by K.A. Rose

Transformers and all related characters and indica © and ^TM Hasbro and Takara, 1984-2007. Used without permission for non-profit fan appreciation.

Whatever I'm doing with this, it's not worse than Kiss Players, okay?

LONAC characters Waitstate and Sunspot on loan from Bitstream and Trixter, with permission. Neutral character Blind on loan from Hane, also with permission... I think.
 

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  Autobot Shuttle 1, Outer Sol System, Human Year 2005

Scavenger kicked viciously at the remains of the Autobot Prowl's carcass. The sound of his foot crushing the plating of the dead strategist's head was the only noise on the ship.

"That! And that!" he squealed, his adrenal pumps taking the long way round in cycling down for him, in the wake of the hijacking. "It serves you right! It serves you right!"

"Scavenger!" his captain barked from the other side of the bridge. He and the lieutenant were examining one of the other bodies.

Heeled, Scavenger let Prowl's head be and set about tearing open his chestplate. So many goodies. So many rare, rare Autobot parts...

"Take only what may be of use to us," Megatron ordered his men, overseeing rather than taking part in this exercise.

They were about a decicycle from entering Earth airspace. This mission of Megatron's had gone exceptionally well-- they would land in Autobot City under cover of one of their enemies' own shuttles and launch an attack from within. All those researchers and civilians would never see it coming. And commandeering the shuttle had neatly shown just how effective their souped-up weaponry would be once unleashed.

Scrapper kept his head down and checked the bodies. He could do little else. He didn't precisely care how his commander decided to do things, as long as he left some beautiful carcasses to toy with. There was only one creature in Autobot City whose life he worried for.

And he did worry, excessively. He hardly checked the frame on the large red fellow, and his second-in-command Hook definitely noticed, but said nothing. Although more aloof, Scrapper knew that Hook, too, cared for the safety of their old pet project, DC-Theta. They may have only played nursemaids to the child, but her design was among their most precious, and they'd only forgiven her parents for stealing her back because they knew Wheeljack and Ratchet were better equipped to develop her.

Scrapper wondered what she looked like now. It had been megacycles since he'd seen her-- the Autobots guarded their little china doll quite jealously. Or maybe it was embarrassment. She had been programmed as a Decepticon and she would always carry that unfortunate little blemish, in their eyes. Perhaps even her parents thought of her as maligned, something sullied long before they'd had a chance to touch her...

The captain of the Constructicons caught movement and looked down at the next body in the pile, and his compressors sank.

There were few Autobots in this universe that Scrapper did not want to see in pain, but Ratchet was one of them. The four of them --him, Hook, Ratchet and Wheeljack-- were too inextricably bound to injure one another without remorse.

As he looked down at the medic, his adrenal fluids started to go cold. Had he known that the medic would be on board, he would never have volunteered his team for this mission. He had signed the Constructicons on with the assumption that Ratchet would be on Earth when they arrived. Perhaps he would still not be able to escape death, but did it have to be here, like this? Struggling out his last moments of life as the circuit fires smouldered inside of him?

Ratchet looked up at Scrapper with dim, almost blackened optics. If Scrapper let him be, the next Constructicon would eviscerate his body while he still lived. But there was no way to save him now-- no way to spare him, not with Megatron's heat signature all but bearing down on Scrapper's neck...

However, it was not Megatron's presence but Hook's. His lieutenant laid a hand on his shoulder and leaned close to his audio receptors.

"Disconnect the mainline from the power centre," he said quietly, so that only the two of them might hear.

Scrapper made no response. A sickness was taking over him, a sudden weakness throughout every line of his suspension. The Autobot medic stared up at him, blankly, little if any sentience at all left in him, consumed by pain and disintegrating agony. There were no means of sparing him. There was no dignified death in store for him. There was only an ugly little mercy.

The captain of the Constructicons pushed open Ratchet's chest panel and sought over the melted and crackling circuitry for power components, found the mainline cable, and pulled. There was a brief, sharp anti-noise, as the last of the medic's processors went dead.

The revulsion Scrapper had kept barely at bay took over completely. He met his lieutenant's gaze and knew at once that this would be the last of the Constructicons. After this battle, come what may, they would either fight to usurp Megatron or defect entirely. That there could be no dignity, even for the admirable, sickened both of them to the core.

It had been by Ratchet that Hook and Scrapper had been spared death by torture after the loss of Theta in the Antarctic. It was by him that they had been allowed to see Grapple again, to abscond with him and plead their case to him, to apologise but say that, all the same, they would never stop being in love with him, no matter what his answer might be.

Grapple had given no answer, but he hadn't gone back to the Autobots, either, even when Scrapper and Hook returned to the Decepticons. In the aftermath of the siege, were it to be successful, it had been their ambition to see him again, but there was no way that could be, now. They had stood by as a good mech had been gunned down, and been merciful only insofar as to give him a quick death.

A pair of grubby hands appeared, pawing over Ratchet's blackened components.

Scrapper snarled and batted Scavenger's hands away.

"But we have to inspect the bodies," his subordinate whined.

"This is a medic, you fool!" Hook shouted. "There's nothing we can use here!"

"Okay, okay!" Scavenger sulked over to the next body.

Scrapper hung his head back down. He knew he should be moving on, and Hook's nudging at his foot urged him as much, but he couldn't bring himself to budge. He surveyed Ratchet's corpse one last time in despair.

His optics landed on something curious, a small node affixed to his communication board. Borrowing a small medical blade from Hook, he eased it free, his back to the others so that no-one could see what he was doing.

A two-way silent channel modulator. Scrapper didn't have to guess who owned the other one.

A sudden, stupid, crazy idea occurred to him, and he glanced furtively to Hook to give him some cover. Hook scowled his disapproval, but Scrapper opened his chestplate and stuck the modulator inside anyway, wrapping the naked ends of the wires to his comm centres hurriedly in a way he hoped would escape Megatron's notice.

"Test, test," he experimented over the line.

"Ratchet?" As expected, it was Wheeljack's signature that pinged back. The voice came in crystal clear, now that they were in the Sol system. "No... Who is this? How did you get on this line?"

"'Fortiter, fideliter, forsan feliciter'."

"..!"

"Listen carefully," said Scrapper, glancing over his shoulder. "There's no time to explain. Autobot City is about to come under attack. We will be in Earth orbit in your sector in one-point-two decicycles."

"Where's Ratchet?"

"He's dead."

"You're lying."

"It would be beneath me to lie now," Scrapper told him. "As long as your faction have been mounting your assault on Cybertron, we have been planning this attack. Megatron has rendered it flawless. If you sound the alarm for our coming, Megatron will call off the assault and switch to his auxillary plan, which will attack the nearest human centres in order to draw you out. Our weaponry has advanced since the last time we staged a battle on Earth-- the humans will be unprepared for us, even worse than you. You cannot stop this. We are coming."

"Then why warn me?" The hollowness in Wheeljack's tone came through clearly, even over the silent channel.

"Because," Scrapper said: "there is one life you are able to save, and both of us know it."

The channel hissed with silence.

"Listen to me, Scrapper." Wheeljack's voice was heavy. "If it came between the life of my mate and my kid, I would choose Ratchet every time."

"You don't have that option any more."

"I know."

"I'm--"

"Don't tell me sorry. Don't tell me there was nothin' you could do. You heap of slag. I hope the inferno takes you before I see you, because I will kill you, every last one of your kind."

He did not say that he would welcome it, that he loathed himself enough that he'd love death to come for him now. He clenched his hand over his open chestplate and concentrated on the only words he could allow himself to say.

"Just get her out of there. I beg you. Get her to safety."

"Who are you to tell me, you murderer? She's my child. She's the only piece of Ratchet I got left now. Do you think I'd let one scrap of harm come to her?"

Scrapper's circuits flushed with relief at the words, what he had needed desperately to hear. "Thank you."

Halfway through saying it, the channel went dead. Not simply with silence, but with finality. Wheeljack had severed his end of the line.

Hook cleared his throat behind him and Scrapper heard Megatron's footsteps across the shuttle floor. He tore the comm module out of his chest and crushed it.

"What's that?" his commander demanded, pointing at the shattered component in Scrapper's grip.

"Unrecognisable, my lord," Scrapper answered. "I would say nothing of any value."

"Well, then quit dallying with it and find something that is of worth. That twit Scavenger's already amassed a pile of things."

"Yes, sir," Scrapper said mechanically.

He knew Wheeljack wouldn't alert the base. He would rise to meet his fate with the rest of his kind. That was fine. It was noble that way.

But he would save the life of his daughter, of that Scrapper was very sure. If nothing else, it was the last piece of Ratchet that still lived. He would die to preserve that, just as willingly as Scrapper would betray his lord to see it done.

It was an inexplicable emotion, the love of a parent. Theta might never come to see Hook and him as such, but it held sway over him just the same.

She was a very lucky child.

Persephone Recuperation Retreat, Far Side of Pluto, Human Year 2295

Neon's olfactory senses detected the chemical fires while he was out offroading. They had already gone out by the time he got back.

It was a huge, blackened mess. He stood at the ridge overlooking the remains of his parents' cottage and thought nothing for a very long time.

He knew they'd succeed eventually. He had done all he could to stop them, thwarting every attempt. When Papa Scavenger swallowed liquid furmanite while in Praxus, Neon had rushed him to the emergency repair centre. When Papa Dead End injected a poison compound into his energon tanks, Neon sat him down and flushed his system and got fresh energon in him in a matter of milicycles. He had been there to repair them after they'd severed their circuits. He had called for help whenever they'd torn their components out of their chest. He'd switched the gas off when they left it on and stopped the oil taps when they left them running and above all kept smiling, as though if he smiled hard enough his parents would someday smile too.

Well, they had done it now. He turned his back for an instant and they were gone. Homebrew explosives and leaving the taps on. A double-whammy like that, there wouldn't be enough of them to put back together.

A lot of his parents' friends had struggled to make life work after the wars. Decepticons had it the worst of anyone in this new life, that his parents said was made of nothing but bureaucracy and taxes and prescription sensor nullifiers.

Neon knew he had been an accident of his parents' commiseration but he refused to resent them for it. They had given him everything, in their absent-minded way. Both professors, ostensibly, they'd brought in a good living to keep him upgraded and preoccupied, and since they had TAs they could always take the odd sabbatical to overdose on high-grade energon or try to gouge their adrenal cables out with a set of spoons.

After their last big attempt on Praxus, Neon had dragged his parents out here for a proper recovery. When he left them to go out driving, he thought they were happy, at least, happy enough not to try something. But his parents had never been happy.

Neon stood vigil over the wreckage of their cottage long after the retreat's clean-up crews had come and gone. There was nothing big enough to leave with him, except the bill.

After a long silence Neon detected the high whine of a jet's landing gear, and looked over across the horizon to see a small, white vessel touching down. She transformed at a distance and approached him.

She was taller than him by a great deal, and silvery white. There was a bare, blanched part on her shoulder in the vague shape of the Medic Union sigil. A doctor, at least formerly.

"Neon?"

"Yes."

Her voice was very warm, and Pluto was not a very warm place.

"My name is Highwind. I've come to take you to your uncles'."

He went with her. There was no good reason not to, any more. And she'd already paid his bill.

Asteroid Aceso, Alpha Carinae Quadrant

His uncles Hook and Scrapper lived in a boondock quarter of the galaxy, on a little asteroid they had built into a castle. The grounds and lower level were for main use, and the lone tower was where their paramour resided.

Highwind did her best to explain the relationship during the flight. Neon's uncles had remained here almost exclusively since the end of the Great War, vying for the the favour of an ex-Autobot architect that had captivated their sparks. The architect, Grapple, had not assented to either's advances in all their hundreds of megacycles of appeals, but was polite to them, and agreed to stay until he'd reached a decision. However, it seemed he was a fairly indecisive person.

"Who would do that?" he wondered to Highwind. "Waiting on some dude for so long?"

"It might be easier to understand if you were more familiar with humans. The drive is the same in our species, but less common, I suppose, for how predisposed most of us seem to be toward violence rather than accord. Nevertheless," she warned: "please don't say anything to upset your uncles. They are largely unaware of the recent political unrest on Cybertron, and they have no need for unnecessary anxiety."

Neon frowned, but he followed in silence as Highwind led him past the parapets into the central courtyard.

There were no drones that he could see, and a great deal of dust had fallen upon the yard. The technorganic garden that at one time must have been quite expertly arranged had been left to grow wild, with plasteel weeds nearly as tall as he was sprouting from cracks in the flagged floor plating and helix blossoms dotting the fleximetal ivy that threaded over each wall.

They passed the garden into the open corridor, and from there into a series of dimly-lit hallways. Often, passing a bare window, Neon glanced out to see the lone high tower, the pearly-white pedestal where Grapple apparently spent most of his day. The entire compound had been designed with the tower at its centre, with all other buildings sprouting up as wildly around it as the mixed and uncertain garden.

As if detecting his puzzlement, Highwind explained the nature of the castle. "Each of these buildings was erected as a tribute to Grapple, in the hopes of earning his favour."

"It hasn't worked?" Neon deducted.

"Well, your uncles are not so easily deterred, but these days they do tend toward simpler gifts..."

