Flashback – Atheists in a Foxhole – Closed

[Deleted]

Barricade, as a rule, didn’t crashland. So when Autobot anti-aircraft fire put an ion ball the size of a combiner’s fist through the port-side engine turbine, Barricade decided that rules were made to be broken and tried to yank their craft out of the nosedive that ultimately put him and a fifteen-mech chalk into a middle of enemy territory. The majority of the Cons in the carrier had been fliers and Barricade blew open the bay doors in time to get the entirety of the fliers out and a handful of mini-cons and smaller ground troops that could hitch a ride on their larger flight-blessed allies. Unfortunately, as pilot, Cade saw none of this hospitality, nor did the biggest front-liner in the crew. A heavy-mass build with yellow optics and blue plates who didn’t seem surprised by his ill fortune.

He was, perhaps, as surprised as Barricade to survive the crash.

Autobot infantry hadn’t been muchly interested in hunting the remains of a shot down K-class personnel carrier, but that didn’t mean that Barricade and his large compatriot would go unnoticed this deep in Autobot turf. They’d missed the drop zone by ten miles and it was ten miles of heavy Autobot ground support between them and Decepticon friendlies so that meant – as the second sun this side of the planet swung below the horizon – Barricade and Breakdown found themselves weathering the night in a subterranean maintenance shaft while the rumble of Autobot heavy tanks thundered almost directly overhead. They were very much pinned until these bots were out of the area and they could risk a run out of this sector.

“So,” said Barricade after nearly an hour listening to Autobot engines. The glow of his optics was almost the only light in the service tunnel, just bright enough to cast light against the wide-set, massively powerful bot across from him. He pinged amusement. “You used to run with the Wreckers?”

[breakdown]

Breakdown rebooted his optics, rerouting the power he had diverted to his audials as if he could identify anything from the constant hum of Autobot engines except that they were full on surrounded. Then before they had even calibrated to the near darkness of the tunnel, narrowed them when it sunk in what exactly Barricade was trying to use as a conversation starter.

Stupid games, boasting about kill counts, what you like in a mech or femme -- that was how you passed the time stuck somewhere you might die. Asking about a guy's old unit in Prime's army these days was right up there with wanting to know his processor specs, and while Barricade's at it why not ask Breakdown what he thought of Adaptus? Sure, getting stuck and almost killed will loosen up any vocalizer, but it was still the second thing Barricade said to him in weeks, since they'd done Morobishi -- and the first was just to tell him not to jump, a pretty obvious order in a K-class drop.

"Used to," Breakdown forced out, glancing up over his knees folded up in front of his chest in this claustrophobic little tunnel just to see if Barricade's face was as smug as his field. It was. He scowled. "Something funny about that?"

[Deleted]

“Not that I can think of,” said Barricade, optics flicking upward at the sound of something very massive rolling overhead.

He didn’t speak again for a moment, a razor-edged alertness crossing into his optics at what he thought sounded like the footfalls of a cybernaught… or a combiner. The Autobots had scrounged up a couple of those recently, more and more ordinance as Zeta Prime began to take this uprising for the civil war that it was – hence the recall of the Guardians to the homeworld. Hence the recall, even, of the Wreckers. Barricade looked back to Breakdown again; the towering dense-mass, yellow-opticed, shape of him hulking in the dark. That mild tang of defensiveness in his EM field.

“Cons talk,” said the infiltrator, leaning back against a corroding wall, the color nanites in his optics dimming a bit. “Zeta called the Guardians back to bolster the Autobot ranks. Problematic. Funny thing though, Cybertronian police guilds are still the best body for body at killing other Cybertronians. The Guardians have too much hard coding in ‘em. Makes a mech hesitate. Lotta them switched sides real quick. Wreckers though.” Barricade shrugged. “All anyone knows about them is ghost stories.” And the occasional interspecies complaint under Intergalactic Law. “Consensus is they got a… 52% survival rate?”

Not a rating that Barricade was pulling from thin air either. That stat had, in fact, been pulled from a military brief that Barricade had made himself familiar with in the course of one of his… extracurricular missions for the cause. The one’s that didn’t include flying drop-ships full of living bombs to their inevitable final destination. Cade folded his arms, helm dropping back against the wall.

“Mech who joins a crew like that…I might be the first, but I won’t be the last to ask: Why join up?”

