Coward Clone Skywarp (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
panic_prince) wrote2014-07-17 01:23 am
panic_prince) wrote2014-07-17 01:23 am
(no subject)
00.
Duty in the natal stations that ringed the apertures of the Well of Allsparks was supposed to be thrilling. Newspark care was vital to the perpetuation of Cybertronian society, wasn't it? And what duty could be more vital than detecting the newly disgorged balls of spark energy as they drifted free of the Well and catching them for implantation into waiting protoforms? It was supposed to be a glamorous, challenging, electrifying job!
So why was Gaze bored out of her mind?
Oh, sure, she remembered her lessons--she was only newly released from the natal tech certification program, so it wasn't like they were that far behind her. She'd sat through the same lectures about the Well's phases, how sometimes it was fertile and prolific and sometimes it went almost dormant, as any other tech. She'd even been warned, when they assigned her to this station to start her career, that the Well currently experiencing a low-yield phase. But she hadn't realized that 'low-yield' meant 'you'll sit in front of a blank monitor all day, every day, and since you're a newbie, that's the only job we'll let you do'.
She could have it worse, she supposed. Even boring monitor duty in a quiet natal station was better than, say, orbital construction work, or energon mining, or waste processing. Maybe her aptitude tests had pegged her for just a harvester and not an implanter or a caretaker or an arbiter or something else, but she should be grateful she hadn't been sorted into a labor or servant caste. She would be doing something vitally important to Cybertron, that's what they'd told her and all her castemates in her crèche and at the academy. Harvesters were special and important, the only people deft and sensitive enough to work the technology that captured natal sparks; she was special and important.
And still bored. Drumming her fingers on her console, Gaze he glanced at the blank screen of her monitor and then looked around the empty room, wondering what the other techs were doing while she was alone in here. She knew they weren't heavily staffed in the station right now; only Trylight and their supervisor Keenedge were on duty, but they were supposed to be on duty in here and maybe she wouldn't be so bored if there was someone to talk to--
Her eyes returned mechanically to the screen as she internal monologue continued on, and for a moment she didn't even realize the import of the little blip showing on the monitor. A spark! The first spark to have disgorged from the Well since she'd started working here!
For a moment, Gaze froze totally, arrested by the little blip on the screen and paralyzed by her practical inexperience. Then her training took over, megacycles of simulators and datapacks and shadowing trips moving her hands through the motions of activating the gentle electrostatic net that would capture the spark before it could drift up to the planet's surface and bring it in to the station. Her fingers deftly activated scanning and analysis protocols, triggering the devices built into the monitor station and the rim of the Well to start taking preliminary readings on the new Cybertronian life. She brought up the live camera feed and set her hands into the controls that would minutely vary the voltage coursing through the net, urging the spark with gentle little electromagnetic pushes towards their outpost.
As soon as it was in position, the pulsing little ball of energy drifting gently down the funnel of the net, Gaze switched from the EM controls to the canister ones. With hands that trembled she activated the manipulator arms that reached out from the rim of the Well, positioning an empty natal chamber just so and scooping the spark inside with painstaking care. She brought up the frequency monitor subscreen and watched it intently for any sign of the fluctuations that might indicate trauma to the new spark, but all the prelims were still coming up blue.
It wasn't until she'd retracted the capped canister into the receiving bay that she realized her engine was running hot in her chest, her vents working loudly to try and cool her systems. She rubbed her shaking hands together and sat back from her monitor, eyes watching data on the spark compile on the screen without really seeing it.
She'd done it. She'd done it! She'd birthed a spark from the Well!
The door into the monitor room worked behind her, and Trylight stuck his head into the room. "Hey, we heard the alarms going off, what's-- did you catch one?"
"I did!" Gaze whirled delightedly in her seat, gesturing at the screen behind her. Staring at Trylight, she saw his optics go wide.
"Whoa," he breathed. "Are those readings correct?"
Frowning, Gaze spun back around to her console and the preliminary frequency reading that had compiled on the screen there. Part of her training had involved poring over spark frequency graphs and learning what the various spikes and fluctuations meant. A harvester was no arbiter-- it wasn't her job to read the spark and decide what path in life the new Cybertronian was destined for-- but it wasn't until her second or third vocational battery that she washed out of those more prestigious paths in the natal care caste. And everyone in her crèche had gotten a basic course in spark frequency analysis, no matter what career they ended up being trained for.
She knew enough to know that what she was looking at was very, very unique. Most sparks had low-amplitude frequencies with a regular period; the chart on her screen showed huge uneven peaks and valleys, a hugely erratic signature unlike anything she'd seen in her training.
"What's wrong with it?" she asked, a strident note of panic in her voice. "Did I hurt it?!"
"I don't know," Trylight said. He sounded calmer than her, which took the edge off her panic, but the worried frown on his face was far from reassuring. He came up behind her, leaning over her shoulder and starting to tap at the console. The static graph of the preliminary reading disappeared, replaced by a live representation, this one fluctuating and shifting as the spark oscillated in the natal chamber. Trylight's vocalizer hummed with white noise static as he considered what he was seeing, and Gaze tried not to wash her hands together too nervously in her lap.
"Well? Is it all right?" she prompted when Trylight's moment of silent contemplation dragged on far too long for her anxiety.
"I don't know," he said again. He pointed at the marching progression of huge peaks and valleys on the screen. "If you'd damaged it or it was having a fit, these spikes wouldn't be regular like this. The reading would be erratic; this is regular. But the amplitude--!"
"Amplitude alone isn't a reliable indicator of spark trauma." Neither tech had heard their supervisor come into the monitor room, so Keenedge's sudden, measured words made Gaze jerk in suprise.
"Arbiter!" she squeaked.
Trylight acknowledged the other cyb with far more composure. "Arbiter Keenedge, have you ever seen anything like this?"
"Not in a very long time," she said, coming to stand behind Gaze's chair. She urged the junior tech out of the chair with an ungentle nudge, and indicated for Trylight to take the vacated seat. "Take another reading as soon as that natal chamber is safely stowed," she commanded, her voice crisp. "We'll need to see if those peaks maintain that amplitude, or if it's going to even out. And if that spark is what I think it is..."
Keenedge trailed off and was silent for so long that Gaze, watching her superior intently, wondered if maybe she'd suffered some kind of cranial short. But no, the arbiter's bright optics were still moving, watching Trylight work and the new graph of the spark's frequency compile on the screen.
A small, sharp smile stretched the cyb's face. "There's a long list of very important Cybertronians who are going to be jockeying for the right to sponsor this newspark, I think."
01.
Junior physician Slipstream was verifying inventory reports submitted to her by the expedition's medtechs when the ship-wide alarm started to sound.
It wasn't the strident alert that she'd heard blaring during emergency drills, nor the staccato combat siren that indicated that the ship was about to come under attack. No, this was a deeper sound, a gentler but insistent gonging that repeated itself regularly over almost a decicycle. Then the alarm went silent, and the ship's comm system crackled to life with a faint hiss of noise.
"Attention all crew, attention all crew." That was the voice of Windchaser, the ship's first lieutenant, and Slipstream straightened attentively where she stood at the workstation. "We've got Live Current successfully parked in geosych around our target and we're still on-schedule, so coordinators, make sure your teams are keeping to their timetables. I need the first wave Seeker squads to report to the primary transportation bay to receive your final coordinates; second wave squads, get with your wing commanders for sector briefings. All other away teams, you are now officially on standby and should start going through your pre-debarkation checklists. I know you've all seen the prelims on this place, so we should have our work cut out for us. Good luck, everyone!"
The comm clicked off and Slipstream relaxed, turning her optics back to her console. None of those instructions had been targeted towards her; she wasn't part of any of the Live Current's away teams. That's what the medtechs were for, which was why each squad of prospectors, surveyors, and miners had at least one attached to their unit. But medtechs were only trained in the basics; they could perform basic maintenance and provide field repairs, and that was about it. Slipstream, on the other hand, was a physician, an exhaustively trained cyb of expansive skills. Maybe she was fresh out of the academy, still getting the experience she needed to back up that training and hone those skills, but she was infinitely more valuable than some tech. She would be staying up here on the ship where she was safe, and where the expedition's senior physician could directly supervise this last, practical term of her training.
And what a physician! Pharma was a legend among doctors, his name spoken with reverence by the staff and instructors of the Academy. He was an accredited master of flight-mode medicine, and considered the foremost expert in the field when it came to the ailments that afflicted energon seekers. They'd studied his papers in the Academy, learned his techniques, and swapped unbelievable stories about his most famous procedures.
