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Chapter Text

One minute I thought my research into hyperutilization of hydrocarbons was going to vault me to tenure. The next thing I knew, however, I was told to vacate the shoddy faculty housing I’d been assigned to six years ago and hit the road. 150 years of stalwart dis-inclination towards politics and public pressure had crumbled and my alma mater dumped a load of adjunct professors off at the academic dump as soon as was practicable.

It didn’t matter how much we fought. How much we explained the validity and importance of our almost-nearly groundbreaking research. Turned out that unbeknownst to us, we were not popular and we had overstayed our welcome. Please-leave-before-next-semester-so-sorry-it’s-cold-have-a-paltry-last-paycheck-and-a-Starbucks-card. Buh-bye-now-don’t-come-back-we-won’t-miss-you. Therefore, while I never would have been on a dirtbag roadtrip comprised of car camping and the occasionally truck stop shower this time of year by my own volition, the only place for me to go was a friend’s proverbial couch, and that couch was an entire continent away.

So there I was, driving down some two lane highway in the dark, hitting patches of ice here, there, not quite everywhere. Weather had been holding back, but as I came into the great plains, the heavens had broken loose, pelting me with great soaking showers, hail the size of cous-cous coming down so heavily it almost resembled snow, and then grapple or ice pellets, I wasn’t sure which, and it didn’t matter. The intensity had fallen off as the afternoon had stretched into evening. I thought maybe I could spend another miserable night camping. But then the cold seeped into the car and settled around my ankles. As I tried vainly to warm my feet at the vent, I’d decided that I’d stop at the first roadside bedbug metropolis that would promise a hot shower for cheap, and I’d sleep in a real, if terrible bed. But as I’d driven on towards the next waypoint of civilization, it seemed as though there was less and less civilization, not more and more.

I’d gone from rural lands, little houses a few, maybe ten miles apart, to here, where I didn’t see a single light. The roads here didn’t even have reflectors. It was like I’d fallen into a disused corner of the United States.

I’d checked my GPS a couple of times and it seemed like I was still headed towards Fargo.

But about the third time I’d passed a sign that seemed to be advertising a long gone business, I’d decided it was malfunctioning. The sky was dark; there was no moon, no stars, and no lights. I hadn’t seen another car for over an hour. Maybe two. Without GPS guidance, and no sense of direction under the inky dark sky, I could be driving in circles and while I still had a solid half tank of gas, I didn’t like the idea of keeping going without daylight to help my orient myself. Half a tank was a long ways, but it wasn’t forever.

I was looking for a place to pull over safely, with enough room between me and the road, when lights suddenly blazed in the sky.

Great purple and green lights, but not like an Aurora -- and it couldn’t have been one because the skies were cloudy. No no, flashes like explosions, great bursts. The color going from deep purple to bright hot violet, and then dying. Not emerald green, not red. It didn’t seem like airplanes other than it was happening in the skies.

Then blue electricity, not a thunderbolt, but a strange cylinder of anger, shot down the road.

I’ve never been a sucker for atmospheric sciences, but my former office mate was, and we’d done a bit of storm chasing together. If that was atmospheric phenomena, if sure didn’t look like anything we’d observed on our trips.

I jerked the car to the shoulder. It was steeper than I’d thought, and my hood pitched down alarmingly. I yanked up the emergency brake and my car stopped rolling, but it was going to be hard to reverse back onto the road from that position.

The battle of electrical blasts and strange lights seemed to be coming my way, and as it did, the objects in the sky lost altitude. Quickly. Their movements were shockingly fast, unbelievably fast. I’d never seen anything move at low altitude like this, but I’d once seen the Blue Angels do similar maneuvers only a few hundred feet higher.

Was this some sort of secret cropduster acrobatics competition?

No, no it was not. Just as I’d even had the thought, I realized that one of the lights was changing. Transforming.

One moment I saw a plane, well… something like a plane. The next, the giant version of a cheap 1980s robot toy was standing on the roadway above my car.

What.

A spray of purple slop splashed over the driver’s side window, obscuring my view of the robot.

Gross. I was looking forward to chipping that off with the ice scraper when it inevitably froze out here.

“Arise newling! Arise and fight!” For such a booming voice, it was awfully shrill, awfully high.

What the hell was this?! I’d love to say that I had some funny thought about how the midwest liked to go too far with the engineering competitions, but I was so confused, so unbelieving, that all I could think was that I had fallen asleep at the wheel, and I’d crashed, and I was having a hell of near-death experience.

But in the time it took me to even have that thought, I was no longer in my car. I was in the middle of battle royal between massive robots. They moved so fast it was difficult to understand what was happening. All around me were angry red eyes, glowing with rage. Guns thundered, fists flew, and I was clutched in two hands, held to the chest of a robot who seemed to be projecting a shield in front of my face.

“Seekers, fall back!” The shrill voice shrieked.

The robots battled until they were behind me, and I flinched as a barrage rained down on that shield, but it didn’t even falter.

A massive cluster of missiles drove towards us, and I turned away, certain it was the end, but then, I was still alive, so I opened my eyes and realized that the hands that held me were made from the same material as the seat covers I’d bought just last week.

I twisted around and looked up.

The robot was made out of my car’s parts.

Or my car was made out of robot parts.

Regardless, my car was projecting a shield that was decidedly not a stock option on a used 2012 Subaru Forester.

Just as I processed that, two huge bursts of energy flashed out from above the shield and smashed into the robots advancing on us. They stopped where they were, weapons raised, aiming projectiles, and one pulling back an arm, as if readying himself to ram the shield. But they were frozen in place. I took a deep breath, thinking that this whole strange interruption was surely over, that I’d return to reality and someone would be explaining what was going on, but instead, my car and I were suddenly hundreds of feet in the air, clutched in the talons of the robotic plane, hurtling through the air at a speed that would have been unthinkably dangerous to me if the shield wasn’t still protecting me from the elements.

I think I passed out, or at least I wasn’t forming good memories, because it seemed like we were instantly coming around for a landing. Seconds ago we’d been picked up, but the next we were flying above a dimly lit sign in the middle of an otherwise dark field of nothing. And then we were landing, the robot carrying my us not rolling out like a plane but slowing to a hover and then transforming back into their robot form.

“How on earth did they find us?” The shrill robot said to one of the others, maybe both of them. “We’ve been jamming signals in the location all day, they should have never come close! Is one of you disloyal?”

“Never!” One replied. “They must have detected the same energon signal.”

“With what? Only we have upgraded sensors,” The other said.

While they were distracted, I looked up at the robot that I thought was pretty sure was my former car, “We should go,” I whispered to my car.

My car very slowly began to back up.

“Stay where you are, Newling,” the leader snapped, and my car stilled.

“No,” I hissed, “I’m your driver, I’m who loves you, feeds you the good gas, washes and waxes you, does all those oil changes with the fancy Valvoline stuff. I, Wielder of the Vacuum and Provider of Air Fresheners order you to get us out of here.”

“You know you are yelling, we can hear you,” the Shrill Leader snapped at me.

I wasn’t… oh… I had probably been deafened by the battle, and I probably was yelling.

“Look, I’ve got no part in your whatever that was back there, and I sure don’t want to be involved either. All I want is my car back, and we’ll be on our merry way. And…” I paused, thinking of what else I really needed to say to induce them to just let me walk off, “...and I promise you, no one will ever hear about this. Ever.”

The leader turned to me, and I realized that he had a face.

Not just a visage, but a face, one that seemed to work mostly like a human face. His expression was one of amusement, but the sort of amusement that parents experience when their children have said something that reveals the godlike powers granted to parents in the early logic of childhood.

“You flatter me to think that I can just wish and have things be so,” the leader robot said, “but it’s not a simple matter to undo what has been done.”

His flowery language and tone suggested anything but sincerity.

I was used to flirting with mechanics to get my car back in a timely fashion, but whatever was in that mechsuit didn’t strike me as the kind who gave a damn about the attention of women. My other option was a heavy application of social engineering. It worked on the type that liked to feel powerful, liked to see you beg. There’s no shame in saving your own hide, so I begged.

“She’s not just a car,” I said, forcing a little extra emotion into my voice, “she’s the first car I ever bought with my own money, that I chose. We’ve been together this whole time. I have more pictures with this car than I have with friends. I’ve never been able to keep her in a garage, but I used to bring her battery into my bedroom so it would be good through the cold nights. We’re less than a thousand miles from her first night in a garage, ever-ever. There’s a new set of snow tires and an oil change waiting for her too.”

I was surprised by the ferocity of my words, and how true they felt in my mouth.

“Uh,” the leader said, and I wasn’t sure if he was non-plussed or dismissing me.

“She has a name,” I pressed on. “She’s Calamity, after Calamity Jane, there’s this funny story –“

“Ugh, stop,” the main robot said. “I’d have never touched Calamity with the Sparkstrand if I’d realized it came with a little pet, but the heat of battle brings strange dividends to us both.”

“She!” I insisted. “It” rankled my nerves.

One of the other robots held the boss’s arm down with his own, and turned to me, “It’s easier when you are agreeable. There’s ...human… snacks in there, go get some and cool your jets.” He jerked his head towards a low building that was barely visible in the low light of the flickering sign that was then some 20 feet above us. “Set the human down,” the robot said to Calamity, and she let me down, gently.

Wobbly legs held me up.

The robot flicked on a searchlight that cut a blinding path up to the building.

I think it was the use of the word “human” that made me decide to follow the instructions. I think I kind of knew that I wasn’t dealing with humans when my car was converted, but I had perhaps been hoping that this was some weird military tech and inside the robots were super futuristic mech pilots. But after the awkward use of the word “human” I was certain that I was dealing with something else entirely.

Going inside was the path of least resistance. It was the path the robots wanted me to take. It was the safe choice when I needed to stand down, and I took that exit ramp from the situation, since I couldn’t have been further outside the known boundaries of my world.

I was surprised when the big blue robot followed me.

“You need to know when to shut up around the boss,” he suddenly opined.

“I need to know what he’s going to do to my car!” I snapped, the horribleness of it all raining down on me. I had no idea where I was. Everything I owned was inside Calamity’s trunk, and I didn’t know if it had become part of her, or not. But my best hope of maybe getting out of here was my cell phone, and it wasn’t going to do me much good, having a whole 12% charge and no charging cord. And that presumed the place had electricity.

“It’s going to sort out,” he said very unconvincingly.

We stepped inside through some weirdly huge doors, and lights came on.

“There’s human stuff in there, and back through that doorway. Well, we think there’s human stuff back there. We don’t fit,” the robot told me.

I looked where he was pointing.

We seemed to be in some long-derelict truck stop and diner combo. The main dining room was in a Quonset hut, with the center of the ceiling soaring overhead just tall enough for the robot to straighten up in the center of the room. Off to one side there were the remains of the cafe kitchen, and I could see a disused retail space partitioned away from the dining room by a kneewall topped with spindles to let light through. There was a dark doorway that lead off somewhere situated between the partition and the kitchen. The restrooms, the office, storage closets, whatever. I’d find out soon enough.

I backed into the retail area, still staring at my babysitter (Captor seemed too strong a word.)

The place was pretty well picked bare. The advertisements and remaining products strongly suggested that this place took a nosedive and closed in the late eighties, maybe the early nineties. All that remained behind seemed like things I couldn’t really use this very moment. Tiny glass jars of Carmex, some long-since clouded over cleaning supplies. Rolls of that gross scented toilet paper everyone’s frilly, fussy Aunt or Grandmother had way back in the day.

What I really needed was some food, but what remained in that store couldn’t have been more likely to poison me. Even now I could see some of the cans bulging from some long-ago fermentation process that surely left toxic sludge behind.

I half-heartedly tried the door, but the truth was, it was deeply cold out there, and while I hoped there was civilization between me and the point of hypothermia, I didn’t know if there was or wasn’t. A truck stop seemed like the sort of business that couldn’t lose money if it tried, but this one had shuttered. Maybe the civilization that had supported it had gone bust, dried up and blown away in the prairie winds. Maybe I wasn’t even in the prairies anymore. The door was locked, anyway. Even if I had been in possession of some very clever way to depart, it didn’t seem I was getting out.

And I wasn’t going to leave without Calamity.

I walked back into the central cafe, and wondered if maybe the kitchen still had something.

My babysitter and his similarly hulking friend, but not the leader of this group of robots, had settled down into two giant chairs that they had clearly brought with them. In front of them they had a large old-school television, but it was off. They both rotated their heads to look at me, but neither said anything. They just watched with eerie, unblinking eyes of burning red.

I reminded myself, they didn’t want me dead. If they did, I’d be dead. They were wicked fast compared to me. Wicked huge. And while those weapons didn’t seem to do nearly as much damage as I expected to the other robots in the battle, I suspected they’d be more than effective on a fragile human body.

“So,” I ventured, “I understand you need my car, but what do you want with me, exactly?” I didn’t add that it felt a lot like spare parts, extraneous to needs.

Both robots shrugged in unison, “Boss wants to keep you. Last Strandicon we –” He suddenly stopped.

“Little pets are important,” his companion finished.

“What’s going to happen to Calamity, my car?” I decided to ask.

Both ‘bots shrugged again.

I resumed my search for food in silence, and was rewarded a cupboard full of much-more recently purchased shelf-stable items. It was heavy on salt, sugar, carbs, and processed cheap calories, but it was human food and it wasn’t expired. While searching for someway to heat water, I found a freezer that was full of frozen, boxed dinners. Someone used this place. I checked the expiration date. They didn’t use it often based on the fact this was about to go off, but they used it enough to leave frozen foods here.

Not really sure what someone would use a remote truck stop for, but whatever.

I was grateful to have something to eat.

I was grateful for the idea that maybe someone would appear to do whatever it was they did here, and rescue me in the process.

But mostly, I was grateful to be warming up.

A little more searching revealed a microwave.

I had a fork, didn’t need …. well, had was the operative word, everything was in Calamity, and Calamity was outside. Somewhere with the boss.

The bots seemed to be anxiously waiting for something, drumming their fingers, nervously shuffling around in their chairs as if they weren’t quite comfortable.

I quietly ate a Marie Calendar’s steak-and-potato dinner with ‘steamed’ brocoli. I’d been surviving on leftover freeze-dried camp food, canned soups, and road-food, so the frozen dinner tasted significantly better than it had any right to.

My phone beeped.

10% battery.

I checked it. No bars. No wifi. The only thing it was really good for was pictures and maybe the radio, if I could pick anything up. In theory, I had a location, but I didn’t trust that. Not with how lost we’d gotten.

I decided to power it down.

I cleaned up the tiny mess I’d made in the kitchen and wondered what to do. I was exhausted, it was colder than I’d initially thought it was in the hut, and the warmth of dinner was already fading.

I hoped one of the back rooms had a couch. I really hoped I wouldn’t be sleeping on the cold floor. To my surprise, the first room inside the hallway held a pair of sturdy bunkbeds. The mattress was surprisingly good. The sheets smelled a little dusty, but I could smell the lingering scent of dryer sheets too. The pillow was one of the nice ones with latex noodles. I couldn’t believe my luck for a moment. I’d have settled for a crappy motel and here I was, sleeping on a cloud!

But then reality rushed back in, because it had to. For all my joy at the bed, I was a prisoner. And my car was a robot. I had problems.

But, butter side up, a crappy bed wasn’t one of them.

Chapter Text

The morning started with a cacophony. One moment I was in a dead sleep, and the next, I really wondered why a bunch of robots who were probably aliens were having a loud argument in English.

There was a fourth voice, a voice that sounded like it had once been powerful and commanding, but now sounded thin, drained, airless. But abusive nonetheless.

“You idiots have a single mission,” the rasping voice choked out, and then coughed weakly. “This source should have been identified months ago, and yet you bring back nothing. I survive on scraps. If I couldn’t see your diminished faces and your own growing hunger, I’d think traitors who feast behind my back and lie to my face! But surely your own hunger grows and yet you find nothing. Defective the lot of you. Seekers don’t seek for seeking sake, they find.”

I poked my head out from around the door frame that lead into the main cafe.

The robots were huddled around the leader, who held out his wrist. A hologram of another robot, one leg cleaved below the knee, arm nothing more than wires protruding from a shoulder socket, stood on that wrist, projected in perfect miniature detail. I was seeing him from the back, but I thought I could make out that part of his face was badly damaged. There was certainly damage all along the side of the missing arm and partial leg.

“My Lord Megatron,” the boss began to say.

“I’ve had enough of your excuses, Starscream. First you asked for days, then you asked for weeks. Now you ask for months. Your own energon could heal much of this, and don’t forget that I know it. You claimed when you went on this mission that you had no more designs on leadership, and I foolishly believed you then, but I remember your slippery tongue and how it says one thing while meaning another. Your brothers’ reports of your endless and frantic search almost convince me of your loyalty, but my convictions wane.”

