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One.
The Praxian Enforcers’ lead tactician worked out of a renovated storage room. Stormwatch had filled his office with exotic furniture imported from offworld, and lined the walls with knickknacks acquired during a dozen tours of duty in far-off star systems, but the scuffed metal floors peeping from under his elaborately patterned, organic fiber rugs gave away the illusion.
Enforcer leadership had framed their decision as one of practicality. It was true that a warbuild, especially one of Stormwatch’s size and wingspan, could barely squeeze through the door of a standard officer’s cubby, but it would have been no significant trouble to merge a few offices to accommodate him. No, Stormwatch had been shunted off to this storage room because having a warbuild nearby put Enforcer leadership ill at ease.
Prowl, and the rest of the cold constructed Enforcer workforce – who resembled warbuilds more than their superiors liked – felt differently, but their opinions made little difference. Cold constructs did not get promoted.
Today’s training exercise involved only Prowl, his mentor, and a series of random-generated space battle simulations. The exercise had an additional layer. To practice multi-threaded processing, Stormwatch had spread out games and puzzles over every open space of his office floor, desk and chairs, and the dozen little ornamental side tables that dotted the room. Mentor and student were tasked with playing those physical games alongside running their digital analyses.
Stormwatch insisted that his tacticians keep some level of physical awareness while they worked, for their own safety. Perhaps it was an unnecessary skill in mechanisms who worked inside the most secure building in Praxus, but Stormwatch trained all his subordinates like they were going to war.
Edging carefully around the Scramble mat laid on the floor, Prowl bent to examine the Patrak board set atop a desk chair cushion, and made his move within the allowed ten nanoklicks.
Across the room, Stormwatch pinged Prowl his countermove alongside his dice roll on the Towers board, which was set up beside Stormwatch’s collection of aged and flavored energon. Just as Prowl sent his counterattack, an internal alarm pinged.
“Add another hundred analysis threads, please,” called Stormwatch. The distant, mild warmth of his voice always startled newcomers to the Central Precinct, but it matched the warbuild well. Everything about Stormwatch was mild; he had no great passions and an exceedingly even temper. He weathered both victory and defeat with equanimity. Prowl often wished he could claim the same.
The gentle Alitexian waltz playing from the desk console changed to a bright Comitite ballad. Prowl brought up the data net and identified the exact piece, then added this item to his ongoing data file. When this exercise ended, Stormwatch expected Prowl to provide a music tracklist.
The two tacticians moved from game to game, exchanging moves while the music played and periodically increasing their number of running analyses, until the alarm rang again and Stormwatch stopped instead of shifting to the next board.
Catching the question projected in Prowl’s EM field, the flight frame’s own field took a wry edge. “I’m close to my processor’s limit,” he explained.
Prowl was nowhere near his absolute computing capacity. Breaching the higher reaches, perhaps, but still easily within a comfortable range. Stormwatch was well aware of this, and with a rueful twist of his lip plates, he waved Prowl away. “Continue increasing the difficulty as long as you can, detective. Care for a drink?”
Prowl was not half the gourmand Stormwatch was, but he nodded, preoccupied with reallocating his processing capability toward his thousands of ongoing simulation threads.
With two cubes from his stash in hand, Stormwatch stepped gingerly through the limited clear space left in his office, mindful of his wings and the radar pod on his back.
Even after his discharge, he’d kept his Sentry alt mode with its surveillance, target detection, and tracking systems. Flying in the safe zone outside a battlefield, Stormwatch had once directed Cybertron’s armies using his sensors’ immediate, up-to-date feedback on troop placement and environmental conditions. He’d been among the army’s best. His service record – and his office walls – were plastered with awards and commendations.
A laugh broke into Prowl’s thoughts. “I can’t believe you still have enough computing power for extraneous meta,” Stormwatch said, coming within an arm’s length of Prowl, but no further. He held out Prowl’s cube using only the tips of his servos, and Prowl absently took it. Stormwatch’s servos dwarfed Prowl’s elegant digits – Stormwatch was larger than any warbuild flight frame barring shuttles.
Prowl took a sip, the triple-refined energon going down smooth. “Should I add more simulations, sir?”
Stormwatch hummed, the sound reverberating in Prowl’s sensor wings from his sheer size. “Let’s add another dimension to the exercise. You require more effort to parse social cues. Talk with me as we play.”
“What would you like to discuss?” Prowl, reminded by his chronometer, shuffled his cube to one hand and drew a slate from the deck dedicated to Praxus 11, wrinkling his brow at the result.
“I’ll increase the difficulty level further and require you to choose our topic,” answered Stormwatch.
