Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The last thing Prowl needed today was a meeting with an alien.

At least he knew it was coming. That was something he could appreciate about these particular aliens--they believed in following clock time, even if it was the wrong clock.

He was trying to get his work done in advance. It was ultimately a futile endeavor, because they still hadn't reinstated interplanetary contact and trying to track the progress of the war on this planet was useless as a shallow tread on the outside terrain. There was no kind of effective centralization of information on this planet at all. The natives kept all their information on paper or physical punch cards. Sky Spy could only pick up so much data at once even at its highest speed orbit. Powerglide and Tracks, their only lucid flyers, weren't even allowed over some regions of the planet because the humans didn't want them there. They weren't allied with the Decepticons. They just didn't like the idea of Cybertronians overhead. Optimus was going along with it, because of course he was.

Well. Prowl couldn't actually blame him for that. The humans were puny but there were billions of them, and unlike the Decepticons, the Autobots could not depart en masse from the steaming heap of mud that still swallowed up half the Ark.

As if it heard him thinking about it, the mountain chose that moment to rumble. The update from Beachcomber appeared eight astroseconds later, assuring them all that this was the result of debris dislodging from the northeast side, not the harbinger of another true eruption.

Prowl tried to let go of eight astroseconds worth of panic-induced emergency fuel deployment, collected the manual adding machine he'd been forced to resort to for note taking, and left his office to go meet with an alien.

The Federal Coordinating Officer for disaster relief efforts arrived punctually, for an alien. He was driving one of the humans’ alt mode substitutes, the same kind Hound had adopted, a four wheeler unique in its capacity to run all its wheels directly from the engine. Another of this planet’s charming quirks was front-wheel drive. Prowl was stuck with it after his own rebuild until Ratchet had the spare time to map out and find parts for an alternative schematic.

The humans had put down broken rock as a crude road-paving measure. Supposedly they would manage actual asphalt paving, eventually, when the mountain was quieter (dormant, they called it, like a thing that lived and thought and consumed—Prowl had not decided yet if this was a preferable way to think about it). Prowl was not prioritizing the road paving. He had more urgent projects and less than zero desire to add to the weight of the mountain.

One of those urgent projects required the assistance of the Federal Coordinating Officer, which was why Prowl had agreed to this meeting. He wanted to stay on the human’s good side.

They greeted each other with polite phrases that did not acknowledge how much neither of them really wanted to be out on an ash-covered mountainside under a crudely erected tent. In the absence of communicable electrical signals, these humans had developed all kinds of little intricate greeting rituals for recognizing fellow sapients. Some of the Autobots thought it was fascinating. Prowl could admit it wasn’t uninteresting or even unimportant to figure out the nuances of communication among the species that controlled this planet’s vital resources, but it simply wasn’t a priority right now.

“Why did you want to meet?” Prowl asked, once the human had provided an update on road conditions and they had each provided a complaint about the lingering ash.

“Well, we’ve got a bit of a budget problem,” the officer admitted, scratching at the mask that kept his internal environment free of particulate. “It’s the mudflow in the waterways. The Columbia’s finally cleared up, and we’ve got shipping going again, but the three local ones are still clogged. The engineers finally got their estimate back to me for long-term dredging, and with conventional techniques, it’s going to be upwards of 200 million dollars. Our funding is less than 30 million. Congress is fighting out the appropriations now but if we don’t get the blockage cleared, we’re looking at some serious flood damage come the fall when the water tries to come through.” He flipped his hands out, palms up. “I got three different agencies giving me three different estimates and I haven’t locked them in a room yet to make them agree, but none of them look good. Figured we could use some serious help if we want to keep the fallout from this whole mess from going any further. Otherwise the fall’s going to drive a lot of people out of their homes. And, well. You all are a lot bigger than us. You’ve already cleared a pretty good chunk of the mudflow up here to get the roads going and your doors open. Now, I can’t promise anything, but it seems like helping us move some mud and clear the rivers sooner would be a solid goodwill gesture for the people around here who are still pretty panicky.”

Prowl listened to this proposal in increasingly frustrated bafflement. It made even less sense than the humans usually did. Prowl had begun studying human history, in order. Texts on the civilizations of the Nile and the Tigris and the Euphrates had made it clear flood festivals had been important for ensuring good harvests for millennia, but surely their agricultural infrastructure had overcome that by now. “I can take this proposal to my Prime, but the answer is likely no.” Because Prowl would tell him not to do it. “As you have noticed, we have cleared a pretty good chunk of the mudflow, but the vast majority of our spaceship is still buried under sediment. Our work on this is only further delayed by our attempts to surveil the Decepticons—” this human had nothing to do with the flyover restrictions and there was no point yelling at him about it. Extensively. “—and those of your fellow humans who don’t believe we should be here in the first place. The mountain could potentially erupt again at any moment and destroy what little we have managed to achieve here. You have said yourself that this eruption is an unprecedented event within your procedures. Inform your superiors that celebrating this water-moving festival will not be possible this year. If they object, send them to me and I will inform them that next year’s harvest will have to be managed with or without the blessing. If transporting that much water is not feasible in the given timeline, the liquid will just have to wait.”

He was clenching his adding machine very tightly by the end of this. The human was silent for a minute. In the distance, another rockslide rolled down the slope, the rumble almost fully muffled by the falling ash.

“Mr. Prowl,” the human said finally. “I’m sorry. You’ll have to excuse my ignorance. Does your...home planet...have a water cycle?”

“A what,” Prowl said.

The human used one of the surveying tripod legs to draw crude diagrams on the ground outside as part of his explanation. Prowl knelt down to study them without a thought for the ash in his joints. This information was more important at the moment.

The diagrams were very crude, but the gist was conveyed. Evaporation. Condensation. Precipitation. And constantly, ominously, the risk of downward flow.

“I mean no offense,” Prowl said. “but this system is grossly inefficient.”

“None taken. I didn’t design it.”

“So when your scientists described acid rain as a side effect of the volcano...” Prowl mused.

“The acid very much is. The rain, not so much. It rains here. We’re in the Northwest.” Prowl added this to his roster of internal complaints about the Ark’s current location. “We’ll have a decently dry summer, we usually do, but come fall and winter we’re going to get a lot of water falling on us with all its usual exits blocked. It’ll flow down the river valleys, but they aren’t deep enough to take it. People will lose their homes. Their farms. Probably some lives, even if we try to evacuate.” He looked up at the peak of the crater ridge to the east. “We tried to evacuate the mountain and some people just wouldn’t go.”

“How many?” Prowl asked.

“Not sure yet. We’re still looking for bodies. There’s at least fifty people we can be pretty sure were in the worst zone that nobody’s seen since.”

Prowl did not know the proper human protocols for recognizing grief, or expressing an understanding of loss. He looked down at the diagram again and the inevitable, inefficient cycle of deluge.

