Chapter Text
It was a routine exercise.
They were all routine exercises.
The Aerial Corps hadn’t been in a fight in ten times the average organics’ lifetime, but command had been in charge thousands of times longer than that, and the hard won battles seared into their hard drives told them to keep the troops flying. A threat would come soon enough. This fresh force, this hopeless flock of soft-plates and half-frozen Constructs, could not be allowed to sit idle. So despite how little Cybertron needed them to, they spun their rotors and fired their jets and kept the skies of Vos thick with wings and blades. The thickest they’d ever been and would ever be. The Silver Harvest had just sputtered to a close.
To manage congestion the function of each squadron had been ruthlessly specialised. Everything in close proximity had the same or similar build; one or two dozen interchangeable shapes taking off in unison along a shared angle of ascent. It was late afternoon and several rows of Forged lift fan VTOLs shared the square of concrete, squatting in alt mode as they waited for the signal. They’d gotten specific enough that all but three were twin-rotor, with stabilising tails that curled overhead like the spoiler on a race car. The convenience of a helicopter and the speed of a jet — though they were, taxonomically, helicopters. Without a medical degree or a fetish it might’ve been impossible to tell them apart. Luckily, paint standards had lapsed somewhere in the last few millennia, and there was almost a full rainbow arcing across the landing zone.
Whirl was not, ordinarily, an attention seeker. His overcast blue paint was at the conservative end of their spectrum. And his spark screamed inside its casing in anticipation of his plans for today’s routine exercise. There was no way he wouldn’t get noticed. Would he get noticed? This was a delicate operation, like a transplant, or a resuscitation. Exactly the right amount of force in the right place. If he overshot or let himself slip they’d have him committed. Otherwise it’d be a quick trip to the CR chamber and back to his berth.
This afternoon Whirl was going to crash.
[Cleared for takeoff] Air control’s voice crackled through their comms, all mid-week exhaustion and ennui.
There were a few reasons Whirl had chosen today. The wind was plausible deniability bad and no-one could hear anything that didn’t come through internals. When the weather warnings had first come through their CO was determined to get ahead of the storm: he’d drilled this manoeuvre so hard the squadron were in a fugue state. On a personal level, Whirl had laid on thick during their last break how excited he was for the Skymaster finals this weekend. His technique had been flawless lately. There was talk of a promotion.
No-one would ever suspect he wanted out, let alone that the want was so bad he’d break himself to escape. Outside of Vos he could see a future stretching into the chronal horizon. Here, flat as the city was, more airway than anything, there was nothing ahead for him. If they thought the crash was deliberate, though, they wouldn’t think his depression was situational. It was practically against protocol to talk about function changes here. Nobody would get that he wasn’t trying to leave this life — he was trying to leave this life — concrete expanses and squat warehouses and the ever-narrowing minds of command with their orders that said they were not fliers, they were VTOLs, they were helicopters, they were twin-rotor lift fans with a particular tail configuration which made them fast. But he never had the time to change his circumstances. He’d been trying, less drastically, for upwards of 10,000 stellar cycles. The most they ever had free was a mega-cycle or two for a public holiday. Not enough to finish his submission or the paperwork or file exemption. More drastic. He had to be more drastic.
[Okay, boys, climb.]
The CO sounded tired, too, but it was his own fault. Spinning up his rotors at the front of the squadron he took the air. Blinding silver in peak afternoon light, Whirl added him to the list of excuses. How anyone thought that was a safe colour to have in the lead was a mystery. Thank Primus no-one cared about colours.
Around him the rest of the squadron buzzed from the ground like a swarm of insects. Just below the wind the sound sat like the layers of a travel channel cocktail. Iacon, baby! He’d be there soon. On a slight delay he jaunted into the air but kept under the others, patient for his moment.
[Same as before. Move into formation, circle around, land without any position change. Sandstorm — don’t frag this.]
They got clear of the landing zone and the wind hit like it’d been waiting for them. Over the rooftops they could see every pennant and flag in the compound fighting against its lines. In the distance rust clouds kicked and flipped over the desert, threatening a tornado. As bad as anyone had ever seen. The point of the drill was to maintain position in adverse weather conditions but, realistically, this was beyond no-fly levels.
