EP0.5 - Texas, Cleaver's ship - 'Reboot' - Closed

[Deleted]

The processor scan that Reflector had facilitated (and the medic still had no idea what the little mech had gleaned from that that was so terrible) had meant that Cleaver had managed to bring Dasal's cranial hardware back to an almost perfectly operational state. She'd had to replace the burnt-out data ports with ones she'd taken from Decepticon drones, and made similar transplants around the mech's previously ruined spark casing. Otherwise, she was confident that her surgical skills with circuitry hadn't dulled from disuse over the solar cycles.

Living mesh had been a nightmare to grow back without an immersion tank when Cyberton's medical bays were intact, but Dasal's protoform seemed to have made good use of the energy his body was siphoning from another spark. There were more crumpled scars than clean expanses of protoform in the mech's chassis, though overall the healing was progressing better than she'd anticipated.

Checking the newly installed optics (old, and a lower spec than before, but the she closest she had'd to the mech's originals amongst her collected parts) for the last time, Cleaver ran a hand down the mech's chassis in a final sensor scan for errors. Coming up clean, she made sure the room's two doors were sealed and transmitted a start-up code to the slumbering processor.

Boot-up was slow, and Cleaver had time to draw a stool to the side of the berth at Dasal's hip and transform her blades into hands. Projecting a strong aura of calm/peace/no threat/medic, she thumbed the mech's wrist and braced herself all the same. It would be far from the first time an abruptly onlining patient had clocked her if he came back with a start, but a small price to pay to see them moving again.

When she heard micro-parts beginning to whine and click with reflexive checks, testing the thoroughness of her work, Cleaver uttered quietly, "You're alright, mech."

[Deleted]

Dasal – or rather the Decepticon infiltrator, spec ops operative, and field lieutenant, Barricade – came violently online. His tactile sensor array blazed active, blitzing his neural net with residual feedback for a single molten blaze of panic/agony/confusion and (for a nerve-stripping split second) there was a ghost of a fist in his chest, caged around the case of his spark. He howled. A machine scream and whine. A grip on his wrist. Someone standing over him, large mass mechanism, his EMF array went haywire and blinded him to who or what he was looking at. He snarled and tackled the larger Cybertronian at the waist, the powerful torque from his leg hydraulics rocketing him, and her to the floor.

“Get away from me!” His EMF sensor hit him with a medical ident but he was too disoriented to note it. His servo was jammed against her neck, but he couldn’t… hold. Someone had cut the hyrdraulic cords in his wrists. His eyes were on the fritz, blitzed with static – Primus above these weren’t his eyes. “Who are you?!” he snarled. “Where am I?!”

[Deleted]

The safest and most effective way to deal with this kind of behaviour was, unfortunately, almost the cruelest for a Cybertronian in his condition. Rapidly and with practised ease, Cleaver twisted them both hard on the floor until the panicking mech was on his front-plates on the floor with her significantly larger and utterly solid mass on top.

Her elbows and knees on the deck, Cleaver used her limbs to pin the mech's own into a long line against his body, though she didn't go so far as to rest her chin on his helm. He struggled admirably for a few more kliks until it became quite clear that he wasn't going to move her heavy frame an inch. When he'd stopped thrashing, at least, she let some of the tense strength out of her lines but kept the pinning cage of her body in place.

"Are you done?" she asked mildly, dry as the air and earth outside the ship. "Because I'm not answering any questions until you stop thrashing about hurting yourself."

[Deleted]

Barricade, and that was his name (for some reason he’d forgotten), writhed beneath the massive femme on top of him, bucking and twisting pointlessly in her grasp, processor firing furiously trying to make sense of where he – old transport rig, decommissioned class-4, not a medical bay retrofitted custom (was this a closet?), Kaon-designed – was. Scavenger ship he decided and in the split second he’d seen her, the femme sitting on him currently was a big build, not a standard medical class. Was he flipped? Did he get his ident turned out somehow? No. His cover was still… was still… wait no. There were seven dozen firewalls in his head. Why were those there? Why put them there? Why didn’t he remember a single damn thing and why did his head feel like it had been turned inside out?

“Well since answers aren’t so forth coming,” gritted Cade, stilling somewhat when the tribulation of movement sent great bolts of pain and error code through his body. “I suppose I could finish up early.” He ex-vented hard. “Why am I under medical care, yours specifically?”

[Deleted]

"Because I just got done fixing you."