They found Scrapper in his study, which was a great deal mustier than the yard. He was sunken into a deep concentration, poring over his word processor. Highwind released Neon's hand to go to Scrapper's side, and knelt next to him, touching his forearm gently to gain his attention.

"Hello again, uncle," she told him sweetly.

"Ah! Theta!" Scrapper exclaimed, looking up. "I didn't hear you step in. How are you, my dear?"

"I am well, thank you. I've brought you your nephew."

"Nephew... Not Scavenger's..?" He scanned the air several times before his milky pink optics located Neon, hanging close to a bookshelf along the far wall. "By Primus. You're Scavenger and Dead End's, are you? Neon-- that was your name, wasn't it? Come closer, boy, let us have a look at you."

He touched Neon's shoulder when he sauntered within reach, and felt along his face, searching out his features with hands and squinting optics. It wasn't so much that his vision seemed to have degraded, simply that Neon was a little hard to look at, something he quickly commented upon.

"You're quite aptly named, aren't you, nephew," he remarked. "Scavenger's son... I take it the sorry creature has finally taken himself offline."

"He and my other father committed suicide two cycles ago," Neon explained to his uncle.

"Terrible. I'm very sorry for you. Your kind get the short end of the energy conductor quite enough without being abandoned, on top of all else. Well, you are quite welcomed here, my boy. It's the least we can do for your old contributor."

"You must have a great deal to talk about," Highwind said to the pair of them, rising. "Uncle, I'll go and prepare dinner. Is Hook with Grapple in the tower?"

"Ah, yes, it's his turn with serenading. Please call them both in before it gets too dark."

"I will, uncle."

She swept out silently, leaving the two males alone. Scrapper returned briefly to his word processor, squinting at the contents of the screen, and struck the erase key.

"Won't you miss that?" Neon asked, alarmed.

"Slag, all of it," Scrapper replied dismissively. "I haven't been able to complete a new article in almost a megacycle. When Theta leaves, so does the foundation of my research. But come up here, boy, you're much too small. I'd've thought your manufacturers would have built you bigger."

Neon climbed up onto the ledge of his uncle's table.

"How is Highwind, er, Theta, related to you? The same way as me?"

"You and I are not quite related, of course, but you're kin to Hook and me just the same, child. Scavenger wouldn't have wanted it any other way. Theta, however-- that's simply my name for her; you should address her by her current designation: it's much more expedient that way-- has a bit of a complicated history with us, but I'm afraid the term is merely out of affection. She's called us that since long before you came into being."

Neon was not used to feeling small, in the temporal sense. Papa Scavenger had been old but Papa Dead End had only been about a hundred megacycles old when Neon was created, and the two of them being professors in Praxus, Neon was constantly surrounded by young manufactures. Not only was Scrapper significantly aged, but he was terribly outdated, everything down to the gesture of his fingers whirring loudly as he moved.

Each wall of Scrapper's study was lined with shelves, containing datavolumes with complex names Neon could only half read. Many of them bore Scrapper's ident as the author, and the word "derivative" featured frequently.

"Your Uncle Scrapper is a leading expert on derivatives," Highwind explained to Neon, after an awkward dinner in the main hall, where Scrapper and Hook had taken turns in offering treats to Grapple. "He remains chiefly a theorist, however, mainly because he isn't active in the scientific community any more."

"He said you help him," Neon said, stacking the last of the dishes into the blast-sanitiser. "You're a derivative, aren't you?"

"My," Highwind said, surprised. "You catch on quickly. It doesn't often occur to people."

"Did my uncles make you?"

"They didn't create me, but they contributed significantly to my first form. I might not have survived, if not for them." She placed a narrow hand over her slim chestplate. "Derivatives struggled quite a bit even to live, in those times."

Neon couldn't really understand. His parents may have been miserable but he had never wanted for material support. Upgrading a derivative was slow-going work, but he had reached his micromaster equivalency within eight megacycles, and had been working steadily toward full-frame classification at the time of Dead End and Scavenger's deaths.

But everything at the castle being in such terrible disrepair, he couldn't imagine seeing many more upgrades in the near future. The whole asteroid was a time warp, cut out of the flow with the rest of civilisation. There was one vidscreen in the gallery which was always shut off, and a tinny old Junkion radio so dusted over that Neon figured it might break if he tried to tune it.

Highwind was his only link with the modern galaxy, and she came and went at random, off on her own missions the subject of which he never figured out. Sometimes in evenings she would sit at Scrapper's word processor in his study and transcribe his dictations, silently correcting and suffering his many tangents, which varied from the philosophical to the insanely technical, and most of it sounded like gibberish.

Grapple, the architect, was distractedly nice and very withdrawn, only descending from his tower for meals. He sighed often of wanting to return to building, but even though nothing trapped him here, he didn't leave. When Neon's uncles weren't busy serenading him at his window or presenting him with trifles, Neon wondered aloud just what was so attractive about the 'bot that his quasi-relatives should exert so much energy on him, and he never got a satisfactory answer. It was all very romantic, oh yes, and after a while comforting, but in the back of his mind he heard Papa Dead End snickering derisively whenever Hook or Scrapper mentioned the word "love". "Love" was still little more than a human loanword, when Neon had last lived on Cybertron.

He soon grew restless at the castle. They had their own solar generator here and never wanted for energy, and Highwind's visits kept them well-stocked with all other essentials, so there was never a reason to leave. He roamed the grounds frequently but the asteroid was far too small to ever truly leave the castle behind. Additionally, Hook, who was if anything even farther gone than his old captain, insisted on spending time with Neon, convinced it was down to him alone to bestow a proper sense of culture upon the boy.

Some of these bonding periods were more interesting than others. Hook tried for a time to teach him swordplay, but grew frustrated when Neon didn't pick it up fast enough for his liking. He was quite pleased, if not nearly as enthusiastic, when Neon took to poetry, although he lost interest in the boy's literary studies entirely when he learned Neon's favourite poet was the Autobot Wheelie. While Neon had always known Wheelie as an assistant professor of liberal arts at Praxus University, who could execute a mean haiku with little apparent forethought, to Hook he was just "that insufferable little creature".

Detecting his boredom, Highwind eventually brought some replacement parts and fixed the old vidscreen for him, augmenting it with a radio dish that he might pick up some transmitted broadcasts, even if he had no friends to call. As it happened, Neon didn't have any friends to speak of, and even if he did transmissions from Cybertron were tightly regulated these cycles, so he was grateful to have a little teevee to watch.

Highwind warned him repeatedly not to play the news broadcasts loud enough for his uncles to hear, and suggested that he not watch them either. Neon didn't care much about politics, but the news was suffusing everything lately, and was hard to tune out.

He learned of his uncles' situation in pieces, in a sort of stop-starting osmosis. Very little was told to him; rather, he just came to understand it by inference, as time went by.

Highwind loved her old nursemaid Scrapper too much to tell him what the true reception to his articles was. Although she always managed to find a publisher for his essays, they were viciously criticised among the scholarly community on Cybertron, which seemingly never budge in its stance on derivatives. Scrapper's essays were ideologically absurd in their eyes: he spoke of derivatives as the greatest potential and natural evolution of the Cybertronian species, citing the reproductive habits of organics as proof that sex-based genetics offered the greatest biological diversity at the least expenditure of planetary energy. He eschewed what he called "designer bias", the practise of designing each Transformer from scratch based on aesthetic and the vanity of the medical community rather than pragmatic evolutionary strategy. And above all else, he insisted that derivatives' weakness was a self-fulfilling prophecy incited by a prejudiced federal government, that, together with a capitalist health care system, was undermining the future of the breed. It was no wonder his words weren't so well-received.

Neon found Hook and Scrapper working on Highwind at times, their outdated chassis not appearing to have any detriment to their skill. Neon would be the first to admit he knew very little about Transformer anatomy but Highwind appeared to have among the most advanced systems he had ever seen-- the combined efforts of the greatest minds of the Great War, his uncles said.

In exchange for their services, Highwind kept Hook and Scrapper maintained, and kept them fed, and played along with their eternally fruitless appeals to Grapple. Grapple, who respected them, smiled at them, but never budged and accepted either them. As though his spark was the most precious commodity in the universe, and he could only give it once.

Neon came to understand with no doubts in his mind that the attraction was not electrical, at least not predominantly. His uncles did occasionally grow physically frustrated and turned to each other for relief, doing so in the dead, secluded corners of the compound where they thought Neon could not wander by to hear, but Hook and Scrapper's affection for each other did not change. They remained old comrades, noble rivals, and housemates, and nothing more. Apart from Grapple, the only individuals they spoke of favourably were their old teammates, all of who were dead now except Mixmaster, whom Neon had never met and, by the sound of it, didn't want to. They also spoke briefly of Highwind's parents, but the recollections seemed uncomfortable to them, particularly when in range of Neon's audio receptors.

They were lonely and nostalgic and virtually everyone they had once known and respected was dead. All they had left was their devotion to Grapple, and Grapple was only theirs insofar as he didn't leave.

When the war broke out, Neon couldn't contain himself any longer.

"They're calling all able-bodied Decepticons to the front," he burst out at dinner one night. "Don't we have a duty to respond?"

The three elderly mechs looked up from their energon cubes and then drifted their heads down again.

"Neon," Highwind cautioned him again.

"If Megatron is so determined to have Devastator among his ranks, he may resurrect that spurious copy that Violen Jygar found sufficient for his purposes," Hook declared imperiously, punctuating his remark with a sip of his iron sulfide drink. With the degradation of his internal components, he had developed a slight intolerance for energon taken on its own. "We have done our duty. They should leave us be."

"Well said," Grapple told him soothingly. "Why should any of us be drawn back into that cycle of destruction?"

"These conflicts are led by the impudent and myopic," Scrapper agreed, toying with his cube. "Since when are we honour-bound to such types?"

Neon stood up from his chair furiously. "You're just being lulled into complacency by this Autobot!" he shouted, stabbing his finger at Grapple. The others at the table jumped.

"Neon," Scrapper exclaimed. At the other end of the table, Grapple looked shocked and wounded.

There was a loud scrape, as Highwind slid her chair back and stood up.

She led Neon out of the dining hall forcibly, dragging him by the wrist. "What did I tell you, cousin?" she lectured, as they reached the corridor. "Your uncles are leading a different life now. You have no cause to drag a political agenda into their home."

"It's not a political agenda; my parents were both Decepticon and so are they! Why shouldn't we stand up for our side?"

"You're too young to believe in these things," she despaired. "I'd have thought your parents would have long since dissuaded you from that line of thinking. They both knew well the futility of war."

He smirked horribly at her.

"I never did listen to my parents," he said smugly.

"No," Highwind sighed. "I can see that."

Grapple did not come down for supper for the next two cycles and his suitors were not able to get him to speak to them, so Neon knew what he was expected to do.

The architect's compartments were completely overstuffed with presents, all of it collecting dust despite his best efforts to keep them clean. He worried over them quite a lot, but on that particular visit Neon found him limp in his recharger bay, watching the bare patch of black sky through his tower window. In this stretch of their asteroid field's orbit, the Western view consisted mostly of a thick nebula that did nothing aesthetically but blot out a quadrant of stars.

Neon sought out a chair whose seat he could reach and sat down.

"Sorry for what I said the other night."

"Hm? Oh, no, please don't worry about it," Grapple said, voice high and weary, not looking at him yet. "I know what pride means to a Decepticon. I have, after all, been in the company of your uncles for quite some time..."

"But they're not interested in enlisting."

"No, I'd imagine they've had their fill of war, but theirs is just another facet of the same kind of integrity. Why do you think they volunteered for the Siege of Autobot City, after they had been inactive for several megacycles? All pride. 'Fortiter, fideliter, forsan feliciter'..."

"What's that?"

"The motto of our alma mater. Do you know Old Cybertronix?"

"No," said Neon.

"It means 'with bravery, with faith, and perhaps with success'. I was in the stage above them at the architectural school, but we still knew each other very well. Yet I had no idea for the longest time just how much they admired me. Certainly not until the front had moved to Earth... Oh, I've gone off subject, haven't I?" He chuckled a little to himself. "But ultimately their admiration meant nothing compared to their honour, so they rejoined their teammates, leaving me alone to what they had built. When they returned after the war, they swore their service had been completed, and they were honour-bound only to me from then on. They moved from our little refuge on Earth to here, and they built this castle as a tribute to me. And then they've just kept on building. And they're quite marvelous structures, really... It's embarrassing to be the subject of so much attention..."

"But you don't like it here," argued the boy. "I mean-- you're trapped, aren't you? You're depressed."

"Your uncles are very kind to me. I would not be ungrateful."

Neon felt himself getting frustrated again. Grapple, who had since sat up in his bed and was watching him kindly, smiled soothingly at him.

"When you grow older, perhaps it will make more sense to you."

"I don't want it to make sense," Neon said stubbornly. "I want to go fight for my side. I don't care if my uncles don't want to serve-- I hate it here. I want to be somewhere alive."

Grapple watched him sorrowfully.

"My dear boy," he said. "There is nothing further from 'life' than a battlefield."

