Flashback – “De Facto” – Closed

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“Yeah, yeah big guy,” drawled their third mech, who’s alt was a kind of docking-yard hover transport. The electromagnetic cycle pads set all along the bottom of his chassis were kicking up dust and debris as he hummed along almost perfectly silently besides Orion’s and Hide’s wheeled alt-modes. He skated around in front of Ironhide, driving backwards in front of him, almost bumper to bumper with the massive vehicle. “We all know ‘ow ta duck’n cover. Promise ta hide like a little sparklet when ya say.”

Orion, plowing over a long strip of crater-pocked street, cast a sidelong look at the smaller mechanoid who promptly spun away from the weapon specialist and started skating back and forth across the ruined road ahead of him. “What is your designation?”

“Bladetech. Nice ta meetcha, Prime.”

::Likewise, but restrict chatter to inter-Autobot radio until further notice.::

Bladetech’s headlight flashed once in what the young Prime supposed was assent before jetting off head of them, his engine noise cutting dramatically as he rounded a corner and the trio continued on in relative silence before, three blocks later, Bladetech stopped before existing sidestreet into one of the main thoroughfare, backing his alt almost directly into Orion’s front fender. He pinged hasty Autobot shorthand for ‘enemy’ and Optimus very quietly transformed and moved to look very quickly around the corner. Blue optics refocused, irising wide before he ducked back out of sight and moved back to crouch with the other two.

::Bit of luck.::

::Both combiner teams,:: pinged Bladetach rather enthusiastically. :: Ain’t combined yet, we just gotta kill one of each team and there aint no combiners.::

::Correct. Blade tech, one story up. Balcony. Grenade. Then cover fire. :: The other mech immediately jerked his chin up and Orion laid one hand palm up on the ground. The trooper fit the heel of his pede in the Prime hand, slapped him on the shoulder and was launched gently up on level, the bot catching the edge of the ledge, pulling himself up and edging out of sight. Orion looked to Ironhide, his optics, perhaps, wider obove the edge of his battle mask than they should have been..:Are you ready?::

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...just gotta kill one of each...

Ironhide vented, optics trained on corner and what was beyond it and not on the mech at his side. Just one of each, quick and simple - a sound strategy where combiner teams were concerned. Perfectly reasonable strategy in any situation, really - take out the crucial individual to defuse the enemy, and the truth of a combiner team was that all individuals were crucial.

Bladetech's almost cheerful ping over the comms felt like it had crawled up underneath Ironhide's plating, painting acid through his lines. ...kill one of each... Sensible. Tactically sound. Certainly the optimal course of action.

Ironhide cycled systems that felt as though they had run powder dry. It wasn't the first time - there had been earlier skirmishes, small things, quick and over with, nothing on the magnitude of combiners. Cybertronians, still, all the same, and it felt like running on empty, like creeping fractures through his struts, and slag simmering in his tanks. He had done it. He had faced the sparked frames the Primacy would tell him were his enemy and he had fired when told to fire, fast patching what had to be patched to DO it, but the feeling had never gone away.

They were all the same race. They were all the same people. He had been sparked, oath sworn, and hard coded to protect Cybertron and its mechanisms and to do the exact opposite, even with the gaping chunks of code they had gouged out of his primal systems, felt like wrenched engine pumps firing backwards and base core conflicts.

And his Prime, the one he had been handed off to, would stand there and ask if he was ready. Ironhide cycled another ventilation, firming and double layering the patches that would let him do exactly what he told all of his trainees not to - rely solely on his targeting algorithms, shunting all of the action of response and aim and firing into mindless protocols that would, bolstered by mass memory, take out targets without benefit of relying on anything Ironhide thought or felt. He couldn't afford to think or feel - that wasn't what he was there for.

He cycled one more ventilation, spinning up his mid-range cannons in a series of quiet clicks, the systems already primed and humming. Thoughts shunted into one partition, emotions into another, leaving only a stark tier of priorities - Protect the Prime. Take out the designated enemy.

::Ready when yeh are.::

[Deleted]

For a moment, one incandescent split-second before he told Bladetech to hit them, Orion just looked at the other mech. In that single moment, in the neural lightning storm of his mind, where that one kilk could drag on for the eternity he needed, Orion Pax accepted for the final time – in the hundreds and hundreds of times he’d already convinced himself that he’d accepted it – that he wasn’t allowed to not do this. His beliefs did not matter, what he felt did not matter, all he'd done before did not matter.

