===
Of course, there was no possible way Wheeljack was going to keep up with a jet. His signal with the holomatter threatened to drop out at any moment. The only way he was going to be able to stick with it was if he started to project remotely, but how to do that without a hiccup was going to be a feat in itself.Wheeljack opened the comm lines and hailed Ark-32. He had Hot Rod on the line in an instant.
"Kid, drop whatever you're doing and prepare for incoming data transfer."
"Er! Roger, Wheeljack," said Hot Rod, followed by some scrambling in the background. "Okay! Gate's open."
Wheeljack selected the entire Stark-avatar directory and slingshot it over the wireless. His processors started clipping with the slowdown, but he was able to keep a handle on his wheels. When the transfer approached 75%, Wheeljack gruffed, "Okay, I want you to mount that in Station Theta at the following co-ordinates on my mark. You're gonna have to be exact on this one, kid. And then I need you to bounce me up."
"Is this battle protocol?" Hot Rod asked, alarmed.
"You can signal Prowl when you like but take care of this first." Wheeljack detected Thundercracker slipping almost outside of his avatar's maximum range. He sped up, distantly aware of Pepper squawking in her seat. The data transfer was nearly to 95%. "Okay? I'm sending the co-ordinates and estimated trajectory. Don't mess this up!"
He heard Hot Rod's footsteps racing through the ship's corridor. "Vector Sigma, Wheeljack, what're you tailing?"
The signal to the avatar was waning fast. Another two, three microcycles at most. "You got Hardhead ready to bounce me or not?" Wheeljack demanded.
"He's on it, he's on it!"
"Right. Three... two..."
The transfer hit 100%. Wheeljack heard Hot Rod slamming the surface of a console; his own avatar projection cut out in the same instant.
He could hear Hot Rod's fans spinning. "Avatar is seated with reasonable-given protocol. Checking visual... Oh, scrap!"
"That's normal," Wheeljack told him quickly, before the kid got the bright idea to touch the navigation controls. "Just engage the A-Life, and tell Hardhead--"
They were ahead of him on that one. The hailing from the orbital bounce arrived in his relay queue; he quickly approved it, then almost forgot to brace himself.
It came as a tug at first, and then very quickly the force was tearing him off the road with his wheels still in motion. It squeezed and compressed him as though sucking his body through the gap in an electron cloud. Not exactly pain, but a hell of a long way from pleasant.
Still, it was over in a microcycle, with only minor nausea. And now he could vent a huge sigh of relief, thinking the worst was over, for a few refreshes at least.
Wheeljack readjusted his brakes, observing the interior of the Ark-32 with his external cameras. Immediate crisis averted, he could reallocate some of his resources and get Pepper up to speed before she died of fright.
...Oh wait.
===
Ratchet had summarily destroyed Stark's phone once he noticed the transmission being sent. The human's insistence that he wasn't signalling for help was not particularly impressive.The medic had then dismissed his holomatter and transformed, the better to address Stark face to face. Stark had rolled onto the grass and fumbled to tug the remains of his clothes back on. He may have thought about escaping, but being unarmed, armourless and not even in possession of a good pair of shoes, he had elected finally to remain where he was.
Now, with the phone eliminated, Ratchet found he finally had Stark's attention.
"Just tell me one thing," Ratchet said. "Were you doing it on behalf of the Avengers?"
"No," said Stark.
Ratchet nodded. If that was true --if he was willing to believe that, and it did sound more plausible than pretty much anything else Stark had said tonight-- then maybe this could all still be resolved quietly. The last thing the Autobots needed was two fronts on this ball of dirt.
"What you did," Ratchet said slowly, "was wrong. I don't mean impolitic. I mean this was immoral and beneath you as a member of your species."
"I've... got nothing witty for that," Stark admitted.
"Good, because--"
All of a sudden, Ratchet's systems locked. His raster feed went dead; his self-preservation systems threw up warnings that an emergency override was taking place.
A virus? But when did Stark--
The tug came and Ratchet found himself ripped through foldspace, dragged through a powerful current of compressed data. He reemerged in a heap on some unknown metal floor, his cables jittery and twitching.
The warning flags vanished from his sensor network; in the same moment, his raster view returned. Ratchet looked up to see a familiar ceiling, and a familiar face as well.
Wheeljack extended a hand. Ratchet, angrily, accepted it.
"That was out-protocol," he said. "You can't just hijack my systems like that. You could have hailed me--"
"You'd shut your comm line off," Wheeljack snapped back. "We don't have time to argue. We got a problem."
The inventor pointed to the crumpled, lifeless form of what appeared to be a human female, curled on the floor by their feet. An optical scan quickly ID'd her.
Ratchet emitted a frantic noise and knelt beside Pepper to scoop her up. She was limp like she was made of cloth. "For Primus's sake, Wheeljack," he exclaimed, "how big do the letters on a memo need to be for you to see it?! How long has she been like this?"