“I don’t know if we will be able to help you hold the flood back,” Prowl said, after a moment of silence. “I will talk to my Prime about it.”

The human exhaled so strongly a little puff of ash rose off his mask. “Thank you. Thank you. We do—we can probably handle this ourselves, if you all can’t spare anything. We have the tools. The engineers have worked a few miracles already. But I don’t want to have to count on them coming up with more.”

Prowl understood, acutely.

Optimus Prime said yes almost before Prowl had even finished explaining.

"These are our neighbors," he said, firmly, from where he was holding up a corner of a collapsed hallway so Bumblebee could carry out the supplies that had been stored there. "They have already given us their assistance. It's only fair to offer ours."

"Of course," said Prowl, who had never expected anything else and now couldn't even muster up the will to argue. "How?"

"We have the best of the Autobots here," Optimus said with that serene wisdom that never failed to get on Prowl's nerves. The worst part was that he believed it so sincerely you couldn't help but agree with him.

"The Decepticons—" Prowl made a valiant attempt to redirect what he could already tell was going to be one of those efforts that swept up everything around it.

"The Decepticons are struggling to adjust as much as we are," Optimus said with an unfair amount of insight. Prowl was not visibly struggling and did not appreciate being lumped in with anyone that was. "We will dispatch them as necessary, and if we can prove our willingness to cooperate with the humans, it may lead them to cooperate with us. In the long run, solidarity with the population of this planet is what will determine our success."

Prowl's transmission groaned. The mountain rattled around them. Bumblebee zipped out from under the lowered ceiling, between Optimus's legs, and crouched next to Prowl. They all held still, waiting until Beachcomber's all-clear came through five astroseconds later. Bumblebee, being more than a little insane, went right back into the collapsed hallway to finish retrieving supplies.

"I'll try to believe that," Prowl said, and went to go prepare a briefing on the situation with a minimum of visible struggle.

Prior to launching, most of the crew of the Ark had been put into medical stasis. The plan had been to work in shifts, prior to their undignified crash on this absolute backwater. A select crew would take the first turn flying the ship, and either trade off with other crew members or expand the operations team, depending on need and energy availability.

Post-crashing, most of the crew of the Ark was in the process of being extracted from medical stasis, based on various and updating priorities. Beachcomber had initially been at the bottom of Prowl’s list, given that waking from emergency stasis had involved a bridge full of angry, combative Decepticons. He had shot up to the top of the list once the understanding that disturbed geology could and quite possibly would destroy them far faster had set in.

Priorities had also favored rousing Perceptor and Wheeljack, which meant that there were three whole scientists at the command meeting who quickly grasped the implications of a moving fluid system far faster than Prowl had.

And then failed to provide a solution.

“I am still measuring,” Perceptor said, somewhat wild-eyed. “Do you understand that all of the elemental weights are different in this galaxy? If you want me to be able to calibrate anything, I need to have complete and accurate readings. Wheeljack may be able to get 'close enough' and fix things after they blow up, but I am a chemist for a reason.”

“I’m still trying to help Ratch get things up and running,” Wheeljack apologized, notably not denying the explosion accusations. “Teletraan-1 took a lot of hits and it’s not designed to operate without a network. If you give me a month, I’ll have more of the ship salvaged to work with, but we just don’t have the equipment right now.”

“I can tell you what the slag is made of, but I’m just one bot, mech,” Beachcomber said. “I’m a geologist, not an engineer. The earth’s gonna go where gravity takes it.”

“Thank you,” Prowl said, and did not thunk his helm against the table. “Thank you all very much.”

“What are the humans doing about it?” Jazz asked, flicking through the pages of the report in rhythm.

“I have no idea,” Prowl said. “They’re all very small. They’re probably using those types of drones that they cut the road up here with.”

“I can go find out,” Jazz offered, like it didn’t matter to him either way and he hadn’t been tearing off down the mountain road to make friends with aliens every chance he could get. Optimus had already had to give him three disappointed speeches about sneaking into places where the humans really didn’t want any visitors. If Prowl was lucky Optimus wouldn’t have time to find out Jazz was probably due for a fourth.

“I’ll help!” Bumblebee offered, because he had imprinted on one of the humans that had helped them in the first unearthing and really wanted to find him again, as he would tell anyone who held still long enough. Prowl had forbidden him from using Sky Spy to conduct surveillance on any individual humans because even he could see that was a diplomatic disaster in the making.

“Fine,” Prowl said. “Anyone else?”

“I’ll go,” Grapple said. It was the first time he’d spoken since he’d found out about the damage to the Ark after being brought out of stasis seven planetary rotations ago. Hoist patted him on the shoulder.

“Fine, good, fine. Do you know where to find the human work site?”

“Sure,” Jazz said, and Prowl had a moment of relief before he followed it up with “How hard can it be?”

“If that isn’t a joke—” Prowl threatened.

“Joke! Joke, it’s a joke.”

Looking back on it, Prowl would have acknowledged that however eager he was to go, Jazz should not have been the one to agree to what the Autobots would be offering. Of course, he had the standing and wherewithal to make those judgements given his position as Prime’s other second. True, he had perhaps the best understanding of their army’s collective resources and capabilities. Yes, he was better at talking to humans than many of the Autobots, including Prowl.

However. Jazz did not seem to realize that among the Autobots, he was unique in his fondness for being in the water. The proposed plan he returned with was going to involve a lot of mechs standing in the river shoveling mud or putting up wire fencing for long stretches at a time.

“It’s the quickest way to go about it,” he argued, after Prowl had spent fifty astroseconds staring at the plan in silent despair. Unfortunately, he was not wrong. It would be the quickest way to go about it, it would require nothing other than mech-power and time, allowing them to conserve their own resources, and as part of the agreement the human Army Corps of Engineers was willing to provide them all with bulk quantities of fuel in return for their service. It would mean that those not directly helping with the river dredging project could focus on things that didn’t involve sourcing energon.

“Yes,” Prowl agreed, trying not to sound as exhausted as he felt. “Excuse me. I need to go talk to Ratchet about stasis removal. Please show this to Optimus and tell him I’ll have the first rota ready in a planetary rotation.”

Ratchet agreed to shuffle the next couple of stasis removals to make way for new priorities after Prowl had a talk with him. Well, he agreed on the condition that Prowl go into recharge for a solid half a rotation first. Prowl’s attempts to argue were ruined when he sat on a recharge bed and was almost immediately subject to a system override as his systems prioritized the energy stream and initiating defrag.

Once he came out of recharge, he felt saner than he had in several planetary rotations, but it was with enormous relief that he watched Hoist and Ratchet wake up Seaspray and Smokescreen.

“What’d I miss?” Smokescreen asked, blinking one optic at a time to check functionality.

“We crashed and many things are terrible and I need you to organize personnel,” Prowl told him.

“Well, only one of those is new,” Smokescreen said. “Immediately?”