The next ten seconds, Ironhide, Bladetech, and his soldiers back at the rally point - that mattered. The Prime opened his comm.

::Bladetech, hit them.::

The grenade tore two of the Decepticons apart instantly.

One died instantaneously, his entire upper chassis blown open to the spark chamber which vented with a burst of blue and ozone and dropped the mech dead on his link-brothers. Bladetech did not relent. From his perch, the tanker-mech had unraveled from his frame a small suppressing arsenal and laid down a blanket of plasma fire on the startled gestalt team. The all dove for cover so they did not see Ironhide or Optimus until the front fender of Orion’s armored six-wheeled vehicle mode slammed through their first meager cover. Orion came out of his alt at speed, right arm already blade-configured, and came down hard on the first team’s LT. He had enough time to cry out before Orion put his weapon through his chest all the way to the hilt and, immediately, used him as a projectile to bowl three of his soldiers down and give Ironhide space to catch them with a flanking salvo

::Prime!:: Bladetech in inter-Autobot radio. :The other team is combinin’! All three’a the dead mechs are from team one!::

::Keep shooting! Hold down the first team and prepare to move!:: Or hold down what remained of them. Orion spun, ax-kicked a mech who tried to take an energon axe to his neck, shot him as he went down. A shot dented his shoulder. (Class one weapon. Not powerful enough.) He fired at the retreating combiners, missed each and every one of them by swathes of space. In seconds they had leapt to form the legs and trunk of a three-story combiner. Energon soaked Orion’s hands, over-hot and slick. He ignored it. All of team one was dead. “Ironhide!” He leapt a barricade and hit the ground in his alt. “With me!”

::Back to original plan!:: Bladetach again, already scrambling back to ground level. The combiner was already swinging around to zero in on the retreating Bots.::Primus damn, *that* team aint ever buggin’ us again!::

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For one split nanoklik Ironhide had a targeting lock - not on the rapidly combining team that was bearing down on them but on the trooper whose words were still ringing through his processor in split-strut echoes of wrong that grated through his spark like shock charges. The viciously gleeful tone was one he knew well but the target it was aimed at was indelibly burned into his optics and processor, Cybertronian sparks flaring in the last burst of death and for that one brief moment he wasn't sure which target he should let fire on more - the Decepticon combiner team or the Autobot trooper and Prime.

Remnants of loyalty coding and the automatic threat assessment of the gestalt won out, cannon fire targeting the still-locking joints of the massive combiner in rapid fire bursts that ripped off connection plates before they could tesselate into place. Standing his ground he dug in pede locks and joint stabilizers, switching out energy rounds for hard state artillery capable of punching through ship plating, mass memory and algorithms lining up a  shot he didn't dare look too closely at.

::Ironhide!:: Sharp, terse, wreathed in command glyphs that made him twitch reflexively, but he stood firm, dorsal sensors tracking the Prime as a variable while every primary sensor was trained on the towering combiner. ::With me! NOW!::

No. He didn't speak it but he didn't slagging move either as the combiner's optics flared and the giant took one lumbering step forward. His Prime's glyphs were blisteringly sharp in an agitated tight beam. The trooper, Bladetech, was littering the comm channel with a stream of profanity, half frantic, part awed, mostly having to do with stupidity. Ironhide blocked it out, spooling it to a quick temporary partition, and focused sight and protocols on the blast charred and loosened plates at the combiner's knee.

One more giant step, weight shifted onto one leg, back leg lifting - one more step would be near enough to be stepped on, pede swinging up and up, higher than Ironhide's helm. Come on. One hitch higher, weight solidly on the stabilizing leg and...

THERE. Ironhide fired before he could think better of it, target locked to the already damaged joint, his pedes sliding back half again his own length as the recoil slammed through him. He didn't wait to see if the missiles hit, already twisting to throw himself into alt mode, wheels peeling out across the pavement. ::Go!:: he roared to the other two. ::Afts in gear and GO!::

[Deleted]

The combiner staggered. The colossal weight of the mechanoid came down and the linkages and gears in his right knee blowing out as he brought his full weight to bear. The giant swayed, stumbled and fell. It seemed to happen in slow motion, the shadow of the colossus falling across the street, across all three Autobots as they raced away. The crash from behind them shook the ground so hard the metal and stone road kicked up against their wheels as Ironhide’s marksmanship did its brutal work. The EM field the gestalt threw was massive, hitting sensor panels like a physical blow and the hard mechanical roar that rose up from the damaged mech seemed to shake the glass from the skyrises.