"Less than a millicycle," Wheeljack said defensively. "Argue later; just go and fix her!"
Ratchet wanted to object that even that amount of time could do enough damage, but Wheeljack was right-- he had better save his arguments for later. He cupped Pepper safely in his hands and moved with all haste down the corridor.
The Ark-32 medbay wasn't quite as well-furnished as his space on Ark-19, but it would have to do the job. Entering, Ratchet switched on the bioreaders and converted their scan settings to the custom targeters he and Wheeljack had thrown together, vaguely anticipating they would to take on more human patients someday even if they didn't want to. He slid Pepper's limp, fragile little body onto his operating table, cued on his lights, and switched out his hand servos for a pair of defibrillating pins.
It wasn't until the bioreaders measured the first leap in Pepper's heartline that Ratchet reflected that this was going to be very awkward when she woke up. If she woke up.
===
She did. And it was awkward.Water being a good supplementary coolant in their engines, the Autobots had taken to keeping reservoirs of the stuff on the orbital. It took a while to locate a thimble small enough for Pepper to hold, but once Ratchet did, he went straightaway to get her something to drink.
She was shivering a little. Ratchet thought about extracting his stretcher from his leg compartment to offer its sheet to her, but remembered what sort of use it had seen tonight and thought better of it. He settled for sealing the medbay doors and adjusting the vents to warm the air up a little.
Of course, that then left him trapped in a room with her.
They said nothing for several millicycles. Saline had leaked out of her optics upon her resuscitation, and dripped intermittently after that. Maybe she would need more liquid replenishment than Ratchet had anticipated.
Finally, the silence getting to him, he settled on a by-the-books debriefing. "Sorry, Wheeljack is an idiot. He shouldn't have done that while you were with him."
Okay, not quite textbook. But with the crisis apparently averted, his anger was seeping back in.
"How do you feel?" he carried on, in a vain effort to curb it.
"Fine, I guess," Pepper said hoarsely. "I don't want to know where this water's been, but..."
"It's pure. We filter it."
"Oh. That's it." She took another sip. "I was having trouble placing it."
Some sort of coping mechanism, analogous with some forms of Cybertronian PTS. Well, he was no shrink. And he'd rather not be guilty of projection or anything of the sort.
What would he do if it were Verity or Jimmy on his medical bed? He'd get the one of them that wasn't, of course. Humans would always understand each other better than a Transformer could hope to even puzzle one out.
Pepper fell silent once more, staring at her cup. She started crying again.
Primus. He wasn't meant for this. And if she had been with Wheeljack tonight, that meant there was probably more to her saline leakage than Ratchet was going to be able to fix. She needed someone on her own level. A friend. Something. She needed to not be around machines for a while. Actually, more to the point, she needed to not be around him for a while, before he could no longer trust himself to be civil with her.
"...We'll get Tony up here, okay?" he said finally.
She nodded and hiccuped, still shivering. She seemed to hate herself for how she was acting, but had no idea how to stop.
Geez, if that didn't feel like everything lately.
===
They came down to collect Stark in the Quinjet when he was about five miles from his house. They didn't have any spare clothes for him, but they did have his armour.He suited up while Cage took the Quinjet above cloud level. It was a wonder how he managed to pilot it, especially with copilot Wolverine not doing anything much but snarl at the controls.
"You're looking peppy, Logan," Stark told him, tugging on his boots.
"Never thanked you before," Wolverine muttered. "So, thanks."
"Huh?"
"You sure gettin' around tonight," Cage remarked, glancing back over his shoulder. "How'd you pop back over here after the merry escapade wit' Gort?"
Gort? That was harsh. Luke practically didn't even know Ratchet. "Long story," Stark answered. "So what's the nightcap?"
"The Autobots need ya at their space station. Apparently they got Pepper up there and she in bad shape. Need someone to talk to."
Stark stopped screwing his chestplate into place with a portable drill and looked up, alarmed. "Hostage situation?"
"Naw, man!" Cage laughed. "Autobots an' Avengers are friends, remember? You should know, you bein' half Autobot yerself."
That's probably not what you're going to think by the time we get there, Stark thought privately.
He had guessed, after Ratchet had vanished on him, that she had been orbital-bounced to somewhere a lot closer to her companions. He couldn't imagine Ratchet keeping a certain little factoid to herself, now that she knew it. There were certain secrets she just couldn't be expected to keep, and who could blame her?
But Pepper might actually be hurt, too. Stark couldn't overlook that possibility either. And Ratchet wouldn't conscionably put an innocent life in danger, even if she and Pepper did seem to bristle and hiss at the mere mention of one another.
