Chapter Text
The first time Blaster met Prowl was in a medbay.
It had been a long and tough battle, and his audial suite was still ringing from pushing his speakers too loud for too long. But he had still managed to drive off some Con grounders with a small quake, and the town that could have been completely lost had only been partially destroyed, so he had decided to take the win and accept the "good job" the Prime had given him.
So he didn't pay any particular mind to the bot on the bed next to him, who was patiently waiting for a new leg and hand.
In fact, he wouldn't even remember the occurrence until millions of years later.
The first time Blaster remembered meeting Prowl was in that base's command center. It was also his first time coming inside the room, furnished with only a large central table and corresponding chairs and then computers and screens on the walls, and his first thought was that it looked pretty empty. Then he thought that the Prime was still quite imposing when he was sitting down at the head of the table, and that the black and white mech next to the Autobot commander looked unhappy to be here. At least Jazz followed him into the room. Blaster didn't know why exactly his new friend had brought him here, but he knew that he was glad to see at least one familiar face.
"Prowl, OP," Jazz said in lieu of introductions, and Blaster tried very hard not to make a weird face at the familiarity of that, "this is Blaster. Great taste in music, brave in battle, experienced in radio. He was part of that small pocket of Autobot resistance in Polyhex until last month, he understands more dialects than I do, and he taught half of his squadron to speak hands in the three weeks he's been with them."
"How do you know that?" Blaster couldn't stop himself from asking, taken aback by the quick summary.
Jazz's visor glinted. "I asked around," he simply said, even though Blaster knew that nobody here had asked how many dialects he could understand, then he turned his helm back towards Prime. "Point is, Blaster is the best bot for the job."
"What job?"
Prime finally moved, but only to unlock his fingers, glance at the bot next to him who was gripping his datapad probably more strongly than was necessary, then lock his fingers again.
"Blaster," the Prime said in that voice he had that made everyone listen with only a word, "as I understand it, you are one of the bots in this army who are the most..." he hesitated slightly, "talented in communication."
"I don't know," Blaster answered, very honestly, as he had no idea how talented other bots were, or experienced, or whatever the metric was. "Sir," he added belatedly.
"That's not-" the Prime stopped himself, then seemed to change the subject. "If Jazz says you're the bot we need, then it means you are. That's enough for me."
Okay, okay, cool. Prime really had a way to make anyone feel more at ease in his presence. But Blaster was still very much in the dark as to why he'd been invited to what looked like an informal meeting between friends.
"I still don't know what you need me for?" he asked.
The mech sitting next to Prime (how had Jazz called him? Prowl?) finally looked in Blaster's direction. Not directly in his optics, but close enough to fool most everyone.
"We're in the process of reorganizing various departments," the mech said. Blaster immediately noted that he was making his voice pitch and drop in the classic Iacon accent, but it didn't sound natural to him. It rather sounded as if this Prowl was purposely trying to hide an innate voice that was uniform, too flat to convey such important information with the weight it needed.
Unaware of Blaster's swift analysis, Prowl continued: "One of those changes is the creation of a new position, to centralize communications both between Autobots and with neutrals and Decepticons."
"It is rather disorganized," Blaster agreed, and immediately regretted the impulsivity of that given the mechs present.
"Exactly," Prowl nodded, apparently not one to get offended so easily.
"We'd like to offer you that position," Prime said, probably just to make sure that Blaster really understood why he was here.
Alright, that did make sense considering how Jazz had introduced him. Blaster was well aware that the Autobot resistance was scattered all over the planet, most of them in small pockets that rarely received steady orders from above. Most of those bots spoke at least the Iacon dialect, as that one had been used for official communications for as long as there had been official communications from Iacon, but it stood to reason that the highest officers of such an army couldn't always rely on that assumption. The Autobots did need someone who could relay orders to everyone, and make sense of what came up from the ground. And apparently, Optimus Prime thought that this bot was Blaster.
It was a big responsibility.
But the Prime looked at him with that face that meant he had full faith into Blaster's abilities, and Jazz looked at him like the job was already his. So Blaster accepted.
Over the next months, Blaster spent an inordinate amount of time building the Autobots' communication system from the ground up. At first, he had wanted to build over what was already in place, but in less than a day he had changed his mind. The Autobots had been using the existing infrastructure to send their messages, but that could only really be used inside the cities. And the Decepticons were destroying that infrastructure faster than repair teams could fix it. And it was dangerous for the repair teams, who could also be more useful elsewhere. Many reasons for a new system to be put in place.
So Blaster thought a lot about it, redacted drafts and proposals, and was introduced to Wheeljack and Perceptor. The scientists took it as a personal challenge to develop an entire new way of sending and receiving radio waves, without using the towers and relays that kept being broken by either Decepticons or combat. Formulas and diagrams were drawn, antennas were deployed, and soon enough a small team was sent to another Autobot base for the real field test.
"Alright, they're in position," Jazz said from his seat at the monitor. In front of him, a small box was beeping regularly, their only link to the old system. Jazz's teammates had been trying out the connection for as long as it could last, and Protihex was just at the limit of the line of sight range.
"Perfect!" Wheeljack said, and flipped a switch on his own monitor, that one covered in scratches and with a variety of weird-looking devices plugged in. A green light turned on on his screen, which Blaster knew was only for the benefit of those around who hadn't spent months designing and poring over the new system. He took out one of his own cables and plugged into Wheeljack's monitor, the by now familiar program feeling like an old friend as the edge of his consciousness. "It's good on our side, tell them to switch off the connection, and turn on the new communicator."
