindle said.

He shot back upstairs high on relief; he almost didn’t believe it had worked that well, but Megatron wasn’t just taking a quick and easy shot, he had absolutely just put his whole processor on the job of getting Optimus Prime. Which meant he was going to be going overtime to give Prime reasons to be gotten, and Swindle could more than take it from there, given that they could barely see each other for a few minutes at a time in here. And yeah, it wasn’t gonna last long afterwards, but Swindle didn’t need it to last, he needed Prime to hop on board just long enough to persuade Megatron to let go of his freaking suicidal—for the rest of them—plan to take on the Solaris Confederation.

Megatron’s angle was brilliant, too, and Prime ate it right up. “Why is Megatron fighting another preliminary match?” he asked Swindle the next day, frowning as he looked around at the very small audience. “The main one is already scheduled. Surely he is increasing the risk that his capabilities will be recognized.”

“Yeah, but we want these guys to recognize them,” Swindle said. “These guys are all horizontal players. Lixlix has five smelters. Maddarlo has ten cleaners—what, you still don’t get it? If we’re letting the slaves go for real, we’re gonna need these guys and their crews to help work the place. So Megatron’s gotta get them on board.” Swindle shrugged when Optimus stared at him. “You can’t get something for nothing, y’know. Somebody’s gotta pay the bills.”

Prime seriously watched the whole match with his fists clenched like he was scared Megatron might hurt himself. Loopy. Fantastic, but loopy. It was a tough match for real too; the Myrkidan was brutal, and his claws and poison-injector stingers were tougher than durasteel. Megatron took half a dozen hits in a row from the stingers, and if Swindle hadn’t known it was a setup, he would’ve been sure Megatron was about to go down any second from pretty much the first one and right up until the Myrkidan closed in for the kill and Megatron suddenly shifted, grabbed the already-spent stingers to get the solid grip that was almost impossible to get on a Myrkidan, and literally tore him in half.

Everybody in the stands quit chatting when he did it: they were all smart enough that they all got that the whole thing had been a beautiful play, including the prelim fights yesterday. They all looked over at Swindle. He spread his hands. “Yeah, so, I think it’s time you guys meet my boss,” he said, and he flipped open the gate to the ring and let Megatron stalk into the box.

“Allow me to introduce Lord Megatron, ruler of Cybertron,” Swindle said, grandly. “He’s not really here to fight an arena match, in case you hadn’t realized. But we could really use a few good partners. In a nice, gently-used trinium mine.”

They all ate it right up. There was a lot of value in a dramatic reveal, and anyway this was a score on a scale none of these guys could even imagine going after themselves. Also, Swindle implied heavily that the whole thing including them getting caught in the first place had been a setup, suggesting that there was a big army of cybernetic warriors ready to come sailing in to hold the mine once they’d gotten it. Because otherwise they’d all have called Megatron crazy and run away instead of signing on.

Optimus was watching Megatron the whole time, paying zero attention to the horse-trading that went on, until finally they were done and on the way back, and he said, “You’re injured,” like he’d for-real assigned a negative value to seeing Megatron get hurt.

Megatron glanced down at the stinger punctures. He’d controlled the whole fight so tightly that they’d all hit in soft joints: painful as a neural lancer, but fast for self-repair to clean up. He shrugged. “I’ll manage. It’s only pain.”

“It’ll be worse than that if the glixin penetrates your system,” Prime said.

“I’ll just need another layer of coraslime,” Megatron said dismissively.

“In puncture wounds?”

Megatron paused and looked at him. “Would you like to know how I made it out of the mines the first time, Optimus?” he said softly. “A load-bearing strut collapsed at the mouth of my unit’s tunnel. I was half buried and almost entirely cut off from the others and our supervisor. There was a small opening: I signaled to let them know I was functional. While I lay there, I heard the supervisor discussing the tunnel with his own superiors. The decision was made that the mine had become unstable in the area and digging it out was inadvisable. So they left me there. After I spent four weeks trapped and starving, I reached the maximum levels of pain processing and my system overloaded. It fried the block on my motivator. That’s how I got free. My definition of pain isn’t the same as yours.”

That was for sure. Prime was practically flinching the whole time Megatron talked, like it hurt him just to hear the sob story. But even when it was over, he asked for more. “How…did you end up in the Arena?”

Megatron shrugged. “After I collapsed the mine—” sure, of course he’d collapsed the entire mine, “—I hid aboard one of the retreating transports. It got me to Cybertron, but my career options were limited. A trash hauler I met while scrounging for oil told me about the Arena and how to get there.”

“How often did you have to fight?” Prime whispered.

“As often as I wanted to eat,” Megatron said.

Prime trudged back to the sorting station behind Swindle in complete dejected silence, practically overheating on pity and guilt, and went back to his corner. Swindle figured letting him stew for a while was the best thing to do: his processor was probably hung up on it and looping. He’d drive himself halfway there. All in all, Swindle felt pretty satisfied with how things were going when he headed off to his shift. It was a good feeling. A good feeling that lasted him his whole sorting run, right up until he came back into the rest chamber, ready to nudge Prime along a little more, and discovered he was gone.