Sandstorm, despite the CO’s callout, swept from his position toward the next chopper in line. The pastel pink and purple duo in the rear swung in and out from each other. Along his row Whirl noticed a whole canon of off-kilter movements, dips and tilts, though they went in the same direction and maintained height and distance.
That was his cue.
Raising his right wing to catch a draft he jolted instantly up-and-left and collided with the tide-green underside of his favourite drinking buddy Sea Breeze. He refused to feel sorry as his wing peeled through Sea Breeze’s landing gear. He disengaged as many sensors as he could so he wouldn’t feel pain either. Jumbled together like a tumbleweed they careened out of formation, losing parts, Whirl’s more vital than Sea Breeze’s. A bit of plating, that rotor, then he tipped and tore huge chunks of his tail in some furiously moving junction. Despite how many signals he’d dismissed there were still countless sirens about critical damage and lost altitude and systems offline. It didn’t feel like anything. It must’ve looked like death. He could stall his engines now.
Disentangled from Sea Breeze he spiralled at the ground like a yo-yo, tipping on his side and pirouetting wing over tail over wing over cockpit. Each turn threw a few extra pieces onto the concrete. Comms joined the chorus in his head [Whirl! Whirl! Whirl!] and he laughed out loud in reply, confident no-one could hear.
The ground was so close. The sky was so far. Reverting to robot mode would be too suspicious which meant he couldn’t throw fingers at it like he wanted. Just inertly enjoy the thrill of his rapid descent. Was there a better sensation in this world?
But no amount of disengaged sensors could prevent the agony of impact. He landed almost upside-down and crushed the remainder of his tail under the rest of his weight. The shock took him out of alt mode and the thoughts from his mind. Reverting onto his back his tail became crushed shoulder-blades and his torn wing became a broken arm and his fractured cockpit panel became a cracked chest. He lay shattered with vacant optics pointed at the sky as the rest of the rainbow — Sea Breeze included — made a controlled descent. They looked good without him. He didn’t belong here. No.
This was not what he was made for.
⚔️
He was hauled from the CR chamber too soon, arm plates warped and blades in a concertina. Stable, yes, but his joints hitched and whined in ways they shouldn’t have. Whichever of the medbay staff pulled him out couldn’t get a clear response to their diagnostic questions. Didn’t matter. Despite the Corps’ continual expansion they hadn’t built capacity to match. Someone else needed the chamber so they wheeled him through to a berth.
Over the following days, as the numbness left and the pain settled in, he cursed his systems for the distraction. He had limited opportunity to make this work but it was impossible to do that work when he was alternately shorted out on medical grade, driven to distraction by his back, or stuck in appointments with the Corps’ clinicians. Any sign of lucidity and they descended on him like scavengers, picking through him for exposed lines and poor reaction times.
To his horror they sent a psych. He didn’t know they had psychs. How his CO talked, you’d think airmen didn’t have minds to damage. Someone was worried about the fact he’d stalled. “I went into shock,” he said, “obviously.” The strength of his assertion seemed to worry the little intellectual more. “Because I was surprised,” he pressed. Everyone else thought it made sense, but not this mech, who kept his eyebrows low in disbelief as he typed his notes into Whirl’s record.
Halfway through the mandated recovery timeline (which was a fraction as long as he’d need to be fully operational) they let him take visitors. The squadron dropped by with snacks and preloaded datapads. “Thanks.” He tried to be polite. “Can I have some gear from the barracks, too? Something to keep my hands busy. Who can I trust with my password?”
Sandstorm volunteered, and came back the next day with a rattling lockbox. “Real dense, huh?” He raised and lowered it to demonstrate the weight of the thing, looking curious.
“Yeah,” Whirl replied as he took it, “real dense,” and said no more.
Alone that night he opened it.
The lockbox contained thousands of stellars of salary’s worth of tools, gears, casings, and decorative minerals. Heavy with purpose. And amidst that rattling mess of materials and half-formed, experimental projects was an alarm clock near completion. A few of the cogs didn’t turn as smoothly as they should have. Otherwise it functioned. Primus. He was close. It was a race between his recovery and his craft.