I thought that was the end of it, and I started to make coffee for myself, but I realized, that was only the opening barrage of a rough ride. The damaged robot lit into a grudge built of minor slights, real disappointments, and what sounded like half-remembered fights. At first, he rounded on each of the assembled robots, but as his anger grew, it was the leader, Starscream, who bore the brunt of his ire.

And there was much, much ire.

He raged.

And the proud robot shrank in so much as anything that is taller than most houses can shrink.

I barely registered to them. I drank an entire cup of coffee, boiled a toothbrush I had found for a solid five minutes, used it, and helped myself to microwavable cinnamon buns before Lord Megatron abruptly ended his tirade.

“I might remind you that we rescued you,” Starscream said, carefully. A housewife gently soothing her brutish husband, knowing to choose her words with great gravity and wisdom. “We combined with a dumb ship to carry you safely from Cybertron to here. We risked our lives for you. We gave up anything we’d had to bring you to a place where recovery was possible. Why do all of that if our end goal was to let you die of your injuries? We could have done that decades ago.”

“You need me,” Lord Megatron sneered.

“Precisely, I need you,” Starscream agreed, “Ergo, we run our reserves to nearly nothing, searching for natural energon on a planet simply bursting at the seams of unsuitable sources!”

“One could think you crashed the ship on purpose, force me to need you, give you a chance to draw out my humiliation and poor condition.”

Starscream fluttered the winglets on his back, and the crude patches – I even saw cheap speed tape stretching along one section! – caught in the light. “I assure you, my own condition is far from a source of pride, and you know I would never endanger myself so severely. I’ll remind you, I am the best flyer; if anyone else had been steering the ship the impact would have been fully fatal.”

“You’ve lost control of the other seeker trine.”

“One could argue I never had control, only you did. It is they who betrayed you after our arrival, not I. How many times must I tell you of my newfound loyalty before you believe it?”

“I prefer to be shown things, as you best know. Energon is loyalty to me now!”
I looked at the other two bots.

They seemed to be resolutely and staunchly pretending that this argument wasn’t happening. Or if it was, it wasn’t that bad. And if it was that bad, well, no it wasn’t.

Lord Megatron, who wasn’t really coming across as that noble to me, took some final potshots at Starscream and then ended the call.

Starscream clapped his hands, and both of the other bots straightened, and returned to paying attention. “Skywarp, Thundercracker. Quarter speed cruise over sectors 4A and 5B. The readings were strongest there last night when we were ambushed.”

“With what energy, boss?” It wasn’t accusatory, but it was sharp.

Starscream rummaged around in a storage compartment on his hip. “The dregs of yesterday’s experiment,” he said, as he handed them each a softball-sized lump of what looked like purple cake.

“This isn’t very much.”

“Stretch your ration as far as it goes, no unnecessary expenditures at base, dim your eyes, no use of the search lamps. Anything to reserve energon – ”

“-- all due respect, this scrap you make in the lab isn’t energon,” one of the other bots griped.

“It’s as close as I’ve come yet!” Starscream snapped back. “The sooner you find something, the sooner we can all heal, not just Lord Megatron. So get to it.”

“I’m sick of running half my processors at best.”

“Well if you don’t want to be used to it, you know what to do.”

“I don’t think it’s out there, Commander Starscream.”

“Then you better hope my experiments prove more palatable in time,” Starscream replied, “when you do the cooking, you can complain. In the meantime, go find something better and we’ll all sing your praises.”

Both of the underlings lumbered out the door.

Starscream began to turn to leave, and then, finally, I was noticed.

“You, watching us with little spying eyes.”

“I don’t really have anywhere else to go,” I pointed out.

“Listening in and enjoying our daily humiliation?”

“Listening in, yes. Because I had to. Everyone within two miles of this place got a front row seat! Enjoying it? No. I’m not really sure if that was your boyfriend turned boss, or boss turned boyfriend, and I guess there’s an off-chance he’s just one or the other, but he was giving off both kind of vibes with you. But it doesn’t matter, because no one should treat other people like that and get loyalty and respect in return.”

It was surprisingly bold, but I realized that I wasn’t really talking about Starscream and Lord Megatron exactly. I was really talking about my own situation. I was never in a relationship with my mentor. But I thought he respected me and my research, I thought he was a real friend. But he’d left me on read after the massacre of adjuncts and teaching assistants from the program. Nothing. No acknowledgment. Just silence.

“You don’t know what you are talking about,” Starscream replied.

“Yeah, yeah I do!” I said. “I had a bad boss. I had a boss I would have jumped into dumpster fire for, would have followed across the galaxy, and he straight up left me in the wind to twist.”

“Are there other people on the planet who can appreciate you, understand you for what you are, admire what you gave up to be where you are?”

“I guess,” I said, since I still had friends, still had fellow researchers who were just as shocked, saddened, and angered as I was by the turn of events.

“Then, I assure you, you do not know what you are trying to talk about.”

I realized I’d been dismissed, but I couldn’t let it go.

“Fine, let’s talk about something I do know something about. I can help you with energy density, I know I can. I’ve spent the last eight years of my life in a labcoat creating better energy outcomes.”

“No, it’s my lab, and I don’t want to deal with a meddling skinsack in the way.”

“Fine, let me take my car and I’ll get out of here, never to be in the way ever again.”

“No.” Starscream said flatly. “Your former vehicle is another matter I must resolve. You stay here. If you want to find yourself on my good side, you’ll do something about the fine layer of oily residue and whatever filth comes from the crevices of my closest but ultimately unsatisfying companions which blankets this room. It’s intolerable.”

I wasn’t sure this Starscream fellow had a good side. And I almost said it, but I thought better of it. He’d told me it existed, and he’d told me how to find it. That had to be worth something. And if it did exist, and this was genuinely the path to his heart, fine, good! Whatever got me my car back. And anyway, now that it had been pointed out to me and I’d been forced to consider it, I was none too pleased about the fine mist of vehicular grime all over everything either.

Fortunately, during the fight I had found the old janitorial closet during an attempt to find the restroom again. I’d also found a shower that looked tempting until I realized that there wasn’t any hot water. Well, there wasn’t yet. I’d found a hot water tank and I’d switched it on, but it was certainly still heating. It was a big old commercial unit, like we’d had in the faculty house where I’d lived. At home, it had taken two hours to come up to temp when it blew out (which was once a week at least) so I decided to put a big pot on the stove and begin the work of vacuuming the venue. It was big, after all, big enough for three huge robots.

I wished I could have music.

But I hadn’t found a radio. Just the television, and when I flicked it on, it picked up static on four channels, and some sort of local programming that seems to be reruns of old children’s programming.

So I cleaned in silence. The kitchen went from dank to tidy. The tables lost their soft velvet flocking of grime and instead gleamed. Mopping removed tread tracks and muddy imprints of robotic feet (wildly articulated!) from the hard floors while vacuuming sucked up several bags worth of dust to reveal a colored pattern on the short-napped carpet. The back rooms, which I was quickly designating the human portion of the building, were relatively clean compared to the main area. The retail area was clearly the dirtiest. Bucket dump after bucket dump was an alarming shade of brown-gray.

I found an old operations manual that had a list of nightly chores. It advised mopping the whole front retail space with a single bucket unless it was raining or sloppy outside. I laughed at the lazy optimism, and went back to my labor.

It felt good to do something, to see progress. I liked the simple nature of it, the straightforwardness of the work. It was nice to not have to reach laboratory standards of cleanliness, just good standards. It was nice to think that it might be appreciated, not expected.

As night fell, I nuked a bowl of Orange Chicken and waited for Starscream to come in the door, waited for him to marvel at my thorough response to his request. Waited for him to hand me my keys so I could get out of here.

Instead his two flunkies arrived, paying no heed to cleaner surroundings, and proceeded to track who knows what filth across the floor before falling, exhausted into their chairs.

I was miffed.

I dragged the mop bucket out and cleaned up behind them while shooting daggers from my mind into their armored chests, but it didn’t work. They looked at me briefly and they looked awful. Grad students up 48 hours with a malfunctioning experiment tired. Grad student being strong-armed to the doctor by a friend tired. I’d been that tired, worn down by bad boss, bad diet, and too many expectations on myself. I regretted my earlier daggers. I wanted to say something. I wanted to tell them they didn’t have to do this. I wanted to somehow be a Good Human Friend like always seems to crop up in these sorts of stories.

The one on the left, the one that looked a lot like Starscream, except he was blue, cracked an eye and gave me a brief nod of approval. Then he heavily turned his head to his comrade. Who also looked a lot like Starscream, albeit less so.

“Do you remember how Starscream would race us to the tower in flight school, and he’d be at a table, feet up, chair tilted back, drinking a cup of hot, spiced energon when we got there. He’d hand us each a cup, and we’d know how hard he’d beaten us by how hot is was or wasn’t?”

“Mmmmhmmm,” the other bot intoned without opening his eyes.

“And do you remember the day that we decided just to race each other, and we realized when we got there that Starscream was the one making the spiced energon? That he wasn’t just beating us bad enough for it to cool down, that he was beating us bad enough he had time to make it? That it wasn’t just on tap there like he’d implied.”

“Mmmmmmmmmhhmmmmmmm,” the other bot agreed.

“I miss a hot cup of energon sometimes.”

The big blue bot pulled another softball-sized ball of purple stuff out of his storage spot, raised it to his mouth, and then thought better of it.

“I could heat it up,” I said.

“You could,” he agreed, “but it’s not worth it. It will only make me miss the real thing.”

Ouch. I felt swatted away like a pest, a cat on a busy kitchen counter, or a toddler underfoot.

Starscream chose that moment to make a grand entrance.

“You,” he said, and pointed at me, “you I need.”

“Please don’t need us,” the big blue bot rumbled.

“I never do,” Starscream said, and it sounded awfully cheerful for how mean it was.

Chapter Text

The Turn

Starscream saw fit to grill me on every detail of car ownership. Among the roughly 14 million questions he asked, there were a few I could answer. When did I buy Calamity? (2013.) Why did I buy Calamity? (Right place, right time, right features, right price.) Who made Calamity? (Subaru, a manufacturer of many commonly available cars.) Was Calamity special? (To me! Not to other people.) What was Calamity supposed to do? (Drive places?) Why-the-slag-did-Calamity-have-a-top-shelf-shield-and-no-offensive-capabilities?

“This your tech,” I told him.

“All of our other Strandicons have manifested with offensive abilities, weaker, but offensive. All Strandicons started as human technology,” Starscream said, and projected images of the things they’d turned into Strandicons spread across my vision.

A harvester. An old tractor. Some sort of articulated earth mover.

“All of those things kind of have some violence built in,” I said, not terribly interested but still I forced myself to focus on his problem, because that was the best chance I had at returning my car to me. “Maybe intention in the design and creative process matters? Something made to rip up plants or earth, do damage, maybe it comes out the chute angry. I don’t know. My car was designed to be safe. Really safe. A shield makes sense to me.”

Starscream stared at me as if I should say more, but I shrugged. Wrong kind of engineer. I might have taken good care of my car, enjoyed every minute of driving her, considered her the better part of certain adventures, but I didn’t know what went into designing cars or what sort of things the engineers were intending when they finalized a design.

“What were you intending when you … uh… converted my car?” I asked.

“A new recruit, cannon fodder. The others have served as a distraction long enough to effect an escape from stickier situations.”

Well hey, at least he was honest.

“Well, the plan ended up working pretty well for that,” I said and I realized that was not perhaps in my best interests. If I made Calamity seem valuable, he might want to keep her. And I needed her back.

Of course, I also needed her to stay in one piece, and making her seem valuable might have been the best way to achieve that.

“Mmm,” Starscream intoned. “Our last hope of easily converting lesser sources to high grade energon were dashed in that battle, so while we were able to retreat – the Decepticon way! – we certainly gained nothing for our losses.”

“Huh?” I said, because that made no sense to me.

Starscream put one knee over the other, interlaced his fingers and folded his hands neatly over his knees. It was such a human gesture it was almost instantly disarming and charming.

“Energon is a relatively easy substance to synergize from common sources, provided you are in possession of the right catalyst and working compressive equipment. The catalyst, unfortunately, isn’t plentiful in this solar system. While it is long lasting, such a catalyst degrades over time. We were recently able to acquire more catalyst at significant cost. But our former allies turned sudden betrayers took it from us. We are well matched in power. Had Calamity had offensive capabilities, it may have tipped the scales in our favor. But she doesn’t, so she didn’t. And we lost the catalyst we’ve spent months procuring.”

I saw how he’d be mad. He’d thought he had his victory well in hand. Instead, he simply had a better retreat. A retreat that they probably could have managed better without a random addition to the team and an inconvenient little pet.

“So I continue at my lab counter, eking out a drip here, a dreg there of low-quality energon substitute, enough to continue this miserable mission but not enough to end it. And far less than is needed for any illusion of comfort or satisfaction.”

“If I help you in the lab, will you give me my car back?” I asked.

“I told you, it’s not so simple to return it to it’s former form, if it was, I would. Strandicons use more energy for less effect than a proper transformer.”

“Is that what you are, a transformer?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Didn’t you also say you were something else?” I said, because I thought he’d called himself a Decepticon, but maybe that was something else.

“A Seeker. I’m a Seeker. Leader of my Trine.”

Okay, I didn’t think I’d heard that before, but I decided today was not the day I tried my luck, and I nodded as though this was the information I wanted.

“Anyway,” he said, his tone already dismissive, “I can’t see what a human scientist can do for me. In terms of evolutionary curve, you are mere steps away from witchcraft and wishing.”

He stood up and stepped towards the door, but then looked over his shoulder, as if he wanted to say something else. Instead, he scanned the room, and I’m not sure if I saw a hint of a smirk or not when he met my eyes for just a second. But then he was on his way.

I was, again, thoroughly dismissed.

“Wait!” I called out.

“What is it now? Going to suggest some other mad scheme to free your car?”

“No, I don’t have one,” I admitted. “I just want my stuff.”

A hint of a smile played across his face. “Maybe. Keep finding ways to be useful to me. I could get used to things being clean around here.”

I didn’t let my anger play on my own face. He had the upper hand, I had the nothing hand, and he knew it. I knew it. God, the universe knew it.

Well, no, I still had my wits, and they were not ‘nothing.’ Starscream needed his ego fed in the worst way. I’d figured that out, well, really I just knew it. His friends? Over it. That ego wasn’t getting anything from them. But academia had granted me a secret Ph.D in the fine art of buttering people up. I could kiss ass with the best of them, fawn like a fangirl over the undeserving chair who sat between me and my grant money, and flirt the fat wallet of a well-heeled alumni into the permanently open state. But that was humans, and that was when I was at my best.

Which I definitely wasn’t right then.

I was exhausted. I gave up. No reason to fight today when tomorrow offered me another shot at getting my stuff. I could have really gone for a podcast or a just a downloaded book, but instead, my phone was still off because I couldn’t charge it without a cord. I turned off the lights and tucked into bed, really wishing for a clean change of clothes, because I was really tired of sleeping in Carhartts and who-knew-how-many-days-old-underwear. I’d showered after the chores were done, but I was getting just a little stinky. Not so much I didn’t want to hang out with myself, but enough that I was catching whiffs.

I’d fallen asleep for a while (I could tell because of how firmly my face was smashed into the pillow and how rude the awakening was) when my car’s alarm went off.

BEEP-BEEEEEP-BEEEEEEEEP-BEEEEP. WOOH WOOH!

I groggily hurled myself out of bed, slammed my feet into my boots and prepared myself for the possibility of needing to break glass to get out of the building, but to my surprise, the back door was unlocked, and I was able to inelegantly jog towards the old service garage in loose boots.

What the hell?

A thunderous crash came from the garage.

But my legs were like lead, and when I tried to speed up, all I did was lose my boot.

I hopped back, crammed it on, raged at the time lost to actually lacing and tying them, and then turned back towards the garage.

There was a massive flash of purple light and the alarm went silent.

My god, was Calamity dead?!

A great, bell-like clang echoed in the garage.

I heard heavy footfalls behind me.

Starscream’s comrades were behind me, looking at least as confused as I felt.

A shrill squeal of frustration rang out.

Well, that was a dignified noise, mmmmhmmm.

Another crash of metal, a tiny beep and more flashing lights.

“I think he’s beating up my car!” I said to the two bots behind me.

“Oh, I doubt it,” the dark grey bot said. I hadn’t yet figured out who was Skywarp and who was Thundercracker.

“Well what’s going on?”

The grey bot and the blue bot looked at each other and their faces show mirrored smirks.

“Ow! Ow! No! OW!”

Suddenly, the big roll up door on the first service bay opened, and something about the size of a cast iron skillet was flung out onto the thin snow. Except it was purple and clearly hot.

Starscream casually walked out of the garage, bent down, picked it up, and then noticed us.

“What?”

“We… thought… we heard something,” The big blue bot said.

“You didn’t,” Starscream replied.

“I did. I heard my car alarm.”

