Ep0.5 - Russia - Coming In Hot - Closed

[Deleted]

"Well, well, aren't you a pretty little thing?"

Jazz sat back in the pilot's seat and pulled his last cube of energon (low-grade, Decepticon-made, and tasted like old exhaust, but had a kick like a class 9 engine) out of his subspace. First visuals of his first good lead in vorns deserved a bit of a celebration, he figured. Primus knew not much else had gone right lately.

Picking up the rumor about the war heating up again, about the Nemesis and Megatron and an Autobot cell hunkered down on a small organic planet called Earth, had been Jazz's first good luck in a long while. He'd run into a lone Autobot seeker awhile back, but the poor mech had been more than half mad and not interested in chasing down the Autobot high command. And after him, well, it'd been a long run of Decepticons. It'd only been the last of those, a scrappy energon refinery in an almost-more-dense-than-it-was-worth asteroid field, that had been any use. He'd come away from THERE with a tiny space-faring shuttle, enough energon to fuel it and him, rumors of Optimus Prime on a planet called Earth, and the satisfaction of a base well-blown-up.

That had been awhile ago. A few unfortunate incidents with overenthusiastic Decepticon deepspace raiders had delayed him, then delayed him further when a lucky shot had damaged his shuttle, turning the usually-temperamental little ship into something that actively tried to kill him on occasion.

All told, Jazz thought, swallowing the last of the energon, he was due for some good luck. Maybe not "finding Optimus Prime" luck, but "finding some Decepticons to steal from" luck wasn't expecting too much, he thought. And who knew? If Megatron was still on this planet...well...if any Decepticon in the universe knew where the Prime was, it would be Megatron.

Lacking all that, a planet with some reasonable power sources would do just fine.

"Or maybe some sentients. So I'll have something to talk to besides inanimate objects. That'd be awesome...." Jazz saluted the planet growing on his viewscreen with his empty cube before tucking it into his subspace.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Two things happened when Jazz's ship reached the Earth's exosphere.

First, he rejoiced at the proof of sentient life in the form of a slew of primitive but active artificial satellites (even if they nearly gave him a spark attack at first, thinking he'd come upon some kind of Decepticon comm station outpost, orbited by a flock of Soundwaves.)

Second, his shuttle tried to kill him again. The engines cut out.

Jazz, who had been plotting a careful course through the local sentients' airways, sighed, hit the sequence to reignite the engines, then again...aaaand again, with swearing this time.

The fourth try (and a bit of pleading) got the engines to reluctantly online with a slew of errors that Jazz had never seen before but translated to "you're slagged, fragger, enjoy the ride!".

As the shuttle started to nose into the planet's gravity well, Jazz cursed some more and used what little of the engines he had to ease the craft into his entry lane. He watched the calculations as the hull temperature rose. "C'mon, baby, you don't really want to crash into that ocean, no, you don't. Trust me. It looks reaaaaally cold and oh man do I not want to have to climb a continental shelf somewhere...."

The shuttle's engines continued to sputter as they fell (Jazz couldn't really consider it flying at that point) through the atmosphere and broke through the clouds. The flat, gray-blue expanse of ocean sped by below, and a glance at the scanners verified that no, no he DIDN'T want to land in there, because at THAT temperature there was no way he was going to make it to land. He'd fall into stasis on the bottom of the ocean.

Oh no. No way. That is NOT how I'm goin' out. Frag THAT!

Jazz spared a hand from the helm to slap comm channels, transmitting a distress beacon. He didn't have time to see whether the default was for Decepticon, Autobot, or all channels. Autobot, Decepticon, whatever, whoever, he could deal with it. LATER. If he wasn't DEAD.

Jazz manhandled the helm. Babied the engines. Finessed the jet stream. Sweet-talked the entire shuttle. When he ran out of things to do, he deployed his last-ditch hold-out: he prayed.

Please please please don't let me die here this is a STUPID way to die please please please

Whether it was the babying or the finessing or the sweet-talking or the praying that worked, Jazz had a glorious thirty kliks to feel relief as he cleared the continental shelf. Then his shuttle plowed into the white land...and started SINKING.

For a terrible few kliks Jazz cursed at the shuttles's sensors, certain they'd betrayed him and he was going to sink through the ice crust and be dumped into the ocean after all. But all that happened was the hull shuddered and pinged as it cooled rapidly before the shuttle stopped sinking, tipping a bit as it found a resting place.

Jazz froze, barely daring to ventilate. Waiting. For the ground to give way. For Decepticons to descend and blow him to smithereens. For the ship to explode out of sheer spite. Something.

Nothing. The shuttle's hull pinged sullenly, settling against the bedrock.

Jazz slumped back in the pilot's chair. "Well. That was an adventure." He patted the console. "I take back everything bad I ever said about you."

The shuttle's low fuel warning pinged on. A klik later, the status reports signaled a hull breach.

Jazz vented a sigh. "Right."