Satisfied that he wasn't going to lash out at either the equipment or her (and slag she was getting too old to be thrown down like that), Cleaver eased her weight off from the smaller mech and sat back on her haunches. Eyeing the black and white form critically, she clamped a hand around the edge of the berth and pulled herself to her pedes.

He got up on his own, the notion of getting a hand from her apparently never entering his processor, and she watched how the blue optics flashed critically about the room. "My name's Cleaver, and I'm a Neutral medic. I found you damaged on a scouting run and brought you back to my ship." Her optics narrowed with a lance of concern, her tanks twisting with a foreknowledge that hadn't reached her processor yet. "How much do you remember? Do you know your designation?"

[Deleted]

“Barricade. And, no, I don't recall much. Are we in Kaon?” he demanded flatly.

He glared up at her, optics flashing pale default blue from beneath the brow-ridge of his helm, his whole EMF a ragged fission of tension across his faded plates. He was slowly becoming aware of himself, of the aches inhis body, of the numbness, the blocked neural nodes and that jammed up trapped feeling of busted transformation cogs keeping him locked in root mode. He couldn’t get past the firewalls. They were too deeply entrenched in his own safety parameter – his anti-hacking barriers? He froze for a split second, trying desperately to recall if he’d botched his cover, if any detail of his story had a reason to ring untrue, anything at all but he could not… remember. He seethed, engines revving darkly.

“What happened to me?”

[Deleted]

This was going so much worse than she'd feared, and Cleaver made a conscious effort to keep the feeling out of her field. Her reply was quiet, cautious. "I don't rightly know, Barricade - was hoping you could tell me."

She'd never met a Cybertronian who didn't know of the death of their homeworld, who didn't carry the grey weight and pain of the holocaust of their race. It was unfathomable, and somehow more troubling to think of having to tell him that hard fact than it was that he'd just recently had a butcher go at his spark cavity.

"You got slagged up pretty bad," she finally went on, even and steady and by-the-book professional in tone and pitch if nothing else. "Don't know who by - whoever did it was long gone by the time I stumbled across you. You had a lot of processor damage from a pretty unforgiving hack. You've been in my care three joors, now."

[Deleted]

“My internal chronometer does not match my last memory file,” said Barricade with law cohort conciseness. “My diagnostics are reading short-term and partial long-term neural net corruption. A massive section of my memory core is firewalled.” He doubled back his last scan, rechecked it. “The code structure is familiar. Cleared. Third party security code patch.” Military grade? Why Military? “My own data clearance is in the code structure, ninety-ninth percentile complexities. So you couldn’t have done this.”

Which meant someone else had set up his security, someone he trusted enough to set up a memory lock, but now he faced the intell agent’s catch 22 for a bad core hack: he couldn’t remember who his control asset was. The gap in his chronometer was so massive it nauseated him instantly to think of everything he did not know but the gift of being an infiltration unit was basic training that told you not to not panic when you’d suffered a partial core wipe. His coder was clearly excellent, however, because he was locked, not wiped. Small mercies. He had a chance of getting everything back.

And in the back of his mind Barricade thought: Neutral medic? Neutral to what? But what he said was, “Why did you help me? What do you want?”

[Deleted]

Special Ops mech, Cleaver privately surmised, or something to do with high end security and infiltration at least. Likely a high priority target to the other faction, or else he'd just seriously fragged up an operation. Dangerous, all the same.

Thoughtfully, Cleaver rubbed a hand across her jaw, mindful of the new kinks in her lines that Barricade's lunge at her throat had added. At last, she settled for the last questions as a means to start. "I'm a medic, so that should cover the 'why' as well that I don't want anything from you."

Hesitating a klik, the femme extended a hand and a faint holoprojection above her palm. Earth spun fast and silent, associated glyphs providing the planet's stellar co-ordinates. The date was also projected, adjusted to its equivalent as it would be on Cybertron - where Barricade's memory currently ended. "This is where we are now. Short of it is there's been an ongoing civil war that's nearly wiped out our species, and turned Cybertron dark. Megatron and the Prime are both here, so I can only assume that you're affiliated with one of them. I'm alligned with neither, and I'm not looking to make your presence known to either side. You're safe with me for now, until you've regained your memories, by whatever means."

[Deleted]

“Fabulous.” Barricade could not have said that word with more sarcasm without damaging himself.

He grimaced, a pronounced ache developing in the core of his processor, directly below the root of his cranial case – his neural net running up against firewalls in an attempt to recall data he clearly knew but could no longer access. The neural paths still existed to the data, but slammed up against that hideously complex code wall. Somehow, the shock of his world being dead had no effect on him. Like someone reminding him that an old cohort member of his was dead – at the time he hadn’t been thinking of it and in a way forgotten it but now that she said it… his previous question about whether they were in Kaon struck him as grossly glitched.