Jazz relaid the demand to his team, whose confirmation was barely understandable through the static. The screen on the box flashed red and beeped strongly as the connection cut, then shut down entirely.
Nobody said anything. Blaster could hear everyone else holding their vents in anticipation. He couldn't afford to do that, he couldn't afford to focus on anything else than the incoming communication they were all waiting for. He waited one whole nanoklik, turned off his optics to focus entirely on his audial suite, two nanokliks, gripped the side of the monitor, three nan-
A click.
Blaster smiled.
"Hello, hello, do you hear us?"
The sound was so clear!
"We hear you, Protihex team," he replied out loud.
Someone let out a deep vent behind Blaster, and Wheeljack's hand landed on his shoulder to shake him out of excitement.
"We hear you too, Iacon team, loud and clear!"
Loud and clear. Blaster felt his smile grow, but the test wasn't over. On Wheeljack's monitor, the program was showing almost perfect transmission of data, and barely any loss of sound quality.
"Alright, test one is conclusive, switching to internal comms for test two," he said out loud, for both the away team and the other mechs in the room, and called up the newest program in his internal communication suite. There were only two contacts so far, but in the near future there would be so many more.
"Do you still receive me, Mirage?"
Another click, sharper, located entirely in his internal comms.
"Yes!" the answer came immediately. "It definitely feels weird, but I can hear you in my communication suite."
The subtleties of the Towers accent were less noticeable than out loud, but Blaster could still discern the old melodies of it.
"The sound is so good", Wheeljack marveled next to him, optics fixed on the indicators on his screen. Blaster could only agree. Even on his best nights on the radio, he had found it hard to get such clear sound. And that had been in a city with three times as many antennas and relays than it had needed, not across empty plains devoid of any relay that could boost the signal.
"Perfect," Blaster continued and threw a thumbs up to the audience, "we can go to test three. Wheeljack isn't plugged into anything, I'm sending you his frequency."
That was the last thing to check that day. The real breakthrough in the system that Wheeljack and Blaster had invented was to use bots' natural broadcasting abilities in the radio range to transmit voice and data, which so far had only been theoretical. But given how closely related bots and computers could be sometimes, there was still a risk that the communication link was actually piggybacking on existing network infrastructure. Which would defeat the point entirely, and also leave the communication vulnerable to any hacker. Jazz and Prowl had both spent an entire week with Blaster working on that particular risk analysis. Sometimes he still saw exploitability versus attacker's skill matrices in his recharge fluxes.
The data packet tagged as "Wheeljack's contact" was sent along the connection without a hitch. Mirage acknowledged the reception of the packet, and Blaster's call was put on hold.
Next to him, Wheeljack suddenly stopped fidgeting with the edge of the table. Then he raised his helm slowly, looked Blaster in the optics, raised his hand to show he still wasn't connected to anything, then said:
"It works!"
Blaster heard Jazz's whoop, and Wheeljack's excited talk with Mirage over the comms that weren't physically connected to anything, how genius was that?!, and also Optimus Prime's congratulations and everyone else's enthusiasm.
There was still a lot to do, in fact Blaster had a whole list on which only the first item was now checked. Tests on longer distances, over various terrains, across cities and plains and the Sea of Rust and the canyons and battlefields. Tests on bigger transmitted files, and with more participants to a call. Test whether someone could call someone else without knowing their unique identifier first, and whether someone could hide their identity from a call. Develop the security of the new system, ensure the confidentiality and the integrity of the communication. Blocking calls, tracing calls, strengthening signal strength over weapon discharges. Blaster's schedule would be packed for months or even years to come, and he couldn't wait for it.
He barely had the time to properly put everything away before he was swept into the celebration. A cube of engex found its way into his hand, and everybody wanted to talk to him, or to Wheeljack, or to both of them. It was a whirlwind of repeating the same explanation over and over again, to bots who probably didn't understand most of what he was saying but were willing to listen anyway. It was intoxicating in all the best ways, not less because of the second then the third cube of engex, and then he was playing music, and Jazz was playing his own, and then slowly the party was winding down, until only a few bots were left.
Next to him, Jazz was supporting Wheeljack, who had clearly had one cube too many. He smiled at the sight, and the engex really wanted him to laugh, so he did just that. But his laugh quickly turned into a dry cough, his intake dried out by all the talking and yelling over the music.
Another cube was softly put in front of him, and when Blaster raised his helm he saw the bot who had been the most quiet that day. But Blaster could see the relaxed lines, the smoother movements, the flickers of the door wings. The bot that he had learned was the head of Tactical Operations was quiet, but far from emotionless about the demonstration.
"It's mid grade," Prowl explained before Blaster's silence.
"Oh," he finally said. The engex really was making him slow. "Thank you."
Prowl gave him a small smile, and waited for Blaster to take some of the energon and get a clearer processor before he continued:
"Congratulations. That was impressive," the mech said, which made Blaster's fuel pump do weird things inside of him.
He decided to drink more of the mid grade about it, instead of drunkenly embarrassing himself in front of the joint second in command.
"It wasn't just me," he then weakly tried to argue.
"Wheeljack insists that it was your idea to use skywave propagation to avoid interference from the metal ground," Prowl threw a glance at where Jazz was trying to bring the engineer out of the room, hopefully to Wheeljack's recharge room and not his lab. "I must say, not many would have thought of that solution."
Blaster really needed to find something to answer to that, because all that praise was going to his processor faster than the engex had. He decided to raise his own cube towards the one that Prowl was still holding, and also throw a wide smile with that.
"Mark my words, Prowl, radio is the future."