Highwind's radio dish was a little indiscriminating in the transmissions it picked up, meaning that both Autobot and Decepticon propaganda got through. Neon, like any good adolescent, enjoyed a good fluid-boiling and watched the Autobot transmissions aggressively, quietly snarling when the big talking heads like Optimus Prime and Rodimus came on the screen. He discovered he liked hating their messages a good deal more than hanging on the words of Megatron and his officers, and sought the Autobot transmissions out constantly, hoping to hear something else that would get his adrenaline pumping.

The only interesting speaker on the Decepticon side was Lieutenant Havoc, a minibot war-helicopter who was rumoured as the son of Megatron himself. He made no speeches, exactly, but instead served in rallying messages for the Megatron Youth, the special academy for Decepticon nextgens like Neon, who had not been alive to have trained during the Great War. The adverts made no mention of not taking derivatives: both sides were desperate for troops and the Decepticons would take anyone who could fight with dignity.

Despite Highwind's adamant insistence that he leave his uncles out of his chosen politics, Neon brought the telecast news back to Hook and Scrapper, asking Hook if they could resume his swordplay lessons. Hook refused, openly revolted. Scrapper, concerned with his nephew, attempted to draw Neon onto other interests, namely architecture and medicine, and failing that, archaeology, which had been Scavenger's pet interest. But the rock their castle resided on yielded nothing of interest in its core, and Neon was forbidden from taking the emergency shuttle out for a spin.

He thought about taking it anyway, but like as not his time here had had the effect of warming him to his uncles and Grapple, and with Highwind's visits growing more sporadic he didn't want to deprive them of their last lifeline.

So he stuck to the vidscreen, and watched the bitter rivalry develop between Havoc, the handsome Decepticon prince and that Autobot poster boy Prowl. You never saw them on the same screen together, their battles consisting entirely of the vicious verbalisations launched back and forth in their respective broadcasts, but in Neon's mind he saw them duking it out in the black starfields of the front, their hatred for each other only matched by their skill.

"I'll bet he's a fantastic fighter," Neon said of Lieutenant Havoc, speaking eagerly at dinner. "I'm sure he's taken out whole fleets of Autobots-- all by himself!"

"Oh," Grapple said vaguely, picking at his beryllium. With Highwind gone so long, their foodstores had grown scarce. "This is the boy you have a crush on, then?"

"What? No! You don't understand," Neon insisted, but his uncles simply chuckled.

The three's amusement over his interest grew only until they agreed Neon really needed something else on his mind. Hook bowed readily to Grapple's suggestion that the garden could use some revision, and before Neon could get a word in edgewise he was spending the better part of each cycle pulling synaptic weeds and laying new filament. When the courtyard was done they moved onto the grounds, seeding plasteel grass and clearing the volcanic hedges out by the ice fields. It was long, hot, draining work when the distant sun was on them and immobilisingly cold for the rest, but it did, for once, relieve the boy's boredom.

Neon found he actually took a strange liking to it. It got his fluid cables sweating and his frame hardened and taut. He had always enjoyed offroading but caring for his parents had limited his outdoor activities, and Praxus hadn't had much by way of open ground. In the latter cycles after Hook had released him for the day, Neon often transformed and went skidding out across the ice, daring himself to take sharper and sharper turns off the scalloped hillocks. Hook, with no altmode suitable to keep pace with him and too weary besides, stood at the line of the hedges and laughed, the laser hoe slung over his shoulder.

The boy still snuck into the gallery before recharge on some nights, to wash himself in a brief glow of News Destron and the stories from the front. Soundblaster's intonations ensured a constant march of progress, with cycle-by-cycle advances all down the main front. There were glorious tales of whole Autobot regiments surrendering en masse. And the Megatron Youth were not idle: Lieutenant Havoc's transmissions spoke of the great contributions cadets were making to the secret police and in the retaking of neutral territories.

While he worked his uncles' fields and planted his uncles' gardens, Neon kept dreaming of serving alongside him, the Prince, the young brilliant lieutenant, the valliant knight of the Decepticon cause. Havoc was not simply the war personified; he was the war as it ought to be, the war that the young people were fighting, somewhere far away from here.

Even looking at Havoc's face on the vidscreen revved Neon's engines. He kept a captured still of it on a datacard next to his recharger bay, fingering the diodes under the panelling of his inner thigh until the surges built up inside of him before he shut down each night. He stole a solderer from Hook's toolkit and switched it to its lowest setting to tease his nervous circuits, biting his lip and staring intensely at that suave smirk, feeling so bad for doing this but unable to stop.

For all his uncles' efforts, he couldn't shake his desire, any more than they could stop their well-ingrained habit of serenading each night at the base of Grapple's tower. He wanted to fight. He wanted to go to war.

In the end, the war came to them.

On the first anniversary of Neon's parents' death, Highwind returned, her plating scorched and gouged, gutted circuitry all but trailing on the ground behind her. She tracked brackish internal fluids across the flagged floor plating that led into the courtyard and fell into stasis lock in Scrapper's arms before she managed to say a word.

Even being the most professed with Highwind's systems out of anyone in the galaxy, Hook and Scrapper still took decacycles to fully repair their adoptive niece. During this period she took her element supplements in her private compartments, which Neon carried up to her on a work tray.

"You may not want to do that," she said, smiling faintly.

"You weren't fighting for the Autobots," Neon said stiffly, collecting her leftovers.

"I may as well have been, according to some."

"You're not an Autobot," he told her adamantly.

She regarded him with the sort of sadness Grapple had once exhibited. "Not lately, no."

He resisted throwing down her things. Why did she say all this, when she knew it irked him?

"Why do you have sympathies for them?" he demanded. "This whole war began because of the Autobots' ties with humans! A human killed a Decepticon-- that's what this is all about!"

"If you think any war is sparked by a single event, your logic circuits are more rudimentary than I realised," Highwind told him, her voice animated for the first time. "You say I have sympathies. Very true-- I have sympathy, for a great deal of people who don't receive much in these times. Everyone suffers in war, and those that suffer worst are those that have the least power to effect change. Do you really think Megatron's Youth Brigade is kind to your type, or there is any nobility in what they are made to do? Do you think they're really liberating those villages, winning the sparks and servos of every province they come across? 'Rehabilitating' these so-called 'traitors'?"

"The Autobots are the ones guilty of war crimes!"

"Indeed? I'd say no-one's blameless in a conflict like this. If you listened to your father's lectures more closely, you may have come to understand that."

Neon hauled up the tray in his hands and stormed furiously out of the room. He wanted badly to dump everything in the corridor and go wheeling out of there, but he stayed the course, returning the items to Scrapper's workshop and slamming them down on the table.

Scrapper looked up from his microscope, dazed, his washed-out optics taking a moment to locate him. He asked, in that mild and scratched voice of his, if everything was all right.

Neon ground the gears in his jaw. "How can you harbour a circuit-traitor like that?" he shouted, jabbing a finger in the direction of Highwind's compartments.

The microchip Scrapper held with a delicate pair of smelting chopsticks did not move as he spoke. "You might notice, my boy, that we did not ask any questions of ourselves when we took you into our care."

Neon's fist slammed the table. Several glass containers jumped and shattered, and before the first unidentified liquid had spilled to the floor, Scrapper was out of his seat and had the derivative by the throat.

"Not in my workshop," Scrapper growled, in a voice Neon had never heard from him before. "Not while Theta's parts lie on the table, my boy. Do not ever. One flake of her circuitry is worth more than your life."

The chopsticks with the microchip were still held precisely in his free hand. Neon's gazed fixed on it, horrified that the fingers had not so much as twitched, even as the hand around his neck tightened its grip.

"Perhaps I never quite appreciated Scavenger's worth while he was alive," Scrapper continued, "but his child will be joining him prematurely if it does not tread carefully. Do I make myself clear, nephew?"

"Yes, sir," Neon gasped.

Scrapper released him. The boy landed and stumbled, clutching at the spidery cracks his uncle's grip had caused in his neck plating. His uncle looked strangely frail all of a sudden, studying his fingers as though first laying optics on them. He muttered softly to himself and went back to his chair.

He spoke at length, head bowed over the microscope and the curious leylines of his work. "Clean the mess you have made and then leave. You are not permitted to set foot in this lab again, not while Theta still needs repairs. I will take her supplements up to her myself from now on," he said, and paid his nephew no further attention.

As a chilly aphelious autumn set upon the castle, Hook and Neon's time was occupied with harvesting the elements they had seeded. It had turned into a fortuitous decision to plant their own base metals, for with Highwind still in recovery and, she said, their normal marketplaces currently overrun with regiments of liberators, they were dependent on their own resources to stay healthy. Of utmost importance were the iron and sulfur deposits they had developed, without which Hook and, steadily, Grapple could not absorb their energon.

But then winter crawled across the fields and overtook their volcanic hedges, and still Highwind could not walk. The damage to her hydraulics had proven too extensive for even Scrapper's brilliant hands to repair, and unobtanium was one metal that could not be naturally sown. She grew as despondent as the castle's other house pets, and Neon came upon her confiding worriedly in Scrapper, her only regular visitor.

"Uncle," she whispered, that Neon barely heard her from the hallway, as he passed carrying a wheel to some new animatronic present Hook was building for Grapple. "I don't feel I've made any progress. I can feel this project slipping from my fingers..."

Through the open crack in her door, Neon saw Scrapper gently touch her face.

"You haven't lost anything," he assured her. "The technology is far more advanced than we could have imagined."

"My father designed it on a whim, and nearly three hundred megacycles later we struggle to recreate it, based off of-- off of wirebare theories, off bare hunches. Uncle, I'm completely lost."

"You are but one person, child..."

"I'm not even the shadow of my father's brilliance," Highwind said savagely. She held his hand clasped between hers. "I'm a discredit to both of them, Uncle, even after all that you've done for me."

"What I do is meager, my dear; practical, at best. Your parents are whom we might thank for all the good that has been done for you, and they are irreplacable, this is true-- but you are not here to replace them."

"Uncle..."

Scrapper's words moved Neon in strange ways. After doing his errands for Hook, he went to Scrapper's study and took a closer look at some of the volumes lining the shelves.

The titles were not any more comprehensible than the last time around. Cybertronian Evolutionary Trees and Their Anomalies: Triple-Changers and the Smoking Gun on Paradron; Spark Alleles of Five Decepticon Production Lines and Their Exhibited Colour Predilictions; The Rise of Sentience: A Counterargument to the Quintesson Origin Theory, which had a colourful cover and a note from the publishers inside it bitterly thanking Scrapper for singlehandedly bankrupting their company; and A Brief History of Cybertronian Reproduction, which sarcastically spanned twelve volumes. Near a dim corner, Neon located a well-thumbed and appended databook with a hand-encoded title on its spine: DC Line - Official Commission - Aborted, and a string of dates reaching back to the time of the Great War.

Neon pulled this one off its shelf and nearly sank beneath its weight. He eased it down to the dusty floor instead. Kneeling down in front of it, Neon eased the front of its casing off and called up the table of contents.

I. Preliminary Research
II. Foundational Development
  A. Concerns of Physicality
  B. Environmental Restrictions: Submarine Terran Localities
III. DC-Alpha
IV. DC-Beta
  A. Restrictions and Improvements
  B. Escape and Containment
V. DC-Gamma through DC-Zeta: Failures
VI. DC-Eta
  A. Acquisition of Autobot Contributor Subjects
  B. Interactions with Subjects
  C. Spark-Chipping: History and Execution
  D. Graft Failure
VII. DC-Theta (Active)
  A. Conception
  B. Initial Schematics; Contributors:
    1. Wheeljack
    2. Ratchet
    3. Scrapper
    4. Hook

Neon might have dropped the book if it wasn't already settled on the floor. In the past, his uncles had only spoken of "Theta"'s parents in vague terms, never precisely naming names. Neon had never been an avid student of Papa Dead End's history lectures but you could hardly not know who Wheeljack was. Even the staunchest of Decepticons admired him. And the medic Ratchet was not unknown either...

Theta's section made up the rest of the table, and it was still ongoing. Neon skimmed through the rest of the list.

  E. Theft and Decommissioning (age 5)
    1. Designer Hiatus: Scrapper and Hook
    2. Autobot Reassignment and Redesignation
  F. "Chassis" Period: Pre-Siege (age 5-10)
    1. Known Modifications
    2. Autobot Functionality
  G. "Chassis" Period: Missing Megacycles (age 10-12)
    1. Recovery in Osaka, Japan, Earth
    2. Extraction of Secondaries
      a. Spark Membrane Technology (ongoing)
      b. Reassertion of Principle Spark-Consciousness
      c. Continued Relationship of Multi-Spark Orbital Systems (ongoing)

Neon puzzled over these references. He tapped on G1a to see further details.

"Having received advance warning of the attack on Autobot City by unknown means, the scientist and inventor Wheeljack prepared a transmutive sealant shell --for lack of better terminology, a membrane-- to encase three protoform sparks kept incubated in the city's R&D quarter. These sealed sparks were stored within Theta's laser core at timed intervals. Although their exact mechanism is unknown to all modern science (the membranes were summarily destroyed during subsequent extraction), these structures allowed the encased sparks to remained unfused for two megacycles, an unheardof duration.