Orion, however, had already hit the brakes and reversed hard; spinning a complete one-eighty and gunning back down the street toward the falling giant, tearing past Ironhide, transforming ten meters out, rolling and launching just as the combine’s head hit the ground. In that moment there was no thought beyond the reflexive, aggro-tec born immediacy of what he was doing. He landed on the back of the giant’s neck with meteoric force, pede slamming down so hard, the gestalt’s neck plating buckled. Seconds. He had asto-kilks to do this before the combiner recovered so there was no time to think, like there had been no time to think before.

Orion opened fire directly into the back of the combiner’s head.

At this range, even he – archivist with legendarily bad aim – couldn’t miss and the giant’s helm burst open. The alloy split in with a stink of scorched metal, akali and that sick death-stink of ozone as a spark somewhere inside the head-mech’s folded frame work seized and gave out. An immediate seismic convulsion took the rest of the gestalt and Orion didn’t have a word for the many-voiced agony that rose from the combiner as he came apart at the shoulders and hips. Orion jumped down, hit the ground, watched as the dead mech’s team fell out from the rest of the combiner, transforming into their root modes as they did.

One of them was screaming, the mech who’d made up the left arm – this high animal noise, clutching her chest and howling. She was screaming someone’s name. She was kneeling less than five meters from him. From the way the other combiners were frozen, they clearly thought he was going to shoot her and were waiting, dreading, watching… so when the Prime turned away, transformed, and immediately raced back up the street he imagined their surprise. He didn’t imagine their loathing.

“Holy slag, Prime!” Bladetech, driving “That was. –”

“Back to the plaza,” said Orion, interrupting him. His spark felt like it was burning through his chest, his fuel tank in his gut like it was full of lead. “We still have the rest of their mechs to worry about. They could still push forward and we don’t know their numbers. We regroup.”

“I can take out the other –”

“Move. Out. Bladetech.”

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SICK. There was no other word for it, no other base glyph that could encompass the feeling in Ironhide's tanks and spark. Sick, wrong, on so many levels and so many ways. It thrummed through him, in every circuit and fluid line, like a ripped and draining leak in his protomass - wrong wrong WRONG.

He had been given to the Prime as an oath sworn Guardian, to protect and preserve, and he couldn't even look at the mech. Didn't dare, not with his protocols burning through him in blistering waves. He had been on his pedes moments after the larger mech and had taken one step forward - follow, protect, defend - before he had realized what the other meant to do.

Ironhide was still standing there, frozen, protocols and lines arrested in guttering errors, when the shot rang out. When the femme began screaming. It was, within his memory, the worst sound he had ever heard on a field of battle. It was mindless and broken and utterly, completely, Cybertronian.

Move out, fall back, transform, DRIVE. He stumbled through the motions on purely automatic, dragged in his Prime's wake and it was easier, by far, to focus on the immediate. Fall back. Regroup. Secondary harmonics growled through his engine as he pushed himself nearly into Bladetech's rear bumper, the sound furious and shaking through him. DRIVE. Drive, Pit take it, because if he didn't, if he stopped, if he thought...

There was a clear line of sight between his left side sensor and the Prime, a line of sight that should have been for defense and instead had him calculating trajectories and the Prime's armor density versus his own caliber weapons, the combiner's scream still echoing through his audials and mass, and no no NO, just DRIVE. Shove it down, partition, FOCUS, and his only responsibility just then was to keep the young hot head in front of him on track, repeating the Prime's order as he herded the younger mech in front of him with snarling growls. "Move! GO!"

[Deleted]

The Decepticon army as it had lain in wait whilst the Senate put off the gladiator's joint appeal with the archivist was not a fully coordinated one. The commanders were labour strategists, foremechs and cohort leaders who were long experienced with organizing mecha to perform long, ugly and thankless tasks, vorn after vorn. When Megatronus cut the hanging syllable from his name and left Orion to his puppet Primacy, a number of military mecha aligned to the revolutionist movement and straightened out the still-booming ranks. Megatron commanded them all, used the blind and justice-lusting loyalty they'd sworn to him to play their violence through the streets like pieces across a Crystal Hex board. There was nothing to be done about the minutia of tactics on the ground level, though.

They'd made a glorious mess of things.

Progress was slow and savage, the Autobots putting up a dogged, though gradually yielding defense. Intelligence had placed the new Prime at the fore, but Megatron had not needed to be told that Orion was here to know. That intangible connection between them still hummed, the thread between brothers not quite severed.

