The Iceman Cometh (Closed, Starscream)

[Deleted]

Set after Castling, on the Flight Deck of the 'Nemesis'.



Though it could seem so at times, the 'Nemesis' hardly ever flew alone. Patrol sorties cleared the airspace regularly, particularly when the great behemoth moved out of cloud cover. Sometimes, when resources were found close to the surface and far away from the natives' prying eyes and lackluster sensors, transfer might even be done on the wing rather than waste energy on ground-bridges. At the moment, however, the warship was chasing the horizon over a solid sea of white; his path was low enough that occasionally the lower-most tip of a jutting spur dragged through the vapor for a second or two.

Visibility above this wall of camouflage went on for miles; the flight deck was bathed in slanting afternoon sunlight that reached partially into the access hangar, making the shadows in it that much sharper. The need to call in for clearance before take-offs and landings seemed almost moot in the crisp air, but discipline and habit did their job. The calls came in, were answered, schedules maintained, and when they weren't, someone nonetheless took care to smooth things over. The flight control crew had been doing this for a very long time and they all knew the drill and each other well. There were, therefore, really no ready suspects as to who might have placed a quick call to the guts of the 'Nemesis', to the lab down there and the black-ice mountain sulking within it.

Shockwave was still angry. If anything, he was even angrier than he'd been when he'd traveled through Roulette's memories and discovered Starscream's... infiltration into his routine. Never mind MECH and their processes, that report had gone on to whoever it was that required it. Likely Soundwave. It did not fall to Shockwave to counter the enemy, only to provide what tools might make the process more efficient. To provide such tools, his own routine had to remain efficient. Smooth. Unchanged. Starscream, as usual, had ensured none of those adjectives qualified. He had... interrupted. And then he had been nowhere to be found, until the most recent events had drawn him from wherever he'd been skulking back to the 'Nemesis'.

Shockwave had been immediately pressed into studying the weapon recovered from the battlefield where Lord Megatron had been injured. It was primitive but effective, at least by his standards, and when he received the comm. from the bridge it was a matter of moments to set the ongoing scans to continue automatically. He did not, as he usually did when forced to leave his lab, reroute the more important feeds to provide remote data.

He was not going to be able to focus on those.

::Commander Starscream has arrived on the flight deck.:: Such a short message, but all he needed to know.

He was moving no faster than usual; his tread was no heavier than the norm as the scientist wound his way from the depths of his lab towards the flight deck. His field, however, preceded him: it was a swirling vortex of black ice, a glacier advancing with unstoppable inertia. Any Vehicon caught in that area immediately remembered important duties elsewhere, like cleaning exhaust ports and recycling vats.

Shockwave did not care. He was wholly and entirely focused getting to either the flight deck or the entry hangar for it, finding the reason thirteen different projects had had to be put on hold, and discovering why his one halfway-decent proxy in a ship full of military personnel had been risked for absolutely no scientific gain he had found. The dark violet of his frame half hid him in the long shadows, but the glaring red optic was as unmistakable as the charged baritone when he saw his quarry.

"Starscream."

[Deleted]

When a patrol was cleared to land on the flight deck, protocol dictated that the Nemesis' was to be slowed to a designated approach speed in order to ensure that no Vehicon touched down into the intense relative windflow. The upper winds of the planet's atmosphere could be fierce at times, strong enough to tear a robot from its feet and hurl him into the clouds.

When two senior officers went onto on the flight deck, the entire ship was hastily brought to a halt.

Wispy cirrus drifted overhead as Starscream flipped into his root mode and thudded onto the deck. He straightened, locked his wings into place with a flick, and dismissively waved off his escort, a Vehicon jet that soared into the layer of thin cloud above. It disappeared shortly after, the roar of its engine shrill as it faded into the wide open sky.