Prowl allowed his irritation to spike his field. Conceding this round of cards, he turned to the Stones board, his optical sensors falling on Stormwatch’s merit award for the Foiejal campaign.
“Why come to Praxus?” he blurted out, remembering too late the indelicate associations attached.
Praxus had rejected Stormwatch in every possible way. Its streets and buildings were too small for his towering size, its population too frightened of his warbuild frame. Stormwatch would have been more comfortable living in Vos, or even one of the industrial city-states. Core temperature heating, Prowl clamped his intake closed rather than withdraw the question.
Stormwatch stirred his bowl of captured stones with a single large servo. “Praxus had an opening for my function and they were willing to overlook my frametype because of their historical ties with Vos. A more revealing question you could ask is: why didn't I renew my military enlistment? Few warbuilds leave the army, unless their unit is being eliminated in a cost-reduction purge.”
“You liked being a military tactician. You were good at it,” Prowl pointed out. Then, more daringly, he added a secondary deduction, “You wish you were still there.”
They played another two rounds while Stormwatch framed his reply. “I became unpleasant in the eyes of my superiors. It’s the fate of all tacticians.”
“I do not understand,” replied Prowl.
“We are the choosers of the slain,” replied Stormwatch. “Whether we bring victory or defeat, death goes before us.” His mentor’s voice had turned very soft and distinct, as if imparting some great secret.
“I do not understand,” repeated Prowl, more urgently.
Both of them ignored the alarm signaling them to move to their next game.
Shutting it off, Stormwatch gripped his cube, tipping its contents back and forth. “Tacticians…When mechs look at us, they see how we sit safe in our offices and command centers, and we kill people. If we’re good at what we do, most of the people we kill will be our opponents. If we’re not, the people we kill will be our allies. Either way, the corpses of our comrades start to add up. It makes mechs uncomfortable – makes them resent us.”
Stormwatch swallowed his remaining energon with a sharp motion. “If you’re going to survive as a tactician, learn to tolerate being alone. That’s the minimum requirement. It’s why most newcomers burn out after their first loss or two. They can’t stand the isolation. The best tacticians are either sociopaths, or mechs with tolerably self-destructive coping mechanisms.” He shook his empty cube. “Mine are high grade and dissociation. Figure yours out as early as you can, because we both know you aren’t the sparkless drone rumor says you are.”
Stormwatch set his cube aside, and turned off the music.
Understanding their exercise was over, Prowl did his best to smooth out his jagged field, and commed his mentor a data packet containing his analyses and the music tracklist.
Stormwatch shook his head, his usual mildness underlaid with tired harmonics. “Nothing phases you, does it?”
Praxus’ lead tactician sagged against his desk. “I don’t have anything left to teach you, detective. I’m recommending you for a field placement. Polyhex is struggling with border smuggling – again – and they’ve put out a call for assistance.”
Prowl inclined his helm. “I am willing, sir.”
“Good.” Stormwatch sighed. “Go and learn what you can. Visage, their special unit’s lead tactician, is rather infamous, but one of the best alive - provided you can stand his personality.”
“I will do my best,” Prowl replied, sensing his dismissal, and made to leave.
The sharp pop of a seal snapping off an engex bottle followed him out.
Two.
After a lifetime spent within Praxus, Polyhex was shockingly alien to Prowl.
Praxus, nestled within its crystal forests, was insular and inhabited almost entirely by its native frametype. Polyhex was fascinatingly diverse in comparison. Below its surface ran extensive, deep cave systems carved by subterranean energon wells, while the landscape above formed high spires and spindles of rock and metal, or sharp plateaus surrounded by cliffs. Little of the land was flat, or suitable for driving, and only in those few plains and basins did great metroplexes rise up: over-energized, overbuilt hubs of commerce and government.
The mechanisms who lived here were equally diverse. Polyhex hosted one of the largest rotor populations in Cybertron, who lived secluded in aeries unreachable from the ground. While foreign frames of all kinds could be found within its cities, Polyhex’s wilds and highlands had shaped its own unique type of ground frame.
Living among such rugged terrain, native rural Polyhexians optimized their root modes over their alt modes. They tended to be sturdy and compact, but powerful, with the strength to jump vertically many times their own height, and to carry three or four times their own weight.
Climbing was an essential skill. Most Polyhexians had strong claws and could rotate their wrist and ankle joints at least 200 degrees, allowing them to climb down sheer cliffs and cave walls headfirst; extreme climbing builds even had additional arms and hypermobile joints.
Mineral deposits in the local geology rendered electromagnetic sensing unreliable. Native Polyhexians relied on optical and audial sensors to compensate, giving them an unusually broad sensor suite compared to most Cybertronians, not unlike Praxians with their sensor wings.