“Immediately,” Prowl said.

“What am I here for?” Seaspray asked, sounding fretful. “I’m not good at personnel management.”

“I just need you to be in the water,” Prowl admitted.

“Oh!” The relief in his voice was obvious. “I can do that.”

“I take it you missed us?” Smokescreen asked, sitting up and slowly working through his limb functioning with the routine of someone who had been stasised many times before.

“Among others,” Prowl said, neutrally.

“Did we lose anyone?” Seaspray asked, a classic soldier’s question.

“Not yet. Not for good,” Prowl said, and was determined not to let it be a lie.

Chapter Text

Hoist, as a medic, was supposed to have a pretty good understanding of his own frame’s capacities and tolerances, which made it extra embarrassing that he was the one who was now thigh deep in mud, unable to get the leverage to move himself after a particularly ominous crack.

“I really am sorry,” he said to Optimus where the Prime was currently trying to pry him from this trap. “I should have been paying more attention.”

“We all make mistakes sometimes,” Optimus said. “Can you brace your legs at all?”

To add insult to injury, the humans had started spectating. One who was level with Hoist’s head was looking at him, rubbing his chin.

“Say,” he said. “You’re a tow truck sometimes, aintcha?”

“I’m a tow truck all the time,” Hoist said, unsure if he was being mocked. “I just can’t transform with the mud like this. It’ll get in some very sensitive joints.” He and Ratchet had both been yelling constant reminders at everyone about not transforming while on river duty.

“Yeah, sure, but your cable rig still works?”

“Yes, it does!” And unlike his transformation seams, his cable rig was designed for use in all conditions and was able to be cleaned. “Optimus, wait an astrosecond, let’s get Ironhide over here.”

With the cable rig hooked onto Ironhide, Hoist could work the winch at less than full strength to haul himself up and counteract the sucking mud. Between that and Optimus hauling on him, Hoist was hoisted up onto level ground.

He then promptly collapsed on level ground because his axle was disconnected from a critical bit of his undercarriage and he had no leverage, but he was at least out of the mud.

“You doing okay there?” another human shouted at him. They’d backed up out of range for the robot hauling part.

“Busted something in my axle joints,” Hoist said. He wasn’t sure how far up his torso it ran, but his knee was for sure out of commission. “I don’t think I can fix it myself.” Ratchet was back at the Ark today—Sky Spy wasn’t in range to transmit communications, so they’d have to get someone to race back and let him know, and then he’d have to get out here, and in the meantime Hoist was just going to be in the way. And their work crew would be down two people.

The humans were muttering among themselves and just when Hoist had gloomily concluded that he was going to have to get someone else to drag him off to the side one of them walked a little closer than shouting range.

“One of the reserve guys on a crew upstream is a mechanic, apparently. You want we should go get him, he could take a look?”

A human mechanic?

“I don’t think a human mechanic is going to be able to do much,” Hoist said, carefully. “I have a very different internal setup than you all.”

“Human mechanics don’t work on humans,” Gears said, cranky as usual. “They work on vehicles.”

“I met a human mechanic!” Bumblebee yelled from where he was moving rocks.

“WE KNOW,” several Autobots yelled back at him. Bumblebee had only mentioned it, oh, ten times.

“Oh, uh. Then sure, I guess,” Hoist said. The point of this project was for them to figure out how to collaborate with humans, and for the humans to figure out how to collaborate with them. He was probably one of the best candidates to figure out if it was safe for a human to work on a Transformer. Ratchet could check over this mechanic’s work later.

Smokescreen volunteered to go fetch the mechanic, and Gears and Bumblebee helped get Hoist to a cleared spot further from the river to give Optimus an exit path. Not that he was taking it.

Ironhide brought the winch hook back to Hoist and hollered, “Optimus, are you coming out any time soon?”

“I,” Optimus said. “Hm.” He attempted to follow Hoist to solid ground, but getting the leverage to lift his fellow Autobot clear of the mud had apparently made him a victim of Two-ton’s fundamental principle of physics—that of equal and opposite reactions. “I appear to have merged into your lane, Hoist.”

“Not my lane,” Hoist said, hastily. “You can keep it.”

There were a few chuckles from the gathering crowd—it was getting larger as more Transformers drifted in to see what had stopped the work. Smokescreen drove up with an unfamiliar human in his chassis, and Hoist waved his crane hello, which was about all the movement he was willing to risk.

“Hello!” the human said, climbing out. “You’re the fella with the offset axle?”

“Maybe so,” Hoist said. “But you can call me Hoist.”

“Hoist, huh? Well, I’m Sparkplug.” The human didn’t seem to notice the way several heads immediately turned towards him, excited to meet a human with a name that actually sounded like a name. Hoist felt better about this already. “Usually my, uh, clients aren’t laid out the same way you are. Mind telling me where the problem is?”

Hoist asked Smokescreen, “Can you grab Sunstreaker for me? I need his arms.”

Smokescreen honked an affirmative and waited long enough for Sparkplug to grab his bag of tools before driving off. Humans really liked their little bags. Hoist had yet to see one make major use of subspace, nothing larger than a tool or something that could be held in one hand—maybe it was a cultural thing? He knew that there had been some city-states where major use of subspace in mixed company was frowned upon.

Sunstreaker showed up looking about as unhappy as Hoist would expect of anyone with a healthy coating of mud, but Ratchet had trained him well enough to help with triage and he dropped to kneel on the dirt without complaint. “Problem?”

“Wheel and axle issue,” Hoist said, keeping up his bedside manner. “Sparkplug here has the right size hands for the job, but I can’t point.” And getting out of the river had already taught him a lesson on the anatomical limits of motion without a major functioning component.

Sunstreaker looked at the human, and then back at Hoist, and then back at the human. And then back at Hoist.

Hoist didn’t let the doubt get to him. “So! Sparkplug. You’re gonna be working on my left bifurcated axle branch.”

Sunstreaker obediently pointed to the area and watched as the human got to work. Between Hoist’s instructions and Sunstreaker’s directions, the human managed to get along fine. Hoist certainly didn’t feel in pain. In the background, Optimus must have been making progress, because the gathered Autobots started to offer shouts and cheers of encouragement.

“You can do it, Optimus!”

“You got this!”

“Show us what you’re made of!”

“Why aren’t…” Sparkplug trailed off, glancing over at the crowd of Autobots and then back down at where he was doing something extremely industrious with a coil of wire. Hoist wasn’t sure exactly what it was doing, but he was curious how it was going to turn out.

“Why aren’t what?” Hoist asked. Was something wrong with his anatomy?

The human peered up at him. “Well, I understand why you’re out of commission, but why aren’t the others helping the big guy?”

“They are helping,” Sunstreaker said. “They’re letting him know we’re with him. Moral support.”