Being assigned to work directly under him fresh out of the Academy was the most prestigious honor Slipstream had ever received.
Behind her a door cycled open, and like he'd been summoned by her thoughts, Pharma walked out of his office. Slipstream pulled herself upright at her console, the same way that she had when Windchaser had been on-comm, and nodded a greeting at him.
He frowned faintly down at her. "Relax, Slipstream. This is the Energy Commission, not the Defense Force; you don't have to salute me like some superior officer."
She'd never actually saluted him, but respect and deference for her superiors in age and experience had been drilled into her at the Academy just as much as her medical skills. It was hard not to attend him when he walked into a room. Still, she forced herself to relax, wingtips dipping a little behind her. "Sorry, sir."
Pharma did not object to the honorific, she noticed.
He came closer and peered at the reports on the screen behind her. "Still working on the inventory?"
"That's right," she had, turning her attention quickly back to the screen. "Just double-checking everything before I push it through."
"Very good." His apparent approval made her spark pulse in her chest. "It can wait, though," he continued, and then he smiled at her, a crooked, intimate little expression that made her spark pulse again. "This is your first trip out-system with the company, right?"
"This is my first assignment outside of the Academy at all," she said. The intimacy of that little grin gave her confidence to let her wings lift again, this time not with tension but pride.
"Ah, that's right." His smirk turned mischievous and looked wholly out of place on a cyb of such renown. "Come with me, then, we're going to the bridge."
Slipstream paused a moment to lock her terminal, then had to trot after him to catch up. His broad back seemed to fill the whole corridor ahead of her, never mind that she'd seen clusters of crewcybs passing each other here with room to spare. Shaking her head, she tried to dispel the fantasy, but nevertheless the impression that he was larger than life remained.
"In here," he said finally, his fingers carelessly entering the security code that granted him access to the bridge. She'd never been inside, of course, too junior a crewmember to receive anything like a personal greeting from the ship's commander or a tour of his bridge. Well, she wasn't too junior now, was she? She swelled with pride as she stepped though that doorway, wingtips flicking high and wide. Not even the fact that no crewcyb on the bridge spared her even a glance could dampen her surge of self-importance.
Pharma touched her shoulder as he came through beside her, raising one brilliant blue finger to his lips once he had her attention. She nodded her understanding of the signal, then followed him to an empty place alone the bridge's rear wall.
All around them, a crackling tension that was almost physically palpable seemed to fill the bridge. There were over a dozen crewcybs present, most of them meshed into immersive couches at the various duty stations tucked against the walls of the great room. Spread in a panorama across the front of the space was the most enormous interior viewscreen that Slipstream had ever seen, displaying an image of the planet they were parked in orbit around; in the very center of the space was the captain's chair, positioned in front of a semi-circular bank of consoles and miniscreens. There was a slim seeker silhouette standing just off the shoulder of the chair, and Slipstream recognized Windchaser, her electric-blue-and-purple-on-black paintjob unmistakable. Of the captain, though, she could see nothing but upright silver wings, a long-clawed hand resting loose against the arm of the chair, and a slim leg with those tell-tale seeker heelstruts at the end.
"Mark time," the captain called out; one of the crew-cybs responded immediately from eir couch with the time down to the fraction of a cycle. The claws of the captain's visible hand curled. "Mm, on-schedule. Good. Windchaser, are we ready to deploy?"
"Affirmative, captain." The second-in-command checked a pad in her hand. "All the first-wave wing commanders have reported their squads blue-light for go."
Wings shifting, the captain leaned forward in his seat; Slipstream saw one clawed finger press at a keypad and heard the comm activate. "First-wave squads, activate your beacons."
There was a pause, and then a subscreen lit up bright on the bridge's periphery. "Beacons online, captain!" sang out the voice of the cyb at that station.
The captain's fingers moved over the comm pad again. "Warp core, we are prepared for transport," he said, his voice crisp. "Standby." His hand fell away from the pad and he shifted in his chair again. "Nav, does transportation have the coordinates in order?"
Another crewcyb's screen lit in a rapid, flickering crawl of information. "Transportation is blue-light to go, captain," she reported after a brief hesitation.
The captain sat back, and Slipstream could see enough of him to see his long legs cross and his nearer elbow brace against the arm of his command seat. "Then let's begin," he said, and activated the comm pad once more. "Warp core, engage. Get my people down on that planet."
Pharma leaned close, his shoulder brushing hers. "Watch," he commanded in a whisper, indicating the massive viewscreen at the fore of the room.
The image of the planet was still splashed across the screen, but Slipstream saw now that it wasn't static; no, the target of their mission was turning incrementally in real time. As Slipstream watched, a constellation of blue-white stars appeared, winking into being up and down a broad longitudinal corridor of the planet's visible hemisphere. No, she realized, not stars-- digital icons, superimposed over the photoreal view of the planet. Each one was tagged with a name and a set of coordinates, the characters minute in proportion to the giant screen but perfectly legible thanks to its sheer size.
The coordinates were drop-off points for the seeker squads on their way planetside, she assumed-- and then she realized that the numbers were already shifting, the icons on the move. Real-time position updates? But the shuttles would have barely had time to clear Live Current's docking bay, much less penetrate the planet's atmosphere and release the seekers to their work.
"Are those our cybs?" she hissed to Pharma. "Are they down there already?"
"Indeed they are," he said, and his smug little grin might have annoyed Slipstream if she hadn't been so preoccupied with the impossible materialization of three wings of Cybertronians on the planet's surface.
"How-- that's impossible!"
"Not for the Live Current." It wasn't Pharma who responded to her, though; no, that was the precise voice of the ship's captain, and Slipstream startled as she realized he'd been listening in on them. He'd swiveled that impressive command seat of his around to face them, and he was regarding her over steepled fingers. Slipstream met his optics fearlessly, though her wavering wingtips betrayed her embarrassment over her ignorance.
Still, it seemed the captain was going to take pity on her. "Our ship happens to be equipped with the most advanced warp core unit on Cybertron," he said. "In addition to standard extra-solar jump capabilities, that unit allows us direct individual transportation in-system; its precision is unparalleled. Our warp core, in fact, is one of the primary reasons why the Live Current is the flagship of the Cybertronian Energy Commission's fleet."
"I didn't know," Slipstream said.
"You wouldn't have." The captain sprawled back in his chair. "The technology is highly proprietary."
"If you check your crew contract," Pharma added, "you'll find a provision forbidding you from discussing it with unauthorized personnel. It's sort of an open secret on the ship--" He scowled ferociously, and the captain shifted in his chair. "--which I suppose we can't do anything about, but you will be expected to be discreet outside the crew if you expect to retain your position."
Wings flicking, Slipstream drew herself up and nodded primly. "You can count on me, sirs!"
"Of course we can," the captain said, with a strange smile on his face. "You're a good little cadet, aren't you?"
"Junior physician, sir!"
The captain's optics flicked obviously to Pharma, then away. "Of course," he said again, inscrutably.
Before the strange, suddenly tense moment could progress any further, one of the officers called out from his couch, "Captain! I think we have a problem!"
Just like that, Slipstream was an afterthought; the captain whirled his seat around to face his command console again. "Main screen, Runway. Brief me."
The image of the planet zoomed in, so abruptly that Slipstream felt her gyros try to compensate even though she hadn't moved anywhere. A couple of the seeker beacons had started to flash orange, and given that they were located smack in the middle of a huge formation of swirling clouds, even Slipstream could venture a guess as to why.
"Skybreaker and Contrail just flipped their beacons over to alarm mode," the officer-- Runway-- said. "They're--"
"Contrail's trying to patch through, sir!" That was another one of the officers, sitting up far enough in her couch to crane a look back at the captain. "Should I accept the transmission?"
"Yes, yes! On-comm!"
Immediately the bridge was filled with the unmistakable crackling howl of wind heard over commlink, a sound that was intimately familiar to any flight-alt Cybertronian. "Command, you gotta ghhht us out of --ere," came a hoarse voice, half blurred out by the static and environmental noise of the transmission. "Whoever classsszzzzkt --is storm as a category three wsszt --ompletely deluded!" There was a stretch of completely incomprehensible garble, then: "--five at least! Skybreaker'zzzzz --is completely fried out!"