Radio, and more specifically long-range radio, really was the future. At least it was for the Autobots. According to Perceptor, Cybertron's very stable ionosphere was a rarity among planets. According to an article published by Starscream vorns before the war began, that might have come from the composition and stability of its atmosphere. According to Blaster, and Prowl, and Jazz, what mattered most was that other Autobot bases, and even individual bots, could now receive and transmit communications from most of the planet's surface, even though they didn't really need to, and Decepticons couldn't stop it without blocking their own transmissions.
Now the real work could begin.
Bots came and went from other bases or pockets of resistance, military units stopped by on their way to nearby city-states, and gradually, everyone in the faction received their personal frequencies and guidance on how to use the new radio system. What had begun as Blaster's high command-assigned radio lab, slowly turned into both his office and a full-fledged radio station. The first time he had seen it, it had made him think about his own, pirate, station in Iacon, before the beginning of the conflict. The new one was of better quality, courtesy of Autobot finances, and for the first time he had guidelines to follow, but nostalgia was a strong factor sometimes. It definitely was when he hung on the wall his own programming schedule and put in the application to broadcast on an unused frequency.
Some of High Command had been reluctant at first, saying things like "distraction for the troops" (really?) and "a waste of his time" (but it was his time, wasn't it?) and "what if he uses the broadcast to covertly send sensitive information to the Decepticons?" (thanks for the confidence, Red Alert!). Then Jazz had talked to the Prime, saying things like "boosting troop morale" (totally) and "preserving culture". Blaster was a bit confused about that one, but evidently Optimus had been sensitive to the argument. Sometimes it paid to have friends in high places.
"Didn't you become friends with Jazz before you knew about his rank?" Tracks asked when Blaster recounted the event at his Radio Station Official Opening Party. Blaster shushed him. Minor technicality.
"Jazz was right," Ratchet said when he came back the next month. "I would have given the same opinion. Just ask Prowl."
"Well I can't really do that," Blaster pointed out, and Ratchet rolled his optics.
"Troop morale is a very important aspect of such a protracted war," Prowl answered two days after Ratchet brought him out of stasis. "Most of this faction never thought they would be fighting at all, and none really understand how long it will last."
"How long?" Blaster repeated uneasily. "Do you really think it'll last such a long time?"
Prowl looked at him with a carefully blank expression, that still didn't hide very well his inner conflict, or his wince when he inadvertently pulled on his fresh welds. "Megatron will never stop willingly," he explained, "and Optimus will never let him continue unimpeded on his path of destruction. What everyone still likes to call a conflict is well on its way to spread to the last neutral city-states and regions. It's becoming a full-scale war faster than most bots think."
"Oh."
"My point is, the Autobots do need the distraction that your radio station provides. They need to-" another wince, "to remember what they're fighting fzz- for."
"Are you alright?" Blaster enquired, unsure whether to help Prowl lean back down against the backrest.
The mech waved away his concern. "I'll be fine." And then he just cycled air and dimmed his optics.
"How did this happen, again?" Blaster asked as a distraction, covertly informing Ratchet that his patient was getting tired.
Prowl sighed, a long and drawn-out and pained sound. "The intel was wrong. We didn't think that- kzz- seekers would be there. We- zzt- were outnumbered."
Then Ratchet arrived, Prowl turned off his optics, and Blaster was shooed out of the medbay.
"The intel wasn't actually wrong," Jazz confided in Blaster later, over a cube of energon in a closed soundproof office. "There was simply a misunderstanding."
"Some misunderstanding," Blaster threw back bitterly, thinking of sullen mechs in the mess hall and fresh welds in the medbay. "Bots are saying that Praxus is going to be lost to the Cons."
"Hm," Jazz just said, then a pause, then: "What do you make of that?"
Jazz pushed a button on his datapad, and a conversation came out of the speakers, obviously recorded.
Iacon to Praxus: what is the air situation? Over.
Praxus to Iacon: skies are clear here. Over.
Jazz stopped the recording and looked expectantly at Blaster.
"...That can be understood in a few different ways," Blaster said cautiously.
"Exactly," Jazz confirmed. "The bot in Praxus thought they were talking about the bombardment that Megatron has been threatening for months. The bot on Prowl's team thought they were talking about regular Seekers. And when Prowl got that information, he thought that Starscream's armada wouldn't be in Praxus. So he didn't bring enough bots to defend against it."
A misunderstanding, Blaster thought grimly.
"So what happens now?" he asked, just to not let the silence stretch too much.
"Well, Praxus is lost," Jazz answered bluntly. "Ratchet will make sure that Prowl and the others are repaired, like he always does. And we're going to go over standard communication procedures with everyone. Again."
"I should have been on comms," Blaster muttered into his cube. "This wouldn't have happened."
"Nonsense," Prowl shut him down the next day when Blaster expressed the sentiment again. "Thinking like that is useless. You were simply busy elsewhere. Maybe you would have asked for clarification, but it's not your fault that someone else did things differently."
Blaster sighed. Of course Prowl would think that.
"Still," he insisted. "A misunderstanding like that shouldn't have happened."
"No, it shouldn't have," Prowl concurred. "But what can we do about it, apart from what Jazz has already planned?"
The question had been rhetorical, Blaster knew it, but it still kept him awake during his rest cycle. And it was still looping between his thought processes days later, when he pinged the door to Prowl's office.
The second turned from his board when Blaster entered. He was used to seeing the complex field strategies and maps of Cybertron on Prowl's wall, but the shortened piles of datapads on the desk were a surprise. Evidently someone had already reduced Prowl's workload.
"Are you really supposed to be working again already?" Blaster asked as he approached.