Starscream turned away. As he strolled across the deck he folded his hands behind his back, his steps unhurried. He was, for the time being, in a good mood. Megatron was practically an invalid and the Nemesis was once again back in his control. While there were still problems and nagging concerns that rankled him, those two strokes of absurd luck overshadowed nearly everything else on his agenda. He planned on savouring them both for as long as possible.

A flurry of reports from the flight crew sleeted across his neural net as Starscream strolled into the access hanger. The shadow of the overhang fell over him and he dimmed his optics accordingly. Hm. Unusual readings in the South Pacific. Possibly worth looking into. Power fluctuations in the engine array. Immediately worth investigating. An update to the maintenance schedule took milliseconds to file and skim back into the overhead.

Somewhere in the back of his mind it occurred to him that the hanger was far more echoing than usual.

In the middle of processing a requisition request from Knock Out, Starscream looked around in annoyance. It was the middle of the day. Where was the duty watch?

"Starscream."

His name thundered across the hanger. Starscream spooked and whirled around, coming face to face with the ghastly red eye that glared out of the shadows.

"Shockwave?!" Astounded, he stared. "What are you doing out of your laboratory? I assumed it would take nothing less than a ship-wide catastrophe to budge you from your pit."

[Deleted]

Visually finding the Commander did not prove difficult. The hangar was bereft of any sort of extraneous activity whenever possible, its crew either having done their jobs or out on patrol. Or, at the moment, finding duties elsewhere as expeditiously as they could.

Shockwave did not check his advance, closing in on Starscream with the full weight of his vexation carrying him. "And so I would be. Undisturbed in my pursuit of several scientific goals if it had not come to my attention that you had a part to play in the latest MECH debacle."

All the while Shockwave was telling himself that, surely, he was not so emotionally compromised that he would physically engage the Commander. He was not! Logic ruled supreme in his mind; he only wished to unerringly impress the depth of trouble that had been created by... by...

That irritating scaffold.

"A debacle which robbed me, however partially, of the one reliable proxy I possess in this vessel."

He had meant to stop at a... conversational distance from Starscream. His pedes, however, were carrying him closer as if they knew something he didn't. He did, however, refrain from reaching up and trying to strangle the Decepticon 2IC. Mainly because he was the Decepticon 2IC and (a hypothesis he'd never been able to prove to his own satisfaction) important to Lord Megatron. Somehow.

All in all he was going to end up disturbingly close to optic-to-glaring optic unless extraneous circumstances intervened. "I am under strict, and logical, orders to refrain from disturbing military personnel from their given mandate. I have the use of exactly one partially capable emissary on this vessel, which you embroiled in whatever illogical pursuit you and MECH shared. I am left to consider the fact that you are deliberately sabotaging me."

There was so much more Shockwave could say. He could provide lists of the experiments that had been delayed, the data that had been late if not outright lost. He'd had to leave. his. lab.

But some part of him was morbidly interested to hear whatever lies Starscream could deliver, on the fly or from long preparation, as to his accusation. Then, afterwards, he could see about that strangling. Afterwards, it would surely be logical.

[Deleted]

Starscream gaped as Shockwave bore down on him. All at once he found himself staring up into a single massive glowing optic, close enough that it forced him to lean back.

For an instant he was stunned. Then he snapped his mouth shut and stood upright, his wings bristling.

"Your proxy?" he said. "Sabotaging you? Am I hearing this correctly, Science Officer Shockwave? Wait. Allow me to get my bearings."

Feigning contemplation, Starscream mockingly tapped a claw to the side of his head.

"Would this happen to be the same proxy who managed to get herself and Megatron's drone captured by MECH entirely on her own?" he said. "While that certainly is an impressive accomplishment, do you truly wish to ascribe it as fitting your definition of what makes for a capable emissary? If so, I have another Decepticon you might be interested in chaining to your side. He is big and not that bright, but at least you will both have a lack of depth perception to bond over."

The Seeker snorted and folded his hands behind himself as he turned on his heel. Though his expression grew lofty it was clear he was still keeping a wary red optic on the scientist.