The captain was on his feet, wings low and tight behind him as he hunched over the console. He stabbed a finger out at the comm, snapping a brisk, "Standby, Seekers, we'll bring you back to ship," that was completely at odds with the tension in his shoulders as he whirled on Windchaser. "Can you tell me why I just teleported two of my people into the middle of a category five weather system?!"
"Meterology malfunctions later, captain!" the SIC snapped. She leaned past him and slapped a hand on the comm pad on the command console. "Warp core, engage! Recall beacon code 08772 and 02301 immediately!"
There was a pause, silent in the bridge except for the howl of the wind across the still-open channel with Contrail and the seeker's desperate grunts as he fought that wind. Suddenly the cyb at the nav console jerked in her couch with a cry. "Warp core's throwing back errors, captain!"
The captain swore and pivoted on his heelstruts and Slipstream, who'd assumed she was brought here only to observe, found herself suddenly pinned in the ferocious glare of Starscream, commander of the Energon Seeker Corps and captain of the Energy Commission fleet flagship Live Current. "Get down to the transportation deck and get that warp unit working," he growled, his voice like ground glass.
He turned away, dismissing her with no time for questions, and before she could raise a protest, Pharma had taken her by the arm and hustled her out of the bridge. The last thing she heard as the door cycled shut behind them was Starscream's voice, almost oscillating with tension as he instructed the two stricken seekers to hold steady while they worked on the problem.
The smug, laughing, intimate Pharma who'd brought her up to the bridge to introduce her to wonders was gone, replaced by the distant professional she idolized. "Have you ever been down to the transportation deck?" he asked, still propelling her along with his hand gripping her arm painfully.
"No, sir-- sir, why are we dealing with this?" she asked as he swung them into a trans-deck lift. "Shouldn't a warp core malfunction be engineering's job?"
He didn't answer her, though, he only shook his head with his lips pressed into a thin line. When the lift arrived at the transportation deck, he swept out of it ahead of her, leading the way through the corridors so fast that she had to jog to keep up.
So of course he stopped abruptly in front of a closed door, so abruptly that she almost slammed into his back. He turned, taking her by the shoulders and holding her out at arm's length. "You and I are going to go over the discretionary clauses concerning the warp core unit on the other side of this door in depth," he told her. "Soon. Until then, you keep your mouth shut about what you're about to see. Understand, junior physician?"
Eyes wide, wings low, Slipstream nodded. "Yessir," she said gravely. "I understand."
"Good." He released her and turned to the door, fingers flying through a security code, and then preceded her inside.
On the other side of the door was cozy little space, an anteroom for the larger chamber full of incomprehensible technology visible through the huge window on the far wall. There were a couple of terminals and a handful of screens in the anteroom, and two cybs leaning over them, one a rotary-alt wearing an engineering insignia on her rotor mount and the other a grounder with medtech badges.
"Heavytread, report," Pharma snapped.
The medtech scrambled to his feet. "I think it's having one of its episodes, sir," he said. He turned one of the screens to face Pharma. The repeating pattern of characters said only WINGS HURT HELP PLEASE over and over again. Slipstream squinted at the readout, thoroughly confused. Weren't they here to deal with the warp core?
Pharma's vents purged in a long, hissing sigh. "Of course it is," he muttered, rubbing one hand up the crest of his helm. "All right, I'll see what I can do. Slipstream, follow me."
Another access code got them through the second door and into the chamber beyond the anteroom; just inside the door, Slipstream stopped and stared. She wasn't exactly familiar with the high technology that powered Cybertronian interstellar ships, but she'd assumed the warp core would be some kind of cosmic, quantum engine, inscrutable to her but swarming with engineers and techs to keep it operational. Instead, the room was empty of personnel, and the engine she'd expected proved to be a tangled forest of wires and tubing, interconnected with big chunks of machinery, with a huge console and another set of viewscreens in front of it. Each screen was printing the same characters as the terminal in the anteroom behind them: WINGS HURT HELP PLEASE.
And now the import of the message came into focus for her, because hanging suspended in the midst of the chaotic sprawl of machinery, bound into the wires and tubing, was the unmistakable form of a flight-capable Cybertronian.
02.
"Skywarp, you need to calm down," Pharma was saying, and there was no one he could possibly be talking to but the cyb inside the warp core. He waved a hand impatiently at one of the console screens, blanking it of its insistent, repeating message before accessing the terminal with a quick flurry of fingerstrokes.
Hanging well above the floor, the cyb squirmed in his restraints. There was a mask strapped across his face that prevented him from speaking, but Slipstream could hear his whimpering even above the ambient mechanical noise of the room. He was obviously in pain, and she felt her spark go out to him.
"Sir, how can I help?" she asked, moving up beside Pharma.
"Keep it distracted," he said, not even looking up from his screen.
Uncertainly, Slipstream approached the complex machinery. She was starting to be able to resolve some of what she was seeing; at the very least she could make out a sort of scaffold built up and around the cyb inside the device. She put a foot experimentally up onto a crossbar that looked wide enough to be a step, glancing over at Pharma as she did. He was kneeling down in front of the console against the wall, his back to her-- she wasn't going to be getting any hints from him.
So up into the scaffolding she climbed, aware the whole time of the bound cyb's optics on her as she found herself a secure perch. When she looked up to meet those optics she was struck by two things: their rich, unusual golden color, and how slagging bright they blazed in his face.
"It's all right, it's all right," she soothed quietly, making little quelling motions with the hand not currently wrapped around a scaffold strut. "I'm here-- we're here to help. We're doctors. My name is Slipstream. You're Skywarp, right?"
Right away, the patter started working. The panicky cyb's optics fixed on hers, and he nodded slowly. Good; she had his attention.
She made sure to maintain her eye contact with him, keeping his attention focused on her as she continued. "And there's something wrong with your wings?"
He nodded again, more violently this time.
"Okay." She leaned away from her perch on the scaffold, reaching for the mask strapped across his face. "I'm going to take this off, and then you can tell me--"
But now he was shaking his head, so hard that the tubing that fed down into the mask was rattling the machinery around it.
"Don't touch that," Pharma snapped from below her. "We'll have Unicron's own time of it getting that back in again if you pull it out. The warp unit has diagnostic screens for a reason."
"Yessir!" Slipstream turned back to Skywarp. "Can I get you to, er, print it on your screen for me, then?" She waited for his nod, and then pivoted to climb down off the scaffolding.
Overhead, the comm crackled to life, making her-- and Skywarp, she was close enough to notice-- both startle. "Bridge is on-comm," came the voice of that grounder medtech in the adjoining chamber. "Should I patch them through?"
Pharma's whole chassis heaved with his sigh. "If you must."
Instantly, the captain's voice filled the room. "Dcotor, what is taking you so long down there? My people require transportation!"
"How many times do I have to tell you, Starscream, that this unit is a delicate piece of equipment? It needs time and proper care for proper functioning!"
"That is Captain Starscream to you, doctor, and no piece of equipment is more important than the lives of my seekers. I don't care what you have to do, just get it running!"
As close to Skywarp as she was, Slipstream heard the little whimper of dismay that escaped him clearly.
Below her, Pharma made a slicing gesture to the cybs on the other side of the window, and the comm cut off an instant later. "All right, Skywarp," he said as he turned back, his voice clinical. He hopped gracefully up onto the scaffold, taking up a perch on the other side of the cyb from Slipstream. He held up his hand, showing Skywarp the gently glowing syringe he held. "I've got a nocioceptive blocking compound for you here, something that will dull your pain as soon as it's administered." Suiting deed to word, he bared a medical port in Skywarp's side and flipped it open, locking the end of the syringe into place and emptying it quickly. "There," he said as he recovered the port. "You don't hurt anymore."
Reaching up then, he grabbed the mask strapped to Skywarp's face by the hose feeding into it and wrenched his head around. "Now you heard the captain, didn't you?" His voice was sharp as a scalpel now. "There are seekers in distress planetside and we need them back on-ship, where it's safe. Make it happen."
He released Skywarp and jumped down off the scaffolding without waiting for a response. "Slipstream, I'm going to confer with the techs," he said, not even glancing back as he stalked towards the door. "Put away my medkit."
"...Yessir," Slipstream managed, but she said it only to the door closing behind him. She'd never seen Pharma treat a patient the way he'd just treated Skywarp, not even the ones that he was rightfully exasperated with, and she was feeling just a bit unmoored.