The undamaged rotor in his right forearm turned contemplatively as he lifted the piece from the box. The hands of the clock were stalled. He stared at the face in open admiration of his own skill. Soon, other people would see it too.
⚔️
The Vosian Corps District Service Centre was in a constant state of disrepair. Whirl hadn’t been inside before and he knew that was part of the problem. Military documents were processed by the Corps’ administrators and the only reason anyone ever came by here was if their CO disapproved of a conjunxing. It was possible — probable? — that its most frequent customers were its own employees. Everyone else in their district was part of the Aerial ecosystem. From the cleaners to the doctors to the painters this populace lived and worked and filed its paperwork in the same damned place. The district, like its citizens, had a clear function.
Dawn spread thin over the centre’s speckled glass frontage. This far above the equator day lagged behind and night rushed in. Just like the locals: the sun’s never there when you want it to be. Or so visitors said. There was a solid chance Iacon would have less questions about his ‘accident’ than his superiors. It fit the stereotype. Not too neatly, he hoped, given what he was applying for.
The interior lights blared on much later than the listed hours said they would. No sign of the place actually opening yet, so he deactivated his optics and leaned sideways on the door, keeping his damaged back plates clear. Clutched in his hands was the datapad he’d spent the night preparing. He hadn’t managed to recharge properly; whenever he thought he’d closed everything but his essential processes, something swirled from the background to the fore, activating his rotors and sensory channels with it. He was tired. Without any sign he should stay conscious, there was no reason not to —
The door swung open and almost dropped him through.
His pedes, unusually bulky even for a flier, were just enough of a counterbalance to prevent him tipping too far. The shock reactivated all his systems, even the combat subroutines, spinning gun barrels and sending an uncomfortable thrum through his half-healed cockpit. Depending how well-trained an onlooker was they’d either see the perfect soldier or a mech who should never have been allowed onboard weaponry. Reactive. Over reactive.
A receptionist and a guard stared flatly at him. The receptionist had startled and dropped his stylus but neither of them were lastingly surprised. There was no-one else in the drab, blue foyer. Both were civilian automobile alts, in equally understated blues, which added to the monotony of the room.
Better boredom than fear. Flattening his plates and halting his moving parts — some of them with a gentle tap of his hand, where the connections were unresponsive — Whirl proceeded to the desk.
He settled his datapad on the surface a touch reluctantly. The tiny, quiet, pragmatic part of him said if he let it out of reach they were liable to destroy it. What he was asking was an awful combination of ‘technically possible’ and ‘unlikely to get approved’ — the senate had been notoriously unhappy when someone publicised the rejection records a few stellars ago. If the branch could ‘lose’ his application somewhere he didn’t doubt for a moment they would.
“I’m here,” his vocaliser almost broke as it played the words, “to apply for alt-mode exemption.”
The receptionist’s tight expression softened into — not a smile. It was too wary to be a smile. It wasn’t anger, though, and it wasn’t disgust. Rather than respond to Whirl he tipped his head to the security guard and the pair of them shared whatever enigmatic little emotion this was. When they were done he adjusted himself to face his monitor and clicked through a few screens. “An exemption. That’s quite a request. Goes through Senator Turnstile himself.”
He’d known it wouldn’t be a simple stamp but he hadn’t realised how many levels up the bureaucratic ladder exemptions went. “Do I need to try another day?” He asked, and his tank churned, could he keep living like this.
“Luckily the senate’s out at the moment and he’s in the district until it reconvenes.”
“On site,” the guard interjected.
“On site?” The receptionist looked skeptical.
“I had to reset the alarms in the middle of the night because he —“ Doing an optical double take between the receptionist and Whirl, the guard loudly reset his vocaliser. “— you probably didn’t see him come through but he’s definitely here.”
They shared a nod. “There you have it! Normally he’d want the meeting scheduled at least a week in advance, but I think for this, he’ll make an exception.” The receptionist pointed at Whirl with his stylus and winked. “Or… an exemption?”