“Oh, was that what that was, I mean, no, you didn’t.” Starscream replied.

Everyone stood awkwardly in the cold.

“Back to recharge stations. There’s nothing to see here.”

The big ‘bots turned around, but I looked into the garage.

Calamity waved.

I waved back.

In one sudden leap, she was in front of me, picking me up under each arm like a Mom picking up her toddler.

“Happy!” she squealed at me. “Driver!”
Starscream stared at us, mouth open. “Happy?” He repeated.

“HAPPY!” Calamity confirmed, her yellow eyes brightening to blinding white, and then I realized she’d simply flashed her high beams.

“Fine. Happy!” He repeated, and walked back into the garage.

Then he walked back out. “No, not fine. Unhappy.” He said to Calamity.

“Share happy,” she said, and passed me to him.

Calamity, compared to Starscream, was a short ‘bot. I only dangled perhaps six feet off the ground in her hands. In his, the ground was somehow very far away. And I didn’t feel nearly as safe. And why should have I? Calamity wanted me safe. It was why she manifested a shield. Well, one reason. Starscream, well, I didn’t know what Starscream wanted, only that I didn’t have it.

He waggled me back and forth.

“Nothing,” he said. “nothing at all.”
But as I look at his face, his eyes seem less red.

“Why’d her alarm go off?” I asked.

“She didn’t like the ‘energon’ I made her,” he said, and it seemed truthful, somehow. Maybe it was the face he made when he said it, or the body language that reminded me of my cousin being stumped by fatherhood and his child’s varied tastes, or maybe it was simply the vaguely offended tone that made me believe it.

“I see,” I said, extending a little faith to him.

“It’s all I have to feed her. I even used what little remains of the spices. I guess I’ll slather it in benzene again, like I did lunch. Disgusting.”

“Why?”

“It’s sweet, it’s cloying, need I go on?” Starscream asked.

“It’s the cheap candy of the robot world?”

“What is cheap candy?”

“Short chain carbohydrates pressed into tablets or simple shapes and flavored with citric acid,” I explained, thinking that this chemical analysis would be far easier for him to comprehend than any other explanation.

“It’s the cheap candy of the robot world,” Starscream confirmed, and he smiled, just a little bit at me.

Good.

“Can I see the energon you made her?” I asked, pressing my luck.

“Why?” He asked.

At first I thought to make a case that Calamity was my car and I cared what went into her. But in reality, I wanted to see this energon stuff up close, understand it better, touch it. Starscream understood it on the deep level. He could speak the language of applied science, of the busy laboratory. “We’re scientists. We want to know. It makes us happy,” I said.

“Scientist, ha!” Starscream said, but he led the way into his lab anyway.

Calamity pressed the button that lowered the door behind us.

I sort of wish she hadn’t, but I pretended I was fine, pretended I didn’t mind being trapped in the garage with a well-meaning but ineffectual car-turned-robot, and whatever Starscream was.

He whipped out something like giant chopsticks and used them to pick up a cube of glowing purple stuff about the size of an ice cube.

“Is it dangerous?” I asked.

“Howso?”

“Well, it’s glowing of it’s own accord.”

“I’m proud of that!” Starscream said, “A giant leap forward.”
“Is it radioactive?” I asked. “Or supposed to be, I guess.”

“Of course it isn’t radioactive, don’t be foolish. No one would eat radioactive food.”

“Might we be working from different definitions of radioactive, and –”

“An unstable atom,” Starscream interrupted, “that emits a sub-particle at varying speed and frequency but nonetheless consistent schedule, slowly rendering itself to a stable isotope of lead. No, energon is highly stable and not radioactive.”

“Right, not radioactive,” I agreed. “But could you explain it to a chemist?”

“No,” Starscream said. “You’d need to be a physicist on a planet that had mastered warp technologies for me to begin to hope to explain this.”

“Try me, I’ve read all about the Alcubierre warp drive.”

Starscream smirked at me, “Have you now, well, try to keep up then….”

At the end of the lecture, I was flagging, he was gloating, and I thought I understood that energon was a combination of a solidified form of electricity and stabilized acceleration. But I wasn’t sure, because the mathematics were predicated on a more advanced understanding on how energy becomes matter and matter becomes energy than has ever existed on earth, and also I thought I’d fallen asleep with my eyes open for half an hour or so.
But damnit, I didn’t want him to have this over me. I wanted to be smart, show my value.

“What’s it’s energy density?” I asked, not that it was that important.

“Nearly limitless,” Starscream replied. “Well, when compared to anything your people have invented or harnessed.”

“Outside of nuclear fuels, which we’ve already dismissed, the next best raw material for this experiment, at least next best on Earth, is long-chain hydrocarbons. My specialty,” I reminded him.

“Ah yes, primitive technology. Confusing that you have stuck with it for so long. Ruining your planet for what, a typical top speed below the sound barrier? Poor trade off.”

“Then we are probably talking about sugars or alcohols as the next step down the line,” I said.

“Absolutely not sugar, not again,” Starscream insisted.

“Why not?”

“The resultant explosion had me cleaning my lab for 28 straight hours.”

Oh. Yeah, that sounded bad. I had to admit defeat, I wasn’t contributing much to the idea pool despite my best efforts.

“Hold out your servo,” Starscream told me.

“My what?”

“Your hand,” he corrected himself.

I did.

He dropped the cube of not-quite-energon into my hand, and I was surprised by how light it was, how insubstantial. It was warm, but not as hot as I’d first assumed.

“You can eat it.”

“Well, you can,” I said. “I don’t know if humans should eat electricity.”

“Just try it,” Starscream snapped.

I took a polite bite, and wasn’t surprised to find that it tingled and zapped all the way down. But something infused my tired body with a true jolt. It wasn’t the itchy overspeed of too much caffeine, not the heartpounding numbness of adrenaline, but the pure energy of glee. I went from flagging to almost effervescent.

“Wow,” I managed. “And this is bad stuff?”

“Just wait for the headache,” Starscream said in what I thought was supposed to be a quiet voice, but with a dearth of background noise, it was clearly audible. “It’s not the worst. It’s certainly not the best.”

“Because of the lack of catalyst?”

For a second, it seemed like Starscream was going to add detail, but instead, he just nodded. “A catalyst would drastically remove complexity from the process and improve quality.”

I look at the lab. There was nothing there that wasn’t at least a little familiar.

“This is like cooking on a campfire for you, isn’t it?” I asked, but it was mostly a rhetorical question.

“I’m used to the finest labs in all of Cybertron. Even after the war began, I had access to top tier equipment.”

I nodded. “So it’s rather impressive that you got this far, isn’t it?”

“I am capable of much more,” Starscream said.

“In another lab, on another planet. Here on earth, with all the limitations you have, I think it’s brilliant. A marvel. You’ve had to reinvent a process with none of the expected materials, and you’ve gotten this far.” It was exactly the sort of pep talk I often gave aspiring students who couldn’t quite understand that what they needed hadn’t been invented yet. It was only after I’d said it that I understood it was exactly the right thing to say to fluff Starscream’s ego.

“I’m beginning to like you,” Starscream said, and I noticed his eyes were almost amber in color, far less red.

“Cool, can I have a change of underwear from Calamity’s hatch?”

“Persistent, aren’t you?” He asked, but I could see that he was amused by it.

“You have no idea how horrible funky undies are getting,” I told him.

Chapter Text

Everyone cleared out the next morning, early. I was briefly informed that Calamity was fine, the energon experiment we’d devised the night before (I certainly didn’t recall helping devise an experiment, in fact I distinctly remembered feeling utterly defeated, but I was all too happy to take credit if it advanced my cause) was underway, and they’d be back in time to catch me trying to rescue Calamity, if I were going to be stupid enough to try.

Thundercracker – who I’d determined was the blue bot! – told me conspiratorially that what Starscream really meant was he’d booby-trapped the garage. Starscream overheard him and simply smiled as if to say “that’s right, don’t you forget it.”

I nuked a breakfast sandwich, browsed the operations manual and picked out my task of the day. Naturally, it was yet another exercise in buttering up the boss; fixing the car wash. The notes in the manual indicated it had been turned on briefly in 2018 by a potential buyer. “Rewinterized, Oct. ‘18” the sticky-note said.

That wasn’t so long ago, I thought I had a shot at getting it up and spinning before they got back. But by the time I’d been out tinkering with the carwash for about an hour, the wind had picked up and was howling down the tunnel of the carwash. It was cold! Fortunately, I finally found the controls for the big door, and rolled it down. It was a huge improvement, but when I started priming the water lines, my wet hands quickly turned to ice. I persevered. And then I found the granddaddy of all control boards – “Water Temperatures.”

We had our choice of “Source,” “Mild,” and “Super.”

According to the operations manual, “Source” wasn’t suitable for operations in freezing temperatures. “Mild” was intended for “Light Winter Conditions” and “Super” was a special cycle. Apparently the initial rinse was 35 degrees to avoid cracking glass, the wash cycle gradually heated to just under 90 degrees for “maximum grime busting” and then the final rinse was a cool rinse to again, help avoid cracking glass.

A note on the next page was strict instructions to never set the machine to super because it was too expensive. So naturally, I cranked that control panel to Super, and pushed a button that said “Plus setting” for good measure. Then I filled tanks with the chemicals mixed according to the manual, not the handwritten notes which had everything watered down to meaningless molarities. I realized that an automatic carwash probably wasn’t anyone’s idea of supreme luxury, but it could at least be set to maximum lather. And on the Super Plus setting, whatever that was, it could maybe just warm the cockles of a cold machine heart.

When I stepped out of the carwash, I saw Calamity’s eyes following me.

I waved.

She waved.

I figured she wanted in on the Super Plus action.

I knew I did. But the water pressure in the shower behind the kitchen was more like d-minus.

On the flipside, the big kitchen sink was almost big enough for a proper lounge.

I could feel a maniacal grin cover my face the minute I thought of it. A deep pool for a solid soak, hot water from the bunn coffeemaker to keep it topped off.

Did I know how to live in style?

Maybe in my own way I did.

I poured myself a beer, plonked my butt down in hot water, and it felt like a little pool of heaven there on earth.

And then a bunch of seekers burst in the door.

“Augh! My optics are fogging!” Thundercracker hissed.

Maybe I was safe!

“If you used anti-fog, you wouldn’t,” Starscream began to say, then immediately one of his eyes, which I noticed were not fogged over like the other ‘bots, seemed to zero in on me. “Why are you in the sink?”

“Didn’t think you’d be home quite this soon!” I squealed, and then realized that, of course, I’d forgotten my towel. I slapped a holey dishrag across my chest and tried to look dignified.

“That by no means answers my question,” Starscream said.

“It was cold outside, this sounded a lot better than the shower,” I tried again.

“Shower?”

“Like a human sized carwash,” I explained.

“Delightful!” Starscream muttered.

“Our last base had a carwash,” Skywarp noted.

“I remember, it was nice,” Starscream said.

“...uhm…. you didn’t use it,” Thundercracker replied.

“You did,” Starscream explained.

I stifled a laugh when Thundercracker and Skywarp seemed confused. But I didn’t do the best job.

They all proceeded to stare at me.

I stared back to assert dominance.

“How long will you be lurking in the sink?” Starscream finally asked.

“Boss,” Thundercracker said, “I don’t think she can get out until we leave.”

“Why?! That’s ridiculous,” Starscream replied. “we’re not going back outside.”

“We could turn around?”

“Is this more cartoon logic from those awful broadcasts?”

“You could turn around!” I repeated. “The cartoons aren’t wrong.”

Thundercracker turned around first, Starscream followed his lead, and Skywarp was the last to turn around, making a point of being very slow. I climbed out, started to jam my pants onto clammy, wet legs when someone whistled.

I jerked my head up. “What the hell?!”

“Skywarp, you are sick in the head,” Starscream snapped at the now sniggering bot.

“Skinsacks?” Thundercracker asked him, his tone indicating that while he was not surprised, he was still disappointed. Me too, I thought, me too. Instead of fiddling further with the pants, I just wrapped the material around me and skeddaddled.

When I returned, they were sitting around griping.

They were cold.

They were tired.

They were dirty.

Starscream thought Skywarp and Thundercracker smelled like junkheaps.

The search hadn’t gone well.

But apparently the experiment had!

Thundercracker wanted Starscream to stop gloating about his success unless he was going to share.

Faced with that attitude, Starscream wasn’t sure he would.

But Skywarp would really like him to.

Thundercracker’s ankle felt like it was going to fall off.

Starscream had a dry patch inside his wrist that he hadn’t been able to reach.

Skywarp had found rust in his transformation joint that morning.

Thundercracker thought his lubricant line was frozen again.

Starscream didn’t remember the last time his canopy fluid sprayer worked, and he was tired of having to fix it manually.

Skywarp had a broken talon that had a ragged edge and it felt weird.

“Oh my god, you bunch of metal toddlers,” I said, but I didn’t really mean it. They were cold, they were tired, they were demoralized, and sitting around bitching was their last resort. Sort of like grad students that way.

What they didn’t know was that there was a wood stove in one corner (they’d heaped some human furniture around it, so I thought perhaps they didn’t know what it was) and that could solve one problem, secondly, yeah, maybe Thundercracker thought that a cup of hot not-really-Energon would be a sad reminder of good old days, but it had to hit better than cold brew, and finally, whatever problems the hot cup of Energon didn’t solve, the carwash probably could.

I jumped up on the table they’d made for themselves and grabbed Thundercracker’s head, pulling it to look out at the carwash, which had a light on the outside that said “Ready!”

“See that?”

“Yes,” he agreed.

Right, he wasn’t the brightest bulb in the room. “It’s the carwash, and it works!”

“You fixed the carwash?”

“Yeah! Hot water, soap! Spray wax. It’s faaaancy!”

“Did you booby trap it or something?” Starscream asked.

What was with these people and thinking everything was a prelude to malicious mischief?

“No, and you can put Calamity through it first to prove it to yourself,” I insisted.

“Another ploy to get your car back?”

Again, with the suspicion! “Think of it more like bribery to keep working on getting the thingamadoodle out of her so I can get her back someday,” I said.

“You stay in here while she goes through,” Starscream demanded.

“Sure,” I agreed.

“Skywarp, stay with her,” Starscream ordered, and then marched to the garage.

They put Calamity through twice, and that’s when I found out she could be a car. A perfectly sensible self-driving car. Who kept a little tiny shield between herself and Starscream.

So that was cool.

I really wanted to rush out, dry her properly before they put her back in the garage, but I wasn’t allowed out until they had satisfied themselves regarding the carwash.

Then Skywarp took me out with him, though I wasn’t really sure why. Maybe so if there was malicious mischief in there I’d be an easier target.

Thundercracker transformed first. He fluffed his wings high up on his back, which looked a bit ridiculous, but thus configured, took the carwash at a run. The uncontrollable giggling that emerged from the building was infectious, and I also found myself smiling. Someone was happier than a two year old in a tub, and not shy about telling us.

Skywarp crammed in right after him, in the same ridiculous ruffled wing configuration.

There was sudden squealing, a roar of engines, and a flash of light that was followed up with devious chuckling.

“Uh?”

“Nothing to worry about!” Starscream reassured me. Hah! I had gone up the world, and was worthy of reassurance.

And, it occurred to me, the reason I was out there might have been that they were trying to include me.

“What’s going on in there?” I asked.

“Rowdy seekers!”

“Yuh huh, you don’t say?” I muttered.

More giggling and crashing around. A jet engine poked out exit door.

“It’s not unusual for seekers to like water almost as much as the sky!”

“Well, you can get in there, get rowdy too,” I pointed out.

“I’ve always been more about the bath,” Starscream said.

“Too bad, I don’t have a big enough sink.”

“I know. I’ll be fine with my buckets and polishes, it’s worked this long.”

“Come on, try it.”

“No, thank you. I’m fine.”

“Didn’t you say that your species was dying out?” I ask, willing my face to perfect stillness.

“Well clearly, anyone can count. What does that have to do with anything?”
Perfect opening! I went for it. “Well, that kind of sounds like an activity that could lead to a few more of you, if you just shoved your way in. The choice of partners might even be tolerable now, with all the soap.”

Starscream laughed. A real, genuinely amused laugh. If he were human, there’d have been snot bubbling out of one nostril, tears rolling down his cheeks, snorts, and silent choking for how hard he was laughing.

He finally caught his breath, “that’s not how that works, but I’ve picked up enough human broadcasts in the last 40 years….”

Both jets backed halfway out and then clashed in the middle of the carwash, as if they were jousting.

“Hi-yah!”

“Take that!”

“Oh god, I just got soap in my optics. Ah…. ooh, that feels pretty good, my lubricant duct just unfoze!”

“Didn’t you say you had frozen lube ducts?” I asked Starscream.

Starscream sighed.

“Come on, didn’t you also just say that Seekers love water almost as much as the air?” I cajoled.

“I did.”