She forced her attention back to Skywarp. He was watching her with optics that glinted a little less brightly than they had a moment before. "How do you-- er, that is, does it still hurt?"
The dimmed optics held hers for a moment, then slid away. Skywarp shook his head.
"All right," Slipstream said, but she frowned a little. Wasn't it unusual for any kind of anesthetic compound to work so quickly--? She'd been taught that you used external circuit scramblers to interrupt the nocioceptic impulses for immediate pain relief and saved the internal therapies for long-term or chronic pain. Well, maybe he had a fast metabolism, or Pharma was using a new type of drug. They did say that pharmaceutical development was one of his many talents.
Still, they had taught her in the Academy to be as thorough as she could. "I think I'd better take a quick look," she murmured. "If you don't mind." She leaned away from the scaffold and squinted down at the diagnostic screens, one of which still read
LEFT WING
PIVOT JOINT
SHARP PAIN
Even as she was reading the characters, though, the words overwrote themselves with another message, printing down the screen in larger font than the first:
DOESN'T HURT ANYMORE
NO NEED
"But it might hurt again later, especially if it's a mechanical problem," she pointed out. The well-reasoned argument had been specially formulated to circumvent stubbornness like this. "This will only take a minute."
She leaned deeper into the scaffolding, taking as close a look as possible at the wing in question. The problem was immediately obvious: a loop of wire had slipped around the wing somehow, and gotten wedged down into the joint. It hurt just to look at.
"You've got something caught in here," she said, reaching for it-- and pulling her fingers back with alacrity as Skywarp flinched away from her. She withdrew her arm and leaned back, searching his obscured face with narrowed optics.
He refused to meet her gaze.
"Slipstream!" Pharma's voice crackled authoritatively over the comm from the next room, making her jump. "What do you think you're doing?"
"He's got an external obstruction, sir," she called, glancing back over her shoulder, "I thought I'd just--"
"Stand down from the warp unit, junior physician," he said, and he was using that same sharp, commanding tone with her as he had with Skywarp a moment before. "The captain wants those seekers recalled now, and it won't be able to operate with you up there in the rigging."
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the characters on the screen overwriting themselves again. This time the message read
PLEASE GET DOWN
I DON'T WANT TO HURT YOU
WARP PROCEDURE
INITIALIZING...
"Oh, slaggit," Slipstream said, and plunged her hand through the rigging. It was easy to get a fingertip under the loop of the wire but more difficult to lever it out from where it was caught. She had to shove her other arm in there too, pushing on Skywarp's wing to open up the joint and trying to ignore the sounds of machinery humming to life all around her as she did.
"Slipstream! Stand down!" Pharma thundered, but she ignored his voice, wrapping her fingers around the wire and giving it a yank that made Skywarp shrill wordlessly in protest. He flinched but the wire came free, and she did her best to hook it out of the way so it wouldn't wedge into the joint again.
All around her, the rig continued to come to life. The ambient temperature of the machinery was rising fast, and she could feel a whispery crackling across her dermal plating that meant there was electricity in the air. She could see little static sparks bridging between her arms and the machinery and knew that she was going to have to be careful getting down--
There was a searing bolt of pain through her wings and down her back, a confusion of movement, a jarring sensation of impact. The ozone crackle of electricity in the air peaked with an actinic blue-white flash that filled the room and whited out her unprepared optics, and then she was aware of nothing but the sound of cool air pumping in through the room's vents.
"You idiot." That was Pharma's voice again, and it was coming from-- beneath her? Oh Primus, he was beneath her, she was sprawled across his chest-- at least until he pushed her off and sat up. As her optics recalibrated, she could see that he was scowling down at his hands. "Contact electrical burns. Thank you so much, junior physician." He turned the scowl on her. "What were you thinking?!"
Gingerly, Slipstream pushed herself upright. She ached all over, her wings and hands especially, but the HUD readout laid over her vision wasn't reporting any further injuries. "He had some cabling pulled through one of his wing joints, sir," she said. "It was only going to hurt him again as soon as the analgesic you administered wore off, so I thought--"
"I don't care what you thought." Pharma levered himself to his feet and loomed over her, his face forbidding. "You're not here to make your own decisions, Slipstream, you're here to learn from me, and I expect you to obey me when I give you an order." The sharp lines of his face softened, then, and he reached down to pull her to her feet. "If that warp pulse had gone off while you were still in the rigging, it would have fried you."
"I see," Slipstream said, her wings and helm both drooping. "I didn't know."
"That's right," Pharma said, tilting her chin up and peering earnestly into her face. "You didn't. You don't know much of anything, and you won't until I teach you." His expression hardened again, optics glinting. "So don't pull a stunt like this again, or I will be very disappointed in you. You have promise, Slipstream; I'd hate to have to bring you down for insubordination."
"It won't happen again, sir," she promised him gravely.
"See that it doesn't." He released her and turned to look at the console. "Skywarp, tell me you got our people back."
One of the monitors on the console cleared, loading with a schematic labeled as the transportation deck a moment later. There were two bright icons in one of the spacious transportation bays.
"Good," Pharma said. Satisfied, he turned back to Slipstream. "Clean up my medkit. I'll be in the antechamber with the techs."
Examining his hands again, he left the room.
Slipstream hurried over to the console, peeking sidelong up at Skywarp as she did. The cyb hung slack in his restraints, but he was watching her.
There were words already printed across the screen when she turned her optics to the console:
I'm sorry
I'm sorry
I'm sorry
I'm sorry
"Hey," she said quietly, looking back up at him. "You did what you were supposed to. It's not your fault I couldn't follow orders."
The text remained on the screen, the last line beginning to blink insistently. Slipstream stared at it for a moment, then shrugged and looked away. What more could she say? Besides, she had a job to do.
She tidied away the minor clutter of medical supplies that Pharma had left behind into their compact container, putting it away in its cubbyhole under the counter. Then she gathered up the used syringe and the empty chemical ampoule from the analgesic that Pharma had administered and brought it over to the receptacle she'd noticed in the wall--
And paused. She'd been curious which drug Pharma had given Skywarp, but the name of the compound printed on the ampoule wasn't a painkiller. It was a sedative.
She slotted the used syringe into the waste container, but folded her long fingers around the ampoule and kept it as she hurried into the antechamber.
Pharma and the two techs were conferring over their consoles in low voices. "--full work-up," Pharma was saying. "It needs to be entirely re-rigged, we can't have something like this happening again. And Heavytread--" Pharma glanced up at her briefly. "--make sure you check its wings, there might be damage."
The two techs saluted and Pharma left them to their work, escorting Slipstream out into the hallway with a hand on her elbow. She kept her mouth shut as they passed the guard, waiting until they were in the lift again before she opened her mouth.
"That was a good spot," Pharma said before she could speak. "That wire. The techs are supposed to monitor the warp unit closely, to prevent little errors like that, but they missed this one. Well done."
The unexpected praise flustered her. "Ah-- thank you sir, but--" Wings pressed tight together behind her, she showed him the ampoule. "Sir, this isn't a painkiller, it's a sedative!"
The good humor leached instantly out of his face. His expression blank, Pharma picked up the little capsule, peered at it, then crushed it in his hand. "I know."
"But sir, you told Skywarp--"
"I know what I said, junior physician." There wasn't room in the elevator to back away from Pharma's radiating disapproval, but Slipstream retreated anyway. He followed her, boxing her into the corner. "Slipstream, it is imperative that you don't presume to question the way I treat the warp unit. It's a sensitive piece of machinery and it requires delicate handling, and I won't have some newspark barely out of the Academy challenging my methods!"
"I'm sorry sir, I just--"
"I don't care what you 'just'. This is the second time today I've had to talk to you about this and my patience is wearing thin. If you can't listen to me and do what I say, especially as my student on my ship here to learn from me, then there is no place for you here."
Slipstream shuttered her optics and bowed her head. "Yes, sir." She hoped the high thrum of anxiety that his words triggered in her wasn't as obvious to him as it felt.
Still, he seemed satisfied, backing away and giving her space again. The rest of the ride was silent, but he spoke again when the lift chimed their arrival on the command deck. "The next time something like this happens, junior physician Slipstream," he said without looking at her, "I will take you down for it. They always need more medtechs in the ground crews. Do you understand?"
If the floor of the lift had opened and dropped her into the shaft, she couldn't have been more alarmed. "I... I understand, sir," she managed, staring at his back in open horror as he nodded and swept out into the hallway beyond.