"To the best of DC-Theta's recollection, the sparks all survived and were successfully reincubated into sustainable form.

"(Note: one of these recovered sparks is known to be Prowl 2, currently a Special Operative of the Autobot Army. During her Cybertron Period [see 'Highwind Period: Cybertron (age 156-212)'], Theta repaired this same derivative effortlessly in a planetary nursery, suggesting a lasting imprint of spark-inferred 'intrinsics' [see 'c. Continued Relationship of Multi-Spark Orbital Systems (ongoing)'.])"

Neon was forced to stop reading. His processors throbbed painfully: the concepts were no less unintelligible than their damn titles. The most he got out of that was that Highwind, somehow, had held Prowl 2's spark in her chest, and later she'd repaired him. This was supposed to make him more sympathetic to her... how?

He paged angrily through the other sections and was about to throw the casing back on and forget the whole thing, when a familiar designation caught his eye. It seemed that also while stationed on Cybertron, Highwind had been assigned as the private nurse to Megatron Prime's son, Havoc. It baffled him why Havoc, of all 'bots, would need to be cared for, as strong and capable as he was, the epitome of Decepticon engineering and breeding, but cared for him Highwind had, and for many, many megacycles.

Neon recalled Highwind's words in her compartments: 'You say I have sympathies. Very true-- I have sympathy, for a great deal of people...' She had treated both Havoc and Prowl, arch rivals, the young equivalents of their respective commanders. Her parents were Autobots, yet she had served for both forces, and then for neither force. She was like his uncles and Grapple: not quite anything any more, insisting that non-alliance was an alignment in itself, feeling for and pitying both sides...

He shuffled through the entries to the last chapter of the volume, titled 'Current Projects' but the text was brief and mostly in shorthand, clearly notes Scrapper intended to expand upon later. There was further mention of these 'spark membranes' that Highwind was anxious to reverse-engineer based on her memories of Wheeljack's original. There were even notes on her recent damage and arduous recovery, and a sad, hand-inscribed footnote that mentioned what Neon already knew, that Highwind needed new unobtanium for her hydraulics. More enigmatic, another handwritten note in a corner read 'research stalled-- backtracking'.

Another memory struck Neon-- that of his first arrival here at the castle, when he'd seen Scrapper erase an entire essay as a bad job, claiming Highwind, as a kind of muse to him, was the only thing that made the writing work. They were together in this project, and had been ever since Highwind had been inspired to recreate her father's work. If Highwind's efforts failed, it was as though part of Scrapper failed as well.

He squinted at the illuminated writing, which seemed dimmer than before, as did the surface of the floor around him. He looked up.

It was Grapple. His appearance did not alarm Neon, so much-- he'd become a curious sort of ally, the least aggressive when Neon had his fits and a defender against his uncles more often than not. But it was curious to see him out of his tower when not meal time.

This point brought to his attention, Grapple remarked, "Why, your uncles built every inch of this compound for me, you know. I'm free to go where I like." He added: "Would you care to take a walk with me?"

Neon figured Grapple for having some sort of ulterior motive, but it seemed he really did just want some company that wouldn't start talking about sharing uptimes together and tier-one permissions.

They took a path along the sculpture garden at the southern end of the estate, where in spring time the helix crystals would blossom and light up the night sky. It was all dormant now, with only dry scurf underfoot, and Grappe insisted on walking it-- for the feeling in his joints, he said.

"It was such a delight to see things growing out here in the fields this past summer," he remarked, as they trudged along. He kept a slow pace so that Neon would have no trouble keeping up, but it was a little too slow for his tastes. "The land has always had a natural beauty, but it can look so bleak after a while..."

"It was Hook who thought of it," Neon mumbled.

"Yes, but Hook could never get Scrapper going on the idea. He thought Hook would use it as a show of skill to gain the upper hand."

It seemed to sadden him just to speak of it. He trudged slower on account.

"They're so terribly devoted," Grapple sighed. "If the war were on our doorstep tomorrow they would still think only of me. I'm not foolish-- this can't go on indefinitely. I might say it's gone on far enough."

"So just pick one of them," Neon said, troubled to be forced into an advice role with a much older 'bot, over what were essentially relationship issues. "You like both of 'em well enough."

Grapple made a noncommital noise. Neon pushed the issue. "It's nothing to me which one," he contended. "Hook would be better for you-- I guess he's sorta stiff-upper-lipped but Scrapper's not so sophisticated, and Scrapper's always in his study or worrying over his doll..."

"I knew her parents, you know," Grapple said stiffly.

"Sorry."

"Oh, no. They had their share of animosity for Decepticons, even toward your uncles-- Theta was produced under duress and they fought Megatron bolt and rivet to reclaim her. No, I'm sure Highwind's parents died full of hate for Scrapper and the others. But what else is to be expected? There's very little kindness in war, far less respect."

"But they sent for you to save Scrapper and Hook, when they were blamed for Highwind being stolen," Neon protested.

Grapple shook his head. "Settling a debt. A matter of honour: a rarer trait in Decepticons than in Autobots, but your uncles had it, so Wheeljack and Ratchet sought to match it."

Neon scowled at the ground. It was becoming incomprehensible again.

"It's strange, really, that there's no native Cybertronix word for 'love'," Grapple carried on, admiring the solar winds that, far above their heads, were carrying cosmic dust across the asteroid belt. "It's always been a sensation we've been capable of, even from our earliest sentience. Familial love, brotherly love, the more inexplicable kinds your uncles bestow upon me, unsollicited and persistent even as I fail to respond. Even human languages fall short to describe the more curious forms... habitual love, say, or love borne out of labour, or guilt. Scrapper and Hook's love for Highwind might be said to be the latter two. They are her chief designers, but she remains a reminder of her parents, and therefore of all the guilt and sorrow embedded in those memories."

Neon studied the ex-Autobot carefully. It was obvious Highwind wasn't really the point of this at all. "So where do you fall?" he asked. "In that whole dictionary?"

Grapple fell silent again, but not for too long. "Your uncles are inexcusably good to me," he said. "I've become their raison d'etre-- their reason for living. Oh, Primus, no, I couldn't accept Hook's proposition: Scrapper would surely end his life, or worse, try to fight for me. I couldn't say no to both of them, or that would... Well, I shudder to think of it. There must have been a point where I could have said no with few consequences! But surely that time is gone now... I suppose I could hope that if I were to deactivate myself first, your uncles would have the presence of mind to reflect and move on to a more rewarding life--"

"Kill yourself?!"

Grapple's pace faltered at Neon's outburst. "Now," he said sternly. "Don't attach so much significance to life. If it'll free your uncles of their burden, it would be more than worth it, would it not? Besides, he's surely dead..."

He didn't seem to be speaking of Hook or Scrapper. "Who is?" Neon asked, but he went unanswered, for reasons unrelated to their conversation.

At that moment, a soundless vibration shook their asteroid's thin atmosphere, causing the tilled alkaline soil to shudder and loud cracks to sound from the ice fields. Grapple and Neon snapped their heads up to witness hot orange light blossoming from the side of a near orbital station-- the market colony that Highwind had until recently patronised.

It was too distant to make out clearly, but the closer Neon watched, the more it seemed that there were flashes spreading across the colony's surface, then expanding to its immediate flight space. Something very unsubtle was going on up there.

An actual sound came to them, in the form of a shout. Grapple and Neon looked back toward the castle compound to see Scrapper waving frantically, beckoning them back inside.

They rushed back with all haste. Neon transformed to do so but Grapple was too out of shape to manage so Neon rolled beside him anxiously instead, the two of them arriving together in the gallery where the others were gathering. The vidscreen, normally occupied with Neon's favourite broadcasts, was now in telecomm mode as Highwind --having been wheeled in on one of Scrapper's tool carts-- sat speaking with the strange black-and-white 'bot on the monitor.

"It's good to see you again," the mech was saying apologetically. "I'm sorry it's under these circumstances."

"War is unkind, Waitstate," she told him gently. "The important thing is that we do what we can."

"But you're injured. You and yours are already burdened quite a bit..."

"Have you a doctor in your detachment there?"

"Yes, of course."

"Then have him bring a raw block of unobtanium and we can do the rest," Highwind decided. "I'll be much greater use to you when I can walk."

Waitstate shook his head. "That's too long. I'll send Sunspot. She can make it to you in doubletime."

"What's going on?" Grapple asked, stepping closer to the others.

Highwind looked over her shoulder and then turned fully, shifting on the surface of the tool cart. "The explosion that you saw just a moment ago was an ethnic cleansing. The elders at the market town have refused the Decepticon treaty. Waitstate and his men need somewhere to evacuate the townsfolk, quickly."

"I see," said Grapple. He straightened. "Of course. Tell us what we can do."

"The first thing to do is get you all on your feet," Waitstate said. "Sunspot should be there in half a decicycle. She'll have the metal for your repairs and can prep you on the defences in time for our arrival. Assume the trail's gonna be hot."

"Roger that," Highwind confirmed.

"W-- Hold on," Neon argued. "What're you guys doing? You're subverting a Decepticon mission!"

Waitstate was only momentarily flustered. He recovered quickly. "He's new, right?" he asked Highwind, who nodded hurriedly. He looked over and addressed Neon directly: "These are noncombatants; civilians. They're no more threat to the Decepticons than half the rocks in this belt. LONAC's doing this with or without support, so our only question to you is if you'll help us."

"In a refresh," Grapple said valiantly.

Scrapper and Hook were exchanging glances. "Yes," Hook said hesitantly. "Of course."

She tore up the western grounds in landing, and bounded out of her little mini-jet kickably small and carrying a block of silvery raw metal under her arm. She was annoyingly yellow and spry and lanky and had a voice like a neuro-gnat, Neon thought. The first thing she said when she saw him and his uncles was "Hey there! Gotcher stuff!"

Scrapper and Hook had no time to be bothered by her manners. Scrapper extended both hands and Sunspot deposited the unobtanium into them, and he and Hook immediately raced off for the forge, leaving Grapple and Neon to receive their guest.

Sunspot splayed her feet and stuck her hands on her hips, admiring the castle compound. "Nice place ya got here! What's it for?"

"It's where engineers go to die," Neon told her nastily.

She made a face at him. "For someone with so many pretty colours on, you're not very cheerful." She ambled past him, announcing: "I want a tour!"

"Of what?" Neon demanded.

"Of Highwind's insides-- I bet they're something! Or if I can't have that, this place. I've got a camera. Is there a gift shop?"

Neon snarled. "You're here to teach us the defences, aren't you?"

"You're a defences!"

"That doesn't even make sense!"

"It doesn't have to make sense! I'm a girl!"

Neon stepped forward to pound the yellow minibot soundly into the floor, but Grapple held him back. The elder 'bot addressed Sunspot gently. "Your captain sent you here to help us prepare the castle to defend the refugees, did he not? What would you recommend?"

To Neon's surprise, Sunspot fell silent in consideration and then asked moderately, "What sorta ground defences y'got?"

Grapple explained about the perimeter traps and the heat readers they'd set out for the glitch mice, then discussed the outer walls and the turrets and parapets. Sunspot responded with remarkably well-thought-out suggestions, scratching the side of her olfactory sensors absently as she talked.

"Someone stationed at these two corners, maybe, with automatic rifles and a few grenades. You guys keep horses? Can I see 'em?"

"We'll let you see our catapults later, if you like," Grapple said sweetly.

Sunspot gave this due consideration. "I wanna see the tower instead," she declared. "It's so romantic! Who lives there?"

"Me," Grapple said, smiling faintly.

She squealed and glommed onto both of them. Neon objected, but in Sunspot's mind, any neon pink friend of a big foppish fellow who lived in a tower was equally a friend of hers.

While the two of them were tasked with showing Sunspot to the best vantage points --which, to her glee, included Grapple's tower-- a massive cymbal crash from the forge and vomit of white smoke from the windows indicated Hook and Scrapper had already reached the water-casting stage.

"I don't get it," Neon said resentfully. "Highwind's been out of commission for more than a kilocycle while they try to put her back together, and they're able to reforge her parts in a few refreshes. We coulda just gone and bought some of this stuff."

"The metal is a rather precious commodity," Grapple said. "In the past, Highwind was always the one who acquired it, and she's the only frame among us that uses it in such high quantities."

"And she gets it from us," Sunspot said proudly. "We specialise in it!"

"You're pirates," Neon accused.

"Nuh-uh; freelancers!"

"It's all a little moot at the moment," Grapple quavered, gathering their attention again. He pointed skyward. "There are more pressing matters to attend to."

They looked up. A flock of lights were drawing closer in the Northeast, making a fat V formation as they spiralled closer and resolved into several dozen small ships, pillbug shaped and wiggling erratically as they hit the thin atmosphere.

Sunspot watched their approach calmly. "Guess we oughta be bracing fer impact an' stuff," she remarked offhandedly.

The ships ran to ground straight on the bow, noses burrowing into the scurf. Everything shook. Neon fell and banged his knees and palms; Sunspot supported herself against a yard post, which dislodged under her grip.

