Transformers: Steel Reign

[Cynical Cat]

Deathstrike considered available Autobots that would be suited for Breakout's mission. Shellshock and Overload could act as heavy support. Crimson with a different holorider and some dirt would make good scout. That probably meant including Stryke. Skyshadow's stealth abilities and large payload would make him useful. They would also need aircover. Slipstream's attitudes towards humans would actually be an asset on this mission. They could also use another close in fighter, perhaps one of the new arrivals due from Cyberton. Deathstrike sent his list to Breakout.

[General Havoc]

Wheeljack was standing over a workbench, as usual, soldering together a circuitboard of some sort inside a massive energy cannon, muttering to himself about Primus-knew-what. Scorch marks on the ceiling and walls indicated that this was likely the aftermath of some kind of test. Probably one that hadn't gone too well.

As Shellshock walked in, Wheeljack turned around to see who was there, but his optics flew open wide when he saw what Shellshock was carrying.

"Hornet!" he exclaimed, rushing over to Shellshock. Hornet looked like a twisted wreck, half his right wing blown off, scorch marks and dents knocked into his frame, a massive hole drilled through his stomach, and another right through his head. As gently as urgency would allow, Wheeljack picked Hornet up and moved back towards the repair table, already calling up Hornet's blueprints from memory.

"By Primus," he said as he realized the extent of the damage, "Shellshock, what the hell happened?!"

[Charon]

Shellshock looked down at the small Hornet, then looked at the taller, though still smaller than Shellshock, Wheeljack. "He fought Sixshot. Got hurt so we brought him back to base. Near as I can tell during the assault some enemy forces got to the base, Hornet took this damage defending the humans."

[General Havoc]

"He did what?!"

Wheeljack nearly dropped his tools at Shellshock's explanation. "Dear Primus, Sixshot, what in the name of the Pits was he thinking?!"

Quickly he opened up what was left of Hornet's chasis and began examining the circuitry therein and hooking the little bot up to a number of machines that did lord-knew what.

"Was it his own idea to take on something like Sixshot, or did some fool assign him to it?" he asked Shellshock, clearly trying to keep worry out of his voice.

[Charon]

Shellshock snorted. "If some fool had told him to, you'd be fixing the hole I'd have put through them for their idiocy. He did it himself while Deathstrike was engaging Sixshot. I told him to disengage, but by then Sixshot had already seen him."

[General Havoc]

Wheeljack sighed as Shellshock told him the details. He did not seem surprised. "The number of times he's gotten nearly obliterated because of his own inability to judge the odds. Did he actually disobey you, or was he simply unable to react in time? I won't have him disobeying orders in the heat of combat..."

Locked into performing the scans that would tell him the extent of Hornet's damage, it wasn't until then that Wheeljack picked up on the rest of what Shellshock had said.

"Defending the humans? Defending them from what? Do you know what happened?"

[Charon]

Shellshock went over his data quickly. "He didn't have time to abort his action before Sixshot focused on him. I didn't have time to bring my guns to bear on Sixshot until after he had attacked Hornet. As for how he got his injuries, I was at the front when it happened, but near as I can tell some of the drones, I'll explain those later, got past us and into the human's base."

[General Havoc]

Wheeljack nodded. "I'll call up his input recorder once I've stabilized him," he said, inserting several tools into Hornet's shoulder as well as a keycode. There was a soft "click", and Hornet's mangled right forewing disconnected at the elbow and gently slid off.

With a sigh, Wheeljack tossed the smashed stump of a forewing onto the table and shook his head. "Thank you," he said to Shellshock, "for making sure he got back here alive. I know he can be a liability in a combat situation, and I'm sure most of his design decisions must seem like madness or sadism... but thank you. I'm sure he'll thank you too once he's awake."

Wheeljack picked up a soldering iron and a laser scalpel and began working on the periphery of the hole that had been blasted through Hornet's head.

[Charon]

Shellshock nodded and turned to leave, he stopped just before the door, though he did not turn back.

"You know I'm not making any judgements on you when I say this, but Hornet is going to continue doing things like this, if we have some extra time before we move out again you might want to see about getting some better armor on him. Or else one of these times Hornet isn't gonna come back."

With that Shellshock stepped out the door and headed down the halls, looking for the others.

[frigidmagi]

I am in the repair bay. I am not damaged enough for a CR bay. That is to bad, because Ratchet is annoyed with me. I can tell because he is repairing me without disconnecting my minor pain receptors. It doesn't cause major pain but it doesn't feel great either. For a human it's comparable to the pain of disinfectant, all over your body. I do not show pain. I am a warmachine. I do wish he would finish already though.

"Look at what you've done to your shocks! Plus your stabilization gears are disjointed, worse your primary sensors are completely burnt out. How the hell did you even find your way back to the base? What the... How did you in the name of Cybertron manage to bend your secondary support column?" He mutters while working on me. Part of it is overspill from his annoyance at Overload I think. He's lucky he's safe in a human tank.