"I'm on light duty only until Ratchet is satisfied with how the repairs are holding," Prowl answered, clearly used to the question already. "But we can't afford to have anyone not pull their weight right now."
Blaster eyed the fresh paint that was still settling over the welds. He could still see exactly how the frame had been hurt during that fighting in Praxus, and could only imagine how painful the internal damage must have been.
Prowl caught his gaze and sighed. "I won't return to the field without Ratchet's approval. Now what were you coming here for?"
Right. Blaster handed Prowl the datapad he had come in with.
"What is this?" the mech asked while turning on the datapad. There was only one file on it, but the numerous tabs and cross references would, hopefully, make it easier to browse.
"It's- kind of a compilation?" Blaster answered, suddenly feeling very unsure of the idea he'd been mulling over for days. "I was thinking about how everyone has their own habits when talking," but that wasn't really what this was about, was it? "and how we all come from different city-states and backgrounds," was he rambling? "and sometimes we use words and expressions that the others don't know or don't understand," he needed to stop before he embarrassed himself, "and. Well. I thought it could help."
~Awwk-waard~ sang a voice in Blaster's mind that sounded suspiciously like Sideswipe's slag-eating grin.
Prowl didn't say anything. He just kept looking at the file. Blaster couldn't see if he was reading anything specific. Maybe he just needed somewhere to focus his optics.
"It's not complete," Blaster added as an afterthought. Stupid, stupid, who gives a file like that if it's not exhaustive?! "I probably didn't think of everything, and there are many dialects and regional variations I don't know, especially from around the Kaon region-"
His rambling stopped instantly when Prowl looked up. His face didn't seem to know which emotion to show, so Blaster couldn't even guess what the gift was thought of before Prowl settled on a carefully neutral face.
"...It won't solve the issue that made us lose Praxus," Prowl very cautiously noted in a low voice.
"I know," Blaster said, and he couldn't help a bitter undertone. That point was still sensitive for him too. "I know that was a different problem. But I thought that, maybe, it could still help? Sometimes."
Prowl glanced at the datapad again, and this time his entire frame relaxed slightly. Blaster decided to take it as a win.
There was a shadow of a smile on Prowl's face then, a genuine smile that told Blaster that the datapad was well received. His door wings were standing high, too, a sure sign of Prowl's quiet happiness.
"...It will help," Prowl said as warmly as he could. "Really. Thank you."
Blaster felt a smile of his own grow on his face.
Blaster's internal comm buzzed with an insistent request to come to the base's command center immediately, tagged with both "urgent" and "confidential". Frowning, he put down the datapad on which he was spending his rest cycle putting together a playlist of Kaonite songs, which, while not exactly appreciated by most Autobots, wasn't technically forbidden either. Sure, Kaon had by and large sided with its most famous citizen, and Megatron's contributions to society these days were more of a destructive nature than entertainment, but a bot could still admire some good use of percussion, right? Right. Also, Megatron's face when Optimus had quoted a Kaonite street opera at him mid-battle had been priceless.
The datapad, regardless of its content, was left in its drawer and the door to his temporary office slash radio station locked behind himself as Blaster made his way to the command center as quickly as he could.
When he arrived, Prowl barely took the time to check who had entered the room before giving all the information Blaster needed.
"Jazz's group is about to fall into a Decepticon ambush and we can't reach them," the joint second in command explained, as efficiently as ever.
"Where are they?", Blaster asked, sudden unease slithering around his spark. Jazz and his small team had left three days before, but their road back was supposed to take them through some areas that Blaster wasn't entirely comfortable with, and he knew Prowl wasn't either. The atmospheric weather simply wasn't good these days, and there were only so many reasons that a group of bots couldn't be reached by comms.
He understood the issue as soon as he heard the name of the sector. It was one of the few black spots on the map he was working on, the one hung on the wall in Wheeljack's lab, that Blaster had a copy of in his radio station. It was one of his biggest problems, and his worst nightmare.
"It's the skip zone. They're too close, so we can't reach them with skywave radio propagation, at least not without adjusting the setup, but that takes time and everyone else would be deaf to us," Blaster said, then he pointed at the area on the map: "And those mountains around them interfere with line of sight and ground waves."
Geomotus had tried to explain to him exactly what about the geological makeup of the area was stopping communication there, but Blaster wasn't a geologically minded bot. He had only retained that a huge swath of land could not be reached via radio waves, and that he needed to find another method of communication for that sector. So far he had nothing functional or realistic.
An idea came to his processor.
"How do we know about the ambush?"
"Cosmos saw it from orbit," Prowl answered, firing up short-lived hope in Blaster, "but the ionospheric storm prevents him from contacting Jazz or his team. He had to go through three satellites for the information to reach us."
And communication satellites couldn't communicate with bots directly, they could only contact bases. That was a security requirement that Blaster and Prowl had written themselves, because the Cons kept targeting the satellites. There was no way to warn Jazz from there.
"Scrap!" Blaster's fist hit the table. It was really a testament to the seriousness of the situation that nobody in the room rebuked him for the outburst.
No functioning relay in the area. No communication possible from the air. No communication from space either. And no time to finish any of the candidate projects that might, one day, replace radio.
Except, maybe...
It was dangerous. Probably, he thought. Definitely, he estimated after a klik of reflection, and his hands gripped the edges of the table to steady himself. But Blaster was now well acquainted with the reasoning of risks and rewards, and it would be worth a shot to possibly save Jazz and his team.
"...I'm going to try something," he announced, softly, because that solution didn't feel like it should be said out loud, then turned back.
He was barely out of the command center when a hand on his wrist stopped him.