They descended like thick rain, dotting the frozen fields like seeding pods. No sooner had the first of the ships landed than the first of them split open their side doors, and black-cowled and hunched figures appeared, sprinting across the tilled fields like hell was after them.

Hell was, actually, after them. As the tail end of the evacuation pods hit atmosphere, Neon noticed the larger, black ships close on their jet trails, firing at their backs. They struck a few, and sent the evac pods spiralling, shredding into flakes of hull and cloudy fireworks. Debris rained down with the rest, trailing fire.

The attackers, Neon could see even at a distance, all bore the Decepticon sigil on their hulls. It was the first time he had seen the faction symbol physically, even from afar. They had been banned on Cybertron during the Alliance, and Scrapper and Hook hadn't worn them. The two-dimensional, glinting purple paint streaked across Lord Havoc's chestplate on the vidscreen was a far cry from the insignia he now saw, burning across the black.

Grapple's hand jostled him out of his daze. There was a great rush of footsteps around them; shadows. The first of the refugees had reached them, staggering around Grapple and Sunspot and shouting in a dialect Neon couldn't understand.

Grapple began to reply, slowly, trying to calm them. A streak of blaster fire off cut him off; the townsfolk jerked and ducked as the Decepticon laser beam lanced across the field half a klick out.

"Not much time," Grapple muttered, switching to standard speech. "Neon, help these people into the compound."

That feeling of revulsion that so often swelled in Neon's compressors during dinner arguments reared its head again. "These people have been marked for deletion by the Armada! Why are we thwarting a Decepticon directive?"

Sunspot shoved him roughly by the shoulder. "Talk, talk, talk! Whine later!"

Neon spun around to retort, but Sunspot caught his arm by the wrist and dragged him back in the direction of the central compound. She shouted in dialect to the townsfolk, who hung desperately on her instructions and hurriedly followed in her wake.

The ground rocked beneath them. The Decepticon ships were shelling now, mortars whistling through the thin air over their heads. Neon heard Grapple, distant in the crowd, voice-activate the perimeter defences. The autoguns, barely peashooters, sprang to life along the ridges of the field and craned skywards.

He lost track of things after that. All the sounds and motion blurred together, a cacaphony he hadn't experienced since the wailing of the fire brigade that had chased on the heels of his parents' suicide. His feet pounded the same cold ground they had tread for more than a megacycle but everything around him was madness, a racing forest of legs and Sunspot shouting, directing the evacuees into the unused cottages and galleries that dotted the expanse of the compound. As they reached the inner wall, Neon transformed and sped to the head of the crowd, ordering flocks of people across the the garden walk toward the guest houses.

"Twelve here! The rest of you, this way! Not on the flowers!" he barked, fairly unheeded. "Damn it!"

Neon collided with a leg. He tipped and transformed as he fell, to avoid landing on his roof. He looked up, bewildered, at Scrapper, hoisting an RPG as tall as he was into a line of sight with the nearest approaching ship.

"Hook can deal with her assembly," he said, pressing an optic against the viewfinder and tugging a pair of fingers around the trigger. "That is, if he can work through this racket..."

Neon had just time enough to clap his hands over his audio receptors, as Scrapper fired the grenade launcher. The air thundered, a massive plume of white smoke gushing from the rear end of the barrel and spreading over both of them. Scrapper lost his balance and collided with a near wall.

The rocket sailed through the air and caught a Decepticon snubfighter along the portside flank. It tipped and swerved, violent flames sprouting from its wing.

He'd fired on a Decepticon. His uncle. He'd fired on one of his own.

In the haze of discharge, Neon barely caught sight of the large dark 'bot that strode between them and helped Scrapper to his feet. He carried a deactivated beamsabre handle on a utility belt.

"Hook?"

"Scrapper," Neon's uncle coughed.

"An honour, Captain. Always been a fan. Didn't your people turn into Menasor or something?"

"Student of military history, I see."

Waitstate had a slight swagger to him, but not so much to make him a caricature. "You have wall defences? I need a central terminal to plug into. We've got a bit of overclocking that needs doin'."

"By all means," Scrapper babbled wearily. He started to tip. Neon sprang to his feet to keep his uncle from falling over. "Why, thank you, nephew."

Neon noticed Waitstate's attention had transitioned to him. "Well now," the commander of LONAC began.

"Say one thing about the colours and I hurt you," Neon said venomously.

"Me? Never." Neon always thought it was cheating, the kind of poker face a bot got away with when he had a faceplate. "Beats a black repaint, anyway. Now, that terminal?"

Neon glared sourly at him, and then glanced past his shoulder, as a flicker of movement caught his eye. He tightened.

"Behind y--!"

The beamsabre at Waitstate's side found his hand and burst to life in an instant. The chestplate he sliced in half was not a local manufacture.

"They're breaching the walls too quickly," he said, straightening. He dismissed the beamsabre's blade and tapped his commlink. "Sunspot, get the rest of the townspeople inside the gates and shut her up."

"Aye!"

The body he'd dispatched had collapsed to the ground, coolant and electrical sparks gushing from the gash across its Decepticon tampograph. Neon was unable to take his optics off it, arms grasped tightly around Scrapper's hip.

"Blind," Waitstate continued over the comm. "What's our status in the field?"

"That's the last of 'em," gruffed a voice on the other end. "Be with you in five. Got us some poachers still."

"Roger. Don't engage if you can help it. I'm overhauling the structural systems to buy us some breathing room. Here," he added, drawing a small pistol from a side compartment and pushing it under Neon's nose. It was as big as the boy's whole arm. "Secure the Eastern gate. Don't worry about a body count. Just scare 'em enough to back off."

"No!" Neon objected.

Waitstate squinted down at him, impatient. He shoved the pistol against Neon's chestplate; Neon buckled and was forced to accept the weapon into his arms.

"Sorry, princess, but this wasn't one of those open-ended suggestions. Now get."

Neon ran. Furious, lips pursed, the pistol cradled in his arms. Before his uncle and Waitstate vanished among the crowd of bodies, he saw the head of LONAC settle down crosslegged near a wall and pry open an access panel.

Who did this exhaust port think he was? Barging in here with all these dirty ethnics, that threatened with every step to trod Neon underfoot? They were defying the Armada!

Neon didn't go to the Eastern gate. He hung a right over to a southern turret and climbed the emergency ladder to the top, Waitstate's gun tucked under one arm. The ground rocked as another Decepticon barrage commenced, and Neon clung tightly to the ladder rungs as bits of turret sprinkled down from overhead.

Insane! This was insane! Three of the four residents of this rock were Decepticons by registration, no matter what their thoughts on the matter. But one stupid Autobot invites a pack of dirty neutrals in and now look where they were!

The wall shuddered again, but not from the shelling. Neon looked over to see the rivets along the plate seams pop out and their panels loosen and unfold outward and up. Neon scrambled the rest of the way up to safety in a hurry.

That LONAC guy-- he was transforming the walls. Neon held onto a wedge of parapet and witnessed as, out on the grounds, the perimeter defences raised and craned their fence projectors inward, toward the castle, and spread their light arrays over the compound. The arrays crossed and grew into a complex net, glowing intensely as their charge was amped far past normal parametres. The air twenty metres over Neon's head striped with criss-crossed blue just moments before a mortar finished its arc toward his turret. It splintered against the fence projection and shattered in a gnarled twist of fire and black smoke; the fence linework flickered briefly but stayed strong.

Brilliant, Neon thought, gaze drifting down to the ground outside the wall. It just leaves the ten metres below the projection line completely exposed...

He climbed across the splintered parapet to outside-facing side of the wall and peered down. Landed infantry were racing across the southern gardens for the wall, ducking peasant fire and the reformatted hydraulics artillery Waitstate had transformed out of the infrastructure. Most got plucked off before they reached the 20 metre line, and fell as though snagged by some invisible cord, hauled to the ground in a burst of sparks. One dogged grunt drew Neon's eye, dodging the best of them as he hauled aft right for the gate beneath Neon's position.

Neon's arms twitched around the gun. He started to aim, but resisted. His resistance wavered. He fought it harder.

It was a Decepticon. But it was his uncles' home. But they were defending traitors of the Armada-- and they were being traitors themselves. They'd refused the call to arms in preference to saying here and living simply, but when someone else had asked their aid, all it had taken was that stupid Autobot and Highwind to pledge their allegiance and his uncles had just fallen in line.

The infantrymech passed the ridge where Neon was seeding decagonal orchids, crushing the scalloped patterns beneath his massive treds. Hot, fierce adrenal fluid raced through Neon's cabling and his finger squeezed the trigger.

Evening drew in the cold and the sulfur mists and the Decepticons withdrew to their ships, orbiting sullenly in upper atmo but not a flicker of sentient movement. The refugees, save those that hadn't suffered the assault too well, crowded shoulder-to-shoulder in the guest houses, galleries, dining halls and libraries, the mismatched buildings Hook and Scrapper had built in tribute to Grapple and had scarcely laid optics on since.

The damaged units they took to the lab, where Grapple assisted Scrapper with repairs while Hook still kept cloistered with Highwind. Scrapper muttered darkly, saying he had hoped just this once he could have counted on Hook to do a rush job of something.

Neon found Sunspot conferring with her commander, and another LONAC member who had come in as the star was setting, shaking flakes of sulfur crystals off his frame and three confirmed kills to report. His name was Blind.

He stared at Neon for a long, hard time and then asked, quite unfettered, what his name referred to.

"Infrared," Sunspot explained to Neon, after the debriefing was over and she was sent out to patrol the compound. "Let's just say he totally beats everyone at hide-and-seek."

"Is that how you pirates pass time out there, between gigs?" Neon asked nastily.

Sunspot thumbed a bullet scar in her forearm and shrugged. "It was different 'fore the war," she said vaguely. "Wait's always said 'just lean on an open door and fall into it'. Blind's just a guest, anyhow. Greyscale and Wait got this sometimes-friends thing going on and lately they've been pretty warm, so we were doin' a favour. D'you collect cards? I've been lookin' for someone to trade with..."

"No."

"Darn."

"You're a derivative, aren't you."

"You're a derivative."

Neon detected the truth to that retort was pretty much accidental. Like before, she just didn't seem to know what the word meant.

"A cross-machine manufacture?" he tried. "A merge-spark?"

"Don't be gross," Sunspot said, making a face.

Taking a pathway through the zen garden to the summer house, Sunspot and Neon were stopped by a hunched-over lastgen, clutching her shifting mantle-plating.

"Little ones," she implored, in a heavy accent. "Please, my wife. Very sick. Always our shop sell to Highwind."

"All the injured were ordered to the lab," Neon told her.

"No, not injure. Sick before we move her. The escape, it makes worse. Please help."

"Our medic got left at the colony," Sunspot said unhappily, to Neon. "We thought you guys'd be able ta cover us."

"My uncles can fix anything," Neon said dismissively. "I'll go get one of 'em."

Sunspot beamed. "And I didn't hafta beg or anythin'! You're a good guy, Neon."

Neon didn't answer her. He spun around sourly and stalked back toward the forge.

He hadn't mentioned, earlier that cycle, that one of Blind's "confirmed kills" was actually his.

He had to cut through the main gallery to reach the labs. A group of the townsfolk had broken curfew to hold a sermon in the central courtyard, praying fervently to Primus as they stamped all over Neon's carefully-laid filament. Great. He'd need to air the soil again in the morning.

The gallery was not empty either, of course, with groups of refugees clustered in every alcove. Crying, murmuring in dialogue, singing uninflected to their nextgens. The air smelled like dirt and a whole lot worse. But he picked his way over sleeping and prone bodies to the head of the hall that led into the inner corridor.

As he passed the vidscreen, he saw it switch on. He stopped, thinking he must have left a programme timer on, but the image onscreen was no telecast feed.

"State your name!" the blocky thing on the monitor barked.

Neon stiffened. Decepticon sigil or not, he didn't appreciate being placed in a defensive position. "Why should I?" he demanded.

"This is a party frequency! There are registered Decepticons present within your compound. You are compelled to respond."

Neon's decacores started to pound. He was being hailed, as a fellow Decepticon?

Around him in the gallery, he could feel the refugees' optics on him. His uncles' tone at the dinner table echoed in the back of his mind. Even confronted with what he'd thought he'd longed for, something made him uneasy.

He did not salute. But he did respond deferentially. "I am Decepticon," he said, and provided his ident. "Salutation, Neon."

"Manufactured during the Alliance, were you, Neon?"

"I am derived from Megatron's comrades Dead End and Scavenger, sir."

"A derivative," mused the messenger. "You're in luck, little Decepticon. Do you know whose regiment this is?"

"Whose?"

"Lord Havoc of the Youth Brigade."

Something in Neon's power components shrieked. His servos completely locked up.

The gears and internal clocks ticked painfully to life again. He breathed.

It didn't help. Things were still overheating.

"Lord Havoc," Neon repeated, feeling faint. "He's there?"

"Lord Havoc is hailing the Decepticon proprietors of this installation. Who's in charge down there?"

Neon could barely keep still. What could he do? He knew, cynically, that neither of his uncles would want to speak with Havoc, but volunteering himself as the head of the castle was just insane. After so long wanting to meet him, the great Prince, the manifestation of what it meant to be a soldier, it seemed so inconceivable. Just the idea that Havoc was in orbit around the asteroid right now made Neon want to hide under the foundation.