“Where’d he go?” Swindle demanded, a little panicky.

Soundwave said briefly, “Megatron requires replacement flexsteel for damaged joints.”

“Says who?” Swindle said.

“Optimus Prime,” Soundwave said, so Prime had seriously just up and gone to get a batch of flexsteel that Megatron didn’t even need, and for sure he was gonna take it to Megatron anyway, and if Swindle got unlucky and they talked to each other for oh, thirty astroseconds, that was the end of his plan and also more or less his existence.

“I better go after him,” he said hurriedly.”The last thing we need is for him to get picked up on a patrol now.”

But Prime had already been to Hook and gone again. Swindle got all the way back down to the mining level before he despairingly heard Prime saying up ahead, “Just let me. It’s not going to do you any good to leave that damage unrepaired.”

They were alone in the rest area; everyone else who might have been using it had cleared out, sensibly. When Swindle peeked trembling around the corner, Megatron was holding out one of his arms—he looked faintly amused—and was letting Optimus carefully pick out the punctured flexsteel so he could swap in a new piece. Great, what a fucking adorable picture, but the second they started talking—

Except that would’ve clearly been much too generous of the universe. Megatron didn’t start talking. Instead he let Optimus finish fixing the whole joint, and then before Prime could move on to the next, he reached out and caught Optimus by the chin and—tilted his head up. Swindle had a moment of pure horror: Megatron was going to put the moves on Prime, and Prime was gonna flip out, and Megatron was going to realize that he’d been fed a line of synthetic energon, after he’d just humiliated himself to Prime, and he was gonna take Swindle apart by micrometers—

Swindle was so paralyzed with horror he couldn’t even burst in on them. He could only watch as Megatron leaned in, slow but with his intentions crystal clear, and Prime’s eyes widened, and his whole body locked up, and he—took down his faceplate.

Swindle had a weird moment of inconsistency, and by the time it cleared up, Megatron had Prime halfway down onto the berth and was kissing him, and Optimus was hanging on to his shoulder with one hand, and only one hand, because the other one was already groping for Megatron’s panel, for freaking Primus’ sake, like he was running so hot for it he couldn’t wait to get at what was behind there, and Megatron was revving up so fast his cooling system was roaring at a hundred decibels over normal.

Swindle kept watching at first because he was so slagging confused, and then he kept watching because sweet steel Cybertron this was hot, and guys on both sides were gonna pay a fortune to get even a slice of this footage, which he immediately started feeding to archival memory as a pure sensory datastream with his own reactions separated out. By then, Optimus was completely sprawled back on the berth with his legs splayed on either side of Megatron’s hips and his optics glowing, already getting it so hard that his running lights were flickering through a spectrum while Megatron worked him over. Prime kept letting out small clicking noises of more lubricant getting dispensed, pushing up a little bit from the surface in time with the rhythm of Megatron’s pistons firing, like he was trying to stay with the spike each time. After a couple more minutes he even groaned and said faintly, “Wait—I need to adjust my internal routing,” just so he could keep getting it that hard.

Megatron had an expression on his face like somebody had poured a whole tank of ultra-refined down his throat and his sensory system couldn’t compose a stable reality model anymore. He was staring down at Prime almost a little confused, although he didn’t let it interfere with the agenda any, at least if the agenda was to spike Optimus Prime into the biggest overload of his entire existence.

Which happened in literally thirty-seven astroseconds more. Megatron paused, slid out—Swindle seized the opportunity to get a fantastically clear shot of Megatron’s spike, fully extended and glistening with lubricant, and Prime’s valve all juicy and warmed-up and putting the wide in wide-open, both shots at least twice as good as anything available on the covert market—and Megatron slid out and tilted Prime’s hips up to a slightly better angle and then managed to extend another inch and then went back into him in a single comprehensive thrust that had to have shoved his spike all the way down and right into the socket on the other end.

“Oh,” Optimus said sounding vaguely surprised, and shuddered all over, and Megatron said, “Open up,” and Prime made a faint incoherent noise and then obviously did open up and let Megatron have sensory system access, because then they both stiffened and their faces went blank as they fell straight into a feedback loop of pleasure that lasted a full half hour before they finally collapsed and Megatron fell forward onto Prime with a massive clang.

They both lay there inert for maybe another ten minutes before Megatron finally rolled off and straight onto the floor with another clang. He didn’t get up, just lay there staring up, optics barely half open. His whole panel was so drenched in high-density lubricant that there were blackened trails dripping away through the coraslime. After a minute he said, “I’m going to have to insist on doing that again on a regular basis.”

“How does daily sound?” Prime said drunkenly. His arm was hanging limp over the side like his motivator couldn’t even generate the basic impulse to get the joint back into neutral alignment.

“Just barely adequate,” Megatron said.