"Where are you going?" Prowl asked. It was outwardly cold, as a commander should be when stopping a subordinate from leaving their post, but there was an undercurrent of worry between the tone. For Jazz or for Blaster?
"Outside," Blaster said, and continued walking down the corridor, towards the exterior door. Prowl let his wrist go, but followed him closely. "I need direct contact with the ground if this is going to work," he explained, and suddenly they were at the door. The command center really was close to the entrance in that base. Probably something that should be fixed.
"The ground?" Prowl looked downward. "Why?"
Blaster tried to locate a good spot. Somewhere where old traces of combat had removed the outer plating, that would be good. But not too much, or otherwise the wires would have been burned by the fighting and would be useless.
"How long do we have?" he asked instead of answering, dropping to his knee joints near a promising patch of metal. His hands dug into the plating of the ground, lifting it so that his entire arm could dig deep underneath.
"A few minutes at most," Prowl answered just as Blaster brought a bunch of sparking wires out of the ground, because of course Prowl understood exactly what Blaster was asking.
That was too short a time frame to have any regret.
Blaster recalled all the research he remembered on what he would be attempting, and removed as much emotional input as possible from the risk matrix that had justified the shelving of that particular project. He fiddled with the wires for a moment and opened the direct communication port on his wrist.
"What are you doing, Blaster?" Prowl asked, his voice strained.
"I'm going to try to contact Jazz through Cybertron's inner network", Blaster said, then added: "If I deactivate, tell Perceptor he was right."
Then he had no choice but to ignore Prowl and his disapproval. No second-guessing now.
He vented one last time to steel himself, then plunged the wire into his port.
Blaster ceased to exist.
He was nothing. Not an Autobot, not a radio enthusiast, not even a simple bot. He was no one. Barely a speck of dust, the smallest spark in the immensity of the network. He tried to look at it, and couldn't. He tried to move, anything, even a fingertip, and couldn't. He tried to speak, to say something, anything, and couldn't. He tried to listen, and couldn't.
He was completely lost.
Data was coming and going all around him, a web of connections across the plain, the valley, the continent, his wires. Data was coming and going all inside him, a web of connections across his communication port, his internal suite, his processor, the planet.
Data was coming and going all around, all around, coming and going, data, wires, connections-
It stopped.
Data was coming and going all around.
It held its vents it didn't have vents its vents were gone gone turned into wells and exhausts
Data was coming and
Data was
Data
It knew data
He knew data.
Data was something he knew. Data was- Data was- Something he could use.
A flash of new data at the fringe of its mind. An intruder a part of himself of itself something new something old someone known.
A tidal wave of new data over his mind. A force a part of itself of himself something old so old someone known.
A flash of something, something else, at the fringe of his mind. Something someone known. A reminder.
A mission.
Data at his its fingertips, wires coming and going all over himself from itself into itself. Parts of itself chiming lighting up in the dark parts of himself sending data sending queries sending interrogations sending worries. Part of itself answering part of himself answering data at his fingertips.
A solution.
A mountain.
It knew what to do he knew he couldn't do it.
A mountain of data in his mind a mountain of metal and rocks on the map. A solution. Move the mountain. Reach forward touch the wires lose himself in it lose itself in the network. Touch the data send commands to the limbs send commands to the mountain move it. Lose yourself in it. Become one with it. Disappear in the network in the data in the mind.
No. Says the bot the song the mech.
No? Says the network the orchestra the planet.
A solution.
A refusal.
A mountain of data in his mind a mountain of wires in him in it a mountain of datapads on his desk. Reach forward touch the wires send something through the wires.
Another solution.
A path clear in its mind the path clear in his mind. A link between here and there, a there on a map, a there in the network.
Solutions.
Sound is no he can't speak it can't speak anymore.
Light then.
Wires move and light up data comes and goes goes goes. Reach forward reach towards- towards- what. who. Reach it reach him. Save them.
Flashes. Over there. Far. Close. On it in him.
Flashes. It can feel them he can't see them.
He can't see. He can't speak. He can't move. He can't hear. He knows.
It knows it's too much it knows it was foolish he was foolish it's too big.
Flashes. Just flashes of light across the mountains.
It will have to be enough.
Flashes of light all around him. Data all around him. Lose himself in it. So easy. Disappear into the network. So easy.
Something rips him out of it rips it out of him, and it's over.
Blaster was woken up by a regular beeping.
It was much too loud, so he went right back to recharge.
Blaster was woken up again, by a regular beeping and two different buzzings and the chime of a machine he didn't know the name of. Also, the whir of a fan, and a few kliks later he identified that particular frequency as, specifically, a medical fan. Medbay, then. It made sense.
He slowly onlined his optics, and sure enough, the distinct ceiling of a medbay greeted him. Rarely a good sight, but definitely better than deactivation.
Some light tings and clangs and buzz brought his attention and his gaze to the side. Ratchet, because obviously Ratchet was haunting his own medbay, was tinkering on something that Blaster couldn't see.
There was a rhythm in there, in the soft taps of the tools and the clinks and clanks of metal and the soft quiet echo of the sounds between the desk and the walls.
Experimentally, Blaster tried moving a finger. His entire arm went to the side, knocking over some... tools? parts? that were on the side table. To Ratchet's credit, the medic didn't jump at the sudden noise, merely stood up calmly to come see him.
"...Oops?" Blaster tried saying, but it came out more like "oukhzz?".
"Good morning to you too," Ratchet answered, and he checked something on a monitor Blaster couldn't see. "Your repairs haven't finished integrating, are you sure you want to be awake for that?"
Blaster didn't feel very awake. He tried answering, and couldn't even get any sound out. Ratchet frowned, looked at his communication port, then simply held Blaster's hand.