Hoist had a guess what Sparkplug was trying to ask. “Take a look at Optimus’s size,” he said. “Now take a look at ours.”

He could see the human crunch the calculations. “You all scale weight much faster than we do, huh?”

“We might!” Hoist agreed. “There’s not enough leverage in that mud. Optimus is the biggest one of us awake right now. A shuttle could probably lift him, but none of them came with us. Omega Supreme could do it but we haven’t dug out the deep transport bays yet. And, well, the Ark could do it obviously, but,” Hm. There didn’t seem to be a grammatical mode for metrotitans in this human language pack. Hoist picked one of the pronouns no one had tried using themselves yet. “She can’t transform with half the mountain on her.”

The human made a grunt of surprise as he put a wrench in place. “Your ship...transforms? Like you do? Into a person...shape?”

“Mech mode,” Hoist confirmed.

“Well, carry me out with the tongs,” Sparkplug muttered. “So how big does, uh, she get?”

“Twenty megakliks, helm to tips,” Sunstreaker said.

“Uh huh. And how long’s a megaklik?”

Hoist was pretty sure this conversation could loop for a while, so he took a shortcut. “See Sunstreaker’s digit tip?” Sunstreaker obligingly wiggled it. “Optimus is that big to the Ark.”

There was a triumphant shout and a tremendous shluck sound, followed by excited cheering. Sparkplug looked over at where Optimus was climbing on to a sturdy section of the bank and said, vocalizer weak, “Ah.”

“Aw, who’s a little kitty?” Hound said, leaning over to peer into a crevice in the side of the mountain. “Is someone stuck?”

There was a ferocious hiss and a swipe of metal claws just past his face plate, but Ravage came no further out of the crack in the rocks. Hound chuckled.

“Now that wasn’t very nice,” he chided.

“I’ll claw your faceplate off, very nice,” Ravage snarled. “Let me out of here, you overgrown lawnmower.”

“But I just want to have a little chat,” Hound said, entirely reasonably. “It’s been so long since we’ve seen each other! Four and a half thousand years, I heard!”

“What the frag is a year?”

“One of this planet’s orbital cycles. What the humans around here call it, anyway.” Now, how to get her out of there?

“Disgusting. You’re going native already.”

“Well, you know me. I always appreciate an organic learning opportunity.” Hm. He wasn’t going to trick Ravage with an image of other Decepticons anytime soon, but maybe…

A set of writhing tentacles wriggled down over the crevice, like they were searching for a way in. Hound had gone exploring on the coast in his second week awake and spotted something, like this but much smaller, in a shallow bay. Ravage’s motors whirred faster and she hissed again but didn’t come shooting out of the crack even as the eight-armed creature crawled its way inside. It was revealed as a hologram as soon as it crawled over and through her, but Hound knew it was unsettling even from the inside.

“I hate you,” she snarled. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you and your stupid little tricks!”

“Oh, that’s hurtful. That’ll keep me up at night.”

“You can’t stay here forever. You Autobots have made yourselves slaves of those stupid squishy organics. They’ll be ordering you out to duty shifts soon.”

“We chose to help,” Hound said, mildly. Ravage had offered him worse insults in the past, but not by much. He must have really hit a frayed wire with his choice of tentacles. “And believe me. We’re not about to forget your little wakeup call anytime soon.” Hound had been one of the only ones whose alt-mode was actually equipped to deal with the volcanic ash that had flooded the bridge as soon as the Decepticons had smashed their way out through the Ark’s front viewport. He had given chase across a benighted unliving landscape of sucking, vent-choking particulate with occasional bubbling pits of mud that even his advanced sensors could only barely warn him about in time, and it had all been for nothing. The Decepticons had jetted away over the ash cloud and left the Autobots there on the wreckage of their ship to die. He’d been forced to give up and trudge back to the Ark and spend thousands of astroseconds hauling his fellow Autobots clear of the bridge, because between the injuries inflicted by the Decepticons before the crash and the ash and mud that clogged joints and grated axles, plenty of the on-duty crew weren’t getting anywhere under their own power. They had been beyond lucky that no one had overheated or gotten a particulate infection. If the humans hadn’t arrived and offered their assistance and fuel, well. There would be fewer Autobots around today.

The Decepticons could yammer about Cybertronian solidarity in the face of the inevitable organic menace all they liked. Hound knew who his allies were.

Hound had been scouting for their enemies ever since, but the primarily flight-based Decepticons weren’t bound by the oceans that encircled this planet the way the Autobots were. They could be anywhere. Now that Ravage was here, under his gaze, Hound wasn’t about to let her get away unsupervised .

“A stupid choice,” she growled.

“Well, not that I’d expect you to understand this, but it pays to be nice to the neighbors.”

Hound could have kept tweaking Ravage’s tail for a while but a series of cheerful beeps let him know Roller had finished making his way over the rocks and was here to help.

“What is that? Who’s there?” Ravage demanded. Hound pretended not to hear her.

“Hey, Roller! Got your taser on you?”

Roller whistled an affirmative and brandished his little shock stick.

“You wouldn’t,” Ravage said, but she didn’t sound sure about it.

“I wouldn’t, no, but only because I can’t fit down there,” Hound said. “Roller, on the other hand? He’s a scrappy little guy.”

Roller beeped out a little tune he must have picked up from the radio Bumblebee had brought him and swapped his six wheels for the little spindly legs that let him sally forth into the crevice. His taser crackled along in time. A low, whining growl emerged and Hound transformed to be at the ready.

Hound started up a countdown in his head and was still at three when Ravage bolted from the crevice, bounded off his hood, and leaped clear. Hound gave chase, but Ravage was scrambling up among the rocks of the mountains and vanishing onto an upper access road. He climbed after her, but she was gone by the time he made it up.

Hound climbed back down carefully to where Roller was emerging from the crevice with his shock stick snapped and dangling and bite marks in his chassis. He was still whistling triumphantly.

“Nice work,” Hound said. He couldn’t pick up any other cassettes in range—and was very sure that if Ravage had backup, he would have had someone harassing him away from trapping her sooner—so he scooped Roller up and tickled his walking legs. “Phase one complete. You did great.”

“Beep!” Roller agreed.

Bluestreak was positioned high above the upper access road, tucked into a sniper’s surveillance point, watching the mouth of the valley. He may not have Perceptor’s scoping lenses, but he could still spot the little shape of Ravage dashing away.

She wasn’t being particularly stealthy. Probably didn’t know anyone besides Hound even knew she was here yet. Bluestreak darted from point to point, using his paint as camouflage against the black and grey of the ashy, muddy hillside.

Soundwave was waiting outside the valley, because of course he was. Bluestreak saw him open his chest for Ravage to leap in and then start stomping off for a pickup point. He switched into vehicle mode, got to open road, and waited.