"Anyway, sabotaging you was hardly my intent. In exerting my cunning towards deceiving MECH I not only retrieved valuable technological data that had been stolen from us, but saw to it that your precious proxy was recovered in the process. All in all I merely used her capacity for getting imprisoned to the greater Decepticon advantage. But I suppose you aren't to blame for not knowing that - not privy to restricted tactical military intelligence either, are you? More's the pity."

[Deleted]

The gall, the nerve, the sheer asymptomatic lack of processing power in that overgrown, overblown, overmannered.... rack of stilts.

Shockwave's one hand worked closed and open. Once. His tone had, if anything, gone even deeper into his usual register, which was irony of a very small degree: he did not get louder when he was angry, merely lower.

The shot at his rank went clear over him. His own title mattered very little to him but that it allowed him to pursue his own vast research interests freely. Still, he would have done the same (though with far less resources) anywhere else, as anyone else, in the universe. To add to that, to Shockwave, there was only one commander of the Decepticons; Starscream might serve as his proxy, ere the tide of war came and went, but that was all he was: a proxy.

A very inefficient proxy.

Shockwave could, however, recognize the tone of the Commander just fine. Tone and insult, however, were all but useless beyond plain recognition: he'd faced far worse at the beginning of his scientific research, when he still had the emotional capacity to feel such verbal barbs. Shockwave analyzed words, patterns and tone in search of mental patterns, not emotional ones. And besides, whenever Starscream spoke Shockwave merely accepted that it was always to insult him. It made things infinitely easier.

He remained perfectly still. "Your bearings elude you much as simple command does. I have no interest in whatever military implications you have, or have failed to, achieve with this debacle."

Despite his anger, despite his... illogical desire to shake the Air Commander, possibly smashing him against the plating of the 'Nemesis' as an impromptu alloy stress test, Shockwave could not help the thin didactic tone that slipped into his words. Underlying the torrent of irritation that came with any dealing with the shrill creature before him, too, came a slender thread of logical motivation: he could not risk his proxy by using his proxy... but then again he'd made plans for that. Scientific plans.

"Roulette and Fairwinds were not captured by MECH entirely on their own. Despite what she may or may not believe, her memories of the event show an ambush prepared to the latest, careful detail. She was set up by someone with advance information of her location. I am unaware of their ability to identify the precision of the ambush as such, but I am not so easily distracted."

He stepped forward, radiating ill will. "Her memories of the physical research MECH conducted are equally focused. I myself have read the account of Breakdown's encounter with them. I have extrapolated all possible data that could be acquired from that brief research. The capabilities MECH demonstrated during this most recent multi-target encounter exceed whatever education they acquired while experimenting on Breakdown." Which was not necessarily true - the leaps of scientific development were there, of course. But only if you had a mind as readily aware of them as Shockwave's. Starscream, however, didn't need to know that.

"By your own admission, you are the most logical source for MECH having acquired that knowledge. She might not have the scientific expertise to understand the research and data-mining scope of what she confronted, but I do."

He was doing it again, pedes carrying him forward on a tide of pure temper. "Given Breakdown's own physical input in restoring Roulette to me and ending this ill-favored delay in my pursuits, I believe he is a partially capable proxy - which is more than I can say about you."

He stopped, again, on the force of sheer logic checking him. It was, however getting harder to do. "Do not. presume. that on scientific matters you will hide your tracks from me. Whatever operation you were engaged in, even a 'military' one, you were working against strict orders from Megatron himself, not to deal with the human irritant even as a deception tactic." It had been in one of the ship-wide daily reports that came from the warship's control room, and Shockwave had only given it his personal attention because Soundwave had affixed his glyph of command to it. Back then the possibility that it may be useful had never even been a calculation running through Shockwave's processor.

"Fairwinds and Roulette have likely already submitted their reports, however... lacking in scientific data and detail they may be. Give me one good reason why mine should not include every logical conclusion I have come to, Commander.