"In charge," Neon babbled. "Uh."

"You mentioned the names of your contributors," the messenger pressed. "Please present one or both of them."

A stinging sensation ran through Neon's adrenal ducts. "My parents are dead. Didn't the Party know this?"

"You operate this installation alone? Treatied with the League?"

"No! I didn't have any part in that!"

"Then, present us with the owner of this frequency, the Decepticon who registered this installation. He must be presented before Lord Havoc to answer for his crimes."

Neon felt his knees start to tremble. He struggled to lock them. "My uncles--"

"Speak Cybertronix, boy! In Havoc's army we do not tolerate humanisms."

"M-my-- The-- The teammates of my contributor-- They're preoccupied-- They've been--"

Fooled by an Autobot pacifist, is what Neon wanted to say, but couldn't get himself to speak the words. Whether or not it got close to the truth.

"--coerced, by LONAC," Neon insisted, shaking. "We raised defences completely out of self-defence."

Like shooting a mech who stepped in your flower bed? said a voice somehow like Dead End's, in the back of his mind. He stuffed it down where he couldn't hear it.

"I'll bring my un-- bring my contributor's teammates presently," he swore to the messenger. "Please hold the line."

"Negative, boy," the Decepticon answered sourly. "Lord Havoc will hail in one centicycle's time, at which point the owners of your compound must be present to speak. It would not be wise to frustrate the Prince further."

"Yes, sir," Neon whispered.

The vidscreen blipped off. The crowding stares of the refugees to his back started pressing in with earnest. He fled quickly into the corridor.

What was he to do? The old fembot's mate needed attention, but one of his uncles needed to speak before Havoc as well, and he had seen the number of the wounded. Waitstate was dealing with his uncles about keeping the compound secure as well, and Grapple was filling every role left by anyone else. How far could they really spread themselves, and would they want to? What if Hook or Scrapper suggested he, Neon, talk to Havoc? And just what could he say to him?

He found them together in Scrapper's workshop: his uncles, Grapple, Waitstate and Highwind, who bickered with Hook and slapped his hands away while she soldered her own leg linkages.

"Uncle, you know I adore you, but it doesn't have to be a job to last right now!" Highwind's voice sounded high-strung.

"If it's not to specifications, it's not worth starting in the first place," Hook objected.

"Do you have specifications?" Waitstate asked Highwind, intrigued.

"No," she replied without looking up, teasing wires into cable casing with one of Scrapper's cooking chopsticks. She smacked the back of Hook's hand as he reached for the energon scalpel. "Uncle! Please! I'd just like to walk!"

"Let her be, Hook," Scrapper ordered, though he went largely unheard. He was the first to notice Neon near the floor. Neon shrank again, remembering Scrapper's early threat about not entering his labs, but that memory seemed far from his uncle's mind at the moment. "Yes, nephew?"

Neon explained, haltingly, about the refugee and her wife. Grapple rose at once, quickly finishing the graft he was performing on a townsperson's torso. Neon didn't mention the hail from Havoc until the ex-Autobot had left the room.

His uncles, Highwind and Waitstate exchanged looks.

"I'll speak to him," Highwind said finally, and no-one spoke up in protest.

Except Neon. "He wants to speak to the traitors that are housing these people. He wants to talk to a Decepticon."

Highwind folded her shin plating closed and ran the fingers along the seams. Normally, her frame was so smooth you might mistake it for a single moulded sheet of metal, but the imperfect repairs had some panels jut out further than they should. Unbothered, she stood up neatly to her feet and started pulling on her kibble, which she clearly had sorely missed during her time spent in repair.

"I should be sufficient for him," she declared. "I'm as much Decepticon as I am anything else."

"No you're not!" Neon raged, growing frustrated again. "You're farther from a Decepticon than anyone else in this place!"

"You're forgetting, nephew, that Theta holds an entirely other significance with the young prince," Scrapper reminded, clearing his work table so that he might bring over the next casualty.

Neon stopped cold. He remembered now-- Havoc's private nurse. How could he have forgotten such a thing? He snapped his gaze back up at Highwind, who was enlisting Waitstate to help adjust her back wings.

"He was a cruel child," she said, almost absently. "But I believe he liked me, what little he could like anyone."

"Hook," Scrapper was saying to his rival. "Come, help me. And rush jobs, please." He was answered with resentful muttering.

Neon followed Highwind to the main gallery. Waitstate accompanied her as well-- it only made sense, Neon supposed, seeing as he and Highwind presently had more to do with the operations of the castle than anyone who actually lived here.

Havoc was nonplussed when he appeared on the vidscreen, large as life and optics immediately settling on Highwind, who bowed very formally to him.

"I see," were the first words the prince spoke. Neon delighted momentarily in how much clearer Havoc's voice transmitted over a direct connection as opposed to a recording, but there was little time to revel in it.

"I'm pleased to see you doing well, Havoc," said Highwind. She had bowed with all the reverence expected of a servant, but she spoke affectionately, as she did around Neon's uncles. "How's your father?"

Havoc's lower lip twitched. "My designer. Yes. He is in good spirits, of course. We've made great strides at the front."

"Any word from your mother?"

Neon could never pretend to know Highwind all that well, but even he could tell needling when he saw it. Havoc's optics narrowed.

"I have only one designer, and that is Megatron, our commander."

"Not mine, Havoc. Your father and I parted ways quite some time ago."

His every gesture was so fluid, too real. He might as well have been right there in the room. "And for better company, I suppose," waving his arm at the various figures behind Highwind, including Waitstate and Neon. "Megatron always warned your sentiment would be the end of you."

"And yet, here I stand. And you, your mantle is quite the one to bear these cycles, is it not? Can you really afford this quagmire?"

She asked him earnestly, with genuine concern, as though asking if she might help to carry something up a hill for him. Havoc detected the tone as well, and bared his teeth at her.

"The Megatron Youth are concerned with acquiring land and resources for the Party's war effort," he said, jutting out his smooth and pretty chin. "You and that pink thing that answered last time are charged with treason for assisting a guerilla force against an officially-sanctioned maneuver."

Neon winced at 'pink thing' and hardly heard the rest.

"The League are neutrals, as are the townspeople you attacked," Highwind replied. "Likewise the residents of this house."

Havoc smirked. Neon had seen the boy smirk a thousand times in the news spots, but never with a smile so twisted. "Nice try, Highwind, but I have done my research, even if my men haven't," he said. "You are not the owner of this castle-- the Constructicons Hook and Scrapper are. Don't you think those two would be interested in joining their old teammates against the Autobots?"

"No, I don't believe they do. Nor do they have much by way of teammates to return to, you might recall. These past few conflicts saw to that. I've long wondered, cousin, just what makes war so attractive to your father."

"Don't use those human terms," Havoc said, his lip curling. "This is your final warning. Release the townsfolk to us or we'll come in there to get them ourselves."

"You're welcome to try," Waitstate answered, arms folded over his chestplate.

"Star-rise, then," Havoc snapped. "You traitors had better make your peace with Primus. We'll blast your rock to dust before the cycle's through."

The vidscreen flashed off. Neon turned to Highwind and Waitstate, terrified. "Can he do that? Break the whole asteroid?"

"Not likely. His fleet's not equipped with that sort of planetbusting technology. We'll probably see a few bruises, though," Waitstate observed.

"Have you heard from the Freedom?" Highwind asked him.

"Plenty. My second's telling me to get the slag out of this place."

"Pay's not good enough for him, I take it."

"It was never about the money. But I'd prefer to use the Freedom sparingly. She's got firepower but she'll never outmaneuver Havoc's ships. Or get the jump on them, for that matter. Not unless they're properly distracted."

Highwind and Waitstate held each other's gaze for a long moment.

"We should go make the announcement," Highwind said at length. "Neon, you should recharge."

"I've got better fuel economy than any of you," Neon argued. "You guys go tell everyone and then power down for the night."

"As you stand guard, and sell us out, as we sleep?" Waitstate mused.

Highwind held Neon back when he drew up a fist. "Your spark is with your family, Neon," she said to him. "We trust you."

"You called Lord Havoc 'cousin'," Neon pointed out, a brief pain pinching in his chest compressors. "Does that make him family too?"

Highwind hadn't anticipated that blow. She looked away from him, staring at nothing. "My Uncle Megatron... though, he would have preferred me to call him 'father'," she said, her voice frailer than Neon had heard it before. "I never knew I had limits to my love until that moment."

"Because of what he was?" Neon asked, mouth hanging open.

"Because he was the one to kill my parents."

"Let's get going," Waitstate urged her. "There's things to be done."

"Yes," Highwind said, sounding relieved, in the sense that some great constrictive weight had been pulled off her chest or, at least, shoved aside. The two left without another word.

After a brief meeting the compound fell silent. Waitstate placed some of the more able-bodied townsmen to stand sentinel at the key positions Sunspot had mentioned earlier, and Neon was left to patrol until startcycle, when Highwind insisted on relieving him.

He walked the inner grounds with a lantern and pistol. He'd've preferred a sword, but had agreed with the full-frames that the noise from a gunshot would do a much better job of raising the alarm, so he kept lugging the thing along. The castle pathways felt a lot different now, not just with the dirty smells the refugees had brought but also in the way it looked now, too narrow and too dark and too exposed at every seam and window.

Transforming the wall had been a feat, especially considering it had never been designed for that purpose. Waitstate had actually hacked into its regulatory OS and forced it using his own transformation protocols, and it looked impressive, but it wouldn't hold that pose forever. Nor would the laser fence, or any of their tripwires or the landmines Blind had planted through the grounds. In fact, suffice to say, they would only survive this intact if Havoc's men never attacked at all.

Before long Neon found himself passing the same Zen garden he had walked by earlier with Sunspot, and went into the summer house on the opposite side of the rock path, where a low light still diffused through a gap in the doorway.

Grapple was just finishing up as Neon slid the door open and stepped in. The ailing lastgen had been laid out close to a window, a set of dusty travelling cloaks piled on top of her and another one balled up to prop up her head. She was listless, barely conscious. Her wife knelt close to her and held her hand between both of hers.

Grapple flipped the first aid kit shut and pinched the bridge of his olfactory sensor. Neon had to provide him balance when he started to stand.

"It did the trick?" he asked the ex-Autobot.

"I'm not sure," Grapple answered, frowning as he left the fembot's side. "It's radiation. Part of her internal systems have mutated their substructures. The best hope for her would be to make her a full transmetal, but..."

"Transmetal?"

"Yes, it's a mutation we've noticed developing in some of the unchecked tribes. Have you read your uncle's articles on it?"

Neon shook his head. Grapple sighed. He stooped to pick up the first aid kit, and sagged, almost like that weight taken off Highwind earlier had transposed onto him.

"I'm out of my depth," Grapple said miserably. "I'm an architect, not a doctor. Even Hook is more a surgeon than a general practitioner, and Highwind, she only knows the treatment of minibots and derivatives. I just wish... Oh... I wish he were here..."

That unknown person again. Neon knew better than to ask the mech's identity, not when Grapple seemed so close to fracture.

"C'mon," he said instead, and guided Grapple out into the garden.

Out on the steps, Grapple sat down and held his forehead.

"We were stationed together," he said to the boy. "On Earth, during the Great War. He was very supportive of me. I was something of a liability, after all, not being much of an asset in battle..."

"What happened to him?" Neon asked, out of a sensed obligation.

"Nothing. Nothing happened to him. We took different assignments during the last stages of the arms race, and when I was sent for to help your uncles evade Megatron, I did it even knowing I might not see him again. I don't even know if he survived the war. I'm sure he didn't, or he'd have come after me."

Neon scowled. "Why didn't you go looking yourself?"

Grapple didn't look around or answer. Neon frowned. He glanced back through the lit window of the summer house, where the aged couple spoke delicately to one another and continued to hold each other's hand.

Some part of him really wanted to understand, but the rest of him just didn't get it. He doubted that he ever would.

"You can't sleep in the tower tonight," Neon said, changing the subject back to something relevant. "Blind's keeping watch up there with the mother of all grenade launchers and a few of its children keeping him company. I can't believe you guys never told me you kept stuff like that in the basement."

Grapple's voice wasn't any less morose than before, but he seemed to be putting on some good humour for Neon's sake. "Well, it was that or the gardens to take your mind off things," he said sadly, "and we didn't think all those weapons would do you much good."

When Neon finished his rounds, he did a mirror route back through his self-made network of pathways and wound up walking through the main gallery again, which was now quiet, as all its occupants had powered down to save energy through the night. Nothing short of their internal clocks or a massive explosion would pull them out of stasis. It was primarily for this reason that when the vidscreen flipped on as Neon was checking the windows, it was only Neon who jumped.

He snapped his gaze around at the screen in time to catch the Decepticon placeholder image, before an all-too-familiar face appeared.

He jerked into a bow on instinct.

"Oh spare me," Havoc barked. "I haven't the patience for this pretence. Bring me Highwind."

"She's-- She's inconvenienced, My Lord."