“It looks like a lot of fun,” I told him with great sincerity. “You deserve fun.”

“I deserve a lot of things,” he grumbled.

One of the other bots backed out of the wash – I couldn’t tell for all the soap suds, reversed the jets and ran around the other side to poke the other jet in the tail, only to transform, climb over the carwash and hide.

The other bot laughed uncontrollably.

Suddenly, Starscream transformed behind me, his wings also in the ruffled position, and he joined the fight.

Soap flew.

Water sprayed.

At one point Starscream transformed just his legs out from underneath his fuselage and went running, looking a bit like a ballerina holding up her tutu,, all fluff atop long legs, only to happily sit down on Skywarp’s canopy while making any number of rude claims, but that lead to them both fully transforming to robot mode to scuffle and wrestle. Someone cried uncle, and then the game began anew.

I wished, just for a second, that I could be one of them, and join in.

I realized then, regardless of their chronological age, which I thought might be in the hundreds of years, these seekers really were young men. They were boisterous and brash, impulsive and and impish.

Eventually the squealing glee wound down, and they all lined up to go through the carwash properly, in an orderly fashion, letting the dryer finish on one before the other crammed in.

I took that as my cue to fire up a vat of the recently-improved energon substitute in the kitchen, which was also great for me because I’d begun to freeze while watching their antics.

By the time they’d clomped back into the quonset, the vat of energon was coming along nicely, and the wood stove was really throwing off some heat after I’d added a log.

“Well, isn’t this nice!” Thundercracker rumbled.

Starscream dumped a collection of jars and canisters on the table, and soon the room was full of the smell of fresh lubricants, clean adhesives, and lightly-fragranced waxes. As they helped each other select new speed tape and patches from a collection of choices, I was reminded of the family of quaker parrots that lived in the Marissa Stilton Biology Building on my former campus. The birds were highly communal, forever busy extending the family home or grooming each other. I sometimes spent a solid hour just watching them being birds. Starscream’s look of concentration as he carefully dabbed salve into a joint on Thundercracker’s neck reminded me of that, pulled me into an observational mode.

I noticed their eyes were light yellow.

Just like Calamity’s.

They were happy!

No. That wasn’t quite right. They were contented, maybe. They were comfortable. They didn’t really need or want anything, though I’d seen some delicate nostril flares that implied that they could smell the simmering energon and it was a source of burgeoning anticipation.

They didn’t even notice me watching them.

In comparison to their earlier mock fights, which had carried so much masculine energy, the preening ritual reminded me of women readying each other for an important event. Turn by turn, one member of the trio was cherished by the other two, who reverently got on with the painstaking task of redoing delicate field fixes, working lubricant deep into joints, and polishing everything to a deep shine. I felt a strange yearning to join the group, just as I had outside the carwash, but I held back. It was an honor, I thought, just to be allowed to observe.

They made sounds, not words, during the process, and the rhythm of their low, rumbling chirps was nearly hypnotic.

“I can’t get this into your wrist joint,” Thundercracker said when it was finally Starscream’s turn to be in the middle seat. Real speech, real words jolted me from my reverie.

“I can!” I blurted out.

Starscream held out his wrist in my direction.

I stepped over to them, climbed up on top of the robot-sized table they’d made out of human furniture and confidentially put a bead of heavy grease on my finger, then rolled it into the tight crevice.

I figured I’d step back out, but Starscream wrapped a servo around my my calves, same as someone leaving their hand around a beer they hadn’t finished but still wanted, and so I stood still.

After a moment, Thundercracker covered his hand with a light haze of car wax and ruffled my hair with it.

Starscream reached out and pulled a few strands into spikes.

Thundercracker fixed the spikes into a helmet of ‘feathers.’ “Like our old parade configuration!” Skywarp said.

“Does anyone still have the schematic for the old parade and drill configurations?” Starscream asked.

“I do!” Thundercracker cheerfully rumbled. “I thought when we won, and there was peace again, there’d be something nice about a group of seekers in the air wearing the old colors and crests.”

“I archived mine… somewhere,” Starscream admitted. “It’s been a couple hundred years at least.”

Thundercracker punched a few buttons on his wrist, and said “Well, I don’t have all the crest designs, but I have a lot of them. There you go.”

Starscream rubbed his hands together and sprouted a different-looking wing on only one side of his body. “Oh, that’s not right,” he laughed.

Skywarp was looking at the wall, and I realized he could probably ‘see’ a projection of the schematic there, “I understand what this is asking me to do, but I don’t think my wing joints ever did that,” he said.
“They must have, we did the flyover of the Tentin Races every other weekend and that was always parade configuration.” Thundercracker reminded him.

Starscream looked at his non-configuring wing. “I think that transformation seam repair will rip if I do that side. I’ll do the crest instead.” Suddenly, he was sporting a large, almost Egyptian-looking headdress that suggested feathers and a beak.

“We’re missing the gilt tape we’d have used, it’s kind of too bad. Remember how the last race of the season, we’d even paint our crests gold?” Thundercracker asked.

“And do you remember how the gold paint would get everywhere for weeks?” Starscream asked.

“Everywhere!” Thundercracker agreed.

“And everyone knew exactly who had been hanging out with Seekers after the races. No where to run, no where to hide – that gold paint would be everywhere on them too.”

“And the gilt tape would always get wedged up in a transformation seam. I always missed a piece,” Skywarp griped.

I laughed. It was funny both because I could picture it so clearly, but also because it seemed like such a human, humble experience coming from a big bad death machine.

Skywarp guffawed in reply and smooshed grease onto my nose.

“We should give you a decent, proper name,” Starscream said.

Part of me felt like pointing out I had a decent, proper name. The other part of me was very excited to let things play out.

“She doesn’t fly,” Skywarp said.

“Or roll.” Thundercracker added.

“No weapons,” Skywarp added.

“No wings,” Starscream added. “Not an auspicious start in life. Which is why she needs a decent, proper name. Astronomical?”

“Ugh, no, we have one already,” Skywarp groaned. “One is enough.”

“Weather?” Thundercracker suggested.

“No need to decide just now,” Starscream opined, “we can take our time to think on it. Now where’s the energon? I can smell it and it’s making me hungry.”

I was pouring the energon into three metal mixing bowls when Starscream’s communicator buzzed.

Yellow eyes quickly jumped to red, and they huddled around Starscream’s wrist to take in the call.

It was Megatron.

And he was in a bad mood.

And when he saw how clean and polished they were, he lit into them for wasting precious time on preening. “You might have been birds of paradise in your youth, but you are birds of prey now, and I expect you to act like it!”

“Our scanners weren’t working well with all the weather. Images bounced off the ice and created nothing but confusion. It’s a waste of energon to be out today,” Starscream argued back.

But Megatron wouldn’t hear of it.

Loose body language from before tightened, faces went taut, and I could see jaws set hard.

I didn’t understand the specifics, but then, I didn’t have to. They were being dressed down rudely, harshly, unnecessarily. Megatron was going for low blows and the proverbial jugular at the same time. Part of me was waiting for him to say something about how the better part of them ran down their mother’s leg before they were even born.

The part of me that hated tyrants as a general rule hated Megatron in particular.

After a few more volleys of insults, Megatron began gasping and coughing. He ended the transmission when it was clear his voice wouldn’t recover.

Starscream’s eyes were like boiling rubies. The depth of anger seemed unfathomable.

“I’m going flying. Alone.” He snapped.

“Is that a good idea?” Thundercracker asked.

“But we just got warm again,” Skywarp said at the same time.

“No and whatever,” Starscream replied to them both.

“Someone really needs to go with you,” Thundercracker insisted.

“And yet I want neither of you!”

“I’ll go,” I said and then realized what I’d just said and really hoped he’d turn me down. Great idea to get into the cockpit of a maniacal, angry, self-driving plane. Yep.

“And why would I do that?”

I could have shrugged then, and doubtless been left behind. Or I had the option to double down. And dumb, dumb me decided to double down. “You can lecture me on science, tell me things I could never know from our barely evolved witchcraft. You can feel big! Or you can play your tiny violin and get it all out. Sometimes that needs an audience.”

Everyone waited for him to say something, but Skywarp butted in in his stead, while Starscream just looked confused at the whole idea.

“Have you even been in a cockpit before?” Skywarp asked me.

“Damn straight I have. I got my pilot’s license at Nebraska University as an undergrad.”

“I’ve never heard pilot used as a noun,” Starscream said, dubious of what I’d just said.

“It’s a verb here, too,” I told him.

“You make a point, I’ll take you,” Starscream said to me, then added a worrisome grin, “but remember, I’m in charge of the throttle, not you.”

Chapter Text

Starscream droned out a verbal safety card as I struggled to figure out the hasps and clasps of the cockpit harness. After a moment, when it became clear the cockpit was designed for someone just enough bigger than me to prove challenging, he shrunk up around me, which was a weird sensation that triggered anxiety deep in some animal part of my mind. My lizard brain was convinced we were being swallowed.

“I haven’t got a clue why I said or did that, it must be some core programming feature,” he mused, but then fell silent for the takeoff and ascent into the sky.

Dials and gizmos spun on the panel laid out before me, but while I could generally determine that one was an altimeter, and another was an artificial horizon, and another one seemed to be a speedometer, the numbers on the dials are some other language and thus meaningless. I was better off looking out the canopy and taking solid guesses as to our speed and height.

We tore away from base at tremendous speed, and when it seemed we were over nothing but wilderness, Starscream took himself through a furious series of maneuvers. Loops, rolls, angles, dangles, complicated stalls, one of which was a hammerhead. While it was fast, and doing nothing for an old neck injury of mine, it was also surprisingly unscary. For awhile he even flew upside down until I felt ill, and started to make worrisome noises.

“Are you going to throw up in my cockpit?”

“Pass out?” I hazarded a guess, and he turned right side up.

“Skinsacks,” he muttered.

And then, when his anger was finally out of his system, he spoke. “I suppose my violin really does need an audience. What a strange idiom.” He murmured the last sentence under his breath. “You wouldn’t necessarily believe it from what you’ve seen, but there was a time in my life when Mega – would you look at me when I’m talking to you?”

“I am looking at you, I’m in your cockpit! You are all around me.”

“My internal eye, up and to the left…. Your other left. Didn’t you say you were a pilot?” He snapped when I first looked in the wrong direction.

“Four out of two pilots are dyslexic.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” He chided.

“That’s the joke.”

“Oh, well it’s not very funny.”

“You’d think it was funny if you’d dreamt it up.” I insisted.

“I don’t dream up lame jokes,” he explained.

“’kay,” I replied, settled my gaze intensely on his one internal eye, and gestured that I was all ears.

“As I was saying, when I was younger, Megatron was terrifically popular. He was everyone's favorite then. He was powerful and charismatic, almost as big as a Prime.”

I didn’t know what a prime was, but I figured it wasn’t really important, so I just listened.

“He wasn’t a sore loser back then. When he did lose a fight, he would stand up, make faces at the crowd as if to say “can you believe that someone beat me? We might have a new champion!” Of course, the next week, he’d win a rematch with them and return to the top spot. You never could get good odds on Megatron, but oh you had a good night when you bet against him and he lost.”

“Fights, odds?” I asked.

“Back then, Cybertronian society loved contests. Airshows, races, obstacle courses, and, of course, the gladiatorial matches. Anyone who was anyone went to see and be seen. I was pretty, and I knew I was pretty. Skywarp and Thundercracker not as much, but still, the trine was a flock of pretty birds that could turn heads. We didn’t even have to sneak backstage, we just appeared and let our faces be our tickets.”

Starscream flew a low spiral to land, but as soon as his wheels touched the soft heads of the grass that poked up from the snow, he was away again.

“I contrived to meet Megatron, right after I’d finished flight training. I invited myself backstage – by then the guard knew me and didn’t care. Megatron greeted everyone like an old friend, including me, and invited me to stay as long as I liked. I stayed well into the night. I didn’t know then that the only fans who stayed late were looking for a different sort of attention. Looking to provide patronage in return for a good clang, or at least the appearance of one. So when the night grew late, and he turned to me as though he wanted to interface, I was shocked, and flattered, but truly, I wasn’t in the mood. I just wanted to meet him. Word had gotten around that he had the makings of a Prime and I wanted to see for myself.”

I thought that maybe I knew where the story was going, but I didn’t say anything, just watched the joystick between my knees gently move and marveled at the idea of a plane that flew and spoke.

“We spent the night talking about his vision for Cybertron. It was compelling. I wanted freedom from the limits I’d encountered. The government wanted us to fly less, wanted us to experiment less, take in more contests, take in more races, and I was foolish enough to wonder why we seemed to be turned away from the work that was supposed to better Cybertron. The more I sought answers – and Seekers are very good at seeking out what we want – the more often I darkened Megatron’s doorway. He seemed to have answers spilling from every seam, every joint. I drank them up like they were pure grade energon, delicacies on which to feast. At times I woke up in his fine quarters with barely enough time to rush to my lab to begin the day. Eventually I realized that people expected to see me there. I’d become ‘Megatron’s flashy Seeker” and it seemed to only increase his popularity. Together, we piqued millions of imaginations.”

“Did you love Megatron?” I asked because on Earth it would have been that sort of story.

“I told you, everyone loved Megatron back in the day.”

“That’s not really an answer,” I disagreed.

“Oh, but it is,” Starscream insisted.

“Fine,” I accepted.

“We seemed poised to steal an upcoming election by a landslide. Until Optimus Prime arrived. Prime was young, untested. When he said he was the path back to Autobot ideals, that he would lead change in his party, root out corruption, and lead as Primes were meant to lead, he seemed like just another starry-eyed idealist who hadn’t yet learned the art of having two faces. There were dozens of them swarming Iacon then. Megatron had twice the backing and he had the benefit of being older. Both of them spoke of freedom and glorious futures. Oh, I’d lost plenty of money betting against Megatron at the gladiator’s arena. That was all in good fun. But the political arena? No, I would back the winning side.”

Starscream began to do lazy dutch turns, then chased a moose at a surprisingly slow speed as if gathering his courage to say more. I didn’t interrupt.

“But we lost. And the war came on but we didn’t know it was war. Maybe because at first, it didn’t seem like war at all. It was polite rumbles that better resembled schoolyard games. We’d have a mock battle, take our winnings, but captured players were exchanged a few days later, having been polished back to good health in the meantime. In fact, the war weary sometimes let themselves be taken for the rest it would bring. The fighting was laughable. Harmless. At most someone would be stasis locked, but it was never the goal. We wanted to show that we were serious, that we weren’t going to fall for another Autobot telling us that if we’d just pipe down that the corruption would get solved, the crooked would straighten, and the energon would flow for all.”

Starscream punched through the clouds and we burst into a world of puffy white cloudfields and streaming sunshine.

“Then we ran short of energon, and the fight got serious. Stasis locking was a far greater concern. Before then, enough energon could heal nearly any injury. There may, at most, be an unattractive weld or a wrinkle that never did seem to flatten, but to simply never wake up was unheard of. As supplies dwindled, sometimes we couldn’t get someone out before their spark died. The first was a shock, a terrible shock. I urged Megatron to make peace then. And Optimus Prime certainly tried. But the war continued. And more were lost to perpetual stasis that slowly drained them dry.”

That kind of sounded like the robot equivalent of cancer to me. And it also kind of sounded like Starscream’s first encounter with death was a grim, slow, horrible death. Yikes.

“I was indignant, and I went to Megatron with every intention of telling him we had to end it, or I was out. But he stoked a fire in me, told me it was good to crave enough power to end a war with a wish. He must have spent half the night stroking my ego, feeding my ambition, and justifying my indignation. And like everyone else under his command, I lost myself to what he needed me to be. Every time I came to my senses and remembered who I was, and what I was worth, he spun me around until I agreed again, apologized for my actions, blamed myself, or admitted my flaws. He liked the theatre of a sleek, arrogant seeker, just barely pinned beneath his thumb. My brilliance in the war room suited his goals, and he liked the superiority over the skies that I could give him, but what he really enjoyed was the vibrant tableau of me licking his boots from time to time. The drama of just enough treachery to quash me, just enough plausible deniability to keep me in his mews, that drama provided the perfect illustration that he could have absolute power over all he chose. It quelled nearly any other unrest in the rank.”

Starscream paused. “I hung my dignity around his neck like a jewel. Whenever he asked, whenever it was needed.”

Oh, I thought to myself, he really loved him. Whether he was merely starstruck by a heart throb, worshiping a hero, or was driven by sheer lust for a charismatic man didn’t really matter. He’d loved Megatron deeply, but Megatron hadn’t loved him.

“I shouldn’t have,” Starscream admitted.

“You shouldn’t have,” I agreed.