"Oh, hey," Cage spoke up again, apparently uncomfortable with the abrupt silence. He shifted in his seat and dug some crumpled sheets of paper out of his back pocket, twisting around to offer them to Stark. "Sorry, man. I destroyed the whatsit like you said, but I jus' couldn't tear up your blueprints. Really think it's best you hold onto this one. Jus' my opinion."
Stark accepted the papers, though puzzled. He unfolded them and examined their contents. It was a very methodical set of diagrams, showing some kind of metallic half-life radiation acceleration neutralisation blah blah blah ray gun, except the pictures had been laid out so conscientiously that they looked like some handy-kit instruction manual. Actually, they looked exactly like a printed instruction manual, except everything was rendered in pencil.
"Who gave you these?"
"What, that Decepticreep bop you on the head out there? You did!"
What 'Decepticreep'? "I didn't do this."
"Sure you did, man! I watched you do it!"
Stark climbed to the front of the cockpit and showed him the drawings for a second look. "And what kind of human do you know," he said, "can freehand a perfect circle?"
Cage looked from the blueprints to him, confused. "But Cap said you was a robot anyway."
"Not enough of one to count, apparently."
===
It was all made abundantly clear as soon as he reached the Autobots' space station. One look at Pepper's pallid complexion told him what had happened: she had been orbital-bounced, something the Avengers knew quite well humans --even superhumans-- were not supposed to attempt. It was probably a small miracle that she was still alive. And no small wonder at all whom she had been with when it had happened.In Ratchet's medical bay, Stark engaged his suit's thrusters to fly up to her. He settled next to her on the examination bed, hooking his legs over the edge as she did hers, and offered her the blanket that Cage and Wolverine had brought her. She took it, looking frail as she wrapped it over her shoulders.
She wouldn't look at him. He lifted his helmet, but it didn't seem to help.
"Come on," he said eventually. "It's not so scary after the first time."
"What? It wasn't scary," she said absently. "It was actually... Oh. You mean dying." She finally graced him with a glance, a little sunken and withdrawn.
"Uh, yeah. No bright lights to report? What did you think I was talking about?"
She looked at him meaningfully, or what would be meaningful if he could just puzzle her out.
It had occurred to Stark that she must have been with Wheeljack tonight. But more than trauma over her recent death and resuscitation, there was a faint patina of guilt to her expression. Well, not guilt exactly. Awkwardness.
"Aha," he said quietly.
She turned away again, fidgeting with a corner of the blanket.
Stark stared hard at his knees. You would think that having coped with Pepper seeing other people before, he could be better prepared for this. Even if a giant alien robot was stretching the imagination, and, actually, had a way of making it all feel worse.
Well, at least he could do what he had to do without remorse now.
"That's not all," Pepper said abruptly. "I..."
Stark decided he couldn't handle hearing it right now. He leapt off the edge of the table and engaged his boosters again, hovering a few feet below her and looking up. "Luke and Logan are still docked with the Quinjet," he said. "They'll take you back to LA to get you checked into a hospital."
"I feel fine," she mumbled.
"Would you let me get away with that?"
To his surprise, she rolled her eyes animatedly. "Yes, because you'd say you've got a gigantic trade secret stuck in your chest."
"Oh. Right. Well, let's say for a minute that you don't."
"No. Thank god. That thing is gross."
"And here I thought it had grown on you. You're going to the hospital, Miss Potts," he told her. He lifted up a little and gestured a request for permission before scooping her into his arms.
He half expected resistance, but she didn't offer any. She merely sighed, and allowed herself to be picked up. Well, she was very tired, after all.
Even so, he didn't quite anticipate her resting her head against his shoulder plating and closing her eyes. She was asleep before they left the medbay. It was such a non-event that it almost lacked closure.
Making his way to the docking bay with her, Stark glanced down and was suddenly struck by how serene she looked, how neutral and shut-off she seemed. For a second he panicked, but his HUD confirmed she was breathing normally. It was like she had fallen into an immediate deep sleep, like a child.
A cold pocket of clarity hit Stark at that moment. God, what the hell did they think they were doing? They were a pair of kids running around with grownups, poised to be trod underfoot at any second. They didn't belong here. In more ways than one, this world just wasn't built to their scale.
He had entered into this mess willingly, even if he couldn't have anticipated most of the fallout. Pepper, though-- she was innocent. She had only been trying to help him, which was all she had ever done. He kept failing to notice it in time to make a difference. How many more chances was he going to get?
As Stark reached the outer airlock, a familiar voice descended from above.
"When you're done with that, I hope you don't think you're going anywhere," said Ratchet, who had apparently been waiting for him in the corridor.
Hidden behind his helmet again, Stark felt at liberty to cringe. "Hadn't crossed my mind," he answered.
===
"Megatron's none too pleased with you," Thundercracker warned Wheeljack's Stark avatar, as they flew over the California-Oregon border. "You're 0.7 decacycles late on delivery this time.""You mean a week?" Wheeljack answered sarcastically.