She was still standing in the lift, stunned, when it chimed softly and the doors slid closed again.
Duty in the natal stations that ringed the apertures of the Well of Allsparks was supposed to be thrilling. Newspark care was vital to the perpetuation of Cybertronian society, wasn't it? And what duty could be more vital than detecting the newly disgorged balls of spark energy as they drifted free of the Well and catching them for implantation into waiting protoforms? It was supposed to be a glamorous, challenging, electrifying job!
So why was Gaze bored out of her mind?
Oh, sure, she remembered her lessons--she was only newly released from the natal tech certification program, so it wasn't like they were that far behind her. She'd sat through the same lectures about the Well's phases, how sometimes it was fertile and prolific and sometimes it went almost dormant, as any other tech. She'd even been warned, when they assigned her to this station to start her career, that the Well currently experiencing a low-yield phase. But she hadn't realized that 'low-yield' meant 'you'll sit in front of a blank monitor all day, every day, and since you're a newbie, that's the only job we'll let you do'.
She could have it worse, she supposed. Even boring monitor duty in a quiet natal station was better than, say, orbital construction work, or energon mining, or waste processing. Maybe her aptitude tests had pegged her for just a harvester and not an implanter or a caretaker or an arbiter or something else, but she should be grateful she hadn't been sorted into a labor or servant caste. She would be doing something vitally important to Cybertron, that's what they'd told her and all her castemates in her crèche and at the academy. Harvesters were special and important, the only people deft and sensitive enough to work the technology that captured natal sparks; she was special and important.
And still bored. Drumming her fingers on her console, Gaze he glanced at the blank screen of her monitor and then looked around the empty room, wondering what the other techs were doing while she was alone in here. She knew they weren't heavily staffed in the station right now; only Trylight and their supervisor Keenedge were on duty, but they were supposed to be on duty in here and maybe she wouldn't be so bored if there was someone to talk to--
Her eyes returned mechanically to the screen as she internal monologue continued on, and for a moment she didn't even realize the import of the little blip showing on the monitor. A spark! The first spark to have disgorged from the Well since she'd started working here!
For a moment, Gaze froze totally, arrested by the little blip on the screen and paralyzed by her practical inexperience. Then her training took over, megacycles of simulators and datapacks and shadowing trips moving her hands through the motions of activating the gentle electrostatic net that would capture the spark before it could drift up to the planet's surface and bring it in to the station. Her fingers deftly activated scanning and analysis protocols, triggering the devices built into the monitor station and the rim of the Well to start taking preliminary readings on the new Cybertronian life. She brought up the live camera feed and set her hands into the controls that would minutely vary the voltage coursing through the net, urging the spark with gentle little electromagnetic pushes towards their outpost.
As soon as it was in position, the pulsing little ball of energy drifting gently down the funnel of the net, Gaze switched from the EM controls to the canister ones. With hands that trembled she activated the manipulator arms that reached out from the rim of the Well, positioning an empty natal chamber just so and scooping the spark inside with painstaking care. She brought up the frequency monitor subscreen and watched it intently for any sign of the fluctuations that might indicate trauma to the new spark, but all the prelims were still coming up blue.
It wasn't until she'd retracted the capped canister into the receiving bay that she realized her engine was running hot in her chest, her vents working loudly to try and cool her systems. She rubbed her shaking hands together and sat back from her monitor, eyes watching data on the spark compile on the screen without really seeing it.
She'd done it. She'd done it! She'd birthed a spark from the Well!
The door into the monitor room worked behind her, and Trylight stuck his head into the room. "Hey, we heard the alarms going off, what's-- did you catch one?"
"I did!" Gaze whirled delightedly in her seat, gesturing at the screen behind her. Staring at Trylight, she saw his optics go wide.
"Whoa," he breathed. "Are those readings correct?"
Frowning, Gaze spun back around to her console and the preliminary frequency reading that had compiled on the screen there. Part of her training had involved poring over spark frequency graphs and learning what the various spikes and fluctuations meant. A harvester was no arbiter-- it wasn't her job to read the spark and decide what path in life the new Cybertronian was destined for-- but it wasn't until her second or third vocational battery that she washed out of those more prestigious paths in the natal care caste. And everyone in her crèche had gotten a basic course in spark frequency analysis, no matter what career they ended up being trained for.
She knew enough to know that what she was looking at was very, very unique. Most sparks had low-amplitude frequencies with a regular period; the chart on her screen showed huge uneven peaks and valleys, a hugely erratic signature unlike anything she'd seen in her training.
"What's wrong with it?" she asked, a strident note of panic in her voice. "Did I hurt it?!"
"I don't know," Trylight said. He sounded calmer than her, which took the edge off her panic, but the worried frown on his face was far from reassuring. He came up behind her, leaning over her shoulder and starting to tap at the console. The static graph of the preliminary reading disappeared, replaced by a live representation, this one fluctuating and shifting as the spark oscillated in the natal chamber. Trylight's vocalizer hummed with white noise static as he considered what he was seeing, and Gaze tried not to wash her hands together too nervously in her lap.
"Well? Is it all right?" she prompted when Trylight's moment of silent contemplation dragged on far too long for her anxiety.
"I don't know," he said again. He pointed at the marching progression of huge peaks and valleys on the screen. "If you'd damaged it or it was having a fit, these spikes wouldn't be regular like this. The reading would be erratic; this is regular. But the amplitude--!"
"Amplitude alone isn't a reliable indicator of spark trauma." Neither tech had heard their supervisor come into the monitor room, so Keenedge's sudden, measured words made Gaze jerk in suprise.
"Arbiter!" she squeaked.
Trylight acknowledged the other cyb with far more composure. "Arbiter Keenedge, have you ever seen anything like this?"
"Not in a very long time," she said, coming to stand behind Gaze's chair. She urged the junior tech out of the chair with an ungentle nudge, and indicated for Trylight to take the vacated seat. "Take another reading as soon as that natal chamber is safely stowed," she commanded, her voice crisp. "We'll need to see if those peaks maintain that amplitude, or if it's going to even out. And if that spark is what I think it is..."
Keenedge trailed off and was silent for so long that Gaze, watching her superior intently, wondered if maybe she'd suffered some kind of cranial short. But no, the arbiter's bright optics were still moving, watching Trylight work and the new graph of the spark's frequency compile on the screen.
A small, sharp smile stretched the cyb's face. "There's a long list of very important Cybertronians who are going to be jockeying for the right to sponsor this newspark, I think."
01.
Junior physician Slipstream was verifying inventory reports submitted to her by the expedition's medtechs when the ship-wide alarm started to sound.
It wasn't the strident alert that she'd heard blaring during emergency drills, nor the staccato combat siren that indicated that the ship was about to come under attack. No, this was a deeper sound, a gentler but insistent gonging that repeated itself regularly over almost a decicycle. Then the alarm went silent, and the ship's comm system crackled to life with a faint hiss of noise.
"Attention all crew, attention all crew." That was the voice of Windchaser, the ship's first lieutenant, and Slipstream straightened attentively where she stood at the workstation. "We've got Live Current successfully parked in geosych around our target and we're still on-schedule, so coordinators, make sure your teams are keeping to their timetables. I need the first wave Seeker squads to report to the primary transportation bay to receive your final coordinates; second wave squads, get with your wing commanders for sector briefings. All other away teams, you are now officially on standby and should start going through your pre-debarkation checklists. I know you've all seen the prelims on this place, so we should have our work cut out for us. Good luck, everyone!"
The comm clicked off and Slipstream relaxed, turning her optics back to her console. None of those instructions had been targeted towards her; she wasn't part of any of the Live Current's away teams. That's what the medtechs were for, which was why each squad of prospectors, surveyors, and miners had at least one attached to their unit. But medtechs were only trained in the basics; they could perform basic maintenance and provide field repairs, and that was about it. Slipstream, on the other hand, was a physician, an exhaustively trained cyb of expansive skills. Maybe she was fresh out of the academy, still getting the experience she needed to back up that training and hone those skills, but she was infinitely more valuable than some tech. She would be staying up here on the ship where she was safe, and where the expedition's senior physician could directly supervise this last, practical term of her training.
And what a physician! Pharma was a legend among doctors, his name spoken with reverence by the staff and instructors of the Academy. He was an accredited master of flight-mode medicine, and considered the foremost expert in the field when it came to the ailments that afflicted energon seekers. They'd studied his papers in the Academy, learned his techniques, and swapped unbelievable stories about his most famous procedures.