[Deleted]

Starscream burst out laughing.

“Please, submit your reports!” he chuckled. “I’m sure they will be a very entertaining read. Submit them, put a patch on me and scan my brain module - all it will do is confirm that I had nothing to do with that MECH ambush. I fully admit I traded information with MECH, but I had no part in that attack. Perhaps your poor traumatized proxy remembered events incorrectly.”

And now it was Starscream’s turn to tilt his head up into Shockwave's. His red optics gleamed.

“And here is the thing, Shockwave,” he hissed. “Every bit of data I gave them, every scrap of information I imparted... I took back. And more.. That I have declined to inform you of this fact is not indicative of my guilt. I am only guilty of disobeying Megatron's orders. And I am only required to explain my actions to him, officer, not to you.“

The Seeker leaned back again. He calmly folded his hands behind his back.

“Incidentally, Shockwave, in time I will file a full report as well,” he said. He smiled coldly. “And so will... Ravage.”

[Deleted]

The whirling vortex that was Shockwave's field came to a complete standstill long before Starscream had stopped talking. Science, Shockwave's only guiding light, found a foot-hold at last among his illogical temper and refused to relinquish it.

Science was ever his guide, and logic his armor. Neither had ever failed him - guided him into unfortunate territory, yes, but never failed him.

His tone had turned almost casual, distracted by far more interesting prey."You are guilty of far more than disobedience; previous experience should attest to the cost of such actions, but it is yours to pay. You will receive a copy of my report, as will Soundwave. As will, when he is fit for duty, Lord Megatron. However..."

Shockwave yielded not a breath of space; if anything he might have shifted closer, but everything about it because intensely fixated, entirely focused.

"... have I just received your verbal and public invitation to use the psychic cortical patch on your person?"

[Deleted]

Starscream grimaced. One optic ticked. No one liked the cortical patch. The experience of having your memories clinically sifted through and databased could be described as distasteful at best.

'Vile' was closer to reality.

But he only gave a dismissive wave, turning his face away from that of the looming cyclops.

"Yes, yes, of course," he said. "Scan all you want. It will only verify every word I've said to be true. If you wish to bolster my report by providing the inarguable results of a cortical scan alongside it, by all means. I certainly won't stop you from solidifying my statement of events. If this is what you desire I'm certain I can fit an appointment in somewhere amidst my busy schedule."

Starscream sniffed and examined his talons, then glanced back.

"Anyway, was that all you wanted?" he said. "If so, I have a proposition that may interest you. One perhaps more suited to your talents than that of an interrogator. That, I believe, is Soundwave's department."

[Deleted]

He was being bribed.

Shockwave was, by all accounts quite as blind to social interactions and the dangerous pitfalls of Decepticon favor-currying as everyone suspected him to be, if not more. He was ruled by science and logic, and neither really allowed room or time to be wasted on the idle play of treachery and double-meanings that had to go with rank-climbing among the faction. He had gone as far as he could, quite simply, because there was no one better than him at his job.

That did not mean he was a moron. It also did not leave him bereft of a scant measure of the typical paranoia found among the highest Decepticon ranks - it was barely there, but there nonetheless. Which meant he could look at the so-called offer that Starscream was dangling before him and translate it to be either a distraction, or a flat-out bribe. Whether he was right or not was moot - what he believed, cemented by on-the-fly calculations with very little data and by his utter dislike of the long-legged turbopigeon in front of him, allowed for no other possibility.

Which was of no concern to the scientist. He could accept the offer and still proceed with his set course of action; whether that provoked Starscream's ire or indifference had become moot in the face of that one, exceedingly interesting scientific concession he had already acquired. "I have no intention of personally wading through your mental pathways. I will merely include your willingness to set up an appointment accordingly in all copies of my report." If anyone had thought Shockwave incapable, rather than simply unwilling, of conveying the barest modicum of emotion through tonality, they'd have likely goggled at the emphasis on the one word.