"I don't care about your stupid human time units," the Seeker snarled back, his ersatz cockpit lighting up furiously. "You should know how to count by now, you stupid monkey."
"Yeah, I'm a stupid monkey," Wheeljack had the avatar retort. "So stupid, your leader finds me invaluable to his war effort."
Thundercracker growled. "This ain't a war, it's a slaggin' arms race."
Which said a lot about just how finessed the Decepticon's understanding was of his own faction's strategic policies. This was as much an arms race as a case of cosmic rust. But getting into politics in this form would be inadvisable.
"Yeah, whatever," he said instead. "And it's so important, your boss sought me out for help, and you're still just his courier service."
The Seeker rolled hard to the right, slamming the unsecured avatar against the glass of his canopy. Wheeljack had the Stark-doll yelp, even though he had turned pain receptors off to save resources.
Thundercracker leveled out. The avatar slid back into its seat. "In case you'd forgotten, Stark, it was you who went to Megatron with a deal! So you better deliver!"
Wheeljack's avatar nursed his supposedly battered side. Privately, Wheeljack excerpted the last few microcycles from the audio logs and put it in his growing reference file.
"Oh, I've got what he's looking for," Wheeljack muttered, though he was feeling progressively out of his depth. There was only so much he was going to be able to bluff with no knowledge whatsoever of the overarching situation; these bits he was gleaning were enough to give a sense of Stark's treachery, but no details. If he could just fake it until they reached the base, though... "But I'm sure he wants me in one piece when I make the deposit," he added.
"He only specified 'alive'," Thundercracker sneered.
The nose of the Seeker's plane form dipped; they were starting into a descent. Thundercracker engaged a mask over the cockpit, blotting out the exterior view. Of course, he wouldn't assume that the Tony Stark he was carrying did all the work of a GPS device anyway.
Wheeljack was faintly aware of a ping coming through in local mode. He ignored it. There was no way he was going to leave remote view now that he was almost inside the Decepticons' base. Even if he couldn't fake his way through this one, if he could bluff long enough to get within blast range of Megatron, it would all be worth it.
They touched down somewhere in a mountainous region, landing on a metal runaway apparently exposed to the air. They rolled down a low slope for thirty or forty metres, and then Thundercracker braked his landing gear and started to transform. He unfolded his legs first, standing upright and opening the glass to his cockpit. The Stark avatar tumbled out into his hand. When he was fully folded into robot mode, Thundercracker knelt and rolled the Stark-doll onto the floor plating. Wheeljack humbly climbed to his feet without comment.
Wheeljack turned and looked up at him-- and kept looking up. The Decepticons had always had a general preponderance in height versus the Autobots, but scale had never really bothered Wheeljack in his own body. Now at a human's height, Thundercracker looked big enough to be confused for a small building.
The floor rumbled beneath the avatar's feet. It felt like a Guardian on the approach, but Wheeljack knew the Decepticons couldn't possibly be keeping something like that with their Earth detachment. He looked around to see the massive feet of another Seeker joining them, the purple thuggish one, whatsisname. Skywarp.
"You got 'im?" Skywarp boomed.
"'Course I got 'im," Thundercracker answered. "Not all of us're so incompetent we can't handle a simple extraction mission."
"Then where is he?"
"He's right there, you devnull!"
Wheeljack hit a moment of panic as he realised he must have forgotten to reengage the heat output. He pulled half outside remote view to toggle the controls, just as Skywarp multiscanned the patch of ground where the Stark-doll was standing.
"Hn! There you are!" Skywarp leaned down close to him. The avatar flinched instinctively, but Wheeljack made it stand its ground. "Where were you hidin' just now?"
"In plain sight," Wheeljack answered honestly. "Apparently that's all it takes to get the better of you, huh?"
Skywarp's massive face panelling drew back into a snarl. He raised a fist.
Thundercracker grabbed it, shouting. "You wanna bust his little brains before Megatron gets what he wants outta them?!" he demanded.
The dumber of the two lugnuts relented, grudgingly. Skywarp straightened up, tugging his hand out of Thundercracker's grip. He made a point to motion Stark down the hall not with his hand, but with his shoulder weaponry. "Get movin', fleshie. The big boss is waiting!"
===
It seemed to Prowl that things kept getting worse whenever he took his eye off them.Case in point: Wheeljack's little project for the science division. Reduced to the role of an arbitrator, Prowl's entire function for this mission seemed to be to pick up the pieces as things very steadily fell apart-- without ample explanation of what he was picking up or why. Things had not been at their most administratively secure on Earth when, out of nowhere, Hot Rod had bounced him up to Ark-32, stating they had a problem.
"What do you mean, you can't get him out?" he demanded, after Hot Rod showed him the terminal Wheeljack had gone and plugged himself into.