Fraggit. He was suffering linearity gaps in his data recall. He would have loved to dig his claws into something but his hydraulics were still under-powered so he settled for humming internally with rage and frustration.

“Any idea which side I’m on? Neutrality doesn’t seem my style.”

And I need my control coder to get my brain unlocked. Of course the flip side of that was… maybe he’d been a double agent for the other side. That, too, was similarly his speed; so insignia and ID codes could mean nothing and he might be walking directly back into the arms of the side who’d just found him out as traitor. Any memories he had of playing nice with one side and mean to the other meant nothing. He could have been maintaining cover. There was a reason infiltrators had identity issues and a 43% insanity rate in his function-class.

“Actually.” He ex-vented angrily. “Never mind.”

[Deleted]

Barricade had just graduated from 'helplessly dependent patient' to 'fragging irritating mech perfectly capable of withstanding a smack round the helm', and Cleaver folded her arms with a slow ex-vent to reign her temper in.

"You could ask your sparkmate," she replied flatly, though not unkindly. "The bond won't be locked out in any way, and the way it's kept you alive is pretty solid proof that it's intact."

[Deleted]

Barricade jerked violently, optics leaping from the section of wall he’d been examining and locking with a kind of murderous focus on the medic.

“My what?” he snarled, advancing a single menacing step to kill this femme for even suggesting such a moronic notion. He was not bound to any mech in any way but function and he had no capacity for such a pointless risk to self and soul. He was an infiltrator. You did not align yourself to the most multi-faceted, double-talking, unfathomable fragging function class out there because it undermined everything an infiltrator was. To be anything and anyone was their purpose. One mech knowing your true spark was…

Barricade stopped. His optics widened a fraction.

Then he panicked. He was unfamiliar with panicking. He didn’t do it very often. It felt weird and come to think of it so did his fragging Primus slotting spark. He reached up and despite the cut power to his servos dug his claws into the patched plating over his chest and focused on the pulse of pain – familiar as the alien frequency in his own soul was unfamiliar. He turned away from the femme and moved to grip the edge of the medical berth and trying fragging make things go together in his head.

“Why does it hurt?” he snarled. “It shouldn’t… this is fragging absurd. I’m not bonded. You’ve made a mistake.”

[Deleted]

Cleaver stepped in alongside him, brow furrowed with concern, but she knew better than to lay a servo on him, even in comfort. "You should be in the Well. Primus, I've seen mechs offline with half the damage you'd sustained when I dragged you out of the hole someone had gone'n'buried you in. Sparkbond's about the only thing that's kept you alive, even when I'd spliced you onto my systems. Should have lost you a dozen times over, but your sparkmate's been sinking more energy, more life force than I can understand straight into ya."

Her hand, curled loose atop the berth, twitched into a fist for a klik before opening again. Though Barricade wasn't meeting her optics, she felt it a duty to keep hers on his in profile. "Ain't the bond that's hurtin', Barricade. There was... I've mended it as far as it'll go, but there was a lot of damage around your sparkcasing that's rooted in your mesh-memory, now. Nothing to be done for that but time."

[Deleted]

Cade’s pale blue optics flared brief psychotic white before flicking up from the berth padding to the femme beside him. Oh, but she was tactful. ‘Damage to the sparkcasing’ could be as clinical as a stray shot knocking his core loose in his frame… or it could be so so so much more horrific than that – brutality dealt outside the haze and battle-haze of the fight. Framed in madness, one-thousand times more terrible, dark and unspeakable and Barricade had to wonder – what kind of war had he forgotten that had become so terrible?

“Being obtuse does not suit you,” hissed the Saleen, “nor does it suit me. So speak. What happened to me?"

[Deleted]

"You were tortured," Cleaver snapped back, rankled beyond professionalism now as the hand on the berth slammed back down in a solid fist. "Pinned, torn up, hacked and left in the kind of sorry state I ain't see in a while. And slag if I know whatever you did that made someone think you deserved it. Got a fragging vocaliser on you like a scraplet's got appetite."

A hot exvent accompanied an irritable flex of her plates, and Cleaver's mouth defaulted to a thin, stubborn line. "I ain't drawing you diagrams, mech, and I ain't gonna let you get so worked up that you start blowing circuits. So you can calm the frag down, or I will put you down until your systems cool off."

Because she wasn't going to utter 'spark raped' in the middle of an argument.