The former gladiator had assisted in tearing through a modest collection of heavy artillery that had been advancing on the rear from the East, and then utilised his newly acquired alt. mode to advance to where Crashstorm had been fighting. Halfway there, the combiner had been crippled and felled. Tactically the loss was a blow, but Megatron had seethed with a wave of genuine disgust when it had been relayed that the Autobot Commander had not slain the surviving mecha and finished the job.

Cowardice. He shot out the ground in front of Orion from the air to stop him running from it.

Megatron's jet mode was relatively new, but Starscream had been a fast and thorough teacher - purely through being utterly insufferable when his high standards weren't met. The Seeker had been the best to come out of Vos, and personality clashes aside, Megatron had had no intention to wasting such a valuable resource. The same methodology had been applied to the election of Starscream to his 2IC.

Sweeping fast and close across the demolished strustures that Crashstorm had struck before being felled, the Cybertronian jet crashed into Orion's side as if it meant to plough through him. They ascended over and across eight blocks before Orion recovered from the blow enough to drop away, landing in smoking rubble.

Transformation sequence completing a bare klik before he hit the ground, Megatron straightened charging distance away from the other mech. The staccato-hum of combat seemed to quiet as he locked optics with Orion for the first time since the Senate floor.

"You do not belong here," Megatron barked, optics flashing with heat. "Your own troops say as much."

He smiled, and the arrangement of his faceplates was bemused, indulgent, cruel and deeply, darkly mocking. "You only continue to function because your pet Guardian is oath-sworn to make it so. You have strayed too far from your library."

[Deleted]

Stand up.

He kept telling himself to do it, to get off one knee and fight, but the pain of being T-boned at Mach 4 was singularly crippling. The impact of Megatron’s jet mode had buckled his right side in because, while he was of an impressive size-class, Orion Pax didn’t quite have the armor to take a hit like that without flinching. Error code flashed across his HUD, splitting his vision, fracturing it like a poor camera feed before snapping back into clarity again – Megatron standing across the ruined street from him wearing a smile that he didn’t recognize. This calculated affection colored by contempt.

He means to kill me, Orion thought, an eerie factuality in the observation. And not quickly.

Stand up.

“Your vanguard is broken,” he said, not rising to any of the baiting. The archivist Prime forced himself to his feet, one hand pressed to the split alloy of his flank, a run of coolant sliding down the metal. He was grateful for the battlemask – allowed him to focus on schooling his voice to calm and not concerning himself with the tell-tale configuration of his facial features. He managed not to stagger as he took up a fighting stance, blade springing from his free right arm, alloy heating at the ready. “Retreat, Megatron. Take your wounded and go.”

//Ironhide, Bladetech? Megatron here. Transmitting location. Relay to central barricade and get snipers in the air. If he's brought reinforcement I want them giving air support to the main defense.//

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The crackle of the Prime's comm tore through Ironhide in a flurry of code cascades that threw his entire drivetrain, wheels locked and spinning out in a screech across the broken paving. It ripped through him, lifelong hardcode protocols engaging in a wrenching twist of firewall partitions and re-routed priorities.

The sick, tank churning feel of watching the young Prime brutally end the combiner team dropped away with circuit numbing speed, emotional routines severed and walled off as the Guardian's primary directives surged online. Firewalled from the feeling, the world coalesced into flashfire data and equations, ranked in hard teirs of necessity. Coordinates dropped into place, mapping distance between himself and his charge and the fastest way to close that space, framed by data points of their forces and the speed, quantity, and type of backup available flashing in cascade threat assessments across his HUD.

Ironhide was already spinning up weapons, engine gunning, when he finally registered the youngster who had swung back around to his side and who was pinging him with an urgent, confused comm. ::…alright, big guy? Hey, you even hearing me?::

::Heard yeh,:: Ironhide snapped back. Aimless, dithering - Primus bless, he hated working with the regular ranks, it was like trying to train wild turbofoxes. He separated out one processor thread to deal with the youngster, his comm glyphs sharp and overlaid with authority. ::An' yeh heard th' Prahm. Get back t' central, relay those coordinates, get our fliers in th' air. GO!::

Bladetech rolled back, engine growling. ::And where'll you be?:: he demanded.

Ironhide didn't bother answering that, just slapped another sharp command glyph - wordless directive, follow orders, GO - at the smaller mech and dug wheels into ground, peeling out in a shriek of roaring engine towards his charge.