"It was necessary damage Ratchet." I reply calmly.

"Twisting your left track is not necessary damage! If Prime hadn't over engineered you, you would be in a CR tank if not gone for good!" he cries starting his torch. I hate that thing.

"I am not 'over engineered'! I am a warmachine built to take heavy damage and continue functioning! I am well engineered for such a task." I say back.

"Whatever, you still better thank Prime for sticking so many redundancies and backups in you. I've seen your record, there's almost not a single part left of your original body! You had just about everything shot, stabbed, crushed, burned or twisted! Not even Ironhide is that bad." Ratchet said.

I mutter at that. Ironhide has accused me of recklessness and other things more then once. We don't get along. We don't clash as badly as I do with Prowl though. Primus help me, Prowl has a large moon wedged up his rear exhaust port and seems to think I should be the one carrying it.

"Lay off the bot Ratchet, he's had a long day." Jazz says waving to me. has he moves pass. Like I said before Jazz is a good officer.

"Almost done, just stay still." Ratchet says. I stay still.

[LadyTevar]

Crimson got off the lightest this time, for which she was rather glad. Having an arm re-attached and your entire front torso plating replaced was annoying. The dents and armor puncture she took this time was repaired in under two hours, leaving her plenty of time to worry about Stryke and Hornet.

Luckily, Styke's damage wouldn't take more than a few days. Hornet had been carried to WheelJack, but Crimson felt she'd just be in the way if she did more than leave a message asking how Hornet was doing. WheelJack might not even hear the message, but Hornet would be happy she'd thought to check on him. Daily. Ok, twice daily. But the teenybot had been nearly scrapped, so of course she was worried about him.

[Charon]

Shellshock's next stop was the repair bay, the old warmachine didn't have to duck for this door, but when he came in Rachet paused his work on Breakout long enough to glance over at Shellshock and muttered an oath to Primus under his breath. "You look as bad as him, what did you wade into enemy fire?"

Shellshock walked over to one of the tables and sat down, his optic had begun to flicker again. "Actually yeah, we pretty much did."

Rachet shook his head in disbelief a few times before getting back to work on Breakout.

Shellshock laid back and waited while his diagnostics were fed into the repair equipment. "Breakout, how long have you been serving Prime?"

[frigidmagi]

"Breakout, how long have you been serving Prime?"

"To use local time units, four million, three hundred seventy five thousand, one hundred eighteen years, nine months, two weeks, 3 days, seventeen hours and twenty one minutes. This is counting the time that Prime and others were deactivated on Earth while myself and others were on Cybertron or other posts. Or would you prefer Cybertronian measurements?" I answer.

It is an odd question since unlike many others not only is my activation a matter of public record but my first 4 megacycles are actually recorded on audio/visual file. I take great satification in the fact that Prime maintains his own copy of that file in his internal database. I myself however do not maintain a copy of the file, nor do I care to view it. It produces an odd feeling when I do so.

[Cynical Cat]

Deathstrike walked into Wheeljack's laboratory. "How is Hornet?" he asked.

[SirNitram]

Deep in the Ark, Teletraan-1 was working on an auxiliary task. Overload's laser core sat in the centre of the room. With no blank protoforms, she was left to rebuild an older Cybertronian form. Accessing internal archives, the computer brought up schematics for the original form of Overload, around the period of the Breachload Project.

Overload 'himself' was a marvel of engineering, comprising incredible physical strength and stamina into a tiny package. Indeed, his name had been something else, so long ago, but had been changed after everyone had referred to the incredible feats of strength he performed in times of peace and war alike, pulling much needed cargo that should weigh more than him by many times.

The trailer was, in it's own way, easier. Nonsentient and in many ways similar to the Prime Trailers, it stored much of it's mass in a subspace pocket; Overload's pocket held more than enough mass from the last form to handle the differences. Restoring the Breachload linkage programming and circuitry was the hard part, but that could be handled after the transformer himself was allowed out.

Thus it was that a form the size of Bumblebee or so walked the halls, trying to track down where Shellshock had went. The repair bay was the obvious stop.

[Charon]

Shellshock only nodded some as the machines beeped that they were done. It looked pretty bad, long range sensors were completely fried, his transformation cog was rather messed up, there were a slew of breaks and leaks along his gun arm, holes in his armor had burned out several auxiliary power stations, and that was the short list.

"No, Earth units are fine, I can convert it." Shellshock was quiet for a time as an automated repair droid began to give him repairs. "Has anything on Cybertron changed from when we left? I haven't had much of a chance to catch up on home."