Prowl’s Praxian sensory abilities, it turned out, were the deciding factor that caused Polyhexian Border Control to accept his application. Vis – their head tactician refused to answer to his full designation – advised Prowl of this fact when Prowl first walked through his door, using considerably crasser language, and added a warning that Prowl would not receive any coddling during his stay. Vis had also told Prowl, in an expletive-filled rant, that he did not care about Prowl’s feelings on the matter and if Prowl didn’t like it, he could roll his aft out of Vis’ department.
A great deal of Vis’ reputation had suddenly made sense.
Vis had an enormous ego, and an equally large deficit of sympathy, empathy, or concern for social protocols. He was hard-mouthed, caustic, hot-tempered, and demanding.
Prowl liked him more than he should. Vis made no pretenses for anything. Not himself, not others, and not the success or failure of the operations they planned. He played no games – not the office byplay Prowl was never any good at, nor the complicated politics his Enforcer superiors were enmeshed in.
Vis loved to talk – almost entirely about himself or his latest brilliant idea. This was fortunate, because Vis also disdained the idea of directly teaching Prowl anything.
Nevertheless, Prowl learned a great deal from him. Policing Polyhex’s rugged, pathless borders, distant from any trace of habitation larger than a homestead, was a divide apart from running sweeps from the safety of the Enforcer command center in urban, wealthy Praxus.
Within Vis’ mobile headquarters, built of modular prefab panels, operations were always planned around low mechpower, limited supplies, and thin intelligence. Reliable communications were short-range only, which meant a field tactician accompanied the officers on every raid, usually within visual range of the operational site. Vis always assigned himself that role, and Prowl accompanied him as a cabled peripheral, spotter, and bodyguard.
It was in Polyhex that Prowl’s preference for a rifle over a pistol crystalized. The acid rifle he’d been issued served more varied purposes than his Enforcer sidearm: to dissolve locks, melt holes in walls or restraints, or even construct traps by compromising a structure’s integrity. Prowl polished his marksmanship skills until his trajectory calculations were optimized for the slightest wind and gravitational fluctuations, and they ran smooth as code from his own core systems.
Smuggler boltholes moved frequently, and Vis moved his agents just as often. Prowl became an expert at breaking down camps and pitching them again, and at watching for the frequent ambushes or snipers that dogged their camp relocations.
The first time Prowl was shot, Vis congratulated him for “not getting snuffed,” and, as if Prowl had passed some strange initiation, informed the officers that Prowl would serve as field tactician during their next raid.
When Prowl, of course, excelled, Vis radiated self-satisfied smugness, as though he’d planned the whole thing. They traded off field tactician duties during later raids, decimating the local smuggler population between their combined competence, and their available targets thinned out.
Vis took command over their final, high-profile raid against the don of the largest mech trafficking ring in Polyhex. It was a brutal affair, ending in messy room-to-room fighting, but Vis’ officers finally claimed the clifftop outpost for their own.
Prowl, with his rifle across his lap, followed the bloody scene through comms and remote feeds as he guarded Vis atop a nearby lookout.
“You don’t approve,” grinned the Polyhexian after they were done, rudely picking Prowl up without warning and scaling down to where they’d join the other officers. Vis was kindled of mixed frame ancestry, but had inherited a Polyhexian’s strength. Though their frames were of similar size, Vis could manhandle Prowl like a symbiont.
Clinging to Vis’ shoulders, Prowl drew his field close to his plating and replied, “I question whether your ruthlessness was necessary.”
Vis’ chuckle vibrated both their frames. “The faster you crush your enemy’s will, the less damage you take. Tactics have only two hard limits: your creativity, and your depravity.”
“Your depravity is why you were exiled to the middle of nowhere,” Prowl returned.
“I know, and I don’t give a leaking frag.”
Mulishly, Prowl said nothing in reply, and Vis placed him on his pedes once they reached the ground.
They picked their way down a defile and up the rocky cliffside path to the traffickers’ outpost, where cleanup was already taking place. Vis took a seat atop a pile of fluid-spattered, greyed frames, and lounged there like it was the Primal Throne as he directed his officers. More than one mech’s field crackled with discomfort.
Vis gave no sign he noticed or cared. “Calculator with wings,” he called.
Venting, Prowl presented himself for inspection.
“We’ve run out of targets.” Vis gestured vaguely around him. “They’ll crawl back eventually, but it’ll be boring out here until they do.”
“I do not see a problem,” replied Prowl.