“I came to notice that for all that Megatron argued that might made right, and that we had to crush the autocracy, when it came down to it, he didn’t take the shot. Again and again he had Prime in grasp, one bash or one blast away from oblivion, and like clockwork, he start in on one of his grand, glorious speeches that would somehow inevitably let Prime get away. His years as a gladiator made him prioritize the theatrics of it all, made it so he couldn’t imagine that his favorite rival wouldn’t be there to fight the next week, or after next, or whenever he wanted a particular cage match. And that’s when I realized, Megatron wasn’t fighting for a cause, he was performing for a grandstand that existed only in his imagination.”

Starscream went silent for a long stretch, and then dove back down beneath the clouds, as if to punctuate that his time at the top, as a shiny general on the winning side, was at a distinct end.

“And Prime? Prime knew how to defend, but he couldn’t fight either. His ideals meant that he let us go a hundred times, a thousand times! And the war just ground on, no end in sight. We lost the smart ones slowly. Prime collected them, usually. Megatron liked the brawn in his ranks, but he never trusted the brains. Too likely to notice the problems. And while he needed me around to make a point and manage the skies, he didn’t need too many of me. It isolated me, frustrated me, bored me. I only exercised my intellect in Megatron’s presence, and only when he wanted a little demonstration. So when the battle came, and yet again our Lord Megatron stood over Prime, gloating and droning on and on, I took a shot. At Prime. And in his haste to avoid certain death, Prime mauled Megatron, nearly tore him in two. I could have swooped in, could have carried Megatron to a waiting medical bay, staffed by the best, swelling with Energon. I didn’t. I tried to take leadership and tried to surrender. But Prime wouldn’t hear of it. He said he’d accept surrender from Megatron and no one else.”

Oh! That probably hit Starscream right in the bloated ego.

“I carried Megatron to our shipyard, Nemesis was not there. I didn’t know it then, but Shockwave had used Megatron’s condition and Prime’s rebuke as a sign that his rise to power had begun. He’d left a trine behind to protect the shipyard, but when they saw Lord Megatron alive, they declared fealty. My trine, and the other trine forced a combination transformation with a partially completed ship and blasted ourselves into space. But the other trine was weak, and my trine carried the heaviest duties. When it came time for us to land here, I was too depleted to carry us safely. The crash ruined our medical bay, and damaged Megatron so deeply that we were forced to leave him in stasis.”

“But he’s awake now?”

“Just recently,” Starscream replied. “Fourteen years after the crash, we had gathered enough energon to repair the medical bay. Another six years after that, we’d collected enough to begin the regeneration of Lord Megatron. But then, in the night, Ramjet convinced Dirge and Blitzwing to leave the fold. And with them, they took the compressor and catalyst used to make energon. They had lost faith. Or maybe they were always treacherous. They left us to choose between starvation and Megatron. Somehow, we found ourselves choosing both. We… no, I won’t tell you that part.”

“Okay, you are telling me everything else, why not that detail? Why hold anything back?”

“It’s unflattering,” Starscream replied., “and you might think less of me.”

“If you were worried about me thinking less of you, why are you telling me dark stories about the war and how you weren’t exactly winning?” I asked, because that wasn’t the sort of thing people just let loose when they were trying to make a case for themselves.

“So you’ll truly appreciate what I say next!” he said exuberantly. “Megatron is a shadow of himself. Yet, until today, I thought that he was all that was left for me. I thought that of all of my people who are left, that his company was the company I’d most prefer. That he’d see me for the marvel I am, that he’d appreciate that the way he had so long ago. And I could appreciate being appreciated again!”

I tried not to blurt out my thoughts, but as usual, they tumbled free before I could restrain them. “Your taste in men is really bad, you know that right?”

He shrugged. I wasn’t sure how a plane shrugged, but he shrugged.

Your trine,” I said, finally realizing that word meant him, Skywarp, and Thundercracker, “adores you. You make them, and they know it. The three of you are meant to be together in some way. You don’t need Megatron. And he doesn’t deserve your sacrifices.”

“It is good to be a trinemate. I’d forgotten that.”

Wow, one carwash and his previously unsatisfying companions were doing it for him. I thought I was going to have to really make a case for them, but he just accepted my wisdom. After one, only one carwash!? I couldn’t decide if that was shallow or the world just needed a lot more happy baths.

“But,” Starscream, “we’re always together. We were forged in unison, and the breath that woke my spark, woke their sparks.”

“See,” I said, “you don’t need Megatron. Your have your birdy brotherhood.”

“You’re right,” he agreed, “I don’t need Megatron. But not because I have a ‘birdy brotherhood.’”

“What do you have?”

“I’ll tell you, but first, a little test. A little experiment to judge my hypothesis.”

His internal eye blinked, no, winked at me, and suddenly he dropped his right wing and threw us into a spin.

I screamed, realized that the floor was coming up on us fast, tried to remember what I’d been trained to do, and instead screamed longer. Sure, I could get a Cessna out of a spin, but a Cessna is a stable little airframe, designed for docility and easy recovery. Starscream is a sentient fighter jet, designed for agility, acrobatics, and deadly precision. Just stomping the opposite rudder and pushing the nose down seemed more likely to flip us over than arrest our spinning.

But oh my, the ground sure was getting close.

“You should do something,” Starscream whispered into my ear, as if he’d relocated the speaker to just behind my right ear.

An electrical bolt ran down me, and my leg all but picked itself up and smashed down on the rudder pedal. I didn’t really want to grab the joystick, because it seemed sick and twisted to manhandle a sentient creature, but that ground was still coming up fast, and it was necessary.

And it seemed to be what he was gunning for.

The rotations stopped way lower than what would garner a passing grade in flight school, but then I began to remember what I was doing. I pushed on the throttle gently, and began to normalize the rudder, only for Starscream to happily jam the throttle full forward and haul us back into the clouds.

“I don’t have an instrument rating, I’ve only got ten hours under a hood.”

“Too bad!” he said, “Get us back out.”

“Auuuugh,” I growled, and bared my teeth in the direction of his solitary internal eye. “I can’t even read your panel!”

“Ooh, that would be challenging. Good thing I’m a… transformer,” he said, and a ripple flowed across the panel, changing the strange Alien markings to something a lot more familiar.

“Pilot, fly!” he commanded, and we were off again.

I was in some weird combination of pilot hell and pilot heaven. Because every pilot has imagined that a sentient plane friend would be the stuff dreams are made of, but probably none of us imagined that said sentient plane buddy would be a cantankerous, slightly murderous robot without a lot to lose. So what it really ended up being was an ego boost balled up with a nightmare. An ego boost because it had been a solid five years since I’d done any flying, so I was pretty impressed I was able to put it together quickly, and a nightmare for obvious reasons.

“Ooops, I seem to have lost an engine,” Starscream said, and we lost half our thrust, and I suddenly had to get awfully heavy-footed on the left rudder pedal.

“I don’t have a multi rating, so we’re going in for a landing,” I said, and began to set up for a landing in a field at 2 o’clock. I was actually quite surprised he didn’t trick me yet again by turning the engine on and throwing us back up into the sky. Instead he seemed settled, and fairly floated down in an elegant glide.

We sank beneath the tops of the windbreak to our right and were almost on the ground when a wind picked us both up and hurled us at the trees. Couldn’t do anything about it, though I tried. Reflexively, I threw up my hands up to protect my face and closed my eyes. Time slowed down, and I heard the engines roar, but I expected it wouldn’t work, expected us to hit the trees anyway.

But there was no jolt.

I opened an eye, thinking that maybe we were, by some miracle, in the sky.

We weren’t. We were hovering over the broken bodies of the trees.

Between us and them was a massive purple shield.

“Whoa,” I said.

Starscream turned in a circle, considered the shield, then it vanished. All there was around us was hoar frost, freezing into flakes in the fading light. It seemed surreal. I’d almost died, been saved from certain injury, and then I was staring at an ostentatious display of one of my favorite parts of winter, as if none of it had ever happened. Just as I caught my breath, found my mental marbles, I felt a tremendous wave of power shudder through the airframe, We were off, blasting through the landscape even faster than we had soared through the sky. The hoar frost sparkled like the stars outside a starship in warp.

“Weren’t you going to tell me something important back there? And wasn’t there a science experiment? Or was that the experiment? Did we get a result?”

“It is far better than I thought, different than I imagined,” he said after a moment. His voice suggested he was drunk on success, and that the speed at which we were flying was maybe the sort of dangerous decision born of elation “Intention, intention most certainly did matter!”

I gently reached out to adjust the trim ever so slightly to pitch us upwards.

“Stop that. You aren’t flying me anymore,” he snapped at me.

“Could we please slow down, then?”

“Silly skinsack,” he said, “of course, you just had to ask.”

Our speed slowed considerably, and I took a deep breath. “So, how does intention matter?”

“Intention created a shield! I’ve never had a shield mechanism before! While you were flying me, I registered all of your actions and generated suggested core programmatic rules that would reflect the intentions of how you flew, which was with a distinct preference for basic, stable flight. At all times the airframe and passenger were maintained within the bounds of a wide safety margin. As if there was a shield around us. When we were caught by the windshear, I implemented the code, and was able to generate a shield!”

“You let us be caught by windshear?” I asked.

“Yes of course, I had to test my hypothesis.”

“What if you hadn’t created a shield?!”

“But I did!” He said, his voice full of triumph. Right, I remembered, Starscream might be impossibly scientifically literate and chronologically old, but he was also a young man with an indestructibility complex.

“Calamity’s core programming has clutched at the Strand, resisted reversion to her former state,” Starscream went on, “And now I know why. Her core programming is to assist and protect the driver in every way. She must perceive her current level of sentience and her newfound ability to create an impenetrable shield to be the zenith of assistance and protection.”

“Didn’t I suggest that intention was the problem a couple of days ago?”

“You did,” Starscream said, “But you couldn’t have told me where the intention lived within her, and you couldn’t have devised a test scenario for the hypothesis.”

“So basically, it was a nice theory on my part, but you did all the math?”

“Why of course, you provided the nudge, I provided the know-how and expertise.”

Starscream would not be popular with fellow academics with that attitude, but if he were an academic on Earth, he’d probably be hailed as a god, which I didn’t think would be a great combination for all involved, so instead of popping off in reply, I moved to the pressing question:

“So does this mean you just change her core programming and send me on my way?”

“I don’t think so,” he said, “touching your own core programming is mere deviance. Touching another transformer’s core programming is playing…Creator.” When he said that word, his shrill, nasal, grating voice settled into a lower pitch with more gravitas and I could hear a smile born of satisfaction in his voice.

Chapter Text

Starscream strode off confidently to his lab after we returned.

I realized that he hadn’t told me the thing that all the backstory was supposed to make me appreciate, or if he had, I hadn’t understood. Maybe because I was too tired. Maybe it had been irrelevant after the experiment?

No, he was pleased, something had captured his imagination.

I needed a nap.

I thought about faceplanting straight into the snow. Not only had the flight been a whirlwind, everything that had happened in two days was a whirlwind. I’d gone from “inconvenient pet” status to “useful warm body” to “valued confidant” in the blink of an eye, without really much deployment of my considerable ego fluffing charm. It just happened. Well no, that wasn’t true. I had some theories, and I wanted to ask Starscream about them, but instead I dragged my exhausted body inside and flopped down in front of the embers because I was really too cold to think straight.

I reached out my feet, and waited for the embers to bring back feeling, only to realize they weren’t doing a lot to heat up the cafe. “Do we want another log?”

Blank faces from Skywarp and Thundercracker reminded me that they hadn’t been in the room when I’d made the fire and they probably didn’t know what I meant.

“Do we want it hotter in here?” I tried again.

“Oh sure, sounds good,” Thundercracker agreed.

I hauled myself over to the cut wood, picked out a likely piece, hucked it in, and slumped back down in the old armchair.

“How’s the boss?” Skywarp asked after a while.

I jolted back to wakefullness.

“Uhm,” I said tiredly, “Elated? He’s…” I trailed off. I decided I probably shouldn’t tell them about the Megatron stuff. They probably knew some of it, but if they didn’t, it wasn’t my tale to tell. They definitely didn’t need to know about the fact he decided to fiddle with his core programming. “Something has captured his interest and sent him humming to his lab. I think whatever Mighty Megs said is forgotten, for now.”

Skywarp grinned at Thundercracker who smiled warmly back, and both of their eyes settled down to dark yellow.

“Do you like flying with the boss?” Thundercracker asked.

“Well, it was insane, to be honest. I’ve never been in a plane so fast, agile, or frankly, murderous. But now that the insanity of it is behind me, I could do it again. I’ve missed being up in the sky. I’ve missed having my hand on the throttle and the yoke.” I sort of wanted to add that I wasn’t super into flying sentient creatures, but Starscream had seemed happy, so maybe it –

“He let you fly him?!” Skywarp asked, and his tone alarmed. Or maybe shocked. Maybe disgusted.

Ooookay, I didn’t know a ton about their society, but I did know that for Skywarp to be disgusted, it must have been really gross.

“Well, not for very long, it was a test,” I demurred and hoped I could kind of get the cat back in the bag. “I don’t think he believed me about being a pilot.” I said, hoping that sounded believable and not like an awkward cover story for ‘yeah, stomped all over his rudders and got my skinsack hands all over his cockpit. Yum.’

“None of us did,” Thundercracker said. “Well, we believed that you believed yourself, but we thought it strange.”

“He said, uhm, your sparks were connected. Can you just talk to him when he’s not in the room? Is that how you knew he didn’t believe me either?”

“Well, everyone has a comm system,” Skywarp said.

“I was thinking more like telepathy.”

“Oh, Primus no!” Thundercracker said. “No one wants that! There’s just a pleasant sense of each other. Little things like happy, sad, disbelief, shock, anger, they come across. We know where we are in the sky. Trine bonds are strange. No one understands them. No one has really tried other than Soundwave, and no one, including him, thinks that research is entirely healthy. It’s like looking at your core programming.”

Well, I hadn’t let all the cats out of the bag, at least.

“We came up with some name ideas while you were out,” Thundercracker said. “Since you fly-fly, you really should have a proper name.”

“Oh? Whatcha got for me?”

“Skywarp likes Windjam, I like Crosswind.”

I had to admit, I didn’t like either.

“Uh,” I said.

“Those weren’t the only ideas!” Thundercracker reassured me. “Do you like winter?”

“As a name, or the season?” I asked.

“The season.”

“Yes!”

“Well, what about Coldfront?” Skywarp asked.

“Oh, I like Coldfront, that’s a cool code name.”

“Code name?” Thundercracker replied, but it didn’t really feel like a question.

“My name is Hannah.”

“You human name,” Thundercracker said. “This isn’t your human name. This is what we call you, not what they call you.”

“Oh, it’s a callsign! Cool! Those are sort of hard to come by in the civillian world.”

“Sure, it’s a callsign,” Thundercracker muttered.

Clearly, that bit of human culture hadn’t trickled in and he didn’t realize that callsigns were supposed to be punny or a little embarrassing. I could steer this in a good direction. “What about Hailwind, using my first initial?”

“Hailwind,” he repeated, doubtful. “It’s a mouthful.”

“Frostwind?”

“Oooh, that’s a good one,” Skywarp said.

Starscream burst back into the cafe, a blast of cold wind right behind him. He kicked the door closed and when it slammed into the jam, the building gave us a groan.

“I know what we’re going to do, all of us!” he shouted triumphantly.

“Including the skinsack?” Skywarp asked, and I could have sworn his tone sounded hopeful.

“Didn’t we just dub her Frostwind?” Thundercracker asked him.

“I guess we kind of did,” Skywarp agreed.

“Including Frostwind, the skinsack,” Starscream confirmed, “Especially her. I discovered something today, all because of her. I discovered our cockpits change. When you put a creator in one, it resizes itself to fit around the creator. I discovered that when you do that, the creator can change everything about us when they use us with intention. Can change it for the better!”

He went on, his voice full of fascination and fervor. “Our old creators didn’t give us shields. Only our cockpits are generally well protected. I never thought to question that until today. It means something. It means the old creators didn’t see us as the thing to protect. Our lives, our sparks, those were perhaps some accident that made us lesser assets to our first creators. Maybe even why Primus sent himself into the cosmos. But a different creator sees us as something worth protecting. Something to care for and appreciate. Having a creator like that makes us happy! It makes us whole! It makes us strong. We. Can. Have. Shields!”

“Did you hit your processor out there?” Thundercracker asked, genuinely concerned.

“Did she do something while she was flying you?” Skywarp screeched.

Again, with the instant assumptions of malicious mischief!

“You told them that already?” Starscream asked me, his face scrunched up.

“It was your gross decision!” Skywarp said, his face and voice full of accusation.

“We’re. Designed. For. It.” Starscream snapped back, jabbing his finger into Skywarp’s chest.

“Both of you have a point,” Thundercracker rumbled, “so back down.”

Starscream picked me up, and my feet dangled above the floor. “Happy! I understand it now!”

“Maybe he hit both processors out there,” Skywarp said to Thundercracker.

“My processors are fine,” Starscream insisted.