The jet that came streaking in to pick up Soundwave was fast, but not bothering with evasive maneuvers. Bluestreak was pretty fast himself, and Prowl had let him borrow the flashy lightbar that let vehicles go as fast as they wanted on any human roads without anyone stopping them. He fixed the direction the jet had flown in his internal navigation and took off.

Grapple, Primus help him, was starting to like these humans.

When he had gone with Jazz and Bumblebee to talk engineering with them, he hadn’t really been expecting to be of much use. These squishies were too small to build anything really big, he had felt. He had just been looking for some kind of distraction from the state of his greatest project.

And then they had shown him what they had already done with one of their big rivers, carving out a channel several megakliks long to let water-based vessels pass. They had accomplished all of it with tools no bigger than Grapple’s alt-mode.

They had even managed to scrounge up this clever little projector that used nothing but mirrors to make their little diagrams large enough he could actually see them. They had explained the whole planned process to him with the expertise Grapple would expect to see from a lifelong miner sinking a new shaft, even though they had said they had never dealt with this kind of volcanic eruption before. Grapple had expanded his human vocabulary by leaps and bounds.

Bank revetments, small supports of woven organic material or stones to shore up the areas along the water channels that didn’t need much support. Metal frames called gabions filled with rocks or dirt for the weaker parts. The dredging mechanisms themselves, hydraulic dredges and hopper dredges and pipeline dredges, to move the dirt off to the banks where it would form levees against any possible floods that might come in the future. Wing dams built into the river to send the current where they wanted it to go.

Prowl and the scientists had made it clear the humans didn’t control the fluid systems that encircled their planet. They were as helpless to escape it as a star-bound planet was to outrun solar winds. And yet, they'd found ways to make it work.

“Whaddya think, Grapple?” Jazz had asked, once he’d done whatever he was doing with the squishies that weren’t engineers. Grapple hadn’t bothered following that bit. “Can we help make this work?”

Grapple had looked over this project, this work that wouldn’t make tall buildings or get them free of this planet but would shape the world around them for hundreds of the planet’s orbital cycles to come, and he had remembered why he loved to build things. And he told Jazz “Yes.”

It had been a week since the official start of the project and, some hiccups aside, they were up to moving 410,000 cubic yards (the humans had a frankly adorable triadic measuring system) of material per planetary rotation. Grapple had settled fully into the rhythm of the work, getting to know the humans and moving pipes and collecting progress reports every day from the various work groups. It was exhausting. It was satisfying.

It was absolutely infuriating to make his own condensed report to Prowl and have the Autobot lieutenant wave most of Grapple’s engineering analysis and demand to know “How is any of this going to help us finish unearthing the Ark?”

Grapple’s tank creaked.

“Well,” he said, carefully. “It’s not.”

Prowl’s engine turned over twice, sputtering.

“Should you go see Ratchet about—”

“I don’t need to go see Ratchet.” Prowl stood and put his hands flat on his desk, straightening all his limbs so as to not impede the flow of energon. “Explain that remark.”

Grapple could talk a lot about geological surveys and resource use and the limits of human equipment, but he stuck to the incontrovertible facts and used small words.

“The rivers flooded because twelve percent of the mountain fell off,” he said, bluntly. “Twelve percent. That percent included us, but there’s a solid chunk of the mountain’s mass still sitting on the Ark, and the entire area is geologically unstable. The humans won’t trust any survey they conduct to be reliable for at least an orbital cycle. Probably two. Maybe more, even if there isn’t another eruption. Even if the humans will loan us the tools and equipment to dig out the Ark, even if we can get the energy, we might just make everything more unstable and, uh. Send it crashing down and have to do this dredging project all over again.” Grapple clenched his fists. He didn’t like this any more than Prowl did. “We can’t unearth the Ark. Not now. Maybe not...for a long time. For now, she’s better off in stasis. I told Optimus that a couple days ago.”

“Did you,” Prowl said.

There was an ominous silence.

“Thank you for your report, Grapple,” Prowl said. “Please leave now.”

Grapple left immediately and messaged Hoist to find out if he was stable enough to get out of the Ark and go somewhere nice and quiet for a while, because he was pretty sure the Ark wouldn’t be quiet much longer.

Bluestreak had shut off the lightbar as he triangulated closer and closer to where he was pretty sure the Decepticon base was located. Now, hiding in the shelter of a treeline, he was so glad he had. It would have been a dead giveaway in the dark of night, considering how the weird stony walled compound had floodlights but they were all pointing within the walls. At the enormous ship. Being built there. Almost complete.

This was bad. This was very, very bad.

Silent as only a sniper knew how to be, Bluestreak backed up through the woods and waited until he was a megaklik away to put rubber to the road. At least now they knew what the Decepticons were up to.

Chapter Text

“Optimus!”

The shout echoed down the corridors of the Ark and interrupted Prowl’s absolutely scathing tirade. He was so angry he had actually resorted to binary in order to use small words and extend the amount of time Optimus was getting yelled at, which was what the Prime deserved. He had concealed vital information about a project Prowl was in charge of and for what? To appropriate resources for the project he approved of? Because he wanted to somehow soften the blow? He was taking entirely too much into his own authority, he had no right to keep this information secret.

Fine, he was the Prime and if they still had a habitable planet he would be helping rule it, but here and now this was Prowl’s project and responsibility and he had no right.

“The Prime is busy at the moment,” Prowl snarled as Jazz sped down the hall and flipped up into a reckless moving transformation without, amazingly, crashing.

Jazz was unfazed. “And I’ll help you yell at him for whatever it is we’re yelling at him for now later. But Bluestreak just got back, and we got a problem.”

Professional differences aside, Prowl and Jazz had worked together as Optimus’s Hands for a long time. They long ago mapped out the balance of their responsibilities and what counted as urgent enough to interrupt. If Jazz was demanding Optimus’s time, either the Decepticons were actively attacking, or they’d been found.

Optimus, not being an idiot, asked, “Where are they?”

“Couple hundred human miles down the coast. Problem’s not the where. Problem is they’re building a ship.”

The command meeting was called immediately. Unfortunately, because Perceptor was deep under the unstable parts of the Ark and Ironhide was out helping with the dredging project and Ratchet was still handling the stasis catalogue, it could only be partially convened.

Prowl had been only partially paying attention to Bluestreak’s briefing, reserving his focus for working through the extremely limited records they had on human technology. There was too much information that was kept on physical carbon that humans all expected to be optically scanned one person at a time whenever they wanted to pass the information on, and almost all of the material was calibrated for visual scanners smaller than even cassettes could duplicate. There were a few specially made ‘books’ that had the information printed large enough Wheeljack could scan them and add the material to Teletraan-1’s archives, but those had to be specially delivered by the humans and rarely came with technical diagrams. Sky Spy had been looking for Decepticons at energy centers, not supply centers. As far as Prowl had been aware, this planet simply didn’t have the available technology to construct extra-orbital spacefaring vehicles.