Being assigned to work directly under him fresh out of the Academy was the most prestigious honor Slipstream had ever received.
Behind her a door cycled open, and like he'd been summoned by her thoughts, Pharma walked out of his office. Slipstream pulled herself upright at her console, the same way that she had when Windchaser had been on-comm, and nodded a greeting at him.
He frowned faintly down at her. "Relax, Slipstream. This is the Energy Commission, not the Defense Force; you don't have to salute me like some superior officer."
She'd never actually saluted him, but respect and deference for her superiors in age and experience had been drilled into her at the Academy just as much as her medical skills. It was hard not to attend him when he walked into a room. Still, she forced herself to relax, wingtips dipping a little behind her. "Sorry, sir."
Pharma did not object to the honorific, she noticed.
He came closer and peered at the reports on the screen behind her. "Still working on the inventory?"
"That's right," she had, turning her attention quickly back to the screen. "Just double-checking everything before I push it through."
"Very good." His apparent approval made her spark pulse in her chest. "It can wait, though," he continued, and then he smiled at her, a crooked, intimate little expression that made her spark pulse again. "This is your first trip out-system with the company, right?"
"This is my first assignment outside of the Academy at all," she said. The intimacy of that little grin gave her confidence to let her wings lift again, this time not with tension but pride.
"Ah, that's right." His smirk turned mischievous and looked wholly out of place on a cyb of such renown. "Come with me, then, we're going to the bridge."
Slipstream paused a moment to lock her terminal, then had to trot after him to catch up. His broad back seemed to fill the whole corridor ahead of her, never mind that she'd seen clusters of crewcybs passing each other here with room to spare. Shaking her head, she tried to dispel the fantasy, but nevertheless the impression that he was larger than life remained.
"In here," he said finally, his fingers carelessly entering the security code that granted him access to the bridge. She'd never been inside, of course, too junior a crewmember to receive anything like a personal greeting from the ship's commander or a tour of his bridge. Well, she wasn't too junior now, was she? She swelled with pride as she stepped though that doorway, wingtips flicking high and wide. Not even the fact that no crewcyb on the bridge spared her even a glance could dampen her surge of self-importance.
Pharma touched her shoulder as he came through beside her, raising one brilliant blue finger to his lips once he had her attention. She nodded her understanding of the signal, then followed him to an empty place alone the bridge's rear wall.
All around them, a crackling tension that was almost physically palpable seemed to fill the bridge. There were over a dozen crewcybs present, most of them meshed into immersive couches at the various duty stations tucked against the walls of the great room. Spread in a panorama across the front of the space was the most enormous interior viewscreen that Slipstream had ever seen, displaying an image of the planet they were parked in orbit around; in the very center of the space was the captain's chair, positioned in front of a semi-circular bank of consoles and miniscreens. There was a slim seeker silhouette standing just off the shoulder of the chair, and Slipstream recognized Windchaser, her electric-blue-and-purple-on-black paintjob unmistakable. Of the captain, though, she could see nothing but upright silver wings, a long-clawed hand resting loose against the arm of the chair, and a slim leg with those tell-tale seeker heelstruts at the end.
"Mark time," the captain called out; one of the crew-cybs responded immediately from eir couch with the time down to the fraction of a cycle. The claws of the captain's visible hand curled. "Mm, on-schedule. Good. Windchaser, are we ready to deploy?"
"Affirmative, captain." The second-in-command checked a pad in her hand. "All the first-wave wing commanders have reported their squads blue-light for go."
Wings shifting, the captain leaned forward in his seat; Slipstream saw one clawed finger press at a keypad and heard the comm activate. "First-wave squads, activate your beacons."
There was a pause, and then a subscreen lit up bright on the bridge's periphery. "Beacons online, captain!" sang out the voice of the cyb at that station.
The captain's fingers moved over the comm pad again. "Warp core, we are prepared for transport," he said, his voice crisp. "Standby." His hand fell away from the pad and he shifted in his chair again. "Nav, does transportation have the coordinates in order?"
Another crewcyb's screen lit in a rapid, flickering crawl of information. "Transportation is blue-light to go, captain," she reported after a brief hesitation.
The captain sat back, and Slipstream could see enough of him to see his long legs cross and his nearer elbow brace against the arm of his command seat. "Then let's begin," he said, and activated the comm pad once more. "Warp core, engage. Get my people down on that planet."
Pharma leaned close, his shoulder brushing hers. "Watch," he commanded in a whisper, indicating the massive viewscreen at the fore of the room.
The image of the planet was still splashed across the screen, but Slipstream saw now that it wasn't static; no, the target of their mission was turning incrementally in real time. As Slipstream watched, a constellation of blue-white stars appeared, winking into being up and down a broad longitudinal corridor of the planet's visible hemisphere. No, she realized, not stars-- digital icons, superimposed over the photoreal view of the planet. Each one was tagged with a name and a set of coordinates, the characters minute in proportion to the giant screen but perfectly legible thanks to its sheer size.
The coordinates were drop-off points for the seeker squads on their way planetside, she assumed-- and then she realized that the numbers were already shifting, the icons on the move. Real-time position updates? But the shuttles would have barely had time to clear Live Current's docking bay, much less penetrate the planet's atmosphere and release the seekers to their work.
"Are those our cybs?" she hissed to Pharma. "Are they down there already?"
"Indeed they are," he said, and his smug little grin might have annoyed Slipstream if she hadn't been so preoccupied with the impossible materialization of three wings of Cybertronians on the planet's surface.
"How-- that's impossible!"
"Not for the Live Current." It wasn't Pharma who responded to her, though; no, that was the precise voice of the ship's captain, and Slipstream startled as she realized he'd been listening in on them. He'd swiveled that impressive command seat of his around to face them, and he was regarding her over steepled fingers. Slipstream met his optics fearlessly, though her wavering wingtips betrayed her embarrassment over her ignorance.
Still, it seemed the captain was going to take pity on her. "Our ship happens to be equipped with the most advanced warp core unit on Cybertron," he said. "In addition to standard extra-solar jump capabilities, that unit allows us direct individual transportation in-system; its precision is unparalleled. Our warp core, in fact, is one of the primary reasons why the Live Current is the flagship of the Cybertronian Energy Commission's fleet."
"I didn't know," Slipstream said.
"You wouldn't have." The captain sprawled back in his chair. "The technology is highly proprietary."
"If you check your crew contract," Pharma added, "you'll find a provision forbidding you from discussing it with unauthorized personnel. It's sort of an open secret on the ship--" He scowled ferociously, and the captain shifted in his chair. "--which I suppose we can't do anything about, but you will be expected to be discreet outside the crew if you expect to retain your position."
Wings flicking, Slipstream drew herself up and nodded primly. "You can count on me, sirs!"
"Of course we can," the captain said, with a strange smile on his face. "You're a good little cadet, aren't you?"
"Junior physician, sir!"
The captain's optics flicked obviously to Pharma, then away. "Of course," he said again, inscrutably.
Before the strange, suddenly tense moment could progress any further, one of the officers called out from his couch, "Captain! I think we have a problem!"
Just like that, Slipstream was an afterthought; the captain whirled his seat around to face his command console again. "Main screen, Runway. Brief me."
The image of the planet zoomed in, so abruptly that Slipstream felt her gyros try to compensate even though she hadn't moved anywhere. A couple of the seeker beacons had started to flash orange, and given that they were located smack in the middle of a huge formation of swirling clouds, even Slipstream could venture a guess as to why.
"Skybreaker and Contrail just flipped their beacons over to alarm mode," the officer-- Runway-- said. "They're--"
"Contrail's trying to patch through, sir!" That was another one of the officers, sitting up far enough in her couch to crane a look back at the captain. "Should I accept the transmission?"
"Yes, yes! On-comm!"
Immediately the bridge was filled with the unmistakable crackling howl of wind heard over commlink, a sound that was intimately familiar to any flight-alt Cybertronian. "Command, you gotta ghhht us out of --ere," came a hoarse voice, half blurred out by the static and environmental noise of the transmission. "Whoever classsszzzzkt --is storm as a category three wsszt --ompletely deluded!" There was a stretch of completely incomprehensible garble, then: "--five at least! Skybreaker'zzzzz --is completely fried out!"