“Oh, let’s say I believe you but at this point, let’s check,” Thundercracker said and fished a cable out of his own storage compartment. “Come on,” he said, and waved one end of the cable at Starscream.

Starscream took the cable but didn’t plug it in.

“We really didn’t get damaged out there,” I said. “I’m squishy. If he’d taken a pounding to his processor, I’d be dead.”

“Mmmhmm,” Thundercracker rumbled. “Shush.”

Starscream reluctantly stuffed the cable into the back of his neck after setting me down.

Thundercracker perused a read out that only he could see. Well, maybe the trine could see it with their different vision, but I couldn’t see anything when I looked in the same direction he seemed to be staring.

“Nothing seems wrong,” Thundercracker informed us after a moment.

“As I said!” Starscream said.

Thundercracker looked at the readout again.

He looked up. “For a shield? This, for a shield?”

“A wondrous shield.”

“Do we have to take the skinsack for a flight too? Do we have to interface or something?” Skywarp asked, sounding first dismayed, but then sort of creepily interested.

“Stop being disgusting and grow up, Skywarp,” Starscream told him. “And also, just for asking that question, no, you don’t get a shield the fun way. We’ll put it into your program directly.”

“Uuuuugh,” Skywarp protested. “Now who is being gross!”

Starscream ignored him in favor of excitedly laying out a flight plan for Thundercracker.

“It’s cold, and Frostwind is is tired,” Thundercracker interrupted.

“The carwash has a dryer setting to warm you up, and Frostwind can sleep on the way out to the practice area,” Starscream said.

“Tomorrow,” Thundercracker countered.

“In the early morning,” Starscream said.

“In the early morning,” Thundercracker agreed.

And by early morning, they meant the minute there was a suggestion of light outside. Thundercracker reached down the hall and gently shook the bedframe with his whole hand. “Start your engine, Starscream has been waiting for fifteen minutes for you to awaken, and if he waits any longer for this flight, I fear he might expire from anticipation.”

I did not understand why this was so exciting, but then I realized, oh yes I did. He was waiting for lab results. Interesting lab results. It probably was killing him.

“Give me a minute to get dressed, and I’ll meet you out front,” I told him, and then proceeded to put on nearly everything I owned as protection against the cold. I could feel the chill pouring off the window, and for a second I thought I could see my breath inside the room. I also wasn’t sure about being the pet pilot to a trio of sentient planes. I wasn’t going to lie and say part of me wasn’t thrilled. Pet pilot had to beat being an unemployed adjunct professor sleeping on a couch in Butte, MT. But former student pilot daydreams aside, the whole flying another person like they weren’t there was weird and I wasn’t completely onboard, so I took time scrubbing my molars until my nerves settled.

Out front, Thundercracker had already transformed. Starscream used his hand an elevator to get me into the cockpit, and then Thundercracker’s cockpit did the same ‘swallowing me whole’ thing that Starscream’s had. I was expecting it though, and it didn’t bother me as much as it had yesterday.

“That is strange,” Thundercracker muttered. I looked around for his eye.

“Where’s your eye?” I asked when I couldn’t find it.

“They are both in the nose.”

“Starscream had one in the cockpit.”
“And let me guess, he had his speaker right up next to your ear,” Thundercracker said, and his voice got a lot closer, “just like this.”

The hair on my neck stood up on that side. “He did,” I admitted.

Thundercracker laughed. “See, what you need to know is Starscream is really high strung. Extra suspicious. And I’m not. An eyeball on someone you trust is just a waste of a good view,” Thundercracker said.

“So he was suspicious of me.”

“He’s not, though, he’s just suspicious generally and curious in the worst way,” Thundercracker said. “The other thing you need to know, is Starscream is quick. Quick to suspect. Quick to judge. Humans always think someone who is quick to a conviction is slow to back down, but Starscream is quick to pivot too, quick to trust when he’s decided his suspicion was misplaced.”

“But he’s keeping an eye on me, one that maybe would have been better spent on views outside the cockpit? Isn’t that him being suspicious?”

“No. He was curious about having a creator in his cockpit. And since he was probably flying on instruments the whole time, he probably needed to give his eye something to do. He’s quick to get bored, too.”

“We were scud running on instruments?”

“I don’t know exactly what that means,” Thundercracker said, “But I can guess. Low to the ground, going too fast?”

“Yeah,” I said, and I realized my stomach had turned into a bottomless pit of cramps.

“He tends to do that on instruments and sonar. He says it keeps him sharp.” Thundercracker said, and then entered level flight from the climb we’d been in.

“Okay,” I said, a quashed a swelling bubble of fear in my body, “just to be clear, we’re using visual flight rules for this flight,” I said.

“Of course,” Thundercracker said, “Your controls.”

“My controls,” I replied. “But you keep an eye on things. I’m rated to fly a Cessna 172, not an acrobatic jet.”

A button glowed on the stick near my right hand.

“That button will return controls to me. Recording your flight data to suggest programming now.”

After a few sweeping turns, I got busy running myself through old skills, including a slick steep turn with a nice roll out, if I did say so myself. I did a bunch of shoddy s-turns, but that had never been my best skill anyway. Thundercracker’s airframe felt heavier, steadier in my hands than Starscream’s had, and I flew it with a bit more confidence than I’d had the day prior. Or maybe I was just less rusty than I’d been. The weather seemed less intimidating, and when we popped above the cloud deck, it was like a dolphin cresting a wave for the thrill, not a crisp punctuation. I flew for about an hour, my head on a swivel, and I didn’t see other aircraft. Which was good, because I didn’t really know where I was, so I just assumed I was bustin’ airspace.

“Do you have the data you need?” I asked after I ran out of easy ideas of what to do. There wasn’t a river or lake to follow, and ground reference maneuvers were really boring without distinct landmarks.

“Oh, hmmm?” Thundercracker murmured.

“Are you napping?”

Silence.

“Are. You. Napping?” I insisted.

“Mmmmmmmm.” Was his reply.

I whacked the button on the stick. “Wake up! Your controls”

A ripple of glowing light rolled across the panel lights. “Ooph,” he said. “Rude awakening!”

“You were napping. And I am not nearly a good enough pilot to be solo in whatever kind of plane you are.”

“Sorry,” he muttered.

“Do you have the data you need?”

“Oh, yes, I’ve had it for a while.”

“Then can we get back to the warm down there?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said, dropped a wing, and took us away.

We came home to a fairly rowdy dogfight.

“Still not working!” Skywarp was squealing, while Starscream bore down on him.

“What on earth?” Thundercrackeer said, and waded in. “What are you two doing?”

“Trying to get his shield to deploy!”

“He’s torturing me!”

“I am testing you,” Starscream insisted.

“Test, torture, it’s all the same!”

Thundercracker gained altitude, and then flipped over so we could look down on the fight.

“Is he really torturing Skywarp?”

“No, he’s not. He’s keeping him distracted from the fact he doesn’t get to fly with a creator.”

“That seems unkind.”

“Do you want fly with Skywarp?” He asked.

“Not when you put it that way….” I said, “Okay, been upside down a bit too long, back over, please?”

Thundercracker righted himself, and flew down to settle side by side with Starscream.

“Yoohoo,” he said, popped up a shield and mock-bashed Starscream.

“Excellent!” Starscream said, his voice full of triumph and glee.

Thundercracker slid from the sky gracefully, and landed on his wheels.

“Why didn’t you transform to land?”

“Not as nice to the skinsack pilot,” Thundercracker replied, and slid open the canopy. His hand popped out from underneath the fuselage and gave me a ride down to the ground.

Then he fully transformed back into his robot mode.

Starscream and Skywarp came down to join us.

“What did you think?” Starscream asked Thundercracker.

“It wasn’t quite –” Thundercracker cut himself off, and all of their faces suddenly changed to “buffering.” I prepared my ears for another round of rage and anger from Mighty Megs, but instead, a voice like a wizard, a voice like a sage, tired but determined, kind but forbidding came through the static-riddled, terrible connection.

“This is a message from Optimus Prime, leader of Cybertron. Recalling all Cybertronians. Return to Cybertron. The war has ended in a conditional surrender from the leader of the Decepticon splinter faction, Shockwave. Our condition is this; Cybertron needs its people to rebuild. Our victory cannot mean anything without the help of all. Deceptions of any splinter faction must return by way of the Luna 2 repatriation station. As a condition of surrender, all Decepticons who set aside their arms, who lay down their allegiance, who step up to provide service to our rebuilding effort in retribution for their actions during the war shall be duly forgiven. I promise safety for all who return…”

There was more message, clearly, but they shut it off.

“Cybertron isn’t blown to smithereens?” Skywarp said, gobsmacked by the news.

“I can hardly believe it,” Thundercracker said.

“Optimus said we could go home, pay our penance, be done. Do you believe it?” Skywarp asked, or exclaimed, I wasn’t quite sure.

“We’re Megatron's Decepticons, we don’t trust him,” Starscream said, “well, we haven’t so far.”

“However,” Thundercracker said, “I trust Prime a whole lot more than I trust Megatron anymore.”

“Prime might say that he’ll forgive us,” Starscream argued, “but we are Megatron’s air command trine. We’re the reason some people are dead. There are people who aren’t all-loving Prime. There are Decepticons left who won’t like a truce, especially once they know Megatron is still alive. There will be too many people who will want us to take up the fight again, or will take up fighting in our name. If fighting breaks out, there could be decades of a new war in front of us! I’m not going back just to start fighting again!”

“I thought you liked fighting?” Skywarp asked.

“I do. But I did not get into the war to fight forever. I got into the war so I could lead Cybertron to a new era. I didn’t go to recharge at night to dream about a superior way to manage my null rays. I dreamt about an adoring crowd when I went to the theatre. My happy daydreams were about dining at the Crystal Spire and occupying the tippy-top of Cybertron society. What, did you just think you could be a brutish prankster in an endless war?”

“Well, sort of,” Skywarp said.

“Use both of your processors Skywarp, please,” Starscream told him.

“Well, what do you suggest we do?” Thundercracker asked. "It's not like we can rock up to Luna 2 and say 'howdy pardners, we're done fighting, also here is Megatron's location, good luck convincing him to dedicate himself to the service of Prime's government and not start a new rebellion.' If Prime didn't accept your surrender," Starscream bristled at that, "once he knows Megatron is still with us, will he accept anything we have to say?"

Starscream’s eyes flashed from red, to yellow, and then to green, purple, and even briefly blue.

He was at odds with himself.

But only for a moment.

“Do we want to go home? Is Cybertron home?” Starscream asked.

“Cybertron is where we belong. Earth is nice enough if you don’t mind aggressive humidity half the year and green gunk growing in your transformation seams. I want to go home,” Thundercracker said.

“And we don’t want to go back to fighting?”

“And I don’t want to go back to fighting. Well, not for real,” Skywarp agreed after a very awkward pause.

“I want to wear my parade configuration at the races, show Newsparks how to fly, and have reason to hope that some of the damage we did in the name of peace can be healed by the science we designed for war,” Thundercracker said.

Starscream considered this. “I want to build something that isn’t Autobot or Decepticon. Something new, not a combination, not a comprise. Something smarter so we never lose generations to a war again. I can’t do that here, I have to do it there. But I’m not willing to restart this whole mess. We have to give Prime a reason to trust Megatron's former command trine is, in fact, the former command trine. And a reason for the Deceptions to not trust us at all.”

Thundercracker nodded.

“Fortunately, we only need to do one thing to achieve both ends.”

“Really? How’s that…” Skywarp muttered.

“We’re going to do what Prime cannot.” Starscream said. “Defeat his enemy.”

Chapter Text

Starscream formed a mask, and I put it on, because I didn’t have choices. Well, I’d had choices, but once I’d decided I was being dealt in, I was playing my part. And my part involved wearing a mask. We were high up in the atmosphere and by his own admission, he didn’t trust his pressurization because he’d never used it before, and in fact, had thought it was somehow related to his self-repair systems. But I didn’t like having a body part smashed across my face; it made me too aware of where my tongue was or wasn’t. And it smelled like old garage or basement or something like that. Starscream had very carefully fitted it to my face, but it still sucked.

At least the view was good. Underneath us, the globe scrolled by at ludicrous speeds. Starscream had told me that, owing to the need to be able to quickly drop back into the atmosphere for my safety, the flight would be stretched from a mere 90 minutes to a ‘whopping’ three hours.

I supposed we were taking a direct route from the Great Plains to Antarctica, but even so, I didn’t even think the Concorde could have carried me so fast.

Earth from this high up, even in the dark, maybe especially in the dark, was dazzling. The snows of the Great Plains gave way to Tropical Paradise that gave way to rugged geography and lush forest, then highlands stretched on and on, and finally we arrived at the sparkling, blinding South Pole, awash in heavy summer sunshine and looking altogether like an alien world despite being of terrestrial origin.

We spiraled down to a little base, and tucked into a small bay.

And there stood Mighty Megs.

Even damaged, Megatron was a hulking unit of robot, at least half again as big as any member of the Seeker trine.

“What is this, Starscream? Come in person to tell me of your failures, here to beg for more time, or do you have something you mean to offer me, something you imagine I want from you?”

“I have come to give you a creator, Lord Megatron.” Starscream said, and opened his cockpit to show me to his commanding officer.

I didn’t care for that wording. But we hadn’t really discussed precise words, so I supposed it would do.

“What am I supposed to do with a skinsack?” Megatron laughed. “Does it make Energon with its organic digestive system?” He chuckled at his own ‘joke.’

“No,” Starscream said, “but I’ve brought you some,” Starscream held out a sizeable cube of Energon. He’d promised me it was enough to nearly completely heal Megatron’s wounds.

Nearly. But not quite enough.

Good strategy by human standards.

Megatron’s eyes widened. “What black magic has come from your lab, why, it looks like it could have been made by Primus himself.” He reached for it, and suddenly a purple shield snapped around it.

“Starscream! Is this some puzzle you think to taunt me with?” Megatron’s eyes flashed instantly to anger.

“This is the gift of the creator,” Starscream replied. “A single flight granted me this shield. Look!” he commanded, and the shield expanded to form a thick, massive barrier between the two bots (and thankfully myself and Megatron.) Starscream dropped it, and reformed it around the Energon cube.

“You trick me, it is a property of the cube and a mirage,” Megatron insisted.

Starscream dropped the shield and held the cube in his hand.

Megatron inclined his head towards it, and Starscream playfully poked it into Megatron’s waiting mouth.

Megatron smiled around the cube. “Excellent.”

Then he pulled out his blaster and shot at Starscream’s hand.

I screamed, the shield flew up just in the nick of time to prevent bodily harm.

“Interesting,” Megatron said, considering the shield.

Then he looked down at his leg, which was reforming rapidly. “I see, I see.”

When it was complete, he tested it. And maybe I was being too harsh, but it seemed clumsy. I had, I supposed, ascribed an unusual level of grace to all Cybertronians, but it seemed that was more a Seeker trait, for Megatron’s movements were heavy and without any lightness.

When his leg was done, it was his arm’s turn. He swung it in a circle, a thug warming up for a rumble, no grace at all. Just big and powerful.

And when it was finished, he smiled a wicked smile. “Soldier, transform and survive!”

The cockpit canopy snapped shut. A blaster pulse streamed past us. Starscream pulled up hard, hung in the air long enough to transform and then he let himself tumble back down, strafing over the austere icy continent to dodge Megatron’s onslaught.

I had been warned that this would be coming, with more or less warning, but that in no way prepared me for what happened next. I had thought that our flight over the great plains had been the zenith of Starscream’s flying capabilities, but apparently he’d cared about his human passenger more than I knew then. This time, Starscream was flying to save our lives. I wasn’t sure how I wasn’t chunky salsa after a few more aggressive maneuvers. I knew that I was passing in and out of consciousness as we tumbled through the air.

“You have to admit this is exhilarating!” Starscream chanted.

“No, I really don’t!” I yelled back. My head thrashed violently when finally Megatron landed a hit through the shield. It had held up to a burst of five, but then Starscream didn’t position it just so, and the blaster bolt flew true. One of Starscream’s wing pods was torn away, leaving a ragged edge. My chest pounded in terror.

“He’s going to kill us!” I eventually managed to yell. I’d been promised that it would look bad, but that it was all really a game. I’d taken that to mean it would look like Hollywood stunts – sprays of sparks, and smoke plumes, everything for the screen, no stuntmen harmed during the making of the battle scene. What was actually happening to us was terrifyingly real. And I was worried that it really wasn’t the game it always had been. Megatron had finally gone around the bend and he really was going to take out Starscream, and me with him.

“No he’s not! I told you, this is a game, killing us is not his goal at…,” Starscream argued back but then stopped himself. “I’ve overlooked something! The way I normally end this game isn’t going to work!”

“Then this game sucks!” I howled. “How does it usually end?”

“I pretend to crash, let him land on top of me and smash out my canopy.”

Excuse me, I was under the canopy! “I thought you had a plan!” I squealed, “I trusted you!”