[Deleted]

It was likely (Jazz having crashed his cantankerous shuttle into the middle of Siberian Nowheresville) that the damn ship intended to leave the former spec ops agent lay to freeze in the middle of subarctic tundra. Lucky for Jazz, his prayers had not fallen on deaf audios… literally because hundreds of miles away, on the bridge of a long-since hijacked Deception raider ship, Sideswipe sat listening – cold-optics on the control panel – to Jazz’s open comm. transmission.

It was on an old frequency… old enough their outdated cruiser was nabbing the chatter off the airwaves. The red and black mechanism sat at cool attention, the dark metal of his right thumb set against the switch that would throw open his end of the frequency and allow Jazz to hear him.

But he didn’t open the channel.

Sideswipe sat there, perfectly still, while the comm. filled the air with Jazz’s labored curses and the sound of his ship rattling and sounding klaxons, every cajole to his suiciding shuttle as it rocketed to earth. The commando said nothing, made no move, waiting for the sound of impact and screaming detonation to signal him leave the bridge and tell Sunstreaker that another Autobot they knew was dead. He wasn’t sure Sunstreaker would care particularly, but Sideswipe did. He cared enough to be tempted to throw the switch and risk Cons nabbing their signal for no reason just to give the mech a few last seconds with a familiar voice in his audios.

But he didn't throw the switch. Sideswipe listened to Jazz fall out of the sky and waited for that sudden clench of hope in his chest to twist cold again in the silence that would follow but he sat and waited, waited…

Impact. Static. Roaring and whining. Sideswipe didn’t flinch. Nephrite bright optics just narrowed. A beat. Another beat… then he heard Jazz exhale and his thumb jammed that twitch on.

“Hey,” he said. His tone was lazy as a summer's afternoon, deceptively so, his hydraulics were still locked with relief. “if you’re not dead. Pick up your radio, get off open channel, and lock my frequency.” A grin so big you could hear it through the comm. “And welcome to earth.”

[Deleted]

The voice out of the comm (Primus, was the line OPEN?) scared the living slag out of Jazz just as he'd walked away to check on the hull breach. He stumbled back to the console, noting the frequency (Decepticon, definitely Decepticon, and newer than the ancient one the shuttle had picked) and his processor already working on contingency plans. It wasn't the standard Decepticon comm response, but the voice...sounded....

Wait. Was that...? No...surely not.... What were the chances...? Still....

Jazz's processor frantically clicked through possibilities as he cut the line. He shunted away the initial happiness at hearing a voice he'd thought long dead so he could think. The Decepticon frequency: did it mean defection? A stolen ship? Something else? Primus knew that those two always managed to get into the deepest slag together.

Not that it mattered either way. He was made. He had a destroyed ship, next to no fuel, was in the middle of nowhere, and it was cold enough to freeze his light-plated aft into a block of ice out there. It wasn't like he had a whole lot of choice.

And he was in a Decepticon ship...transmitting on a Decepticon frequency himself. If needed, he could always play like he'd defected back himself....

Jazz grinned. It was always harder to con a conman, but that just made things more interesting.

Jazz pinged the frequency back. Cheerfully, in a gutter dialect of Kaonese that he hadn't used in oh vorns and vorns: "This'd better be you, mech, or I'm gonna be really fragging disappointed."

[Deleted]

Sideswipe swapped easily into his native tongue, laughing as he did. “Yeah it’s me. Never fear, I haven’t left the universe a cold, colorless, Sideswipe-less wasteland yet. Rejoice! Your life has meaning again, Jazzoid.”

Sideswipe was already expertly bringing the groundbridge systems online from the pilot seat, checking and double checking the systems as the drive core warmed, siphoning power to the waiting bridge arch in the aft-end of the ship. He could not contain his glee. It was very likely Sunstreaker was sitting by himself doodling somewhere and about to get a nasty blast of Sideswipe’s good mood over their open link. It had been so long since they’d had a proper battle – in which not distracting each other was key – that the twins rarely bothered keeping their moods to themselves. Sunny would come bothering him shortly he imagined.

“You following the yellow-brick road to his most Optimus Primeliness?” Sideswipe chirped this while wearing his best smelt-eating grin, mostly to mask his own vague attempt to hear more of the other mech’s voice. “Because if so, you missed him by a continent… and an ocean."

Even though he was already getting a positive voice-match from his onboard ID database ( and Jazz had about as distinctive voice as any mech) vorns of time and war did things to the memory and he could disremember. He wanted to be sure before he brought anybot here.

"Also, I thought you’d died. Some mech sent me a wave vorns ago.”

[Deleted]

Jazz found himself grinning, hull breach forgotten. Sideswipe. SIDESWIPE. Now THAT voice brought back memories. Good, bad, infuriating, and everything in between.

He laughed. "Oh man, long story. I'll tell it to you sometime you got a free decacycle and enough high grade. And I could say the same for you, mech. Heard you and the Golden Wonder got yourselves scrapped. SO glad I heard that wrong."

Jazz had actually heard through the rumor mill that Sunny and Sides had been captured and not heard from since. He'd scoured every Decepticon system he'd laid his hands on afterwards, trying to find definitive documentation of their fate, but had come up with nothing. He'd finally had to give up and admit--with a hard, bitter heaviness in his spark--that they were probably dead.