[rhoenix]

At last, the old, patchwork interstellar cruiser began to close in on the planet identified as emitting undeniable Transformer signals, including the signals of Teletran-1 - the third planet orbiting this particular star. Using the powerful and ancient computer as a beacon, Blindside guided the slowly-responding craft toward it through the other planets of the solar system, and began the final approach, with the intent of entering the planet's atmosphere and landing. He mildly hoped that it landed with a little less of a crash than last time.

As the nose of the craft was one kilometer from entering the outer atmosphere, he opened up the communications array, narrowing his golden eyes before settling on an old Autobot frequency used many Vorn ago. He didn't know whether it was the right one, but he knew and remembered no others. The fact that it was being emitted from a Decepticon comm array couldn't be helped.

Blindside paused before sending the signal, suddenly realizing that it had been so long since he had spoken to any other Autobots that he didn't quite know what to say. Shaking his head, he spoke anyway. "This is the Autobot once known as Firetrack, now known as Blindside, requesting landing clearance and location. I repeat: this is the Autobot known as Blindside, once known as Firetrack, requesting landing clearance and location."

After picking up some very strange readings from over a good third of the planet, he decided not to land just yet, as they looked suspiciously...Decepticon-like. He moved the craft back up, bouncing against the upper edge of the atmosphere to move into high orbit until he got an answer. He also set the communications array to try to auto-find a communications channel being used by what sounded like Autobots, so he could try to repeat his message on that channel. In the meantime, he set his original message to repeat every five minutes on the original frequency.

While he waited, he took a few steps back, and went through a few movement meditation sets slowly, and with great care. He was nervous, though going through the familiar meditation movements helped.

[frigidmagi]

"No, Earth units are fine, I can convert it." Shellshock was quiet for a time as an automated repair droid began to give him repairs. "Has anything on Cybertron changed from when we left? I haven't had much of a chance to catch up on home."

Oh Pit spawn. No one has told him... This is gonna be... awkward. I go for the direct approach.

"Rodimus was there longer then I was but... It's not good. All the changes have been for the worse. Almost all the resources are gone, to the point that there are times when the entire planet and everything on it shuts down for great stretches of time. The only places that have seen even slight rebuilding efforts are the HQs of the Cons. To be blunt on every level but pure sentimentality Cybertron is no longer worth fighting for and is a ruined wreck of a planet. Even worse then when you left I would say." I tell him.

[Charon]

Shellshock was quiet for a long time before he nodded. "So it's a little worse off than I thought it would be." Shellshock glanced over at Breakout. "We could tell it was coming, between the Autobots and the Decepticons we were ravaging the planet. Now though, I guess all we can hope for is that this war will end and that one day Cybertron can be rebuilt. As well as all the planets that have been destroyed by us." Shellshock smiled grimly.

Shellshock closed his optics, across his cerebral patterns flickered images and schematics of some of the old Cybertronian tanks.

[Dark Silver]

TELETRAN-1, in it's infinite scanning of space around Earth, had detected the approaching Decepticon shuttle. It was marked for it's arrival, the classification, and noted in it's database that the shuttle was millions of years out of date.

It would safely file away the information for later perusal by the Autobot command, when it picked up the distress call on a old Autobot Frequency.

TELETRAN-1, being a ultra computer, wasted no time in it's decision, locating the best suited for a mission who was undamaged, and still on planet, and spoke over the comms system, "Unit Deathstrike, report to main duty station immediately. Priority Alpha."


------- o ------- o -------

Brawn and Gears had entered the repair bay just as Breakout was finishing his report to Shellshock on Cybertron. When Shellshock finished speaking, Brawn opened his vocal port, "Yeah, well, as soon as we finish kicking Megatron's exhaust manifold and throwing the rest of those Decepticons in Pits, then we can go back and fix Cybertron back up. Personally I can't wait for that day, I'm tired of this slagging mudball."

[LadyTevar]

Thus it was that a form the size of Bumblebee or so walked the halls, trying to track down where Shellshock had went. The repair bay was the obvious stop.

Crimson paused as she walked down a parallel hallway, frowning and looking back. Was that....? Nah... couldn't be. Overload's bigger!

Shrugging and shaking her head, wondering if her optics needed looking at again, she continued walking to WheelJack's lab, only to find another shock. "DeathStrike?" The 'what are you doing here' was left off.

[General Havoc]

The repair bay was quiet as Wheeljack stood over the motionless form of Hornet, the only sound that of the machines hooked up to the tiny Autobot, every one of them large enough for him to have fit inside, had he only been awake. Which he wasn't.

Wheeljack said nothing to the silent room, his arms crossed, simply watching Hornet. Not the diagnostics, not the charts, not the computer screens patiently displaying reams of data. Just Hornet. Just the miniature Autobot presently sleeping (if it could be called that) peacefully atop the table. Hornet was in stasis lock, so his sleep-mode systems were not working, and yet Wheeljack thought, even so, that he could detect just the slightest movement in the little Autobot, a tiny fluctuation in his actuators, as though he was not in an electronically-induced coma at all, but simply a very deep sleep.

