Ep0 - "Flying Lessons" - Closed

“No thanks,” said Barricade, whose attentions were already on the control console inside the Phantom. For all that this ship was powerful, it was designed for a small crew, either because this prototype only needed a few working mechs on it or because the minds that made it figured an over abundance of cold-sparked bots in one ship was not an overly good idea. You had to be cold-sparked to get in this ship and not find it worrisome. You had to have some kind of ice in your spark.

Barricade sat down in the pilot seat, moving Fairwind to his shoulder“Pay attention to what I’m doing. You’ll have to do it from the inside soon enough,” said the infiltrator, running through the start up sequences, the systems humming warm and reactive under his talons. He reached up under the armor plating at the join of his shoulder and arm, consciously reconfiguring the armor there to retract slightly, revealing a basic sensor jack. “You can link up if you want to download the kinesthetic hydraulic memory. It might be useful once you’re in the system. It might not. Either way I’d suggest it.”

The ease in which he offered this was, perhaps, the most significant comment on Barricade’s relationship to Fairwinds that one could make. He didn’t let a grand total of two other mechs get under his plates and only after eons of snarling at them and getting used them and he still didn’t really trust one of them.

“Knock it off,” said Barricade without any real venom, more a reflex than anything to the cassette’s cuddly impulses. He was already initializing the start up sequences with the long ease of familiarity, pinging the hangar doors to open and giving launch and time frame details to the on-duty flight watch. They wouldn’t be out more than a few hours and would remain in shielded proximity of the Nemesis’ shadow. The usual air for flying lessons and Seeker maneuvers when open air flying was inadvisable.

“Looks like,” said Barricade, “Shockwave’s got the shields back up and running. Stealth systems are still active and the drive core’s been re-energized. This thing can actually feed off and convert almost any form of energy: energon, solar energy, fossil fuels. The minute I hit atmo, it launched planetary scans for useable fuels and besides the energon organic fuels seemed to be acceptable as well.”

The Phantom hummed around them as the hangar bay doors began to come open and with hardly a lurch the anti-grav vibrated online and suddenly the phantom lifted five feet from the deck. A familiar shiver of desire and anticipation slid through the Saleen’s circuits. Briefly, he smiled, then gunned the ship it shot out into bright open air.

Distracted by the great feel of the Phantom under his hands, pulsing around him with the heat and energy of a running vessel, seething with power and heat, Barricade was somewhat taken off guard by the question. He paused, slowing the acceleration of the ship and swinging her back round toward the Nemesis. The great battle ship loomed, like a massive spiny beast sliding through the planet's atmosphere and with a quick drop of the controls, the Phantom spiraled up over into the upper stratosphere.

"I was sparked a ground-bound," he said idly. "Racer model, a chase-bot. Designed to bring down the bad guys when they ran. Law enforcement down to the base code." He put the Phantom through a series of lazy turns, letting Fairwinds feel the arc and give of the systems in reaction to his coaxing. "I guess... I don't know, I like flight as an external thing." A pause. "And I couldn't take Starscream as a flight teacher. How the hell would I handle him as a Seeker commander?"

“Maybe back on Cyberton,” said Barricade quietly. “Not now though. Commander Starscream’s been the top gunner for a while now and with just about every real seeker out there gone AWOL, MIA or KIA if I actually pulled off a successful outmode there’s no way I’d be stationed anywhere but beneath Starscream. More than that, a flight alt mode is never ever a decent stealth disguise. The airwaves are full of eyes human and otherwise but no one’s looking at the ground. Every big city and country on this planet has cars no one cares about, but a plane in the air is something to look at. Runs against my function.”

Barricade shrugged. “Besides… I like ships. The design of them I mean. How they feel.” The Phantom banked again, hard. “Feel that?” Barricade smirks. “I like that.”

“Yeah,” said Barricade, a smile warming his EMF and sliding up his mouth. He was a aware that there was a certain level of protocol that he was breaking just now, but on the other hand, having broken quite a few stranger protocols just recently, this felt like far less an infraction. “You know what? Let’s go.”

The Phantom’s engine sang to life, powered on and with a sudden dizzying burst of speed, shot off from the Nemesis and peeled away screaming into the horizon, the black bullet hull of the starship melting under a ripple of shielding and cloaking fields that turned the ship into a silent blur of metal howling through the cloud banks before breaching the upper levels of the vapor layer and coming into the burn of Earth’s sun against the ocean of cloud. The white banks bright gold beneath the bowl of the blue sky.

“You’ll have fun being this ship, Windy. Might not want to go back afterward,” said Barricade, spark still humming with the pleasure of flight. “But you’ll need to. Get me? You can’t inhabit a ship like this one. A Fallen ship, even handicapped will try to eat you as fast as you eat it. Losing you would be pointless. So be careful.”

“Well, Megatron is always moving faster than anyone else,” said Barricade idly, putting the Phantom through its paces, taking some time to enjoy the atmo break on this planet. Cybertronian skies were almost always clear, not snarled by the thick clouds of water and strange atmospheric densities. The infiltrator adjusted the angle of a turn, glancing toward the cassette on his shoulder, contemplating her role in the upcoming assault on the Autobots. “Doesn’t matter if you’re a giant living weapon or a cassette, promise you that mech’ll leave you eating slip stream.”

He paused a moment, feeling that anchor in his chest now, that hum of foreign frequency through his own spark. He wasn't exactly talking hardware specs anymore.