Wheeljack shut that notion down without even looking up from the machine with blinking lights he had brought to the command meeting to work on. “No, they’ve got the resources. Do you know how much old metal they have lying around?”

“No, I don’t,” Prowl said, trying not to sound as angry as he felt about that.

“We can pool our knowledge later,” Optimus said, deftly intervening. “We need to resolve a plan of action. Bluestreak, what did you see?”

“I came back as fast as I could to report in because that was what Jazz said I should do, I saw there was a ship and then I came right back, it’s almost done and it’s big enough that they’re probably all going to get on it and fly away and then they’ll be back on Cybertron or somewhere else and we—”

Jazz set one hand on Bluestreak’s shoulder, cutting him off. “Live in the moment, Blue. Bluestreak got us the initial eyes-on assessment, Mirage is out there getting more info now. We gotta figure out how we’re doing this.”

“How many people are available?” Optimus asked.

“Not enough,” Prowl said, grimly. “Ratchet is trying to assess how reasonable expanding our revival rates would be.”

“We’ve got a lotta the human project done,” Beachcomber said. “They’ve been real pleased with how fast we’re moving once we got some practice. Shouldn’t take more’n another few weeks.”

“In another few weeks,” Prowl growled, “the Decepticons will have moved on to another planetary conquest, and we will still be stuck here.”

“You can go ask Ratchet about what the wakeup schedule looks like, then,” Jazz said. He sounded laconic enough if you didn’t know that he was checking the emergency ping channel Mirage would be reaching out on if he needed help every few astroseconds.

“That seems like your responsibility,” Prowl told him. “Combat readiness.”

Jazz sat a little straighter. “Personnel and resource issue,” he countered.

“Ratchet is less mad at you,” Prowl argued.

This was a winning argument. Jazz scowled and said, “Fine. Prime, my vote’s for a tactical strike with a small team, planned out as soon as we get Mirage’s info. We gotta move fast. The humans barely know the ‘cons exist, and we don’t want them deciding they can fight them out.”

Ratchet was showing a human around the medbay. Hey, that was the Sparkplug guy who helped Hoist out. Good, Jazz liked him.

“Heeeeey, Ratch,” Jazz said. “You got a minute to talk defrosting?”

Ratchet sighed, not even looking up from the medberth he was running through the mechanisms for. “Oh, sure. Who do you want me to disturb from an unhealthily long stasis and put on a barely-sufficient fuel regimen now?”

Okay, internal memo, it wasn’t that Ratchet was mad at Prowl. Ratchet was mad at all of them.

“Easy, my mech. Not here to rush you. Just wondering what your schedule looks like.”

Ratchet sighed. “Tell me what the schedule is for getting us all off fuel rationing, first.”

Jazz frowned. He knew they’d been having trouble with energon conversion, especially since so much of the Ark’s solar panel array was covered by ash, but surely the human supplies had been helping.

“We’re barely breaking even,” Ratchet said, without even sending the human away. “It’s fine, Sparkplug already knows. He and I were talking locally sourced replacements.”

“Really?” Jazz said. The humans were cool, but he didn’t think they were cool enough to have Cybertronian parts hanging around.

“I grew up in the back of beyond,” Sparkplug said. “Not a lot of parts shops out there. If I can’t fix it, it can’t be fixed.”

Ratchet rubbed his chevron. “Right now, we’re breaking even on energy expenditure. Between personal collection systems and what the humans are giving us we have enough to keep everyone going, but we’re walking a fine line with what it costs individually to process the human fuel and what it delivers. If anyone gets a major injury, I’m going to have to put them back in stasis. We can’t spare the rations an extended use of self-repair requires.”

“...Damn.” Getting the Ark put together and equipped hadn’t been Jazz’s department, but… “We didn’t have a plan for alien planets?”

“We had auxiliary power stored in batteries, and then the batteries had a few thousand years to sit and run down,” Ratchet said. He didn’t say “ask another stupid question,” but Jazz heard it anyway. “We’re running the recharge beds on the dregs we have left, and not replacing any.” He frowned. “We’ve got the resources for maybe one more wakeup call, but after that we need to get the ship’s engines online or a power plant going. You know why we can’t get the engines online. So. Get me a power plant and I’ll get you a schedule.”

Jazz had busted up plenty of power plants in his day. Building one was not his stretch of road.

“Okay. One person?” He spun through his mental sketches of strategies, automatically eliminated the ones that Optimus wouldn’t approve of, and tried to crosswalk the rest with who he already had. “I want Blaster. We’ve got a lot of phone calls to make.”

“Well, you won’t get him,” Ratchet said. “Pick again.”

“You said one person, Ratch, why can’t I get Blaster?”

“Fuel requirements. He’s a tapedeck. If I wake him up on an alien planet after a crash on a new front against the Decepticons, with no cassettes to help him shoulder the load, he’s going to be burning enough fuel to deal with the stress that it’ll work his self-repair like a major injury. Pick again, Jazz.”

“We need him. Or someone who can handle the comms. I’m not kidding about the calls, we need to get an information network up yesterday. Get as many people sending in or trawling through signals as we can. One of the cassettes could do a short-term haul, yeah?”

“On a planet buzzing with information feeds and no carrier to hoist the feedback load? Indefinitely?” Ratchet’s voice was getting a dangerous tone.

“Scuse me,” Sparkplug said. “Are you trying to get a radio network up?”

Jazz, who had forgotten the human was there, decided to humor him. “In a nutshell. We don’t have the equipment in place for it.”

“Well, where are you trying to cover? Washington? West Coast? United States?”

“Why do you wanna know?”

“Well,” Sparkplug shifted his hands to his waist. “I might know a few guys. Or, y’know, a few thousand.”

Ratchet and Jazz were both staring at him now.

“You got any equipment that can pick up signals below 30 Hertz?”

Mirage made it out of the Decepticons’ already-named (ominously-named) Victory and back to the Ark with a flat tire and a foul mood that wasn’t at all improved by finding his fellow Autobots clustered around a human with a box on a tiny table like it was some riveting holodrama. Jazz, at least, noticed him and came over to meet him. Mirage wasn’t sure he liked the way his boss was grinning as they went into a private stretch of corridor.

“And what have you all been doing while I’ve been breathing jet exhaust?” Mirage asked, acidly.

“Making friends with the neighbors.” Jazz looked entirely too pleased with himself. “What’ve you got for me?”

“Nothing good. The ship is built for deep space travel and almost complete. From the gossip it sounds like the plan is to go right back to Cybertron. The only thing stopping them now is that they don’t have the fuel on hand.” He ran a vent to calm his overheating engine. “They’ve developed a new form of energon storage based on local materials. They’re prepping more containers now. All they need is an energy source. They hadn’t even chosen one by the time I had to get back to report.

“But they still need to get to the energy source,” Jazz said. “So we’ve got a chance.”