They lay there quietly for a bit longer, and then Prime said suddenly, “Megatron, what are we going to do?” in a vaguely alarmed way, like it had only just then occurred to him that maybe there might be a few complications if he popped his panel for his worst enemy.

Megatron stretched his arms out overhead, his joints whining faintly as he ran them through a quick maintenance routine, and put a hand behind his head and settled himself with a deep sigh, running his other palm down through the mess, wiping coraslime and lubricant from his body. It was more than a little hot. Even Prime’s wiped-out motivator had no trouble generating the impulse to turn his head to watch that. “I’m open to suggestions,” Megatron said blandly.

The shift-change buzzer went, and the airlocks to the tunnels started to cycle noisily. Swindle very regretfully quit recording—as soon as he could figure out a way to cover his trail, he was gonna make a killing on this datastream—and carefully edged very very quietly back from the door and headed back to the access shaft. Megatron and Optimus could absolutely take it from here. Swindle had total faith: the two of them were both nuts, but they still had functioning motivators, so no way weren’t they going to figure out some way to repeat that particular experience on a regular basis. And that meant that any minute now, they’d all be headed straight out of this slagging mine, off this planet, back to Cybertron, war over—wow, he was a freaking genius. He had just saved everybody’s lives. He had to figure out how to tell everyone what he’d done at some point. They oughta put up a statue to him or something.

Also, six smelters, he could really go for some coolant and a tall cube of energon right now.

#

Prime came back up a few hours later bright-eyed and shiny like he’d just come straight from a steam clean. They’d probably washed off together. Too bad Swindle hadn’t gotten that footage. “Hey, are you nuts?” Swindle asked him when he came in. “I tried to catch you at Hook’s level, but there were like six patrols in a row. Tell me you didn’t go all the way down to the tunnels like you were taking a walk through Iacon Plaza?”

He was expecting to get at least a few degrees of mortification out of him, but Prime just said placidly, “I reached Megatron without incident,” and then he turned to Soundwave and held out a coded chip and said, “I’ll need you to send this message to Prowl and Ultra Magnus as soon as you get satellite access. Omega Supreme can get them and the others here in time. I’m guessing that Starscream isn’t really in as much of a rush as he should be, and we’re going to need all the help we can get.”

“Uh, what?” Swindle said, staring at him.

“Uh, what?” Bumblebee said, staring too.

Soundwave didn’t say anything, but he tilted his head slightly, holding the chip between thumb and finger.

“We’re taking the mine together,” Optimus said.

“What do you mean together?” Swindle said, his voice rising involuntarily. “You mean you wanna get us all fried by the Solaris Confederation at once, that kind of together? I thought you were sane about it! There’s a dreadnought coming!”

Prime paused and looked down at him a little bemused; Bumblebee had his own mouth open, but he’d probably been about to say roughly the same thing, so instead he was doing a double-take over at him. Soundwave was studying him too, and Swindle had just enough processing left over from horror to recognize that he was possibly screwing himself, but then Prime said, “We plan to take the dreadnought as well,” and there wasn’t any processing left over after that.

“Optimus, are—are you—okay?” Bumblebee said, sounding faint.

“I am, Bumblebee. In fact, I’m better than I’ve been in a long time,” Optimus said, by which he clearly meant he’d been laid so hard that his value functions had all gotten screwed sideways. “We have an alliance.”

“Oh, is that what we have,” Swindle squawked out. “Yeah, sure, that’s one word for it.”

Prime glanced at him a bit puzzled, but Bumblebee was saying, “With the Decepticons? To take a dreadnought? Optimus—what do you think Megatron’s gonna use it for?”

“To secure an initial defense perimeter for the planet while we establish a sustainable mining protocol with the help of the Neraadi,” Optimus said. “With the supply of trinium currently available on-site, we’ll have enough to quickly reinforce Devastator, Omega Supreme, and several of the rest of us. Once that’s done, I believe we can negotiate an agreement with the Pelinor Federation to trade for additional defense satellites, and—”

“Yeah, they’ll come in real handy for once you start an all-out war against the Solaris Confederation, huh?” Swindle said in sarcasm.

Soundwave abruptly said, “Message will be transmitted,” and Optimus turned and nodded to him, and Swindle stared between them and realized— “No,” he said flatly. “No, no, no—”

“No what?” Bumblebee said, high-pitched himself.

“No your boss and ours have both lost their freaking minds!” Swindle yelled. “No we are starting an all-out war with the Solaris Confederation!”

Bumblebee turned a blankly horrified look up at Optimus, who reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. “The Solaris Confederation is responsible for enslaving more than a thousand once-independent star systems. They govern their conquered territorities through extreme cruelty and violent suppression, and singlehandedly support almost half the slave trade throughout this quadrant of the galaxy. Megatron has agreed to target their empire rather than independent systems, and to allow self-determination on the worlds we liberate—”

“Oh, Primus, I need to lie down,” Swindle said.

# End