His posture shifted, the great optic focusing entirely on the twiggy, treacherous creature before him. Whether a bribe, a distraction or a trap, none of it meant Starscream's offer had to be good. It just had to look good. Shockwave, unfortunately, had to admit that such a thing would not be entirely difficult. He had a positive wealth of projects, but no means to carry them out efficiently: he'd been warned to leave the military personnel on board the 'Nemesis' to their entirely critical duties, and he'd been absolutely exacting in that regard.

There was only so much one mech, however gifted, could acquire in the way of raw materials with only one hand. His response was flat and dark and perhaps still vaguely irritated. "I am listening."

[Deleted]

For a moment Starscream paused, his wings to the scientist while he looked back over his shoulder with one red optic. Then he turned.

“My personal investigations into MECH – backed up by Ravage’s own data retrieval mission – have uncovered the presence of a small satellite monitoring station located in a large island chain contained mostly within this planet’s southern hemisphere,” he said. “The coordinates are vague, but would likely place a ground bridge within one hundred nautical miles of the station. Given that much of the area is oceanic, locating the station itself would not be exceedingly difficult – for a flier, anyway.”

With his hands folded behind his back the Seeker paced, picking his steps. He orbited Shockwave, and despite his airy manner it was clear he was also taking care to stay out of snatching range.

“The station is old, perhaps little more than a terrestrial telecommunication point. Perhaps it is a tracking station, perhaps it receives telemetry data – our intelligence is not clear. But for whatever reason MECH has a vested interest in it. I want to know why. And given the vast energy potential of that particular region of the planet...”

Starscream stopped and faced Shockwave squarely.

“Find and destroy that station, or else mine it for what data it can provide, and I will clear you for whatever operations you might wish to establish within the area,” he said. “I’m sure they will serve well in advancing Decepticon supremacy on this dirtball planet.”

[Deleted]

Shockwave considered the doubly weighted, so-called offer Starscream had tendered. Starscream wanted him to attend to what was, for all intents and purposes, a menial chore.

The thing was, Shockwave didn't really give two quantum figs about the drudgery of something. His concerns were entirely scientific: on the one hand, that Starscream wanted him far removed from the 'Nemesis' while he hunted this measly human site, and on the other... what did he expect Shockwave would find down there? What sort of trap, or lethal encounter?

One thing Shockwave was used to were attempts on his life. They came and went, sometimes more abundant depending on who he surrounded himself with. He was nowhere near as prone to them as the mechs above him on the command scale, but he still got a respectable share.

A third, and most interesting possibility came with the particular choice of location. It was a site Shockwave himself had been quite keen in exploiting, favored by a lacking human presence; if he would only acquire the mechpower to establish an operation, the possible benefits were almost too rich to calculate.

If.

What was interesting to Shockwave was Starscream's choice of location. Was it accidental, or had he actually been looking into the Head of Science's projects? Not that Shockwave sealed any of his files from the ship's senior personnel - he simply was used to none of them ever bothering him about them.

"I am quite capable of destroying a human site, if that is what it takes. I will engage in data acquisition only if it does not interfere with both my goals and yours. The sooner I am done, the sooner I can move on to more scientific concerns."

Just like that, the mech turned ponderously on his heel; if he was going to waste time going planetside for anything other than scientific reasons, he wished it to be done and over it promptly. He paused momentarily to glance at the spindly jet, weighing him and finding him, as ever, wanting... but well aware he could not simply shoot him without bringing about too many unscientific complications.

"Inform me when the ground-bridge has been primed for my departure."

[Deleted]

Starscream's face revealed little as Shockwave turned and walked away. He simply stood and watched and waited on the air side of the flight deck, his hands still clasped behind his back. When the scientist glanced back he merely raised a brow.

"Of course," he said. "Soundwave will notify you in due time."

And he laughed.






and end!