“Oh, sure. A chance to find the Decepticons somewhere on this miserable mudball when they’ve got their choice of targets and I’m your best option for intelligence.”

“That you are,” Jazz said, and slung an arm around his shoulders. “But Mirage, my mech, let me show you what this miserable mudball has to offer.”

They rejoined the group around the human and Jazz let him know, entirely too casually, that they needed eyes on power plants in a two-hour flight range. The human nodded and started to fiddle with dials too small for a standard-sized mech to handle.

“What is he—”

Mirage’s question was cut off by every other Autobot hissing “Shhhhh!” at him.

“This is the good part,” Hoist added in an undertone.

“CQ, CQ, CQ, this is W7ABK. Calling out again for any alien planespotters, we’ve been asked to focus on power plants or energy production centers on the west coast of North America. Repeat, power plants or energy production centers on the west coast of North America are the most likely places for Decepticon activity in the next twelve hours. W7ABK monitoring. Go ahead.” The human pushed a button and leaned away from his tiny microphone. “I’ll repeat that in ten minutes. We’ll see what comes in.”

The radio crackled. “W7ABK, this K7BDU. I’m up in Centralia and we had a military jet flyover just five minutes ago. Pretty sure it wasn’t the Blue Angels. K7BDU, over.”

The human leaned back into his tiny microphone to say “K7BDU, this is W7ABK. Roger jets in Centralia, much appreciated. W7ABK monitoring, over.” He looked up at them. “Centralia’s about fifty miles north of here, as the—in a straight line. Longer if you’re on the road.”

“So they’ve already set off,” Mirage growled. After he’d burned rubber all the way back here…

All the way back here. All the way there. Powerglide was across the continent, Tracks had something in his antigrav generators from the river muck that Ratchet and Wheeljack hadn’t figured out how to get rid of. They didn’t have any more fliers awake, and there was no way they’d beat the Decepticons back to their ship.

He looked up at Jazz. Jazz cocked his head to the side, and then gave Mirage a nod. They were following the same lines.

Mirage headed for the door, only to nearly trip over Cliffjumper.

“Hey! Where are you going?”

“Out,” Mirage said. He didn’t owe Cliffjumper answers.

Cliffjumper scowled at him. “Oh, the first time we get a real fight in millennia and you’re running away, huh? Lost your hydraulics?”

“I don’t answer to you,” Mirage said, and kept walking.

“Coward!” Cliffjumper yelled after him. That didn’t matter right now. Mirage would deal with it later.

Bumblebee had been with the group working on the river when a panicking human let them know that the Decepticons were up the river stealing energy. Well, they had actually said something about “Deceptitrons at Mossyrock,” but the important parts had been communicated.

So now here they were, shooting phasers that hadn’t been fired since before the crash at the Decepticons and trying not to fall off the top of this ‘dam’ thing. Or maybe that was just Bee, who was trying to play distraction for Megatron long enough for the humans to escape to the other side of the river.

Most of the other Autobots, waiting for reinforcements to arrive, were inside the structure where the hydroelectric turbines that the Decepticons were actually siphoning from were located. Bumblebee had made it his job to get all the humans who had been hunkering down inside out into the open air and away from the facility. He’d seen the Decepticons burn too many battlefields down behind them once they’d gotten what they wanted to believe anyone left behind would be safe. Cybertron was the primary example.

On top of that, Decepticons hated organics on principle. Some principle, probably. Bee didn’t know and didn’t really care to, even less now than he had before the crash.

He’d volunteered to go exploring the territory outside the Ark as soon as he’d groggily onlined and heard that they’d made planetary landing. He was a scout, small and light and maneuverable and with practice exploring in the dangerous areas no one else wanted to go. More than that, he loved it, the rush of climbing and crawling and the fun of fitting himself into interesting places, and obviously an alien planet would mean nothing but unexplored territory.

Turned out an alien planet meant alien terrain, and weather conditions so hostile that Bee’s axles had locked up in thick mud before he’d gotten more than halfway through a search pattern. He’d transformed out of alt mode, but root mode had even more vulnerabilities to the ashfall. His chronometer was still scrambled from so long offline, so once his joints had locked up and he couldn’t move there wasn’t even a way for him to tell how long it took for Ironhide to find him and bring him back inside. And definitely no way for him to tell how long he was laying in a room alone before the alien came in.

The human mechanic who had fixed him up was still the weirdest human Bumblebee had seen yet. Big flashy round eyes and a solid black faceplate with a tube coming out of the middle. Bee had only gotten glimpses of him as he moved around, but as soon as the human’s speech had made it through the new translation protocols in his brain he’d hung on every word. Very few of them had made sense, but they were all new and fascinating and a desperately welcome distraction from how he couldn’t move any of his limbs. And something to fill the awful silence he’d been left with after he’d fritzed his vocalizer shouting for help.

The human mechanic hadn’t been there once Bee had recovered enough to get up and move around and get his vocalizer oiled. There had been so many humans in and out in that first messy Earth week that no one had known who he was talking about when Bumblebee tried to ask after his caretaker. He’d been keeping an optic out ever since—how hard could it be to find a human with a face like that?—with no luck.

A human had helped him when he was alone, and scared, and in danger. Bumblebee might never find him again to return the favor, but he could pass it on and make sure that these humans got to safety.

It did occur to him as Megatron brought down an energy flail uncomfortably close to his back chassis that he should maybe be getting to safety. But that was silly, he was an Autobot, he was a soldier, he’d be fine. Megatron wasn’t even that scary.

“Why ally with these foolish, disgusting organics?” Megatron roared. “All of their power is there for the taking, and you dig for scraps!”

“Yeah, well, you wouldn’t know a good deal if it hit you!” Bee spun a donut dangerously close to the edge and popped back into his form with legs. All the humans were safely away—ooh, and reinforcements had arrived. “Like, get out of here and maybe you won’t get clobbered!”

“What?” This confused him enough that he actually stood still long enough for Optimus to get him with his plasma axe from behind. Ha.

Despite the best efforts of the Autobots, the Decepticons absconded from the dam with cubes full of stored energy. Wheeljack managed to thieve one away for later study, but it barely made a dent in their supplies. They set off in pursuit from the ground—no chance of catching up, of course, especially with human traffic on the roads, but they had the coordinates of the base. There was a chance that they’d get there in time to stop the takeoff.

The chance wasn’t big enough. The speed model frames and Optimus were just in sight of the cooling tower of the Decepticons’ stolen base when a ship rose up over the horizon and started heading for the coast.

“It’s too late!” Sideswipe shouted. “We’ll never get them now.”

“We follow them anyway,” Optimus ordered. Wheeljack would love to know where he got his energy—okay, he knew, it was the Matrix. He would love to get his hands on the Matrix and study it for a while. The thing melting the processor components of anyone who tried to analyze it was probably a myth perpetuated to avoid accountability by past Primes. Even if it wasn’t he could always back up his processor first. For some reason, Ratchet had repeatedly failed to be swayed by this argument.