The kid and Hardhead had helpfully set up a monitor above the console, showing Wheeljack's remote view. If the visuals were to be believed, the inventor's latest sculpture had succeeded where every past infiltration missions of theirs had failed, broadcasting live from within the Decepticons' base itself. He distinctly did not recall authorising any of this.
"His awareness centres have gone fully remote. His consciousness surfaces here and there, but only as far out as the navigation GUI, and then it submerges again," Hot Rod explained. Clearly they had both spent far too much time around this science mech, because, Primus help them, that had actually made sense. "We could unhook him manually, but all signs point to that being a really stupid idea."
"The remote navigation console on Earth could do it," Prowl pointed out. This was a recent discovery of Wheeljack's, apparently owing once again to that classified mission of his, which more and more just seemed to be a case of personal vendetta.
"Sure, but this is a different set-up. Ark-32's array was never meant to handle the Mark Two holomatter designs. He's wired up his own databanks to serve as virtual memory."
Prowl frowned at him. The kid had officially lost him now, and no-one liked to feel dumber than Hot Rod. "Meaning?" he asked, though it pained him to say it.
"Meaning he's got his own solid state drives threaded through the system as a sort of collateral." The kid shook his head. "As you can see, he's relaying straight feeds back to us, but he's incommunicado. So no luck getting him to cut it out. Not to mention, killing the signal now is going to give the whole game away."
"We can't get a ping through to him at all?"
Hot Rod thumbed at the console. Wheeljack was barely discernible inside it, being mostly a bundle of wires in the centre at this point. "He can hear them, probably; he's just ignoring them. Basically, his way of saying it's not over till he says it's over."
In light of the Florida incident, Prowl was drastically rethinking Wheeljack's licence to make a decision like that. Put mildly, he didn't feel the Lieutenant should have any such authority, no matter what he was doing for the science division. This went beyond research-- Wheeljack was compromising a cooling front, not to mention putting his own system at risk. And for, what, scraps and giggles?
On the monitor, Wheeljack's avatar caught sight of a new silhouette as it was ushered into the Decepticon command centre. At such an extreme low angle, it took a moment for Prowl to recognise the outline-- but then it clicked, and his adrenal cabling went ice-cold.
To their knowledge, Megatron had yet to deal directly with the natives of this planet. Decepticon forces were notoriously lackluster in researching indigenous races, only investigating so far as to identify major ecological or economic vulnerabilities. And even in such instances, the Decepticon commander certainly didn't sully his own hands getting to know the locals. Megatron considered himself the emergent ruler of this world even before he'd conquered it, and on this planet, the humans did not rank as intelligent life forms. They barely registered as insects.
So what did Megatron want out of the likeness of Tony Stark? This wasn't part of Wheeljack's theory about the human. Unless he was going to argue for some correlation between the Decepticons and the Machination, and Autobot intel suggested that the Decepticons were just as repulsed by the Headmasters as they were.
The lack of answers was infuriating Prowl. If it could be done without further endangering one of his own mechs, he'd shut this whole operation down right now. If only he could get his digits on some other sad spark involved in this mess.
"Major," came a voice from the doorway.
Well. Speak of a scraplet and there it was. Prowl tore his gaze away from the monitor to find Ratchet entering to join him-- with a certain pet obediently at his heels.
Prowl wasn't altogether convinced with Stark's little display of domestication, particularly since the Florida incident. "Stay right there," he ordered the human in English; Stark only barely complied. Prowl shifted his gaze back to Ratchet and continued in Cybertronix, "Seal the door."
"His friends have left and there's a vacuum outside, Prowl; I don't think he--"
"If I could only begin to illuminate you on how little leverage you have right now, Lieutenant. Now do it." The medic, irritated, complied. Prowl nodded, and added sternly, "Question me again at any point while we're in this room and I'll see you in the brig the moment we bounce back planetside. Is that clear?"
He saw Ratchet's mouth twitch, but the medic raised no further argument.
"Any particular reason for the first-class treatment?" intoned the little creature in English. Prowl snapped his head down to bark out a light threat, but found the human glancing around, thoroughly confused.
"Enough games, human," rasped another voice, that was almost definitely not coming from within the room.
Prowl twisted back towards the monitor. He found Hot Rod looking up sheepishly from a set of dials.
"Sorry, just got the sound figured out," the kid said, but no-one was very much paying attention to him, least of all the human, who was quickly going to start wondering why his own voice was emitting from Wheeljack's remote view.
"One hissyfit deserves another," came the voice of the not-Stark, unseen in Wheeljack's first-person view. "I fall a few days behind schedule, and you send one of your lackeys to tear half my house apart to find me? You ever heard of email?"
Both Ratchet and the real Stark appeared mortified, although presumably for different reasons.
Stark spoke first. "Sly bastard," he remarked. "Somehow, I'm flattered and creeped out at the same time..."