“Really?” Somehow the guard looked even tireder.
The receptionist smirked at the guard’s comment but didn’t shift his gaze. “Head on through, big bird. I’ll let Turnstile know you’re coming.”
Taking Whirl by the shoulder — huge reach, even for an armoured car, didn’t they want someone bigger to handle the local demographic? — the guard led him to a locked door and pressed his free hand to the scanner. It was too narrow for them to pass through together. On their current, funny, angle, Whirl’s blades nearly nicked the frame.
He couldn’t decide whether the back offices were better or worse. Each room they passed was half-visible through a frosted glass door. Assuming that was frost. Some were a mess of the same dowdy colours they had out front, some were tidy white, and the office closest to the end was striated with bold reds and luxurious purples.
The final door, set against the back wall, was solid steel. A lock and an intercom glowed from the frame. The guard pressed the intercom and leaned into the corner as he waited for it to connect. Waited. Continued waiting. If the Senator had an assistant in there, he wasn’t doing his job, and if it was a direct line — hm.
The static stopped. “Come in,” a low voice groaned, and a mechanism clicked somewhere in the wall.
Pressing open the door from the hinge-side, the guard tried to let Whirl through, but it was again too narrow for him to pass. They did a dance around each other until Whirl was in the office and the guard was in the hall. With a tip of his head he let it close between them. No formal introduction, then.
Here he was. Whirl, clutching a datapad, in the office of his local senator. He’d just meant to file a form. This felt appropriate for the magnitude of what he was asking, sure, but he hadn’t prepared for it. The senate was — you know — the big Iaconian machine, a veritable titan. Talking to representatives wasn’t done lightly. Low on fuel, rest-deprived, injured. Suddenly he regretted coming. He regretted existing . “Hhhi,” he forced the word out like overheated air.
“An exemption, hm?” The low voice said, and aware avoiding it longer would leave a poor impression, Whirl looked at its owner.
Senator Turnstile was a hulking land alt: a truck with lights mounted across his shoulders, reflective yellow plating, and caution stripes slapped anywhere that wasn’t bright enough yet. His broad face was outlined by a mismatched formal helm, gloss black, which he’d tried to integrate with the rest of his frame by recolouring his hands and pedes in the same paint. It hadn’t worked.
Seeing the senator was in as messy a state as he was, Whirl relaxed somewhat, and managed to hold his gaze. “I caused an accident and no longer believe myself to be fit for the Aerial Corps.”
Turnstile wasn’t worried about being polite — not that he needed to be — and he let his keen red optics wander across Whirl’s most obvious injuries. Several spidering lines across the cockpit, an inoperable rotor, zig-zag blades, left side scraped clean of paint. He didn’t bother to hide his distaste; his upper lip raised to show his teeth and his brow ridge lowered. Swaying out of his chair and into Whirl’s periphery he let himself vent. Behind him on the desk several bottles glinted in the morning sun. Someone with olfactory mods might’ve noticed other tells. “You’re an airman?” He rumbled.
“It’s stupid. It’s, hah, it’s so stupid. We did these drills, where they’d say ‘just ‘cause you can fly doesn’t mean you’ll always be in the air’, then they’d chuck a stave over and we’d have a go at each other. Here I’m hitting some guy with a glorified piece of rebar — not ‘some guy’! Biggest guy in the squad! — I manage to disarm him. Literally! With a blunt weapon I’ve already dented! Which gets people talking. ‘Wow, Whirl, you’re good with your hands —‘“
“Trying to leave,” Turnstile said, optics leaving Whirl and sweeping to the ceiling. He made a noise like a comm losing signal and smiled in disbelief. “Thank Primus. Some of them see sense.” He staggered over to the window and gazed in the direction of the compound. “I’ve seen injuries like that before.”
It was obvious Turnstile had some… issues… with elements of his constituency. The thought of listening to a proper rant about them made Whirl cringe, but if it got him that signature, he’d suffer through. “Collision. Should’ve seen the other guy. Or the pavement.”