Wheeljack rubbed his optics with his hand. He was imagining things. Hornet couldn't move in stasis lock. Nobody could. It was a deep programming freeze.

There was work to be done of course, lots of it, not the least of which was Hornet's repairs. He had cleaned up the damage, removed Hornet's mangled forewing and opticpiece, sloughed off the slag metal with a cutting torch and was even now fabricating replacement limbs and optics to insert. He had charged Hornet's batteries, repaired the circuitry damage in his stomach and chest, done a thousand different things, but still there was more to do. And yet for now, for a few minutes at least, he had decided to take the time to stop for a second and watch Hornet and consider, not for the first time, just what he had undertaken.

It was strange, Wheeljack had built robots before, Transformers like the Dinobots and the Aerialbots, converted from Decepticon shuttles or constructed out of whole cloth. He had known Hornet was different of course, he was a more intricate design, in the service of a more complicated effort, one that he (if nobody else) understood the importance of. But for all his protestations that he knew exactly what he was doing and that he had calculated everything out to the last decimal place... from the instant he had first activated Hornet, everything had been a series of unexpected surprises.

And weirdly enough, instead of becoming intolerably frustrating, they were proving more important to him than the original point of the whole endeavor. Not that Hornet couldn't be frustrating, almost maddeningly so at times, but...

Well... suffice to say it was becoming more and more difficult to think of Hornet as an experiment. And Wheeljack couldn't tell why. He always worried about the other Autobots. He always worried about his own creations in particular, and about Hornet especially because he was fragile, and small, and prone to getting himself into fantastic amounts of trouble, or so he told himself... but Shellshock had been closer to the mark than he knew. Several times now, Wheeljack had spent anxious hours, uncertain if Hornet was still alive or not, knowing only that he was in terrible danger, as were they all, and it had been with far more difficulty than he had anticipated that he had prevented himself from dropping everything and going out personally to figure out what had happened to him. To make sure he was all right. He had experienced the same impulses before of course, everyone did, but never with such regularity and such intensity.

... what was it that Crimson had said?

The door slid open, and Deathstrike of all people sauntered in. Wheeljack turned towards him in clear surprise as the former Decepticon warrior asked after Hornet's condition. An instant ago, Wheeljack would have rated that about as likely as Hornet defeating Megatron in hand-to-hand combat, but perhaps miracles did happen.

Before Wheeljack could respond, Crimson entered as well, and Wheeljack chuckled to himself as he recalled the messages she had been leaving. At least he had chosen well in giving Hornet's codes to Crimson. She had yet to use them for anything save true emergencies, and it was clear from even a cursory glance at Hornet's behavior if not his algorithms that he trusted Crimson totally, though in fairness, the same could be said about many of the other Autobots. Hornet trusted easily. Wheeljack just hoped it wouldn't come back to bite him one day.

He found he hoped a lot of things...

"He's... stable at least," said Wheeljack, turning back to the quietly sleeping Hornet. "I'm finishing his replacement parts now. It'd probably be safe to wake him in fact, if you wish."

Normally he wouldn't have even considered waking Hornet in such a state, but... for some reason it seemed like a totally reasonable thing to do.

He shook his head slightly. Why in the name of the Pits was it always so hard to maintain perspective as far as Hornet was concerned...

[LadyTevar]

Crimson looked to WheelJack, then to Deathstrike before looking back to Hornet. A brief calculation of odds, and then she stepped forward to the repair table, relatively sure DeathStrike wouldn't connect her words to Hornet's actions.

Leaning over him, she called softly "Einata, teenybot. Time to wake up. You have visitors."

[General Havoc]

Normally, transformers snapped out of Stasis lock like a computer being booted up. Hornet was not normal.

For a second nothing happened, and then slowly, Hornet's one optic (the other being missing), began to glow, and open. A hole was still drilled through his head, but the entire section it was in had been neatly removed, and so now Hornet looked merely... incomplete, rather than horribly damaged. As though some of his parts hadn't been added yet.

He stirred, raised his head, yawned (yes, yawned), and looked around, blinking his one optic. No sooner had he spotted Crimson however, leaning over him, than he predictably beamed a wide smile. "Crimson!" he chirped, and without further ado he gave her a big hug with his left wing and the truncated stump of his right.

For Hornet of course, it was only moments since the battle had ended, not that this would have made much difference in his reaction.

[LadyTevar]

Crimson chuckled, giving the little bot a brief hug back before pushing him away and back down onto the table. "Easy, Hornet ... WheelJack's not finished repairing you yet." She turned his head slightly, so his one optic would see both WheelJack and DeathStrike also in the room. "I'm not your only visitor."