A different problem was quickly surfacing in Prowl's mind. Namely, that it was clear from Megatron's expression that Wheeljack was offering up a poorer imitation than Stark was giving him credit for. Clearly, the scientist knew as little about the current circumstances as they did.
"This's gonna fall apart," Hot Rod said, seeing the trend unfolding on screen just as Prowl did. "Very, very quickly, unless we can get in there."
"I fail to see how that would fix things," Prowl countered. They had both transitioned back to using the autotranslator, it seemed. "The rest of us don't know how to bluff our way through this any better than Wheeljack does."
"How about you jack me in?" Stark spoke up from below.
Prowl glared down at him. "Out of the question."
"It's my body," Stark argued. "And unless you're formally dissolving the agreement with the Avengers, we're still on the same side here. Or do you have something to share?"
It was hard to win a staring contest against an expressionless helmet. And beneath that mask, Prowl knew, was a human that had staged an (admittedly obvious) ambush for them in Florida, and still seemed to have more than a few darts up his forebracers. Prowl drew his lips into a thin line; it wouldn't be beyond Stark to hold secrets over his head as a threat, and as far as Prowl knew, Ratchet was still officially locked out of the Florida mission.
Prowl looked from Stark to Ratchet, still as naively well-intentioned as Prowl remembered him. "Whatever he knows, he can get Wheeljack out of there easier than the rest of us can," he volunteered.
"He'd be put in contact with Wheeljack's internal systems. I can't allow it."
"Then we'll use a proxy! The on-board systems-- or me. It's possible."
"I'm sorry," Hot Rod interjected, "but you don't even have to stare at datastreams like this all day to know that'd create some massive lag. If he's going in, the only proxy he'll want is 'Jack himself."
On the monitor, Megatron expressed that he was less than pleased with Wheeljack's latest ad lib. He showed this chiefly by pointing his cannon directly at the Stark avatar's head.
If that cannon went off, Megatron was going to have a face full of EMP, something even he would realise was not a normal human defence mechanism. If that happened, the Autobots could kiss this current standoff of theirs goodbye, and they would definitely find themselves in a hot war. Wouldn't that look nice on the Earth detachment's service records?
Prowl nevertheless shook his head. "I can't authorise this. Not only do we have ample reason to believe this creature is behind the Machination, but it's clear he's friendlier with the Decepticons than he should be."
"You call that friendly?" Stark asked.
Prowl ignored him. Hot Rod didn't, and he was swiftly manoeuvring to intervene. "We don't have all the details here," he said earnestly, looking Prowl in the optic. "The only thing clear from where I stand is that this human is going to pass the acid test a lot better than Wheeljack is. Sorry, Prowl, but I'm overriding you."
"You knowingly expose a dangerous agent to one of my mechs and I'll see you put under review so fast--" Prowl warned.
"You'd like that, wouldn't you," Hot Rod shot back, raising his voice. "You never did appreciate that we're the same rank. Well, you're on my ship now and we're going to try this out. Hey human-- what's your name?"
"Iron Ma-- I mean, Stark," said the nuisance.
"Stark, you try one false move, I mean step one byte out of line and you're unplugged," Hot Rod told him. "Whatever sort of deal you were brokering with Megatron, consider it called off. You're working for us now."
"I was never anything else," Stark retorted, flying up and seating himself on top of Wheeljack's immersion terminal. Hot Rod started locating the adapter cables.
"Don't believe it," Ratchet muttered to his comrades.
Prowl looked back at the medic as Hot Rod set about plugging the human in. If he was getting shut out of these proceedings, he would at least maintain authority over the one entity in this room he could control.
"And why don't you start talking?" he said caustically to Ratchet. The medic snapped his gaze up, drawn sharply back to present time. His expression hardened.
"Ratchet," the human said insistently, over by the console.
Ratchet glanced briefly at the human, and then straight back at Prowl. "Let me get you up to speed," he said coldly. "I think Wheeljack's been feeding you some wrong information."
===
"I grow tired of these antics, Anthony Stark," Megatron rumbled. "Out of respect for your unique relationship with the Autobots, I had resolved to humour you for a time. But I see you are no different than the rest of your slavering, insipid species."Even under normal circumstances, getting Megatron's cannon shoved in your face was a terrifying experience. It was even worse at 1/4 scale.
Wheeljack had to admit he wasn't doing very well with this. Maybe he wasn't as smooth a talker as he'd been led to believe. What counted at the moment was that he apparently was getting bowed out of this conversation whether he liked it or not.
"I really wouldn't recommend that, Megs," he said through the Stark avatar, in a last, vague effort at leverage. "You don't really know what you're dealing with."
Something tickled at the back of his cognition array. He had stopped getting pings a while ago, but this was something else. Hot Rod had gone and jacked something into him for a chat.