Havoc arched an optic. At Neon's excuse or his deference, Neon couldn't tell. "Then bring me someone else. I won't speak to the housepet."

Neon gave a full-body wince. "My Lord-- I am a loyal Decepticon, like my fathers before me. I swear to you."

"A derivative, huh? They always find me," Havoc folded his arms, which he could hardly accomplish with the massive bracers affixed to each. "Well, speak, then, loyal Decepticon. Why did you evade the call for duty?"

"I couldn't help it, Lord Havoc. I was imprisoned here."

"What, you should have killed them, then. Your hosts stood in your way and they were traitors, besides."

Neon's eyes widened. "But they're--"

He clamped his mouth shut, remembering almost too late the objections Havoc had raised to those human loan words. He could only imagine how the prince would react to the word 'family'.

"...They were kind to me. In their way," he stammered. "Please, show them mercy. They are outmoded and tired. I would join you," he added earnestly, "if you would just let them be."

Havoc studied him incredulously for a long moment, then laughed.

"Peh! Your services, I imagine, would hardly be a credit to the force. I'd never allow such a creature in my army."

Neon felt his power components suddenly grow ice cold. He couldn't mean that. Not Havoc, the leader of the Megatron Youth. Not the noble prince of the young and unwanted, the minibots and minicons and derivatives of the universe. The champion of people just like him! That's what everyone said!

"My Lord..." he croaked.

"Enough! You disgust me. I hailed out of a last ounce of deference to Highwind, but if she is not here then I have no further words for any of you. May the blasts obliterate your chassis, because I don't envy someone having to entomb your unsightly corpse."

"I--!"

The vidscreen flashed off again, and the gallery was dark.

Neon felt a strange prickling on the back of his neck, sweated adrenal fluid condensing there in small droplets. He wiped it away. In the silence his audio receptors were ringing, searching out noise where there was none.

Even so, he detected something, just as easily as he could feel when the alkaline fields were ripe in the autumn. Something was out on the grounds.

He exited the gallery to the courtyard and scaled the Western wall, stopping short of the parapet and instead peering through a narrow casement halfway up the ladder. He squinted through the narrow slot across the tilled fields.

Three milicycles later, he had woken his uncle Hook from stasis.

The uncle and nephew climbed to the Western parapet and crouched low so to not be seen, Neon with his borrowed pistol and Hook with his old hunting rifle he used on turbofoxes in the spring time.

"You couldn't see it from the tower even with the infrared," Neon explained, whispering, though it was only a slight chance anyone could pick up the sound. "They're taking cover under the helium trees out past that hedge. The heat signatures would just show up as gas combustion..."

Hook squinted until he saw them. He frowned, and shifted down with his chestplate flat on the floorplating, lining the sight of the rifle up with his optic.

"Mostly basic infantry," he observed at length, murmuring in low volume as well. "Anything more and Highwind would have detected their impact. I'm sure they've walked klicks in utter radio silence. Ah," he whispered, pressing the sight harder against his eye, and readying his finger on the trigger. "And there they go."

He spoke no more. Neon scrambled down onto his chest like his uncle and took the next casement, peering out as, from across the dark grounds, the first scouts appeared from the edge of the helium forest and started advancing across the fields.

There was a steady thunk of the coil locking and the click of the hammer winding back and then Hook pulled the trigger. His expression did not budge, not with the crack of the gunshot or even the force of the recoil. The shot echoed through the barren midnight fields like a roll of thunder. Hook pulled the coil back again to reload.

He took down six before he settled back on his knees, industriously opening the chamber and shaking out the empty shells. As he reloaded, he said to Neon, "Go and raise the alarm. This is not to be a minor skirmish."

Neon rose carefully, struggling to pull his gaze from the bodies toppled on the fields, and the flocks more that advanced right past them. "So much for dawn," he remarked, disgusted. "What about honour, huh?"

Hook gave him a surprised, exasperated look. "It seems quite late to be telling you this, nephew, but we are named 'Decepticons' for a reason."

Neon ran along the modified parapet to Turret 11, bits of wall exploding into shrapnel as Havoc's men began to return fire below. No pistol of his to sound the alarm was going to do much good now.

Arriving at the turret, he ducked inside under a lifted panel cover and approached the controls Waitstate had shown to him earlier, the ones that activated the fire response system. There was a modbox wired to it with a simpler set of dials and a single button, which Neon pressed after the initial sequence.

All around the compound, the sprinkler system failed to engage, but the speakers did. A long, piercing wail filled the air, over the crackling of sporadic gunfire. Looking down from the wall, Neon saw each of his uncle's mismatched buildings light up inside and dark outlines appear in their doorways.

As he stood there, Neon realised he was overclocking. His adrenal cables pounded in his neck, audio receptors receiving nothing but the cry of the sirens and the sounds of battle; he felt nothing but the distant pound of mortars, the busted earth spraying up like surf as landmines were tripped, the flashing heat of the autoguns as they came online.

He was in a war. A real war, with all the trappings that could distinguish the genuine article. But it was still all wrong.

A rocket shrieked overhead, beyond the defence grid, but its smoke trail was arcing away from the castle. Blind had brought that massive RPG launcher online. Elsewhere, as though hearing it from another world, there were familiar voices, Waitstate's and Sunspot's and Highwind's, shouting orders to the refugees. A million footsteps.

"NEON!"

He looked over. Highwind was scaling the ladder attached to the turret he stood by, a pistol hooked to her waist.

"Good work," she told him. "Now go, help secure the tower."

He couldn't quite process her words. "What?"

"Don't argue!" she ordered, pulling him behind her moments before a stray bullet reached where his head had been. It sparked off Highwind's thigh, leaving a black mark streaked across her white shell.

Without batting an optic, Highwind unclipped the pistol from her hip and brought it up level with her chest. She returned fire, the rapid automatic shots flashing and lighting up her ghostly, impassive face.

Highwind exhausted her clip before she looked around, reloading as she spoke as Hook had done. "Go, Neon!" she shouted to the boy, who had remained frozen in place.

Neon stammered a protest. "I can fight here!"

Highwind bent down and gripped Neon by the chestplate. "Neon, Blind needs ammo from the basement. The top of the tower is outside the defence grid-- if we lose our position there, they'll have a free pass into the heart of the castle!"

"But that's the plan, isn't it?" Neon retorted.

She cast him away. He stumbled and hooked an arm at the top of the turret ladder, and throwing one last scowl in her direction began to climb down. He took to the side of the rail to avoid being crushed by a pair of refugees sporting rifles climbing their way up.

He ducked feet and flapping cloaks as he zigzagged his way through the compound. He was midway to the sculpture garden when the first quadrant of the defence grid gave out, as mortars took out the projection posts out by the calcium fields. The blossoming fireworks displays of deflected missle fire immediately ceased in the black patch of the sky that opened up overhead-- and in moments the aerial fire swooped in to replace it. Neon danced across the flagged pathways that erupted into small showers of shrapnel with every burst of laser fire; the townsfolk around him screamed and scrambled for cover.

"Return fire!" he shouted furiously at them. "You cowards-- don't just whine about it--"

Someone's foot connected with his back and he spun, falling to the ground on hands and knees. Whoever had knocked him aside kept running. Pain sensors in his back struts burned, but not half so much as when a spray of shrapnel peppered his right shoulder.

He cried out, clutching his arm and rolling into the dead plasteel grass. Another quadrant of the defence grid flickered and vanished overhead and he heard the shouts from the western wall increase and grow more desperate. Lights flashed from the other side of the wall and lit the figures along the parapets fleeting silhouette.

Neon pulled himself back onto his knees, taking cover by a copper statue until he could hunt out a clear path to the central courtyard. Once he'd mapped it, he sprang into a run, hurtling at breakneck across the bullet-scored pathway and taking two nicks to the kibble before he collided bodily with the wall of the base of the tower.

He palmed for the entry keypad and missed the access combination twice becausehis fingers were shaking. On the third attempt the door slid open, and he burst through into the stairwell, panting and staggering, briefly disoriented about what he was supposed to do here. Then he heard Blind bellowing a curse from above and remembered Highwind's orders.

Two steps down the flight of stairs leading to the basement, Neon flashed on the body he'd seen fall in the flower patch yesterday, the one he'd shot. Had it been recovered? Had it really expired? How many were dying right now?

Something hit and the whole tower rocked, dust and shards of panelling cascading down from above. Neon's feet were urged into motion again.

Don't think about it. Not your war. Your hand is forced here. If only Havoc could see his spark was in the right place--

Another mortar hit the tower and he lost his footing on the step. He stumbled to the base of the cellar, clinging to the wall. He got the access combo on the armoury right on the first go by some weird stroke of luck and paced in, but the main lights seemed to be blown. He started digging around for Blind's ammo under the glow of the emergency lights.

"Damn it--"

Everything looked the same in the dark. If they'd just shown him down here earlier, if he'd been familiarised with the room's contents, he wouldn't waste so much time. 'Thought it'd be a bad influence', hell. As far as he could tell, it'd sure to be their advantage right now.

A sick thought spread through the back of his mind. Where was Grapple in all of this? That big pile of fluff had better not be fighting. What would his uncles do if he were injured? If he caused that much chaos, he really was as stupid as he looked--

By the blue LED emergency lights, Neon located the crate with the RPGs. He flexed his arms and started pulling one out of the box, and nearly collapsed under the weight. How many trips did Blind expect him to make?

"Kid!" Blind's roar echoed down the stairwell. "You down there or what?!"

"I'm coming!" Neon yelled back in retort. "Don't get your skidplate in a twist!"

He tucked the first RPG under his arm and dug into the box for a second. Thank Primus he had four-wheel drive.

Even in truck mode, the staircase was no picnic. His undercarriage banged against the steps, scraping and contorting, aching terribly, as the cargo in his truckbed rolled and hopped and thunked against his tailgate. A wheel hooked on a gap in the stairs where part of the wall had been blown out and he shifted gears frantically, the oppressive weight threatening to unbalance him at any second. His side sensors reported a rust-red sky over the embattled western wall.

"That's it?" Blind rumbled, when Neon at last climbed the final flight to Grapple's bedroom at the head of the tower. He held his transformation long enough for Blind to scoop the grenades out of his truckbed and then reverted into a limp heap on the floor. "We might as well chuck scattershot at 'em. Get back down there. No, slag it, just help me load."

Blind tipped the launcher he held on its edge to arm it. It was four times the size of the one Scrapper had wielded previously, but only came up to Blind's waist. Neon could probably have crawled inside it and been among the scattershot Blind derisively suggested they employ.

Neon sought out the other launchers stacked beside the window and rolled the fresh rounds over to them. His joints ached from overtaxation but he stretched them anyway, reaching up on the balls of his feet treads to stick one of the rocket grenades in its canister. Only three dozen of the damned things to go.

"Bandit at twelve o'cycle," Blind thundered, swinging the mother of all launchers onto his shoulder like he was handling a fishing pole. "Kiss the ground if you don't want your face torn off."

Neon shot his gaze up at the window. A Decepticon Seeker-class was hurtling straight toward them, all guns forward. Panic tore through him; he hit the deck.

When Blind pulled the trigger, black smoke ripped through the room, and a shriek sounded as the rocket tore through the open window. Moments later was a second crack of thunder, and metal melting as it shattered. Neon climbed back up, topical sensors wincing from the airblasting they had just undergone; he stepped back when Blind reached for one of the smaller launchers.

"Get me reloaded. Hurry," Blind ordered.

"I can't reach that one," Neon objected, pointing to the massive launcher.

"Then fill up the small ones. Just get on it. Shoulda blasted these slagheads before they even left the forest..."

Oppressive smoke was still draining out of the room. Neon resumed rolling the grenade rockets across the floor to their canisters. Blind ate them up at twice the rate at which the boy could load them, and the barrels clanged to the floor dull red and steaming. Neon began to see just how pitifully small a load he had carried up the steps in the first place.

Beneath their window, the blue lines of the defence grid were flickering out, one at a time or in droves. Whole sections of the air above the compound were being exposed, and with it, more aerial fire was coming in. Even Blind's aim and the anticipatory way in which he read exhaust trails couldn't get snag more than a handful out of the massive swarm that was descending upon the castle.

Neon eyed the dwindling pile of grenades. He couldn't even keep count of how many Blind had fired already, but he'd have to get back down before Blind ran out completely. Even as-is, the guy would be empty-handed before Neon could return with another load.

"Back in a refresh," he told Blind as he darted past, but Blind clapped his massive hand on his shoulder, or rather, a massive pinky.

"Stay and load."

"You need more ammo!"

"This'll do. Just--" Blind hesitated, darting his infrared gaze up toward he ceiling again.

Blind released his grip on the launcher. It fell from his shoulder as though in slow motion; Neon opened his mouth to yell but Blind had scooped him up in his hands before he'd made a single sound.

"No time," Blind muttered, barely reaching the head of the stairs before the ceiling exploded above them. The titan hit the stairwell headfirst and cascaded down the steps eight or twelve at a time; Neon, squeezed against his chestplate, saw the fire lash against the walls and swell behind them. The roar filled everything. There was no way they could outpace it.