Whatever was in that thing, it had Optimus keeping pace with Wheeljack, Jazz, Tracks, and the twins all the way to the coast.

The ship was moving slowly and ponderously—clearly, whatever they were using to combat gravity and achieve thrust wasn’t as efficient as an antigrav generator. Or maybe they were augmenting a limited number of generators with manual firepower? That might help if they were using locally-constructed antigravs. Wheeljack had been experimenting with trying to augment salvage from the Ark with Earth-derivative materials, and the replacement antigrav pack he’d been working on for Tracks was pretty snazzy but only really handled the weight of a single mech before changing to a slow fall.

By the time they ran out of land, unfortunately, it had still climbed too high to be shot down. Not that Optimus didn’t try, firing a few frustrated shots after it. The rest of them circled up in a futile attempt to get together for whatever they might do next. Well, the rest of them, save one.

Jazz just screeched to a halt right on the cliff’s edge and transformed, staring up at the ship. “Come on. Come on. Come on.”

The explosion in the engines was so small that Wheeljack didn’t know if anyone else had felt it. He had highly attuned sensors for that kind of thing. It was impossible for anyone to miss when the ship began slowly falling from the sky in its forward motion, accelerating as gravity took back over.

Jazz whooped and punched the air. “That’s Mirage up there! He did it!”

Before they could start celebrating, Tracks said, “I think that might be Mirage falling down here.”

A faint speck was quickly growing larger, tumbling out of the sky. That velocity would not lend itself to a smooth landing. Wheeljack thought fast. He had the replacement antigrav pack on him, but not enough time to swap it out for Tracks’s existing one, but—

“Hey, Sideswipe! Want to test something for me?”

The rest of the Autobots arrived in time to see the Decepticon ship make its final crash into the sea, and Sideswipe and Mirage manage a somewhat slower descent. There was a great deal of cheering and rejoicing and Mirage asking Cliffjumper who the coward was now and other nonsense Prowl didn’t have time for. He waited at Optimus’s shoulder until the Prime decreed that they would return to the Ark for a celebration, and followed closely behind him until they got back to the Ark. Jazz quickly took command of the growing party and gave him a nod. Prowl appreciated this. Another officer on-duty was more useful at the moment than a second voice yelling at Optimus.

Especially since Optimus was wearing that annoyingly serene look that said yelling was going to do absolutely nothing. He had a disgustingly sympathetic look in his optics as Prowl shut the door to his office in search of quiet.

“You deliberately concealed information from me,” Prowl said. He didn’t shout. He was furious regardless. “You denied me knowledge concerning a matter that has been my purview since before we ever left Cybertron. You misled me where it concerned the welfare of a friend.”

He waited for Optimus to deny it, to give him the chant to vent some fury, but the Prime merely nodded and took a seat. “I did.”

“Why?” Prowl demanded. “You and I both know the last thing you are is infallible. What misguided, idiotic, overbearing streak led you to lie to me this time?”

“Because I knew you would grieve.”

“So I can’t even have that?!” Prowl’s hands slammed down on to his desk. “How dare I be sad after we’ve lost our chance to go back to Cybertron! How stupid I am to want to save a friend! What a poor sign of judgment it is to regret my mistakes!”

It was Prowl’s mistakes, every step of the way, that had crushed one of Cybertron’s last titans under the cruel joint-clogging weight of a hostile alien terrain. He was the one who suggested Archimetro consider reformatting for space travel. He was the one who had pushed for an earlier launch, before the shields were fully complete. He was the one who had failed to spot the Decepticon ship approaching on scanners.

He was the one who hadn’t noticed that somewhere in their time on Earth, the Prime had given up on saving her.

“I wanted to wait until you’d found something about this planet to love,” the Prime said. “Or at least tolerate. It shows, how much you hate it here.”

“No it doesn’t,” Prowl muttered. He hated this planet with the burning fire of a thousand suns. He only ever showed the heat of a dwarf star at most.

“It wasn’t just you I wanted to wait on informing,” Optimus said. “You know I believe we need to find common code with the humans. We could steal the energy we needed and dig up the Ark, yes. We would destroy many more of their lives for a project that might not even work. Or we can learn from them. Find how they draw power from the world around them, as we once did from the engines of Cybertron. Make allies. Make friends.”

“Friends,” Prowl said, with distaste.

“Friends,” Optimus repeated. “Look at how many of them helped us today. Look at how many of them helped us when we were in need. We haven’t yet begun to dream of the things we could accomplish together, Prowl.” He rested one hand on the wall. “Perhaps, even, saving a friend now lost to us.”

Terrifyingly, he was leaking solvent from an overheated processor, one single tear falling from his right optic down behind his mask. Horrifyingly, Prowl thought he might be about to do the same.

“We failed her,” he said finally. “We failed the Ark and you lied to me about it.”

“Yes,” Optimus said. “In the hope that one day we could repair our mistakes.”

Prowl sat down behind his desk and let his hands fall from the table. There were faint sounds of a celebration. An earthquake that was no more than a settling of mass, a little further into the ground.

Neither of them said anything for a long time.

Three weeks after the Decepticon ship was shot down, the river dredging project was well on its way to completion. This left several mechs free to work on other projects like fighting off the Decepticons when they reemerged, laying down a better road to the Ark, and beginning work on a geothermal power plant that would make use of the volcanic heat still bubbling astroyards below their tires and convert it into energon.

The humans were helping with all of these. Prowl and Jazz had to reconfigure their duties yet again, and Jazz had broken out several obscure pieces of theology and also a timeshare agreement to make Prowl take on an equal share of managing them. Currently Prowl was trying to find a human in the pile of information that was, apparently, lists of qualifications of humans who wanted to help the aliens doing strange construction projects. Prowl did not want any of them. Prowl, after trying and failing to understand Wheeljack’s concerns about Teletraan-1 and its ability to integrate with the datasets being provided by the humans for using geothermal energy, had to admit that he might need one.

At least the information was in a format he could actually read. He cycled through it at random, torn between trying to find someone who could maybe be useful, or one who would be so useless that he could get rid of them after a week and refuse to take another one.

No. That wasn’t the directive. Prowl was the Left Hand of the Prime. He would do his duty, even when it was stupid. Besides, he could admit at this point that some humans were useful. Sometimes.

A piece of data caught his attention. Hm. This human had a proper designation, one that implied a commitment and aptitude to his field of work. And he was an expert in power plants. Fine.

The humans had managed to run one of their little phone lines out here. They were primitive, but they worked. Prowl dialed up the number sequence that was supposed to connect him and waited for the line to be picked up.

“Hello?” a voice asked at the other end. Useless, uninformative opening. Unfortunately, human protocol for this communication method.

“Is this Chip Chase?”