Starscream did a low pass over the snow, sending a wave of it up between us and Megatron, giving us the briefest of breathers from the fight.

“Well, first, that’s somewhat on you, and secondly, I did, and I still do!” He snapped.

“Great, feel free to share!”

“Ouch!” Starscream suddenly yelped. “He bit me!”

Starscream flopped over on his back and flew upside down a few feet off the ground, which sent Megatron tumbling up into the sky to avoid the ground. I ground my teeth, wondering if we were going to suddenly pile drive into the snow.

“I just have to rethink how to end this fight without getting my canopy bashed to bits!”

“Why can’t you just shield me!?”

“Then he can’t have his fun and the game doesn’t end?”

“His idea of fun is fucking weird,” I said as I scrambled for ideas. “Do you have any control over your transformation? Can you just… move me to a shoulder or something? Let him smash out a skinsack-free cockpit.”

“You are brilliant, the mind of a warrior.”

I was shifted a couple of feet and given a tiny porthole to look out of. Otherwise, I was still surrounded by a cockpit, though it had gotten very cramped.

“Be impressed, Hannah, be impressed,” Starscream said, “I don’t know anyone else who can do that in flight.”

“I’ll be properly impressed when this fight is done and over, and we’re both still alive to argue about it.”

“Brace position,” Starscream advised, and I cinched down my harness harder, and then wrapped my hands over my neck.

“Incoming!” He yelled.

A blaster bolt smashed into the nose of the plane, and Starscream let out a theatrical cry of agony. Well, I thought it was theatrical. Then, another blaster bolt landed a direct hit on a wing, and a hole appeared. Oh god, that had to hurt. “And now for the death spiral!” Starscream said to me, as if to reassure me that all was well in hand and controlled by him.

He let loose an injured keening wail, and lost altitude. Plowing into the snow threw up a wall of snow, all the better to sell the crash. He transformed back into his robot form, carefully keeping me away from his now-cracked canopy. I could see the damage on his arms and legs. Megatron might not have hurt him as badly as Starscream was intimating, but he was in rough shape.

Megatron tore out of the sky, and smashed into us, a raptor falling on its prey. He too transformed back into a giant robot, and punched the shield above the canopy until Starscream could no longer maintain it, and then he pounded the canopy to crystal shards, He ripped off a wing tip, anything within easy reach he took perverse joy in smashing, crumpling, or ripping now that Starscream couldn’t power the shield (or chose not to) in order to get the fight over with.

I didn’t think the whimpering droning in my ear was particularly faked, when Megatron managed to dislocate half of the digits on Starscream’s right hand. Still, Starscream didn’t fight back or protest in any meaningful fashion. Some flailing of limbs, some miserable sounds. Flashing lights all around me suggested that this phase of Starscream’s plan was actually more painful than he was letting on.

I thought the pounding was going to rattle the teeth out of my face and when I screamed out after biting my tongue, Starscream actually put up more resistance.

“Think of the Creator, I still carry her!”

Megatron ceased. “I became carried away, we haven’t had a proper fight in years. Surely you missed it.”

“I haven’t,” a text readout in the cockpit said to me while he was agreeing with Megatron outwardly.

I couldn’t tell what was happening, but I was moving on multiple axises suddenly.

And then I realized, Megatron was carrying Starscream, ergo me as well, back to the base.

“This new technology and this newly sourced Energon, for once I am impressed Starscream.”

“I am pleased you are pleased, Lord Megatron.”

“With this capability, we can finally rule the galaxy… together.”

“Don’t listen to him,” I murmured.

“I’m not going to,” Starscream typed out.

“Tell me, how did the creator give you this shield, and what wonders might await me.”

Starscream launched into a rather poetic retelling of our flight, spinning my role from hapless passenger to skilled dogfighter.

“You let a skinsack handle you?” Megatron hissed. “You naughty Seeker.”

“Ten days ago,” Starscream typed to me, “I’d have thrilled to hear that tone in his voice.”

“Glad to be a positive influence,” I told him.

“The ends justified the means, Lord Megatron,” Starscream said to his supposedly superior officer.

“So it seems. What must I do?”

Starscream prattled effortless technobabble at Megatron, and Megatron listened.

And then, the thing I’d agreed to, the thing we’d tested, the thing I wouldn’t have consented to had I known everything, but also the thing I couldn’t back down from then was on the table.

I was going to fly Megatron.

And this was going to work because Starscream was going to convince him it was the only way to untap his potential. I’d figured out on the ride over that he’d jiggered the test, and when he knew I knew, he’d explained. Thundercracker flew with me, but Starscream had told me that he expected the code change to work whether or not Thundercracker flew with me. Likewise, he expected the shielf to fail no matter what with Skywarp. Presenting Skywarp’s failure and Thundercracker’s success as valid test results was laughable academics, and I was surprised how quickly Megatron ate up Starscream’s dishonesty. How little he questioned the flimsy ‘science’ Starscream presented him.

“We Seekers are not so bold as you, Lord Megatron. If she unlocked within us the mightiest of shields, imagine the weapon that must be buried in you, waiting to be uncovered.” I thought Starscream was laying it on a little thick, but he knew his quarry.

Lord Megatron stood. “And you are most sure?”

“Most.”

“Very well, give me the creator!”

I had to give him credit, as he handed me over, his face looked so guileless.

I had to give me credit too. I was terrified, but I was outwardly calm as though I possessed the spotless mind of a righteous martyr.

Megatron held me in his hand.

I wondered if he was going to squish me.

“Such a tiny thing…”

“A simple key can unlock an ornate door,” Starscream cajoled.

Megatron placed me in his cockpit, and it resettled around me. “Yes, I can feel it moving. I can feel the beginnings of a great power.”

I really, really did not want to go flying in that beast. Everything from the smell of the cockpit to the angry angles of the seat made me feel like I was in the belly of a monster.

“A kiss for good luck?” Megatron asked Starscream, and I wasn’t sure if his voice had a leer in it, or he just generally sounded shady, or he was teasing, but all the same it made me uncomfortable.

“A kiss for success,” Starscream counter offered.

Megatron laughed and hurled himself into the sky, transforming around me.

“Go on, then, show me how you fly, I’m keen to see my new weapon, but I’m far keener to have this over with,” Megatron commanded me.

I took the unusually bulbous joystick in my hand, and put us into a clearing turn.

Starscream’s plan was coming together. Starscream had insisted that Megatron wouldn’t learn anything from the exercise, he was too haughty, too uninterested in really examining the flight and the connotations of how I flew. He was too sure of his utmost superiority. Which was all well and good, but the main part of the plan hinged on the fact that Might Megs was a hedonist. He’d be too blinded by his baser senses to realize the trap until it was too late.

Thundercracker’s words came back to me. “How did you take back control from her?” He’d asked Starscream. He’d gone on to opine that having me doing the flying was a warm, fuzzy feeling, an electrostatic daydream of a mild overcharge.

“Exactly,” Starscream had told him, almost breathily.

In the bright light that was enough sleep, I’d realized this had been the cause of his seemingly drunk behavior, the fast, over-confident flight so low to the ground.

Thundercracker had looked at him with intensity, “And, again, how did you take back control, seeing as you couldn’t have known what was coming?”

“My attention was split, fortunately.”

That answer had seemed suspect to me.

Thundercracker and Skywarp had both stared down Starscream.

Starscream, it had seemed, was immune to the peer pressure.

“You had to have known in advance,” Thundercracker had said.

“How could have I?”

“He’s not going to tell us,” Skywarp had groused.

“Screamer the Schemer never does,” Thundercracker had said.

Starscream’s eyes had gone solid red at that.

“Oh don’t boil your oil at me. There’s no way you could have just straight up resisted that. It was a thousand times better than the first time I transformed into a plane. For the first time in my whole life, I completely understand my alt form. It all makes such perfect sense. Every wire, every system, even all the dials that we never really cared about,” Thundercracker had said. “And you want me to believe that you didn’t drown in all of that? That it didn’t fill your integrated circuits with a benzene supernova?”

They had argued then in the way that only people who really know each other well can argue. I couldn’t have followed it, but I understood enough. Starscream and Thundercracker had both experienced a drunken, euphoric state while I flew them. Starscream had shaken it off. Thundercracker hadn’t. And that had been the cause of the fight.

Which had seemed very stupid to me.

“I was lost in being a plane. I was lost in being a machine, in being a mechanical marvel! I knew it was coming and still I couldn’t have escaped!”

“And don’t you think Megatron will fall to the same spell?” Starscream had asked.

“You didn’t, so I have to think it’s a possibility until I know how you slipped through!” Thundercracker snapped.

Then it hadn’t seemed like so stupid an argument.

Starscream had eventually been coerced to provide a very shifty-eyed and unlikely explanation of how he could have possibly known that flying with a creator at the controls could be overpowering, and how he’d come to program in an interrupt that would jolt him out of it. I’d recognized it for what it was – someone explaining that their experiment was a great success because… they didn’t really know why they’d done what they did because they’d cooked it up after being awake for a ludicrously long time, but it worked, and therefore, pay-no-mind-to-the-man-behind-the-curtain.

Thundercracker had been mollified – what prevented them from being lost in their benzene overload was that both of them had built in an escape hatch – Starscream with his interrupt, Thundercracker with his control-transfer switch. Megatron wouldn’t have either of those, and wouldn’t realize he needed them either.

Starscream’s plan for Megatron was elegantly simple on the surface: Megatron would be delighted by a gift of the newer, higher-quality “energon’ from the lab, he’d be seduced by the power of the shield, convinced of his might and power after brutalizing Starscream, he would be lulled to senselessness by me, and then…we’d spring the trap.

It had seemed like an awful lot of effort to me. I had pointed out that they could have just starved him to death – he was dependent on them for energon. Or they could wait for one of his sleep cycles and shoot him point blank range to fry him, but Starscream had successfully argued that both of these plans had serious flaws – starvation could take millennia, and even then, Megatron would most likely revert to stasis, not die. Until he was truly, utterly gone, Megatron would forever represent a potential rallying point for the disaffected, for those who still chafed to see Autobots in power. To prove Megatron’s death, Starscream would have to share his memories, and I agreed with him, a memory of him shooting an unarmed, unaware leader would hardly build a compelling narrative back on Cybertron; at best it would read as overdue mutiny and at worst, pedestrian treachery.

But viciously and pointless assaulting his own soldier? Endangering a creator not once but twice? Even the those who remembered him best as the as the dashing gladiator would be forced to see him as the irredeemable, unstable warlord he’d become. Mutiny and treachery would become simple heroism.

Unfortunately, like most elegant and simple plans, below the surface there were hundreds of details and moving –

“Boring, get on with the actual flight!” Megatron snapped at me, which jolted me from my thoughts.

“Sorry,” I said, trying to sound unfazed, but Starscream’s plan relied on Megatron being just as hypnotized by my gentle flying as Thundercracker, and I saw no signs of it.

I flew a bit more aggressively.

“Yes, that’s more like it. Interesting. Now, I see Starscream behind us. He only thinks he is sneaky! You must engage with him. You must dogfight, we must see how you attack so that this new code will inform a new weapon.”

“But he’s injured!” I hissed. Worse that that, I knew how damaged he was. It wasn’t exactly all systems red, but it was concerningly close to me. I knew there was a stuck missile. If it blew…

“He is a soldier and he’s had worse.”

That was not part of the plan. But I was forced to turn, forced to target Starscream in the finder.

“What are you doing?!” Starscream’s voice filled the comm.

“Fixing your experiment. You fool, you could have had wondrous weapons if you’d just done things correctly, but as always, you aren’t as smart as you like to think. Your instructions would have only given me a shield. And whether you knew that or not, whether your meant to snooker me out of my weapon, limit me to a shield, I don’t care. I know how to get what I need. If I learn how she fights, not how she defends, my new power will be perfect.”

Megatron dragged the aim to Starscream’s engines.

“You must allow me,” I insisted.

“He can take it, punish him. Punish him for your kidnapped car. Punish him for your field rations. Punish him for his arrogance. Punish him for the sin that he is!”

I let a blaster shot howl right into underwing pod where missiles were usually stored. The side where Starscream could eject the whole pod if necessary.

Starscream’s shield held.

“Again!”

One.

Two.

Three.

The shots were aimed for the same spot. I knew the shield was easier to maintain if he didn’t have to move it, but I also knew it wouldn’t hold out forever.

I tried to give him time to regenerate energy for it, but Megatron grabbed the aim again, “Keep firing until that shield is down. Show your teeth, Creator!”

“Auuugh!” I shouted hoping it sounded aggressive, powerful., “Give me your wings!”

I yanked back on the stick, and forced us into the sky, and then followed up with the kind of flying I wasn’t trained for. While I did it, I made sure to drag Megatron towards the red lines on his gauges. Push him hard, wear him out, but not so much that he’d suspect what I was up to.

Starscream wasn’t pretending to be tired and unprepared for a dog fight, and I was able to pretend I was better than I really was.

I painted a target on his back. “Pew pew pew!” I shouted to Megatron, but didn’t pull the trigger. “That’s one option!” I flew up beside Starscream, and imitated bashed his wing. “That’s another.”

“Take the shot!” Megatron screamed.

I didn’t.

And he didn’t take them for me.

Megatron wasn’t a Seeker. Seekers were first and foremost planes, they wanted to be admired as flying machines, they wanted to see their wings take on a life of their own. Megatron was first and foremost weapon, he wanted to be admired for his power, his ability to dish it out. He wanted to be admired for the destruction he could cause.

But the killshot wasn’t the fun part for him, no, he liked the chase, the hunt. That’s what Starscream had told me about Megatron, how he liked to perform for an imaginary grandstand. Just like a real crowd, they didn’t want too fast a fight. And neither did Megatron.

And so I had him well in hand, this was what would intoxicate him; the hunt, but not the kill.

We flew circles around Starscream’s battered airframe, painting him as a target again and again, but releasing no energy. Megatron shouted encouragement but didn't force the matter. I heard his hunger take over. “Now do it,” he would say, and laugh as I made sound effects with my mouth.

He was drunk and going to sleep, just like Thundercracker.

I amused him as only a creator could. I flattered his raw power, I played upon his ego as a supreme hunter, the mightiest of the mighty. I amused him until he just started chuckling and not speaking. And I lulled him further and further into the stupor.

Then I did it. I threw the joystick away and hauled up on the red handle next to my left thigh.

I was suddenly launched into the air, because that's what ejection seats do. Megatron’s canopy spiraled down to the frigid wasteland below. Behind me, I heard a noise, a harsh ping, not quite like a scream. I knew it was some sort of weaponized sonar Seekers could produce, and it would disorient Megatron if he still had any wits about him, which would guarantee the crash. Skywarp had categorized it as such a juvenile trick it would never be expected, which meant it could be ludicrously effective. The sudden wet willy of the robot world, I suppose. But like the dogfight, I’d underestimated what I was going to experience. The sound ripped through my head, and the second blast felt like it was ripping me apart. Then, my vision went black and the howling air screaming past my ears went silent.

When I came to, I was being held in the crook of Starscream’s arm.

“Is it done? Is he gone? Did you get the footage?” I asked.

“It’s done,” he said, but his face was sad, drawn, long.

“It’s what you wanted.”

“I know,” he agreed. “You were perfect, brilliant even. It’s what was needed. But for one minute, just one minute, it reminded me of how much I loved teaching him to fly.”

“You taught him to fly?” I asked.

“Mmmhmm,” Starscream replied, “a long, long time ago. Early in the war. He had just gained a plane alt mode. And I was his air commander, so who else could teach him? He was an excellent student. We did mock fights, just like you did, painting targets but never firing. I remember it being a fierce joy.”

“Bittersweet?”

“Someday it will be sweet,” he said. “For now it is just bitter.”

We flew to the crash site, and Starscream confirmed that Megatron was unrecoverable. His head was crushed. But, more importantly, according to Starscream, his spark chamber was open, half crumpled. Megatron’s spark was truly dead, truly gone. Starscream picked up the chamber and stashed the surprisingly tiny artifact in one of his storage compartments. Then he scrounged through the wreckage for Energon, lapping it up like a thirsty dog. For a second, it felt like watching someone tuck into a long pork sandwich, but as I watched his wings repair, watched the corrosion slip away and his armor begin to repair itself from the Energon, I shushed my mind.

Humanity wasn’t too much better; the french had butchered their dirty, impoverished king in the streets. Our plan had at least given Megatron a last hurrah.

And now it was over. The big bad was dead. The plan had worked. I had somehow torn down a tyrant I’d barely met and won a revolution I hadn’t even known about as late as last week. I should have been walking on clouds. But instead, it occurred to me that I didn’t actually know what happened next. Sure, my new friends would do whatever they were going to do to get home where hopefully their Optimus Prime would be as good as his word and let them return to their lives after they’d done their time. But what about me, and Calamity? How would we wrap up this utterly bizarre season?