Hitting the sixth landing, Blind slammed his shoulder against the wall that had been perforated from an earlier assault. The plating gave way against him and then the pair of them were sailing free, pitfalling through the air with the firebomb guttering at their backs.

The ground rushed up. Blind swung his weight against the wind until his back faced it and he held Neon shielded in his arms. Blind's massive body thundered as it hit, shaking the ground more than it rattled him back, dust and debris and wire flying up in a massive cloud around him. Neon, even safeguarded from a direct impact, thudded violently against Blind's chest and offlined his topical sensors, audio receptors ringing as parts of his system struggled to reboot.

"All right?" Blind grunted, when Neon managed to pull himself onto his knees.

Neon coughed. Everything hurt. "You?"

"Somethin' feels loose."

The firebomb that had shattered the top of the tower had reached ground level, fire and smoke gushing from the open doorway. Neon leapt to his feet. Blind hooked him back with a finger when he started to sprint for the door.

"Let go! The armoury!" Neon cried. "I didn't close the door!"

"You're not reaching that door," Blind rumbled.

And there was no direct access to the basement door locks from the exterior control pad. Neon didn't care. He broke out of Blind's grip and bolted for the front doorway, opening the external panel and snapping his hand back with a shout when it sparked furiously under his fingers. He shook the sting out of his fingertips and tried again.

"Forget it, kid, we gotta run--"

"Almost!"

Per their code of chivalry, Hook and Scrapper had let Grapple keep the access combination to his tower private. Neon had never learnt it, but he hoped against hope that the master key would work as well.

"--Yes!--"

The exterior doors clamped shut, sealing away the fires that now had nowhere to go but the gap in the 6th floor landing and down into the basement. They were probably already heading down. He could hope for the sprinkler system to kick in, but given that Waitstate had deliberately tampered with their fire systems to work his little building mods, it seemed unlikely.

Blind snagged Neon by his back kibble and hauled him across the courtyard with manic speed. They barely got ten metres before the ground bulged beneath them, swelling and cracking, and at ground zero, Grapple's already busted tower shuddered in its half-melted foundation and began to fall.

The League warrior dragged Neon to cover along with a herd of scrambling refugees, behind the corpse of the greater guest house. Grapple's tower cascaded down in a torrent of suspension and wire and plating, shrapnel flying in every direction, shattering glass and steel and the already battered compound walls.

Neon looked up. A few stripes of the defence grid were still holding, but the cover they could offer now was pitiful. Even as he watched, the last of their lights went out.

Without the grid to obscure his vision, Neon saw the sky around the horizons was a thick, violent red, flashing as though with lightning as gunfire and shelling continued beyond the walls. Above them, in the saturated black, Havoc's fleet were slowly descending. A dozen mid-class battleships and three times as many minicruisers, an entire regiment bearing down upon their small and, now, defenceless castle.

Blind's commlink buzzed. He tapped it. "Say again, Sunspot."

"The Western wall's like totally broke and I didn't do it!" Sunspot's voice was distant and tinny over the line. "You guys better get ready over there."

Blind released his hold on Neon and produced an oxidising rifle from a back compartment. Neon instinctively unhooked Waitstate's pistol from his shoulder. The sounds coming from the western perimeter were reaching them a great deal more in the wake of the tower's collapse. A ground force was rushing in.

At a loss, he looked to Blind for guidance. But Blind was hardly interested in giving him orders.

"We're wide open," Blind said, still studying the heavens. "Pretty soon all eyes are gonna be on us."

In the cacaphony of the courtyard beyond their hiding place, there was a familiar yelp. Neon straightened in terror and bolted back the way they had come.

The courtyard was ruined. Grapple's tower had been reduced to rubble, with bits of it strewn everywhere, lodged in adjacent buildings. Neon saw Scrapper being steadily cornered by an infantryman, nearly twice his height and definitely better armed than the elderly 'bot.

The conflicts that Neon had suffered before fell away. The only thing his eyes could see was his uncle and an assailant.

He barrelled toward them, adrenal fluid pumping through his circuits. Nothing mattered now. There was only one thing he had to do. He didn't care if he was small and useless and that it was running right into death. It was the only option ahead of him.

But a pair of long, streamlined legs got there first. Neon dug his heels into the blackened ground and looked up to see Highwind there, a sword fashioned from the same metal as her kibble in her hands, flashing through the air as though it was made of light.

The Decepticon fell, although not all at once. When he was reached the ground Highwind settled it by running her sword through his chestplate, just off-centre, to miss his spark but ensure he wasn't doing anything else any time soon. She crossed the distance to Scrapper and gripped his shoulder. Part of his left forearm was missing.

"Are you all right, Uncle?" she gasped. He coughed a reply and she nodded. She looked over her shoulder to Neon. "It's thanks to you," she told him, still seeming a little dizzy. Her armour was pockmarked by no few bullet dents and blackened from contact with fire. "If I hadn't seen you running, I'd never have noticed in time."

She bent and looped him into a fierce, trembling hug, and then she sprinted off again. "Take him to safety!" she ordered just before she vanished.

"Don't listen to that fembot; I'm fine," Scrapper objected, even as Neon dutifully grabbed his uncle by the wrist and began hauling him toward the corridor that would lead to his workshop. "I need to find Grapple, boy. Let me be."

"I'll find him. You need to repair yourself."

"Don't talk down to me, child!" Scrapper roared, furious and indignant. He pulled his arm out of Neon's grasp, as Neon was opening the door to the inner corridor. "I have survived worse battles than this!"

"I don't care!" Neon said desperately. He pushed his uncle back towards the open doorway. "I've already lost the orchards; I'm not losing your senile old skidplate too! Get in there, you old man!"

As he managed to urge Scrapper's second foot through the doorway, there was a sound like a balloon pop. A moment's later, something massive tore through the plating of his right arm, and he was forced back, spraying fluids and sparks from a massive wound in his shoulder.

He shouted, but the sound seemed dead. As he hit the wall and slumped to the ground, he saw his uncle's trembling and battered hands reach for him. With his good hand, he hoisted up the pistol Waitstate had lent him, and aimed it directly at Scrapper's chest.

"Get going, you old lastgen," Neon growled. "Don't make me tell you again."

Scrapper froze, but then Neon saw his feet retreat again through the doorway. He vanished. Neon dropped the gun.

He pulled himself up onto his knees with one arm. He clenched his jaw. The pain in his right shoulder was unbelievable. Back on Cybertron he'd never so much as sprained a gear while playing, and even in their rougher moments his uncles had never caused him injury. For some reason, it had escaped him that so many people got hurt in battles.

The bullet seemed to have been a stray one, as no-one fired a follow-up. Neon hauled up onto his feet and lifted the gun, though one-handed it was almost impossible to carry. He tried to carry the butt of the pistol in his right arm and use his left to support the barrel, as he staggered through the corridor doorway after his uncle.

But Scrapper was nowhere to be found. Neon looked down to either side of the corridor. He could have gone either way, to the workshop or to his study. Neon hoped he had enough sense not to worry about his books right now and started off for the workshop in hopes of catching up with him, but not before keying the corridor door shut and locking it with his good hand.

Neon saw light coming from the workshop and sped up, but the silhouette he saw appear in the doorway was not his uncle's. He flattened against the hallway wall immediately.

A lone soldier emerged, battered but steady. Neon could see he'd thrashed the contents of the workshop just moments ago, but had apparently tired of his work. He was a lithe thing, very young, short for his production line but a great deal taller than Neon.

The derivative realised almost too late that he had seen this soldier before. This was the Seeker he had gunned down yestercycle. Repaired, although not completely. He dragged loose linkage wires from his ankles as he walked.

Neon tried to burrow farther into the shadows of the corridor, but there were distinct disadvantages to attempting subterfuge with a bright pink paint job. The Seeker saw him and paused, but fortunately, also saw the gun Neon directed at him.

They held this pose for what seemed like cycles, Neon pointing the pistol at the Seeker and the Seeker's shoulder-mounted rifled aimed right back at him.

He knew what he had to do, but he couldn't get his finger to budge. Before at the wall, it had been a reflex, something half-unthought until it had already been done. It was different being so close. He'd seen Highwind splashed with other 'bots' coolant and how unflinchingly she had used that sword, and how much practise must that have taken?

The Seeker's commlink buzzed. He ignored it. It hissed again, an irate, young-sounding voice coming across the line.

"Kite! Your report!" It was Havoc, for certain.

Without taking his optics off Neon, the Seeker cautiously tapped the commlink key on his shoulder.

"Run into a bit of fire, Lord," said Kite, glaring straight at the derivative as he spoke. "Be with you in a refresh."

He had blue-green optics that had a bit of a watery look to them. He didn't really look like he belonged on a battlefield.

"You're from Praxus, aren't you?"

Neon jolted. His finger, so long immobile, nearly squeezed the pistol trigger against his wishes. He calmed himself quickly. "I don't know you," he told the Seeker savagely.

"No, I just saw you once. You can't say you're hard to remember. Wasn't your dad a professor?"

"Both my dads," Neon said, jaw clenched. What was this boy driving at?

"What did they teach?"

"Cybertronian History and Alien Archaeology."

"That's awesome," Kite sighed. "I wish I coulda gone to school."

Neon's mouth twitched. He didn't answer. Kite shrugged. The standoff resumed.

Eventually, Kite seemed to develop a tic in his hands and lowered his shoulder cannons.

"Listen, I--"

That was the last Kite spoke to him. A bang resounded through the hall and Kite's chestplate ruptured with orange flame. He fell.

Neon swung his head around to the end of the corridor, expecting to see Scrapper, but no-- it was a much different figure, smaller and more angular, who retracted his smoking cannon to its place among his backstruts and strode imperiously forward, into the range of the light coming from the workshop.

For one moment, it seemed like a hallucination, a malfunction with Neon's optics. It was Havoc, and yet, it wasn't at all like he had appeared on the vidscreen or in Neon's fantasies. His outline, of course, was intact, but as he approached it became apparent that even though his body towered over Neon's, the base frame was barely larger than his.

Everything was too large on him, and when he moved it was with a deliberate but plodding grace, threatening enormous power, but mostly in the effort of concentration. He stopped beside his fallen subordinate without so much as a glance in Neon's direction, and summarily crushed Kite's hand under his heel.

Neon winced and bit his lip, wishing he could vanish through the wall. The Decepticon prince was nothing at all like his glamourous camera angles. He spoke viciously, callously, referring to things Neon didn't understand but blaming Kite for all of it.

Tiring of his verbal thrashing, Havoc finally deigned to let Neon register on his radar. He slid his gaze over to the derivative, tilting his nose up so that he glared down at him further than was really called for. Neon tried not to shake.

"Someone was ready for us at the western advance," Havoc sniffed. "You cretin. So you sold us out after all."

Neon could barely make sense of the words. He could only stare up at him.

That was fine by Havoc. He was clearly the sort who disdained listening to other people talk. "So much for your presumed worth, wouldn't you say? What was that about being a 'loyal Decepticon'?"

He reached up and extracted one of the rotor blades fixed to his kibble. Neon had memorised his tech specs-- his altmode was a massive assault helicopter, and each of the helicopter blades formed a sword, or he could combine them into one massive sword. Of course, the corridor was too narrow for that...

Havoc tapped the flat of his sword against Neon's cheek, bent close so that Neon could see clearly into his perfect, smooth face. That face he'd dreamt so often of smiling in approval or something else, because he was just pathetic enough that something like that sounded worthy. "I'm sick of this ball of dust," Havoc sighed, "and I'm sick of your ignoble people."

Neon couldn't look at his eyes any longer. He switched his optics off and squeezed the trigger of the gun.

The bang that thundered through the hallway seemed to echo, as though from farther off. There was a quick whip of air, and a massive crash that seemed to last forever.

Neon switched his optics on again, and then his mouth fell open. The prince laid crumpled on top of his whining subordinate, a massive gash in the side of his chest, nowhere that Neon could have shot him. He swung his head back toward the end of the hallway.

Scrapper lowered the concussion rifle and immediately rushed toward him. "My boy--!" he said hurriedly, and got no further before he swept Neon up into his arms. Neon squeezed back on an automatic reflex.

Cold terror was pouring out of him now, no real comprehension. "But I shot him," he protested, optics flooding. "I pulled the trigger, I shot Lord Havoc..!"

Scrapper settled his nephew down onto the floor. The two of them peered at Havoc, who was stunned more than wounded, and wouldn't stay that way for long. Neon examined the charge metre on his pistol for the first time.

"...That double-crossing Neutral! He didn't trust me!" Neon raged, chucking the pistol to the floor. "It didn't have any more juice than that one shot in the first place!"

"With the way you run around, it may have simply been to prevent anything blowing up," Scrapper hypothesised, weakly amused. "I think we're through here. I'll see to these two. Go out and help the others."

Neon stomped on the floor. "Go here, haul that! Is it beyond everyone that maybe I can actually participate in something?"

Scrapper considered this evenly. "All right," he told his nephew patiently. "Please go outside and end the battle for us."

Coolant boiled in Neon's cabling. "I will!" he bellowed, and stormed off, leaving his uncle alone with the wounded prince and his companion.

Neon tore open the doorway he had entered through earlier. His shoulder still ached, but the nanites were alread