The captain was on his feet, wings low and tight behind him as he hunched over the console. He stabbed a finger out at the comm, snapping a brisk, "Standby, Seekers, we'll bring you back to ship," that was completely at odds with the tension in his shoulders as he whirled on Windchaser. "Can you tell me why I just teleported two of my people into the middle of a category five weather system?!"
"Meterology malfunctions later, captain!" the SIC snapped. She leaned past him and slapped a hand on the comm pad on the command console. "Warp core, engage! Recall beacon code 08772 and 02301 immediately!"
There was a pause, silent in the bridge except for the howl of the wind across the still-open channel with Contrail and the seeker's desperate grunts as he fought that wind. Suddenly the cyb at the nav console jerked in her couch with a cry. "Warp core's throwing back errors, captain!"
The captain swore and pivoted on his heelstruts and Slipstream, who'd assumed she was brought here only to observe, found herself suddenly pinned in the ferocious glare of Starscream, commander of the Energon Seeker Corps and captain of the Energy Commission fleet flagship Live Current. "Get down to the transportation deck and get that warp unit working," he growled, his voice like ground glass.
He turned away, dismissing her with no time for questions, and before she could raise a protest, Pharma had taken her by the arm and hustled her out of the bridge. The last thing she heard as the door cycled shut behind them was Starscream's voice, almost oscillating with tension as he instructed the two stricken seekers to hold steady while they worked on the problem.
The smug, laughing, intimate Pharma who'd brought her up to the bridge to introduce her to wonders was gone, replaced by the distant professional she idolized. "Have you ever been down to the transportation deck?" he asked, still propelling her along with his hand gripping her arm painfully.
"No, sir-- sir, why are we dealing with this?" she asked as he swung them into a trans-deck lift. "Shouldn't a warp core malfunction be engineering's job?"
He didn't answer her, though, he only shook his head with his lips pressed into a thin line. When the lift arrived at the transportation deck, he swept out of it ahead of her, leading the way through the corridors so fast that she had to jog to keep up.
So of course he stopped abruptly in front of a closed door, so abruptly that she almost slammed into his back. He turned, taking her by the shoulders and holding her out at arm's length. "You and I are going to go over the discretionary clauses concerning the warp core unit on the other side of this door in depth," he told her. "Soon. Until then, you keep your mouth shut about what you're about to see. Understand, junior physician?"
Eyes wide, wings low, Slipstream nodded. "Yessir," she said gravely. "I understand."
"Good." He released her and turned to the door, fingers flying through a security code, and then preceded her inside.
On the other side of the door was cozy little space, an anteroom for the larger chamber full of incomprehensible technology visible through the huge window on the far wall. There were a couple of terminals and a handful of screens in the anteroom, and two cybs leaning over them, one a rotary-alt wearing an engineering insignia on her rotor mount and the other a grounder with medtech badges.
"Heavytread, report," Pharma snapped.
The medtech scrambled to his feet. "I think it's having one of its episodes, sir," he said. He turned one of the screens to face Pharma. The repeating pattern of characters said only WINGS HURT HELP PLEASE over and over again. Slipstream squinted at the readout, thoroughly confused. Weren't they here to deal with the warp core?
Pharma's vents purged in a long, hissing sigh. "Of course it is," he muttered, rubbing one hand up the crest of his helm. "All right, I'll see what I can do. Slipstream, follow me."
Another access code got them through the second door and into the chamber beyond the anteroom; just inside the door, Slipstream stopped and stared. She wasn't exactly familiar with the high technology that powered Cybertronian interstellar ships, but she'd assumed the warp core would be some kind of cosmic, quantum engine, inscrutable to her but swarming with engineers and techs to keep it operational. Instead, the room was empty of personnel, and the engine she'd expected proved to be a tangled forest of wires and tubing, interconnected with big chunks of machinery, with a huge console and another set of viewscreens in front of it. Each screen was printing the same characters as the terminal in the anteroom behind them: WINGS HURT HELP PLEASE.
And now the import of the message came into focus for her, because hanging suspended in the midst of the chaotic sprawl of machinery, bound into the wires and tubing, was the unmistakable form of a flight-capable Cybertronian.
02.
"Skywarp, you need to calm down," Pharma was saying, and there was no one he could possibly be talking to but the cyb inside the warp core. He waved a hand impatiently at one of the console screens, blanking it of its insistent, repeating message before accessing the terminal with a quick flurry of fingerstrokes.
Hanging well above the floor, the cyb squirmed in his restraints. There was a mask strapped across his face that prevented him from speaking, but Slipstream could hear his whimpering even above the ambient mechanical noise of the room. He was obviously in pain, and she felt her spark go out to him.
"Sir, how can I help?" she asked, moving up beside Pharma.
"Keep it distracted," he said, not even looking up from his screen.
Uncertainly, Slipstream approached the complex machinery. She was starting to be able to resolve some of what she was seeing; at the very least she could make out a sort of scaffold built up and around the cyb inside the device. She put a foot experimentally up onto a crossbar that looked wide enough to be a step, glancing over at Pharma as she did. He was kneeling down in front of the console against the wall, his back to her-- she wasn't going to be getting any hints from him.
So up into the scaffolding she climbed, aware the whole time of the bound cyb's optics on her as she found herself a secure perch. When she looked up to meet those optics she was struck by two things: their rich, unusual golden color, and how slagging bright they blazed in his face.
"It's all right, it's all right," she soothed quietly, making little quelling motions with the hand not currently wrapped around a scaffold strut. "I'm here-- we're here to help. We're doctors. My name is Slipstream. You're Skywarp, right?"
Right away, the patter started working. The panicky cyb's optics fixed on hers, and he nodded slowly. Good; she had his attention.
She made sure to maintain her eye contact with him, keeping his attention focused on her as she continued. "And there's something wrong with your wings?"
He nodded again, more violently this time.
"Okay." She leaned away from her perch on the scaffold, reaching for the mask strapped across his face. "I'm going to take this off, and then you can tell me--"
But now he was shaking his head, so hard that the tubing that fed down into the mask was rattling the machinery around it.
"Don't touch that," Pharma snapped from below her. "We'll have Unicron's own time of it getting that back in again if you pull it out. The warp unit has diagnostic screens for a reason."
"Yessir!" Slipstream turned back to Skywarp. "Can I get you to, er, print it on your screen for me, then?" She waited for his nod, and then pivoted to climb down off the scaffolding.
Overhead, the comm crackled to life, making her-- and Skywarp, she was close enough to notice-- both startle. "Bridge is on-comm," came the voice of that grounder medtech in the adjoining chamber. "Should I patch them through?"
Pharma's whole chassis heaved with his sigh. "If you must."
Instantly, the captain's voice filled the room. "Dcotor, what is taking you so long down there? My people require transportation!"
"How many times do I have to tell you, Starscream, that this unit is a delicate piece of equipment? It needs time and proper care for proper functioning!"
"That is Captain Starscream to you, doctor, and no piece of equipment is more important than the lives of my seekers. I don't care what you have to do, just get it running!"
As close to Skywarp as she was, Slipstream heard the little whimper of dismay that escaped him clearly.
Below her, Pharma made a slicing gesture to the cybs on the other side of the window, and the comm cut off an instant later. "All right, Skywarp," he said as he turned back, his voice clinical. He hopped gracefully up onto the scaffold, taking up a perch on the other side of the cyb from Slipstream. He held up his hand, showing Skywarp the gently glowing syringe he held. "I've got a nocioceptive blocking compound for you here, something that will dull your pain as soon as it's administered." Suiting deed to word, he bared a medical port in Skywarp's side and flipped it open, locking the end of the syringe into place and emptying it quickly. "There," he said as he recovered the port. "You don't hurt anymore."
Reaching up then, he grabbed the mask strapped to Skywarp's face by the hose feeding into it and wrenched his head around. "Now you heard the captain, didn't you?" His voice was sharp as a scalpel now. "There are seekers in distress planetside and we need them back on-ship, where it's safe. Make it happen."
He released Skywarp and jumped down off the scaffolding without waiting for a response. "Slipstream, I'm going to confer with the techs," he said, not even glancing back as he stalked towards the door. "Put away my medkit."
"...Yessir," Slipstream managed, but she said it only to the door closing behind him. She'd never seen Pharma treat a patient the way he'd just treated Skywarp, not even the ones that he was rightfully exasperated with, and she was feeling just a bit unmoored.