>>function://_talk/open
>>language://text/eng_us
>>content://request revert give-protocol --> 100%
>>content://request grant mobility 2x
>>function://_talk/endOkay, that wasn't Hot Rod. What sort of deaf-mute code was this? He fumbled to raise an auxiliary firewall to shut out the intruder, but the Stark-avatar's adrenal responses were commanding too many resources to pull out of remote view that far.
The silent communication showed up again.
>>function://_talk/repeat
listing contents...
>>content://request revert give-protocol --> 100%
>>content://request grant mobility 2x
>>function://_talk/augmentation
>>content://NOW
>>function://_talk/endWhat was this guy planning...?
"Oh, really," Megatron said above him. "And why might I heed this particular advice?"
Whoever it was cracking into him, he had a view of the situation that Wheeljack didn't. Reluctantly, Wheeljack switched down verisimilitude processes and reached back to the navigation GUI to dial reasonable-give back to default.
No sooner had he done so, than a flood of red flags sprouted up across his navigation arrays. The invasive signal snatched up the avatar's motor functions and punched it into forward drive.
The Stark avatar launched forward at lightning speed. It went into a flying leap and landed on Megatron's leg just below the knee, then swung a fist straight into it. With reasonable-give off, and advanced inertia ratings amping velocity up to flight-worthy speeds, the Stark avatar's ostensibly human hand went clear through the outer metal and most of the major cabling beneath.
Megatron bellowed; Wheeljack panicked and fought to gain control back from the unknown signal, but it bounced him off. The avatar continued to move without Wheeljack's guidance, backflipping off Megatron's side and landing neatly on its feet, then rolling quickly to the left to avoid a swipe.
>>function://_talk/open
>>content://request grant vocal
>>function://_talk/endWheeljack tried to soft-reset the relays, but the circuits refused to sever. Whoever this was, he'd gotten his roots in fast and deep-- at least tier-three. And he was making ample use of it, what with the carving a huge hole in Megatron's knee linkage and dodging Seeker fire like he had it all rehearsed.
>>function://_talk/repeat
loading contents...
>>content://request grant vocal
>>function://_talk/end-You obviously know what you're doing,- he told his hijacker. -Don't make me regret this.-
He pulled --it was a struggle-- out of full-remote view and toggled permissions on the avatar's vocal emitters. The signal swam up and locked Wheeljack out of them before he could so much as twitch.
"Because humans," came the invader's words out of the Stark avatar's mouth, "like to play their best cards last."
Steely realisation closed in on Wheeljack. He knew who was talking.
He halted all navigational processes immediately, but Stark --the real one-- quickly overrode them, slapping his wrists for the attempt. Foreign-born firewalls sprouted up across his interface.
Wheeljack followed the signal to an origin point and tried to backdoor into Stark's system, or at least cut the weed off by its root, but Stark diverted the outbound pathways down an adjacent circuit.
Wheeljack cursed loudly in his own mind. A little sparkle of static near the signal's origin point conveyed the human's laugh.
>>function://_talk/open
>>content://youre making this harder on yourself than you need to.
>>content://if you want this to end without an incident
>>content://just follow along and crunch the renders for me.
>>content://ill take care of the rest.
>>function://_talk/end-I am not gonna be a slave in my own system!- Wheeljack shouted across the silent channel, not entirely sure it could even meet Stark's frequency.
As it turned out, it did, and Stark seized upon this communication line to talk back.
-Deal with it, funny man.-
The Stark-avatar, momentarily locked up from the internal war being waged for its control, was caught from behind by one of the Seekers, and knocked straight into a wall.
Physics dictated that a human body, facing such an impact, would rupture into a handful of bloody, foul-smelling pieces. With the reasonable-give protocols, however, the avatar merely bounced.
Stark used the avatar's voice to laugh. A full, guttural laugh. He had the holomatter pick itself up off the ground, the Seekers looming over him looking understandably horrified. Even with Stark controlling the view, though, Wheeljack could spot Megatron behind them, optics narrowed, carefully thinking.
That did it. -Gig's up. We're pulling out,- Wheeljack told Stark. -He knows you're not real.-
-Oh, really?- Stark replied. -I guess it's a good thing you don't have the permissions to cancel us out right now.-
Wheeljack recoiled in panic. He tried to pull free of the navigation GUI, but his neural networks refused to register. The right gates weren't opening in the right places along his process trees.
-You off-model!- he raged.
-Is that your guys' word for 'bastard'? It loses something in translation.-
Wheeljack watched, helpless, as Stark slid the reasonable-give protocols back on, as well as the pain sensors, routing the feedback entirely through the Autobot's side of the connection.
-Thanks for killing my secretary,- Stark went on. -Oh, and fucking her, too.-
"Megatron!" Stark said through the avatar, reversing the feed of Wheeljack's autotranslator to render his words in Cybertronix. "We know of your dealings with Stark, and now, we know the location of your base as well! Ha ha ha!"