Starscream flexed his recently healed hand, and then stared out across the austere landscape.

His eyes focused in on a distant object.

The remains of the base.

“Is there anything left out there?” I asked.

“For me? No. Whatever scrap of energon there might be isn’t worth the flight back.”

“What if humans find it?”

“They probably won’t, not for a long time. But even if they did, it would be of marginal impact to your society.”

“That’s some serious tech.”

“That you can’t hope to understand. By the time you do understand it, you’d have already invented it.”

He aimed his gun above the base and took two shots. Snow and ice rained down on the base, and while it was still there, I could see how a few storms would finish the job and occlude it from view.

I thought he would turn away, but he looked out over it for a long while. I grew cold – it might have been summer, but it wasn’t much warmer here than it was back at base.

“We should get back,” I said after a bit. “You have stuff to do, make energon, summon a space bridge, pay some pennance, give Optimus his dead enemy and get back to your actual life.”

“That’s the idea, but do I want to?” Starscream asked me.

“Well, I thought you did. After you heard the broadcast, I thought you wanted to go home. I think you all agreed that you trusted Prime more than Megatron, liked home better than earth, wanted to rebuild something new and better. We kinda had to, ” I gestured slitting my throat “your boss to make the plan work, so we’re a bit committed here.”

“Calamity’s shield comes at a cost, one I hadn’t considered,” Starscream said.

“What’s that?” I asked.

Instead of speaking, he knelt down, and projected several lines of code onto the ground. After a moment, it resolved to some sort of pseudo code in English.

“I don’t know what it says,” I said, “I never did do a lot of computer programming, not even when I was a physics student and we had a whole class on it.”

“It’s a little chunk of code that, if you delete it, the shield goes away. All it does is make you want to be near a creator. That’s all. Very simple. But take it away, no shield.”

“You don’t need the shield on Cybertron, though. The war is over.”

Starscream laughed. “I’ll need it if you are with me. Not hurting you has been a challenge, and mistakes notwithstanding, we’ve been careful.”

“And why would I be there?” I asked.

“Calamity finds herself as your car,” Starscream said, which wasn’t very telling. “It’s how she wants to be.”

“Yeah, and?” I asked.

“I find myself as your plane,” Starscream said, bluntly. “With a fond wish to carry you up and away. Higher and higher.”

“But if you delete the code….” I said, “which you don’t need….right?”

“I did delete it. Twice. No shield. Altered it three times. And three times it came back after a few hours. Core coding can be tenacious. It can take decades, maybe even a century to delete something cleanly if it is resistant to the idea.”

The bottom of the world dropped away and sent my stomach plummeting. “What about Thundercracker?!”

“I warned him to write the code to a temporary test, not his core code. In a few days he’ll stop hovering around you.”

“Well, uhm. I’m human,” I said, since it seemed like a good time to remind Starscream that I wasn’t just a creator or pilot, but an entire other thing. “Humans don’t belong on Cybertron, and…. I don’t think I really want to drive Calamity around as a car, because there’s something utterly icky about controlling a sentient being.” I said, implying the other bit, which was, I wasn’t terribly interested in flying them again for the same reason. I should have been direct, but I didn’t want to drill the point home and get myself stranded in Antarctica. “Calamity seems to be a happy person even if she was never supposed to be a person. Can’t you all go home? And can’t you just… I mean I’ll die, all humans do! You are going to have to deal with rooting out the code eventually, can’t you just accept a few more years of dealing with it so we can all go back to our lives?”

Starscream dropped me into his cockpit and took off back for the great plains instead of answering me. Which seemed like a fair response to what I’d just said, because I wasn’t sure I’d made a whole lot of sense.

As we arched over the Gulf, the outline of the Texan coast clear from light pollution, I felt like he was almost ready to speak. But he didn’t. He stayed silent.

We came in over the truck stop. I noticed that Skywarp and Thundercracker awaited us.

Starscream landed, and looked at his Trine. “Have you seen the feed?”

“It’s over,” Skywarp said. “And it feels strange.”

“It’s over and it feels strange,” Starscream agreed, and put me down.

And then he crouched down, rolled forward into a sphinx-like position to look me in the eye. After a second, the other two Seekers did the same.

I was being considered carefully.

“We’re packed up, we can request the spacebridge anytime,” Skywarp said.

“We just need to know how many are going over,” Thundercracker said to me. “It might not be three.”

That sounded like an invitation.

No, it was an invitation.

I could take everything back to normal. I was rpetty sure Starscream could take the Sparkstrand out of Calamity now and she could just be a car again. I could just be an unemployed adjunct professor. Or, I could take only myself back to normal, and let Calamity immigrate to Cybertron. And I thought I liked that option. It felt fair to most involved.

But not entirely fair to me. I didn’t have family, just a handful of friends. There just wasn’t a lot holding me here. I didn’t think I wanted to be the pet pilot to a hangar of three planes, but on second thought, it was growing on me. Maybe it bugged me because it was new. Maybe it was the perfect future for someone who had never really liked flying alone.

I could go across the space bridge and be one more missing persons case that never got solved. But I didn’t really want that for my friends. They deserved me, didn’t they? But how to go back to flying Cessnas after flying three alien jets?

Then again, a Cessna sounded good right about now.

I was confused about me, so I decided to try figure this out for Calamity first. Obviously she could go back to being a stock Subaru Forester. Nah. I didn’t like it. I could send her across the space bridge. Or not. If I didn’t send her with them, I supposed I could try hard and believe in her, get used to being chauffeured everywhere. But that choice would doom her to terrible loneliness when I died. Unless I somehow arranged for her to go to Cybertron later, after I was gone-zo?

But I thought there was better answer to all of this.

It was called “having my cake and eating it too.”

“I want to be copied, can I be copied? You said that you could capture a spark and put in something, and that we had to make sure that Megatron’s spark was gone, vacated the premises, so no one could do that to him. You also said that sometimes, sparks are split. Or combined. If a spark is what makes us sentient, then I have one. Split it. Let the me that is human go on and live her life. And let the me that is…”

The me that was what?

I was still 100% human.

But part of me didn’t feel human anymore.

I reached up and clapped my hands to my head, only to feel the wax Thundercracker put in my hair still holding it in a stiff mock crest despite everything I’d been through since he’d done it. Oh. The part of me that was supposed to have that on my head.

“Maybe this is a bold claim,” I said, “but let the part of me that somehow joined your trine go with you.”

They all looked at each other, searchingly, as if each of the others had the answers.

“You wouldn’t be a creator that could fly us, though,” Thundercracker said, “wouldn’t that ruin everything?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said, “Like I was saying earlier, I wouldn’t be a creator for very long anyway. 40, 45 years if we’re lucky, and then… I’d die.”

“That’s all?!” A horrified Starscream exclaimed, aghast.

“That’s all. Our machines, the things we create, they usually last a lot longer than us.”

The trine seemed horrified by this news.

“You didn’t know?”

“We didn’t comprehend,” Thundercracker rumbled.

“We cannot lose you in such a short time frame,” Starscream squeaked out.

Starscream and Thundercracker looked at each other, eyes flashing.

“She should still be a creator even in the event of a conversion,” Thundercracker said, “it’s not the same as her having her skinsack body, but a creator spark is a creator spark. Sparks don’t change. They gain layers, but they don’t change,” Thundercracker said, as if he was reassuring Starscream, pulling him back from some ledge.

“We’d need the strand from Calamity,” Starscream said. “She would be extinguished.”

“Not so,” Thundercracker said, “I know that my scientific knowledge hasn’t proven especially useful to the Deception cause or the war, but in this, I am the expert. The Sparkstrand is by far the easiest method, but it’s far from the only one. The old method is even less risk. If we fail, she just doesn’t split. So if we take purified Energon and a spark chamber we could…. Oh no,” Thundercracker realized, “we have neither of those.”

“We do, though,” I said.

“We do?”

“Well, okay, we have one, and for reasons I suspect we have the other too.” I said, “We definitely have Megatron’s spark chamber. Can we just… bend it back to normal, wash it out?”

Thundercracker considered my words. “Wash it out?”

“Yeah, like a dirty lantern from the thrift store. Just wash it.”

“And the purified Energon?”

“I still have my APU,” Starscream said, “it’s functioning poorly, but it does function! There’s enough catalyst to produce about two ounces every few months, and I should have three quarters of an ounce now.”

And there it was, the other bit we needed. I had been sure that he had better stuff he’d been holding back from sharing, and I knew he’d carefully weighed the dose of suspiciously excellent Energon that he’d given Megatron. In fact, I thought he was understating how much of the good stuff he still had to share. I would have bet he’d chosen a number that would be –

“Enough, but not a lot,” Thundercracker said. “We’d need a body.”

“She has to be a Seeker!” Starscream said, “We’re rare metals, exotic composites…”

“Did no one else notice the air museum to the north?” Skywarp asked.

“The north has been your patrol area, so no,” Starscream replied.

“Plenty to choose from there,” Skywarp claimed.

“Excellent, go steal something,” Starscream told him. “And enjoy it, it’s the last bit of larceny you get to commit in this life.”

“I don’t get to choose?” I asked.

“Seeker, Seeker, or Seeker,” Starscream replied to me, “Excuse me, I must set up the lab again.”

They all stood up, and I felt tiny.

But important!

The bustle swirled around me. I felt a bit like a bride on her wedding day. Everyone was doing things for me, but I was obliged to sit there and await my future. But of course, some of me – Hannah, had the same future I had before I’d gotten dragged into this mess – my friend’s couch and some unemployment checks. Nothing exciting on that horizon for a while. But the other part of me, Frostwind, had an incredible future. Nothing but everything on that horizon.

“Are you ready,” Thundercracker asked me.

“You know,” I told him. “I’m really not. But we should move forward anyway.”

“Nobody is ever ready for the big changes,” he said to reassure me. “And if they said they were, I’d be convinced they actually weren’t. So you are in the right place. Pretty soon that crest will be real. But before that, I need to work on your schematics. Do you have a color preference?”

“Can I be yellow?” I asked.

Thundercracker gave me a slightly goofy grin, “sure. I like yellow.”

Chapter Text

“Get a load of this,” a short autobot said to his partner. “That’s not anyone we expected. Go get the boss.”

Prowl joined them shortly. “What is…oh.” When Optimus Prime had sent out the broadcast, they’d expected very few of Megatron’s closest Decepticons to take the offer. And with the exception of Soundwave, who had appeared promptly the next morning with his sonic generator handily ripped from his body and ready for confiscation, none had. And as cycles had passed, they expected no more would.

But now, Starscream, all of his trine, and two newcomers, one a Seeker? That was the last thing anyone expected.

Prowl loaded up his scanner and discreetly panned over the trine.

They were either incredibly detailed fakes or that really was Starscream, Thundercracker, and Skywarp. Prowl thought such high-fidelity fakes were unlikely, especially with lack of facilities to support such an effort.

The new Seeker, a bright yellow femme, registered as unknown. No affiliation. In fact, no faction badge at all, anywhere. She wasn’t wearing a battle helm, but a simple crest. A civvie Seeker raised his eyebrows. There had been the occasional wash out from the Academy, but he’d never heard of a washout keeping their battle-ready Seeker alt mode. It wasn’t done. When she shifted her wings, he saw that they had a dazzling sunburst pattern on the underside.

The speedster in the group was wearing a faction badge he’d never seen, a blue oval filled with a constellation. Otherwise, she wore unremarkable armor that looked like an Earth station wagon alt mode. That too, was unusual. Earth had been identified early on as a possible place of refuge, but the lack of naturally-occurring energon, and similar lack of catalysts had made it unpopular with those who meant to ride the war out elsewhere. There really had to be a great story about how a speedster had gotten messed up with a bunch of seekers and gotten such a frumpy alt-mode, but Prowl wasn’t concerned about her and didn’t really want to hear it. The speedster wasn't too important just then. 

The seekers were.

Prowl opened a discreet channel to Ironhide, and sent him the visual when he accepted the call.

“Do you think she knows who she is talking to? Or is she some poor, trineless, refugee Seeker who has found something familiar to latch onto?” Ironhide asked.

Prowl observed her for a bit. “She’s acting like a member of the trine.”

“Trine means three. She’d be four. She can’t be a member.” Ironhide insisted.

“Well watch, and you tell me,” Prowl chided him.

Just then, Starscream turned to the new Seeker, and gently plucked a bit of flotsam or jetsam from her wing.

She smiled.

At Starscream?

Yep, smiling away at Starscream.

“Life sure is weird right about now. Drag all four members of that trine in,” Ironhide ordered.

Prowl approached them, and was forced to gently shove past the speedster who seemed to want to protect the yellow seeker.
“I know who you three scrapheaps are,” he said to his old enemies, “so don’t try anything funny, but who’s the baby bird?”

“Such language around a lady!” Starscream admonished him.

“Frostwind,” the yellow Seeker said.

“And how do you know these Decepticons?”

“I helped them defeat and deactivate Megatron,” the seeker said as if it wasn’t really a big deal.

It was.

“Megatron has a tendency to come back from the dead an awful lot,” Prowl said.

“Show him,” Thundercracker said to Frostwind.

She opened her spark chamber, right there, in front of everyone.

What was it with Decepticons and casual body horror, Prowl wondered. Autobot intelligence feeds were full of them having about as much body integrity as a failed warp bubble. Forced combinations, Shockwave’s ‘experiments,’ even rumors of occasional cannibalism. Being given Soundwave’s body part, directly from Soundwave’s servo to his strongly suggested that there was a certain level of casual derangement among the ranks. This definitely confirmed it.

“Put that away. Why do I need to see your spark chamber?” Prowl asked, and wished he was anywhere else, doing anything else.

“It’s Megatron’s spark chamber, and put down your weapon,” Starscream said, already moving to protect Frostwind. “We reused it. It was the only unused spark chamber anywhere near us, so even if his spark survived being dislodged, it certainly found nowhere else to be, no where else to survive. He’s gone, forever. And this is our proof. We also have irrefutably timestamped footage from his untimely end, captured the moment he imperiled a creator in his greed. It may come as a surprise, but even we have standards.”

It did come as a surprise. Prowl could still feel the dying pulse of Soundwave’s component against his fingers even though he’d purged his memory twice. He couldn’t figure out why it kept landing in his saved core memories. If Decepticons kept a bar for standards, they kept it in the sub levels.

“Stay right here,” Prowl told them.

“Certainly,” Starscream agreed.

“High command needs to review all of this.”

“Of course, we expected as much.”

Prowl left as fast as was dignified to go get Ironhide, Prime, and maybe the whole crew for good measure to review the matter.

“What penance do you think we’ll face?” Frostwind asked her trine leader.

“Hopefully that footage will show our earnest intentions in full, and we’ll be, at most, punished with civil science projects and a notched wing for a year. But you, you have no reparations to make. You’ve done nothing wrong, in fact, quite the contrary. You ended the specter of future war. You are a hero. They’ll love you.”

“Notched wing?” Frostwind asked, ignoring, in Starscream’s opinion, the important part of what he’d just told her.

Still, he humored her and gestured taking a v-shaped notch out of Skywarp’s wing. “Welded shut to impede the healing process. We’ve had worse under our prior management. I had to regrow an entire wing once, from the root, the slow way. That was brutal. I couldn’t fly.”

“He made everyone miserable,” Thundercracker confirmed.

“With a wing notch, we can still fly, if we’re careful, if we don’t go too fast, or get too fancy.” Skywarp said, as if it was reassuring.

“And it won’t get in the way of our important work.”

“Important work?”Frostwind asked.

“We might trust Prime, but we still don’t trust the Autobots,” Starscream said. “We can’t trust them to create real peace, lasting peace. Look, already they are wondering how to deal with us despite their promises. They are backtracking, and they are thinking punishment not penance. We can’t trust the Decepticons, because we… we stopped being the good guys a long time ago. Someone else must ascend.”

“Someone will sign up, won’t they?” Skywarp opined.

“If merely signing up worked, I’d be ruling the galaxy and miserable about it right now,” Starscream replied.

“Probably not the only person miserable about it,” Skywarp muttered.

Starscream pretended to ignore him, but it was obvious he was mildly insulted. “I realize now, of course, that I was never meant to lead as a Prime. I was meant to choose. And raise that choice up. I chose poorly once, but not again. A crown must rest on a worthy head.”

“So poetic,” Thundercracker rumbled.

Starscream put his servos on Frostwind’s shoulders. “I’ve chosen you; a creator to uplift us. A new champion, and a new prime!”
She began to protest, but Starscream shushed her by laying his head on her shoulder and looking up at her with excited eyes that were clearly anticipating vast, wonderful futures. “Get used to it, it’s going to grow on you,” he promised. “This is for you,” he purred, “as a favor, as a tribute. As a thanks for ending Megatron’s power. As gift for showing me what it really means to be appreciated for who and what you are. Perhaps even as thanks for what you will do. Let me be the first to say, all. Hail. Frostwind.”