Vis made an obscene gesture, then continued. “Not enough fun for two tacs right now, so I’m shipping you off to prop up the most pathetic glitch I know. His name’s Cleanup. He runs Tarn’s tactical response unit. They staff their whole department with foreigners because all the locals are on somemech’s payroll. You’ll have an awful time.”
“Thank you, sir,” Prowl answered in the driest voice he was capable of.
Three.
Prowl hated Tarn. Tarn, with indifferent and omnidirectional spite, returned the feeling.
Smog choked Prowl’s filters the instant he stepped off the train, while ash blown from Tarn’s industrial factories smeared his plating and gathered in his joints.
A heavy industrial frame tried to rob him within sightline of the rail station – tried being the operative word. Prowl had kept his acid rifle, and a quick flash of the weapon with his sirens on full volume was enough to send the mugger scrambling.
The central Enforcer precinct was a shielded concrete monstrosity squatting inside a tangle of titanium fences, anti-tank barriers, and defense emplacements. Prowl passed through three separate inspections by heavily armed guards where his credentials were scrupulously examined, tested and confirmed before being allowed to pass through a final set of scanners and enter the precinct lobby.
A sunset-colored minibot charged forward to meet him, field shouting with excitement and enthusiastic welcome. He seized Prowl’s hand, shook it vigorously, and hauled Prowl toward the tactical center, pausing only long enough to explain he was Cleanup, Prowl’s new supervisor.
Tarn’s tactical response unit was overworked, understaffed, and fighting a losing battle against the moneyed interests ripping the city-state apart. Prowl fit in perfectly.
All of the TTRU tacticians lived at headquarters. For obviously foreign frames like theirs, a daily commute guaranteed attempted targeting by the locals. Outsiders did not come to Tarn, that unlovely, blighted, and bloated beast of mines, foundries, smelters, and factories, who consumed its inhabitants until they guttered out. No surprise that many of the workers turned to gangs and crime to make ends meet, while the factory owners lived in opulence and the politicians glutted themselves on bribes.
What little order the Enforcers could exert was a drop in an oil bath. Tarn was already lost to corruption. The Enforcer leadership knew it. The whole of Tarn knew it. Only Cleanup worked with manic obsession, prying tiny corners free from the sludge that would soon swallow everything back up anyway.
“I know this is a losing battle, okay?” Cleanup told Prowl after they’d worked three shifts straight without defrag, shaky on stims of questionable legality outside Tarn. “I know what mecha say about me. About what I’m trying to do. I know! I’ve spent my whole career fighting one long retreat. And it sucks slag! It really does!”
Cleanup leaned over, throwing an arm over Prowl’s shoulders and blanketing Prowl in his field. Cleanup had the clingiest, most emotive field of anyone Prowl knew. “But Prowl, here’s the thing: I don’t think it’s pointless to fight when you can’t win. It frags you up, it hurts, but sometimes you need to accept any kind of victory. Maybe I can only put away a couple low-level gang bosses while the big rigs walk. I’ve got to believe that it’ll make a difference in somebot’s life, even if it’s small.”
“How do we decide?” Prowl murmured, voice overlapped with harmonics of exhaustion. “If defeat is inevitable, how do we decide who receives a chance at survival?”
Cleanup listed, sagging against Prowl’s side. “That’s hard. Can’t tell you an easy answer. There’s an art to sacrifice, Prowl, and it’s one you have to learn: how to trade the most gain for the least loss. Salvage what you need to build on, so you can guarantee a future. Me? I’ve got to believe that every little success matters. Maybe those little successes roll up into a bigger ball of good! Maybe someday Tarn will change!”
Personally, Prowl believed Tarn might change if you burned it to the ground and started over, but despite his exhaustion he retained a semblance of manners. “Our work cannot be finished this shift. We should both run a repair cycle,” he said, and shut down his terminal.
Cleanup assented, and the two of them went downstairs to the barracks.
“If an emergency arises, whose berth will I find you in?” Prowl inquired before they separated. Cleanup missed the camaraderie of being a regular Enforcer, and searched for a replacement in whichever mech would exchange temporary closeness for an overload. Prowl would not mind, except that Cleanup turned off his comm every time he did it.
Aside from his boss’ irritating tendency to be out of contact, and Tarn’s general atmospheric despair grinding away at him, Prowl reached a state of equilibrium. He took to sparring and driving to exhaustion to offset the frustration of eking tiny victories out of a smelting pool of losses, and developed a profound appreciation of having more work to do than he could ever conceivably complete. Work was soothing; work gave the illusion of progress; work required his full focus, leaving no room for extraneous thought, hope or dread.