She forced her attention back to Skywarp. He was watching her with optics that glinted a little less brightly than they had a moment before. "How do you-- er, that is, does it still hurt?"
The dimmed optics held hers for a moment, then slid away. Skywarp shook his head.
"All right," Slipstream said, but she frowned a little. Wasn't it unusual for any kind of anesthetic compound to work so quickly--? She'd been taught that you used external circuit scramblers to interrupt the nocioceptic impulses for immediate pain relief and saved the internal therapies for long-term or chronic pain. Well, maybe he had a fast metabolism, or Pharma was using a new type of drug. They did say that pharmaceutical development was one of his many talents.
Still, they had taught her in the Academy to be as thorough as she could. "I think I'd better take a quick look," she murmured. "If you don't mind." She leaned away from the scaffold and squinted down at the diagnostic screens, one of which still read
PIVOT JOINT
SHARP PAIN
Even as she was reading the characters, though, the words overwrote themselves with another message, printing down the screen in larger font than the first:
NO NEED
"But it might hurt again later, especially if it's a mechanical problem," she pointed out. The well-reasoned argument had been specially formulated to circumvent stubbornness like this. "This will only take a minute."
She leaned deeper into the scaffolding, taking as close a look as possible at the wing in question. The problem was immediately obvious: a loop of wire had slipped around the wing somehow, and gotten wedged down into the joint. It hurt just to look at.
"You've got something caught in here," she said, reaching for it-- and pulling her fingers back with alacrity as Skywarp flinched away from her. She withdrew her arm and leaned back, searching his obscured face with narrowed optics.
He refused to meet her gaze.
"Slipstream!" Pharma's voice crackled authoritatively over the comm from the next room, making her jump. "What do you think you're doing?"
"He's got an external obstruction, sir," she called, glancing back over her shoulder, "I thought I'd just--"
"Stand down from the warp unit, junior physician," he said, and he was using that same sharp, commanding tone with her as he had with Skywarp a moment before. "The captain wants those seekers recalled now, and it won't be able to operate with you up there in the rigging."
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the characters on the screen overwriting themselves again. This time the message read
I DON'T WANT TO HURT YOU
WARP PROCEDURE
INITIALIZING...
"Oh, slaggit," Slipstream said, and plunged her hand through the rigging. It was easy to get a fingertip under the loop of the wire but more difficult to lever it out from where it was caught. She had to shove her other arm in there too, pushing on Skywarp's wing to open up the joint and trying to ignore the sounds of machinery humming to life all around her as she did.
"Slipstream! Stand down!" Pharma thundered, but she ignored his voice, wrapping her fingers around the wire and giving it a yank that made Skywarp shrill wordlessly in protest. He flinched but the wire came free, and she did her best to hook it out of the way so it wouldn't wedge into the joint again.
All around her, the rig continued to come to life. The ambient temperature of the machinery was rising fast, and she could feel a whispery crackling across her dermal plating that meant there was electricity in the air. She could see little static sparks bridging between her arms and the machinery and knew that she was going to have to be careful getting down--
There was a searing bolt of pain through her wings and down her back, a confusion of movement, a jarring sensation of impact. The ozone crackle of electricity in the air peaked with an actinic blue-white flash that filled the room and whited out her unprepared optics, and then she was aware of nothing but the sound of cool air pumping in through the room's vents.
"You idiot." That was Pharma's voice again, and it was coming from-- beneath her? Oh Primus, he was beneath her, she was sprawled across his chest-- at least until he pushed her off and sat up. As her optics recalibrated, she could see that he was scowling down at his hands. "Contact electrical burns. Thank you so much, junior physician." He turned the scowl on her. "What were you thinking?!"
Gingerly, Slipstream pushed herself upright. She ached all over, her wings and hands especially, but the HUD readout laid over her vision wasn't reporting any further injuries. "He had some cabling pulled through one of his wing joints, sir," she said. "It was only going to hurt him again as soon as the analgesic you administered wore off, so I thought--"
"I don't care what you thought." Pharma levered himself to his feet and loomed over her, his face forbidding. "You're not here to make your own decisions, Slipstream, you're here to learn from me, and I expect you to obey me when I give you an order." The sharp lines of his face softened, then, and he reached down to pull her to her feet. "If that warp pulse had gone off while you were still in the rigging, it would have fried you."
"I see," Slipstream said, her wings and helm both drooping. "I didn't know."
"That's right," Pharma said, tilting her chin up and peering earnestly into her face. "You didn't. You don't know much of anything, and you won't until I teach you." His expression hardened again, optics glinting. "So don't pull a stunt like this again, or I will be very disappointed in you. You have promise, Slipstream; I'd hate to have to bring you down for insubordination."
"It won't happen again, sir," she promised him gravely.
"See that it doesn't." He released her and turned to look at the console. "Skywarp, tell me you got our people back."
One of the monitors on the console cleared, loading with a schematic labeled as the transportation deck a moment later. There were two bright icons in one of the spacious transportation bays.
"Good," Pharma said. Satisfied, he turned back to Slipstream. "Clean up my medkit. I'll be in the antechamber with the techs."
Examining his hands again, he left the room.
Slipstream hurried over to the console, peeking sidelong up at Skywarp as she did. The cyb hung slack in his restraints, but he was watching her.
There were words already printed across the screen when she turned her optics to the console:
I'm sorry
I'm sorry
I'm sorry
"Hey," she said quietly, looking back up at him. "You did what you were supposed to. It's not your fault I couldn't follow orders."
The text remained on the screen, the last line beginning to blink insistently. Slipstream stared at it for a moment, then shrugged and looked away. What more could she say? Besides, she had a job to do.
She tidied away the minor clutter of medical supplies that Pharma had left behind into their compact container, putting it away in its cubbyhole under the counter. Then she gathered up the used syringe and the empty chemical ampoule from the analgesic that Pharma had administered and brought it over to the receptacle she'd noticed in the wall--
And paused. She'd been curious which drug Pharma had given Skywarp, but the name of the compound printed on the ampoule wasn't a painkiller. It was a sedative.
She slotted the used syringe into the waste container, but folded her long fingers around the ampoule and kept it as she hurried into the antechamber.
Pharma and the two techs were conferring over their consoles in low voices. "--full work-up," Pharma was saying. "It needs to be entirely re-rigged, we can't have something like this happening again. And Heavytread--" Pharma glanced up at her briefly. "--make sure you check its wings, there might be damage."
The two techs saluted and Pharma left them to their work, escorting Slipstream out into the hallway with a hand on her elbow. She kept her mouth shut as they passed the guard, waiting until they were in the lift again before she opened her mouth.
"That was a good spot," Pharma said before she could speak. "That wire. The techs are supposed to monitor the warp unit closely, to prevent little errors like that, but they missed this one. Well done."
The unexpected praise flustered her. "Ah-- thank you sir, but--" Wings pressed tight together behind her, she showed him the ampoule. "Sir, this isn't a painkiller, it's a sedative!"
The good humor leached instantly out of his face. His expression blank, Pharma picked up the little capsule, peered at it, then crushed it in his hand. "I know."
"But sir, you told Skywarp--"
"I know what I said, junior physician." There wasn't room in the elevator to back away from Pharma's radiating disapproval, but Slipstream retreated anyway. He followed her, boxing her into the corner. "Slipstream, it is imperative that you don't presume to question the way I treat the warp unit. It's a sensitive piece of machinery and it requires delicate handling, and I won't have some newspark barely out of the Academy challenging my methods!"
"I'm sorry sir, I just--"
"I don't care what you 'just'. This is the second time today I've had to talk to you about this and my patience is wearing thin. If you can't listen to me and do what I say, especially as my student on my ship here to learn from me, then there is no place for you here."
Slipstream shuttered her optics and bowed her head. "Yes, sir." She hoped the high thrum of anxiety that his words triggered in her wasn't as obvious to him as it felt.
Still, he seemed satisfied, backing away and giving her space again. The rest of the ride was silent, but he spoke again when the lift chimed their arrival on the command deck. "The next time something like this happens, junior physician Slipstream," he said without looking at her, "I will take you down for it. They always need more medtechs in the ground crews. Do you understand?"
If the floor of the lift had opened and dropped her into the shaft, she couldn't have been more alarmed. "I... I understand, sir," she managed, staring at his back in open horror as he nodded and swept out into the hallway beyond.
She was still standing in the lift, stunned, when it chimed softly and the doors slid closed again.