“How much funding does the Corps get? To treat their men like this? When there’s no war to fight?” He splayed his hand over the glass and rested his helm between the plates of his forearm. The lights on his shoulders pulsed into life and he winced at his own aura. Too close to his face. Too much engex. Now he wasn’t blocking his desk Whirl counted 9 open bottles and 3 to spare.
“Might be for the best,” he replied, “seeing I lost this badly against the ground.”
Leaning deeper into the pose so his optics were fully covered, Turnstile’s voice came out tinny and a tad wobbly from his proximity to the glass. “Of course I’ll approve your application. Of course of course of course.”
“Uh.” He’d prepared a lot of supporting evidence. Should he just… leave it in storage? Might’ve been an idea to research this guy beforehand. This was supposed to be an argument, or at least an impassioned speech.
“Don’t think of thanking me. This whole job’s been pointless. They don’t need anyone here! I thought I was lucky, a maintenance man getting a seat, but it’s ceremonial. The only thing that's changed since I got here is I’m sadder and older. You’re what, a million?”
“Around about.”
“ Get out now. While you’re young. Do whatever it is you’re actually wanting to do. If this stupid government’s determined to kill the lot of us we should at least enjoy ourselves before it happens.”
“If — what?” His optics opened wide. The Senator was drunk. He was exaggerating. Trying to justify his day drinking. Ignore it. “Is saying this in front of me… okay?” Normally his superiors would do everything short of spearing each others’ vocalisers to keep the rank-and-file from hearing dissenting opinions.
“Not the worst I’ve said recently.” He straightened himself and turned his head so a single optic was visible. “Not by half.” Sighting the compound again, he sighed, and his posture deflated back into the slump of someone about to run out of road. “Did you know who I was before walking in here?” He asked.
Whirl knew his answer wasn’t what Turnstile wanted to hear, but he’d never been or be in the business of pleasantries. “No. Might’ve seen some campaign billboards back when. Don’t remember.”
He shuddered, his lights bobbing on their mounts like buoys on a stormy tide. “Yeah. Yeah, I have to do this.” He stood tall and turned so the sun was at his back. Combined with his lights his silhouette had an eerie halo, a mix of synthetic yellow and cool white. Inside it were two spots of red. Dimming. “What’s your name, kid?”
That was the cue. Whirl reached into a compartment on his torso and, his supple fingers closing tight around the familiar shape, whipped out a small rectangular object. “Whirl of Polyhex,” he said. He held the object out for inspection. Mottled light surrounded it.
“Is this what I’m signing for?” Turnstile asked, optics focusing and refocusing, shifting the patches of red on its surface.
“It’s an alarm clock. Can’t get a license for onboard devices unless I take the course. Can’t take the course if I’m stuck at the base.”
“No offense, but from your attitude I kind of thought your plans would be —” He shrugged in lieu of an adjective, and the yellow glow moved with him. “S’pose it’s too late to take back the offer.” Giving Whirl more space than he needed, he navigated around, picking past furniture, until he reached his desk. He fell into the chair like he’d been tipped from a trailer. It groaned. “Whirl of Polyhex. Okay. Given official, senatorial-approved leave from his post to complete:”
“A certificate in chronosmithy at the Vaporex School of Watchmaking.”
Turnstile checked amidst the bottles for a stylus, followed by the drawers, until finally he noticed a glint on the floor. Collecting it, he extended his other hand for Whirl’s datapad before he’d fully sat up. “Let’s make it official.”
One last surge of anxiety rushed through him. A last minute reminder that as soon as it was signed and sent there’d be no rescinding it. He fought his faulty circuitry and handed the datapad over.
It was accepted with equal gravity. Turnstile wrote at a crawl and signed like he’d forgotten his own name. His optics kept steady on the words.
They were both perfectly silent. Engines could be heard in the distance. Thin trails looped across the sky as a trine of jets winged their way west. The morning had been slow to come, but now it was here, Vos was alive with aerial activity.
He pressed the last character emphatically into the screen. “It’s done,” he said.
“It’s done?” Whirl repeated.
“Have fun with your new life.” This far from the window, his paint seemed improbably dull, and his shoulder lights faded as though they’d never been active. “Make it count.”