And work there was in plenty. The TTRU was planning its largest series of raids ever, to be carried out simultaneously across the city-state. To avoid details leaking out to the gang lords, only Prowl and Cleanup were working on the tactical planning. The Enforcers training for the raids would only know their targets once the raids were in progress.
Cleanup was ecstatic, and twice as manic as usual. “We’re getting somewhere, Prowl! I can really believe things will be better soon!”
Prowl had quite a time convincing the minibot to defrag the night-cycle before the raids were scheduled. When Prowl was the first mechanism in the tactical center the next morning, he guessed that Cleanup had underestimated how much defrag he needed, and went to rouse his commanding officer from whichever berth he’d fallen into this time.
When the door slid open and the heavy smell of energon hit him, Prowl knew. He looked anyway: Cleanup, lying on his back, chin tipped toward the ceiling with his main energon lines cut, sunset colors faded to grey.
Prowl calmly took in the scene. Like liquid nitrogen had replaced the coolant in his lines, he turned, locked the door with the strongest encryption he knew, and walked back to the tactical center.
The other three tacticians were already present, running final checks and making sure the raid teams were standing by.
“Status?” Prowl snapped out, moving to the main console.
“All green! Ready to go once Cleanup gets here,” was the reply.
“Cleanup is dead. An Enforcer betrayed us and assassinated him,” Prowl replied, cabling into the console and running the synchronization process. “We will continue forward with today’s operation.”
The third-in-command let out a burst of static. “What do you mean, assassinated? That – if someone’s paying to stop the raids, doesn’t that mean we’re all in danger?”
“The possibility exists,” Prowl answered, preoccupied with establishing comm channels to the raid teams.
“We can’t – we can’t go forward with the raids!” another tactician burst out. “Why take the risk? We’re all going to be recalled by our own city-states anyway!”
“There is no logistical reason to cancel the raids,” Prowl said. “Although Praxus will recall me in the future, I am here today.”
Through a wave of comms chatter that brushed his sensor wings, Prowl pulled the encrypted raid plans from his internal archives, the only place they’d been stored to maximize operational security, and reviewed them one last time.
“Prowl?”
He delegated a single processor thread for attending his fellow Enforcers. The third-in-command stepped forward, looking nervous. “We’ve decided we won’t participate. It’s too dangerous. We should allow Enforcer command to determine whether the raids are safe to be carried out at a future date.”
“If these raids are not carried out today, we will never be allowed to try again. Not with Cleanup dead. Additionally, we hold the initiative. Our targets will expect the raids to be cancelled. However, you may act as you deem best,” Prowl said, and went back to adjusting the raid plans so a single primary tactician could enact them.
“You – you can’t think you can continue by yourself! One mech can’t handle the entire processing load for sixteen different raids!”
“I can,” Prowl said – an indifferent statement of fact – and transmitted the mobilization orders.
Minus one.
After Praxus, Prowl enlisted.
The Autobot recruiter gave him empty condolences, an officers’ commission, and a prize assignment to Iacon’s tactical department.
This did not please Prowl’s new coworkers, who believed the only way a low-ranking Enforcer detective could enter their rarified halls was through pity and favoritism. Prowl could not rule out the possibility, so he did not hold it against them when they made their opinion of his presence clear.
The chief tactician, Spotlight, formed a particularly low opinion of him. Spotlight allowed Prowl only the lowest-level data processing assignments, which Prowl was pulled away from at a moment’s notice to carry out courier duty and other menial tasks. It galled the other tactical officers when despite the interruptions, Prowl turned in flawless work far ahead of his deadlines.
Unfortunately, the suggestions he included were not well-received by Chief Tactician Spotlight. Prowl was called to the middle of the tactical center for a dressing-down.
“I don’t want to hear anything from a jumped-up patrol car! You are not a real tactician! You are, in fact, the least qualified person in this department. You have not graduated from officer school, you have not studied in a military academy – you haven’t even served a single tour of duty!”
“You are here because your hardware barely qualifies you to do data analysis that allows other, better qualified bots to spend their time doing more important things!”
Chief Tactician Spotlight slammed the datapad holding Prowl’s work against a console so hard the screen shattered. “Get out of my sight.”
Prowl dipped his helm and his sensor wings, made sure his field remained drawn tight against his plating, and went back to his workstation.
It was possible Prowl’s analyses were flawed. His superior was not wrong: Prowl was unfamiliar with military protocols and procedures, and he lacked practical experience with large-scale military tactics. No matter. Prowl had always been good at learning. Prowl would seek out the expertise he lacked, and Prowl would work until he broke down or succeeded.
And afterward?
Prowl would see his abilities used to their greatest utility. He would not allow any impediment to stop him – not Spotlight or his fellow soldiers.
Not even himself.