Near future - pain - to recipient of message. State of being awake - continuity - interrogation.
Ratchet was definitely not fluent in chirolinguistics, but Blaster still got the gist of the question. A flash of pain went through his spine, making his arm flail, and a pop-up disappeared from his field of vision. There were still so many other pop-ups.
Negative, Blaster communicated back, and everything went silent again.
Blaster was woken up again, and this time only the whir of the medical fan greeted him.
He could pick up more details around himself, like the little nicks on the ceiling, and the slow drip of a transfusion, and the feeling of the bed under his frame. No more painful pop-ups though, which was definitely an improvement.
Blaster experimentally moved a finger again, and the extremity of his hand followed the order perfectly. He turned his helm again, and there Ratchet was, tapping at the monitor that Blaster still couldn't see.
"Are you feeling better?" the medic asked.
Blaster nodded, and his helm didn't even hurt at that.
Ratchet hummed and checked something on the monitor.
"Your voice box should be fine now. Can you try talking?" he asked while moving from the monitor and towards Blaster's side.
The movement revealed the table that was further away, previously hidden by Ratchet's frame, but now right into Blaster's field of vision. His gaze immediately zeroed in on what Ratchet had been working on. It was someone's arm, black and white in a pattern Blaster was quite familiar with.
"Is Prowl okay?" he asked immediately.
Ratchet hid his surprise pretty well, and focused on testing Blaster's joints while he answered. "He got zapped by a particularly high charge when he got you out. He's fine."
"Really?" Blaster couldn't help asking, zooming in on the arm on the table. Had those scratches always been there?
Ratchet very obviously repressed a sigh, and moved to check Blaster's optics. "That arm's just a spare, if you really must know. In case the glitch decides to electrocute himself again."
"Oh. Okay."
After a few more minutes of examination and probing and testing his transformation and sound systems, Ratchet finally seemed to be pleased with his work.
"You seem to have integrated the repairs correctly," he said, and Blaster moved to get up. He was immediately stopped by Ratchet's datapad hitting the bed next to his legs.
"Now what in the Pits were you thinking, interfacing directly with Cybertron?!" the medic chewed him out.
Ah. Right. He had done that before ending up in the medbay, and in hindsight it seemed like even more of a risk than expected, medically speaking. What had he been thinking about at the time?
"I was thinking that my friends were about to be turned into scrapped metal," Blaster threw back, because that explained everything.
Ratchet sighed, and seemed to lose most of his anger. "I heard," he said. "Quite a crazy stunt you pulled, but it saved them."
Blaster smiled.
"It knocked you out for three days, though, and I had to rebuild most of your electrical system," Ratchet pointed out.
"Worth it."
"Obviously."
Ratchet sat down on the chair next to Blaster's bed, and looked him right in the optics. "Do you remember anything of when you were plugged in?"
Blaster thought about it, and didn't find much.
"...No. I remember... going outside with Prowl. And looking for a way to plug into the planetary network. And then I woke up here."
Ratchet hummed and tapped something on his datapad. "Not surprising. Your most recent memory cells are all burned out. It's not a lot and it shouldn't bother you, but I'd still like to replace them when I get some new ones. Bots aren't meant to interface with a planet, you know?"
"...Sorry?"
Ratchet huffed. "Are you really?"
"No," Blaster admitted.
The medic rolled his optics and muttered something about stupid bots before going back to his desk, and Blaster took that as permission to test walking.
"Where are you going?" Ratchet called back.
"Out," Blaster answered. Wasn't it obvious? He hadn't yet decided whether his objective would be the mess hall or his personal stock of energon in his office.
There was something like a teasing smile in Ratchet's optics, and a sudden ping in Blaster's inbox.
"I believe you have a debrief to go to," Ratchet said.
There was now a meeting in his calendar, in just how long it would take him to go to the room indicated in the invitation. Blaster groaned, just on principle, and went on his way.
The room in question was actually just an office, one that Blaster hadn't visited yet, because high command hadn't been at that base for very long. But the personal frequency that answered his ping immediately raised his mood.
Prowl greeted him with a subdued but sincere smile, and offered him a seat and a cube of mid grade energon. Bless this mech's spark.
"I don't need much from you," Prowl assured him. "The science team is already working on a full report on what exactly you did, and I was there to witness it, so I really just need your point of view."
"Alright," Blaster said, and he told Prowl the same thing he had told Ratchet: that he didn't remember anything.
"Ah," Prowl looked almost disappointed.
"Sorry," Blaster said, "I don't even know how I got Jazz's team to turn back."
"That I can help you with," Prowl perked up, and he turned on a datapad on his desk. "They had almost reached the ambush when, and I quote Jazz here: "The mountain lit up all of a sudden". That was strange enough for him to choose another mountain pass to come back, and they avoided the Decepticons entirely."
The picture Prowl was showing on the datapad didn't look like much: a mountainous metal terrain like there was all around that base, covered in debris and ruins, and a handful of Autobots in car mode in front of it, clearly speeding.
"This was taken by Jazz a few kliks before the ambush," Prowl indicated. "He wanted to remember the damage in that area," he added before Blaster's interrogative stare. "And this," Prowl swiped to the next picture, "was taken by Smokescreen right when Jazz ordered them all to go through another pass."
The second picture was blurry, clearly taken while the bot was already turning. But the main point of interest was the mountain that had been front and center in the previous picture. It was now shining, the glow stronger and more focused than even the lights of Iacon had been. It was clearly unnatural, and impossible to miss. Had he done that? How?