Wheeljack saw the Decepticon commander's optics flare brightly. The routine was comical, but melodrama, sadly, worked.
"It seems we have let some vermin into our house," Megatron remarked to his Seekers. "Gentlemechs-- please. Do what you will to eradicate it."
Megatron's thugs, not too sunny in disposition after having parts of their frames hewn off by a human's bare hands, gladly raised their weaponry.
"This little act of yours will not go unremembered, Autobot," Megatron told the holomatter. "Indeed, I hope your name goes down in history as the pitiful little creature who doomed his entire race."
"Then you better memorise it, while you can," Stark shot back gleefully. "It's Wh--"
===
And then, suddenly, everything around Stark went black.No explosion. Not even a bang and a whimper. One moment, Stark was threaded through Wheeljack's entire cognitive array, enmeshed in a remote view that was almost literally a second skin, and then in the next moment, everything was blank.
He heard something that sounded distinctly like a very large gun being charged behind him. He cautiously resumed normal HUD settings and looked around.
Well now. There were three giant alien robots all pointing weapons at him, including the ambulance of his dreams and the stupid door wings guy who kept fouling things up for him.
In that case, sucks to be him, because Stark had already accounted for this eventuality. Actually, these Autobots should really have given more thought to this situation before they'd let him into one of their consoles using their companion as a glorified remote.
Still seated on top of the console, Stark pulled up the ad hoc GUI again and gave his dialer network a tug. Beside him, still dormant and plugged into the navigation terminal, Wheeljack's body gave an involuntary twitch.
All of them saw it. The red guy started to drop his weapon and move towards him, but Stark couldn't have that.
"Uh-uh," he warned, jerking the resource relays again. A pale burst of static crackled along Wheeljack's backstruts. Boy red froze in place, jaw clenched. What would you average hostage-taker say in a situation like this? "Let's not do anything hasty. Everybody plays their part, and we all get out of this fine."
Great. He sounded like a bad gangster film, but okay. As long as it worked.
Unfortunately, Door Wings Guy was doing his best to make it not work. "Stark," he said steadily, "don't play games you're not big enough to play."
"I'd say I'm holding my own so far," Stark returned.
"I'd beg to differ," said Door Wings. "As it is you're facing two counts of deception, four counts of deliberate sabotage, one count of harmful hijacking and another count of accessory to kidnapping and unlawful duplication."
"Uh-huh," Stark said dully.
"Not to mention, we have evidence to implicate you in the sale of Autobot military secrets for personal gain. Do you deny any of this?"
"Not really," Stark answered candidly. "It's not like you can actually try me for any of that. Come on. I'd love to see where jurisdiction falls in the case of 'lower life forms'. We're just children to you, right? We're just pets." He held the cables connecting his armour to Wheeljack at arm's length. "Can you reason with a pet? Can you tell it 'don't kill'?"
Ratchet was watching him intently. He said nothing.
The red guy spoke up, saying resolutely, "You won't kill him."
"Like this? Probably not. You guys have a pretty loose handle on the idea of death," said Stark. "But for brainbots like Wheeljack here, memory is everything, right? What would happen if I fried even one of those partitions? Erase a few thousand years of research?"
He saw real terror flit across all three of their faces. The red one vibrated angrily, working so hard to keep his own frame under control.
"You wouldn't!" he shouted.
"So, again," Stark said calmly, "you've got to ask yourself: can you reason with me? Because if you can't-- you might as well put me down right now. That'd be a tidy way to solve most of your problems, right? Except the part where you still don't know how to get Sunstreaker back. And you don't know what I can still send over these wires."
He scanned their faces. Glowing eyes, steel-plated expressions. But you could still read total defeat in every one of them.
They got it. A lowly creature-- an animal-- had just outdone their best at his own game. Oh, how the hate was going to run deep. And Anthony Stark, Decepticon informant, all-around nefarious individual, would hardly get a scratch.
Stark snagged on Ratchet's expression. Ratchet wasn't simply beaten. She had a way of looking personally wounded, like this had cut through her worst of all.
Actually, that was probably spot on, at that.
There were a million things he wanted to end this out on, but most of them didn't quite fit. She deserved some sort of gratitude, at least.
"Thanks for fixing Pepper," he told her, and with his free hand he half-twisted around and emitted a repulsor ray strong enough to take out one of the deck windows.
The Autobots kept air on their ship not because they liked entertaining human guests, but because they needed some accessible gas for sound vibration. Breathability and cabin pressure were just byproducts. And when Stark's beam punched out one of the windows and threw errant material, scraps of cable and O2 out into blank space, it provided his own convenient exit as well.
The force of depressurisation pulled him up off the floor of the deck and ripped the cables straight from his suit. He quickly sealed these ports and switched on his boosters, angling himself out of the opened window and into inky, inky black.
Belatedly, Stark hoped Cage and Wolverine had packed him the suit with the air tank in it.
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===