And now, on a watery cold mudball in the middle of nowhere...Sideswipe.

Jazz's elation screeched off the tracks. Wait. Jazz re-scraped his audio. WAIT. "Wait what did you say Prime? PRIME is here?"

Surely...surely his luck wasn't THAT good...?

[Deleted]

If Jazz were a turbodog his tail would be wagging. Sideswipe rolled his optics heavily. Yup, had to be the real thing – not one could fake Jazz-style adoration and Sideswipe had known the mech long enough to be familiar.

“Yeah, he’s here.” You could hear his smirk it was so thorough. “Ain’t got an exact fix or nothin’ but from what I hear their activity’s been coming out of North America and I got a few feelers local that tell me US government’s prolly got some branch somewhere pretending to be weather observation for obscene sums of money.”

Sideswipe didn’t have to be sitting on top of Team Prime to know how to look for them and he’d been listening to Bot chatter, what little there was really, and from the sounds it was a small unit and despite that suffered losses. His capacity for caring had been damaged somewhat, however, and he found himself lending out his sympathies a sum total of never… though he was self-aware enough to know he was likely misdirecting his rage. Not that he gave a frag.

“Look, if you can, run a location scan and give me your coordinates. Our ship’s got a groundbridge and medbay. You take any damage?”

[Deleted]

Jazz's faceplates nearly split, he was grinning so hard.

Prime was here.

Jazz had, he decided, evidently blown all the luck he'd stored up over these long, lonely vorns.

Worth it, though.

Jazz noted the place names but archived them. He could look them up later, when he'd learned the planet's geography.

More interesting was the fact that Sideswipe was obviously NOT with Prime. Jazz supposed he could be on a recon mission or something...but something in Sides' voice (and wasn't THAT an ancient set of analysis parameters to unarchive) suggested that that wasn't the case. Whatever the story was, it was going to be complicated, was Jazz's guess.

Jazz's fingers flicked over the controls, then thumped the console as the power systems fluxed before coughing up location coordinates. "Here you go. Somewhere...uh...white. And cold. And way too slaggin' close to a very cold ocean for comfort, let me tell you."

Jazz sent the coordinates and glanced around at the shuttle's damage reports. "Shuttle's slagged, but don't worry, I'm fine. Your concern, it warms my spark, Red. Hopefully it'll extend to some hospitality, too, because I'll admit, drank my last cube right before this bucket of bolts tried to kill me."

[Deleted]

“Well, you landed in Siberia,” cheered Sideswipe, once he ran the coordinates through his mental GPS. “Good job,” he went on, powering up the ground bridge and getting up to head back toward the control room. “It’s not the polar ice caps, but its close, so points for not landing in the Arctic Ocean at least.”

Primus on a piston, he’d be in some real trouble if he hadn’t caught the spy-mech’s transmission, be it from Soundwave and his global surveillance or sheer sub-zero temperatures and a watery atmo, this Bot had just used up his get out of the brig free card. In a big way, but then again Jazz tended to make his own luck so that probably had nothing to do with any which way. He’d been that way before the war, he made his own way in the war (on both fraggin’ sides) and it didn’t surprise Sideswipe that the devious saboteur was jerryrigging his way though the universe now.

“And you’re in good luck,” he said wryly when he reached ground bridge control and brought it online, the green-white stringy physics of the temporal vortex spinning and sparking into light. The red warrior smirked. “We have a whole ship’s back-store of energon and that’s a lot to split ‘tween two mechs. Better get over here and help us with the surplus.” Don’t have to kill any Cons for it either. Took care of that bit before you go here. Hmm. He’d have to explain the POS and his possession of it. Fun. This would call for high-grade. “Glad you’re not dead, by the way.” Really.

[Deleted]

Oh really? A whole backlog of energon for him and his brother, coming off a Decepticon ship frequency? The picture was becoming a bit clearer...and certainly more interesting. Oh, this was going to make a good story. Jazz could just tell.

"Yeah, same here, Red. Goes for both of you."

A flicker of green and a weak warble from the shuttle's sensors made Jazz look up, where over the top of the crater the landing had dug gloriously familiar strands of green light flickered.

"Got your 'bridge on visual. Gimme a klik to grab my--"

The shuttle, in its last, futile act of rebellion, lost power...and the comm.

"--scrap and slag." Jazz said, kicking the console for good measure before turning to quickly strip the ship of everything he could find useful and shove into his subspace.

When he opened the door, the cold wind swirling into his joints, whirling between the gaps in his plating, made him flinch. Yeah, he'd have lasted exactly a breem in this.

The snow giving and slipping under his feet didn't help things, but eventually he climbed up and out. The sky was blue and endless around him, the ground white and the same. It was barren, beautiful, and cold as Unicron's own slag. Jazz let himself appreciate it for a few nanokliks precisely because he knew he had a nice, warm groundbridge behind him.

Jazz turned to the shuttle, saluted, and ran through the 'bridge laughing.

[Deleted]

((OOC: continued here - tf-prime-rp.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=europe&thread=153 ))