"You can see why Jazz thought it best to turn away and take a longer route," Prowl said, to which Blaster could only agree. These days, it was safer to send bots running in the other direction than towards anything suspicious.
"That kind of looks like the glyph for "stop"," Blaster remarked. "If it was all scratched out."
"Smokescreen said the same thing in his debrief. That's why we think you were at least somewhat conscious."
Blaster still didn't remember it.
A new message suddenly arrived on his internal comm, from Ratchet, with both Prowl and Perceptor copied in. Opening it under Prowl's stare, it turned out to be a summary of the damage that Blaster had done to his frame when he connected himself directly to Cybertron's network. Burned out memory cells that would need replacement, light damage to his language center that his self-repair had taken care of, electrical system completely out of whack, which had shorted out both his audial suite and his voice box, communication port entirely burned out too, as well as the plating and all the internal wires in its vicinity, misalignment of several joints and relays due to sudden full-frame spams, themselves due to sudden electrical charge several times higher than his frame was rated for.
That did sound like a list that'd put a bot under medical stasis for a few days.
"Perceptor wants me to tell you that you're an idiot," Prowl said when Blaster finished reading.
Strong language, but the mech had been the most vocal opponent to the "plug into the planetary network" potential solution, when it was still just a theory. Blaster could admit that in the end, Perceptor had been right about the dangers.
Prowl continued in a much softer voice. "Jazz, Smokescreen, and the rest of their group, however, thank you. They look forward to telling you in person when they'll be back from the counteroffensive."
That explained why none of them had been waiting outside the medbay or in the corridor. Blaster briefly wondered who was taking care of their communication right now.
"As for me..." Prowl added. "I'm glad you're alright."
"…Yeah. Me too."
After a moment of letting him sit with how close he had been to deactivation, Prowl asked him the reason why he had taken such a risk.
"You needed to communicate an information," Blaster shrugged. "I'm the communications officer."
Prowl looked at him as if that answer was both expected and disappointing.
"Is that what you thought I'd say?" Blaster smiled.
Prowl rolled his optics in that way that meant he wasn't actually mad that someone had seen through his officer mask.
The town had had a name once. Now it was just an Autobot complex, one that should have been emptied of civilians and injured fighters days ago. And now it was too late. The Decepticons were closing in, there weren't enough Autobots to protect the town, and there were too many bots who couldn't even protect themselves. It would be a slaughter, Blaster knew. And he couldn't do anything about it, apart from desperately corralling as many bots as possible into the waiting ships.
"Blaster!" a voice called him, and he could see Prowl fighting his way through the crowd of bots currently trying to board the ships.
"We've found explosives," Prowl said as soon as he had reached Blaster. "We think we can use them on the Decepticons when they arrive, but for that to happen we need to fully evacuate the civilians."
"What do you need me to do?" Blaster asked, already readying both his weapons and his communication suite.
It would be mostly useless, he knew that, because communications had been jammed for hours. Both Prowl and Blaster himself agreed that the fact betrayed Soundwave's presence. And he didn't have the time to work through the jamming, because right now the Autobots needed a fighter more than they did a communication expert. The movement still felt necessary.
Prowl came even closer for his next sentence, throwing a furtive glance all around before he spoke.
"Bumblebee managed to listen to a few transmissions between incoming Decepticon ships when he was scouting outside the town," he said while covertly slipping a small datachip into Blaster's hand, and Blaster immediately understood what he meant.
"You need me to decode it?" Blaster still asked, just to be sure.
Prowl nodded. "My hope is that by getting the Decepticon ship identifiers and encryption, we could have our own ships pretend to be Decepticons and pass through the blockade without being shot at."
Which would save all the bots trying to pile up on ships already ready to depart.
"I'm on it," Blaster said, and he ran to a calmer corner to work on the datachip.
The encryption really did come from Soundwave. It was a work of art and complexity, that Blaster might have appreciated if it hadn't been used by the enemy. Luckily, he was becoming an expert at decoding Soundwave's transmissions.
It still wasn't easy by any means. There were red herrings everywhere, traps that would have blown the Autobots' cover instantly, and ship identifiers that were definitely not numbered neatly. But there was still a logic in it, a rhythm that Blaster eventually found with an ironic smile. Looked like Soundwave still hadn't managed to convince Megatron to use truly random identifiers. Blaster was dreading the day that the rest of Decepticon high command would see reason.
But for today, Soundwave's failure might just save the Autobots. Blaster ran back to Prowl and the ships, datachip in hand and usable encryption and ship identifiers in his processor. To apply them to the ships was quickly done, and before the civilians knew it they were finally fully ready to depart.
"We're still waiting," Prowl said when one of the ship pilots asked for permission to finally flee.
"What?! But the Decepticons are coming!" the mech argued. "We're sitting cyber-ducks here!"
"No you're not," Blaster took the time to assert from his monitor. "We are. You're leaving, and we're staying behind to cover you. But you're not leaving until Prowl tells you to."
The mech was fuming, figuratively and literally, but when they looked around for support they didn't find any. Their fault for beginning that argument in the middle of Autobot officers, Blaster thought. The mech huffed with force, then stormed back to their post. Hopefully they wouldn't do anything stupid like taking off before it was safe to do so, but just in case, Blaster still warned a few bots on that ship's bridge.
He heard more than he saw Prowl's few steps towards him.
"...Thank you," the other said softly.
Blaster couldn't afford to look away from his monitoring of radio frequencies, it was just too important that he piggybacked on Soundwave's jamming to talk with the ships, but he still threw Prowl a smile. He would understand.
"You've never steered us wrong," Blaster simply said. He didn't really need to say more. Surely Prowl knew how much trust Blaster had in him.
"Decepticons on the horizon!" Bumblebee called from his own observation post in the distance, and the moment was over.
Prowl gave orders, Blaster and anyone else still present relaid them, and finally the ships were lifting off. It was a sight to behold, behemoths of metal slowly rising up in the air, taking with them some of the last civilians of Cybertron and the most vulnerable of Autobots. The rising sun was glistening on the ships' plating, hiding the little inconsistencies that came from slapping on Decepticon insignias on them. Just in case some actual Decepticons came close enough to look for one of those.
The fleet moved on Prowl's every order, a dance only he could see the end of, but Blaster was the one playing the partition on the airwaves. A moment later, they would have been in full view of the Decepticon fleet. A moment earlier, the dawn on the ambient metal dust would have interfered too much with communications.
One after the other, the ships disappeared behind the faraway mountains, hiding on the other side of the town to circle behind the approaching Decepticon warships. Soon, they were all out of sight, and the only link to them was the radio that Blaster was remotely fighting Soundwave for.
"Raise the shield," Prowl ordered, and at Bumblebee's forceful flip of a switch on the town's exterior wall, a forcefield rose from the complex automatic defenses, hiding the remaining Autobots with its sudden glow. It wouldn't be strong enough to resist against the full force of the Decepticon fleet, but it didn't need to. It simply needed to focus Soundwave's attention on the town long enough for the civilians to disappear in the distance, and then hold long enough for the Autobots to run away too.
"Bumblebee, begin the timer for the explosives and get to the shuttle," Prowl said, "we're finishing here and we'll catch up with you at the meeting point."
Blaster sent one last goodbye and good luck message to the leaving ships, then went lighting-fast through the complex's databanks, wiping out all traces of Autobot encryption and personal codes. The explosion of the town should destroy it all, but with Soundwave around, it was best not to take any chances.
In between removing data disks and shooting acid pellets at what they couldn't take with them, Prowl was throwing regular glances through the glass wall of the command center they were abandoning. As such, he was the first to see it.
"The west side of the forcefield is weak," he remarked. "It will break before the rest."
Scrap. "Because of that saboteur we found yesterday?" Blaster asked.
"Likely. The engineers didn't have the time to repair the forcefield generator completely."
"How long do we have?"
"I have no idea," Prowl answered with that tense pitch he had when he hated not knowing. "We should leave now."
"Agreed," Blaster said, and threw an incendiary grenade at the last servers, since they couldn't bring any of it back.
As they rushed down the stairs, they could finally begin to hear the hum of an incoming war fleet. Low and deep, a sound that struck fear in bots' sparks all over Cybertron. When they ran out of the already burning building, it immediately became clear that the forcefield had also dampened the noise of it: the Decepticon fleet was almost above the town. The automatic defenses were slowing down some of the smaller warships, but many simply ignored the pitiful resistance of a once-peaceful region. It wouldn't buy them much time.
"We can't do anything more here," Prowl said. "Let's regroup with Bumblebee, we still have a way to go to get back to Prim-"
He was cut off by a sudden explosion just above them. As they dived for cover, a figure slowly took shape from the smoke and dust. A tall and blocky shape came from the west, not much dissimilar to Blaster's own frame, but with a distinctive shoulder cannon. A smaller, bird-like, figure circling above the Decepticon let out a shrill cry, prompting automatic defenses in Blaster's audio system.
"Soundwave," Prowl breathed out. Someone who didn't know him would have missed the small trembling in his voice, a sure sign of intense on-the-fly calculations.
Another small figure slithered out from a dust cloud, much too close for comfort. Ravage was closing off the quickest route to where they were supposed to find Bumblebee and the escape shuttle. A quick glance at Prowl told Blaster that they had both reached the same conclusion. The explosion timer was still going, and they were running out of time to escape.
Blaster shot. It would have no effect, Soundwave's frame was too well protected against his electro-scrambler, but Soundwave's cassettes weren't. Prowl saw the minuscule opening when the Decepticon took the brunt of the attack on Ravage and Laserbeak, and a volley of merciless acid pellets hit Soundwave, forcing him to take a step back, just long enough for Prowl and Blaster to transform and finally get away.
Through Prowl's rear window, Blaster saw Soundwave recover quickly, but they were already too far for him or his cassettes to follow. The Decepticons could only watch as the complex the Autobots had just completely evacuated blew sky high, taking with it a good part of the still-full Decepticons warships and burying Soundwave's figure behind dust and flames.
Blaster let out a whoop of joy as Prowl zigzagged expertly between debris and building pieces. Soundwave would show up again, that was for sure, but today was definitely a victory.
"We make a good team," Blaster said to his partner in blowing up Decepticons, letting his smile be heard through his voice.
"We do," Prowl replied, relief clear in his own voice. Then, as the road ahead finally cleared up and the shuttle came into view in the distance:
"Can I ask you something?"
"Sure?" Blaster said.
"I thought you would be more...." Prowl carefully hesitated, "saddened by the loss of this town."
Blaster took a moment to mull over the implied question. It wasn't the first time that the other asked him to explain something that he, or some other bot, was doing. It hadn't yet gotten old.
"Prowl," he finally said. "A few hours ago, I was sure that we were all going to die today, either fighting Decepticons in the town or shot down on a ship. But instead of that, we've saved everyone, blew a lot of Cons, and even got away. That's what I'm happy about."
"Ah," Prowl said. "That makes sense."
"Are you glad that we escaped death and saved all those bots?" Blaster teased.
The pursuit car huffed a genuine smile as he negotiated one last turn toward the waiting shuttle. "Yes, Blaster, I am."