[breakdown]

Breakdown watched Barricade get comfortable, then shifted around until he figured out it just wasn't going to happen for him. Not folded up in a maintenance shaft, and not with Barricade trying to talk to him about why he joined the suicide squad that saved his life. Even took Bulkhead a couple millennia to get that out of him, and even then Bulk -

"Ghost stories, huh," he deflected. He held out his arms and leaned forward toward Barricade sitting across from him. He wasn't actually intimidating when he couldn't MOVE, but he wanted to make the point. "What do they say about us? Do we join because we're just stupid, or are we crazy? Want to die and take everyone out with us?"

He relaxed, pushing his helm back against the wall with a soft metallic thunk, not thinking about the Autobot base humming all around them but the strip of manufacturing plants they had leveled a few miles back. It was a good run for Breakdown -- only two of them had refused to jump. "So we got a 50/50 survival rate. Bet those K-class woulda taken the deal."

[Deleted]

Red optics flickered in the dark, the rumble overhead quietly briefly before the next troop of Bots passed over. “Yeah well…” A crooked smile in the dark. “A bunch of those K-class got to pick a fast and useful death over an extremely, extremely slow death. It’s like Librarian Prime always says: Freedom is the right of all sentient beings. Half of them chose to not get eviscerated on the traitor wheel… the other half chose to willing give their lives for the sake of the cause. Glory of the Decepticons, right? That one guy? Yelling it as he fell out the back of the bay doors, kinda yelped as he fell out?” A bit of a laugh. “And then there’s the Wreckers. You lot chose to join a squad where your first day is, for half of you, your last day. One has to wonder…”

There was a series of thunderous booms from overhead and the pair of Cons froze for a moment, optics up on the ceiling. When nothing came of the sound, Barricade looked back to the burly bot across from him.

“Nah, mech, it’s not that you lot are crazy. It’s that you’re all like the K-class, more than then the ghost stories say. Wreckers is the last ditch 50/50 chance for mechanoids at the end of their rope without another option… or mechs who want to bring about, rather spectacularly, their own end for the purpose of gears and glory.” Cade tilted his head. “Question is: Which were you?”

[breakdown]

Breakdown started to cycle up his comms, and caught himself before answering or worse, saying anything's name. The Cons' tech god had done some kind of patch job to his comm systems when he'd first joined up, but just because Breakdown had looked at the new code and couldn't make heads or tailpipes of it, didn't mean none of the Autobots could. Comms could be cracked, voices could only be overheard, and there was enough going on upstairs to mask it. Were they setting up for something?

Resolved to wait it out, he dropped his voice to its lowest audible volume over the noise. "You're thinking too much," he said by way of Barricade's question. "Joinin' up, or out with the crew, it's the same as K-class -- show up and get it done, 's what the Wreckers do. Course, I turned out to be a pretty bad Wrecker." He caught the flash of confusion in Barricade's optics. With any of the others who got it -- well, Knock Out, anymore -- he'd laugh.

"I left," he explained. "Survived, too."

[Deleted]

Barricade reached into his sub-space, produced a field-ration of energon gels and a dose of nanite infusers. He swallowed half of the gels and hardlined half the infusion before pocketing it. The rest of the gels he held up, then placed on a large but dead power conductor next to Breakdown’s knee. Despite Barricade’s best in ‘shut-up-stop-panicking-and-I’ll-land-this-Primus-fragger’ in piloting skills, their drop ship had all but been trash compacted upon impact, leaving both infiltrator and front-liner a bit battered. If they got into a fire-fight, which could be likely this deep outside their designated drop zone, then they’d both want the extra fuel boost.

And between them, Cade knew Breakdown used more fuel. He'd worked on and off with the ex-Wrecker long enough to have that much figured out and he likely didn't have the regen systems Barricade's model was so grandly gifted with.

“You left and survived,” Barricade repeated. He inspected a large gash in the plate of his opposite arm. Frowned. “Explain that one to me. Like, you left and they tried to kill you for it? Or you left and just survived the war like everyone else? Because leaving a suicide squad to survive seems… self-explanatory.” He looked up from his damaged arm. “That why you left? You and Knockout just didn’t wanna die?”

[breakdown]

Breakdown shook his head. "Slag no, we didn't wanna die. Do you?" he asked Barricade reflexively. "Neither did any of them. Most of them. And a lot of mechs DID. We don't, then we jump ship."

He realized the words he'd used, but wasn't going to start off like that to Barricade of all mechs and then mess it up by second-guessing himself.

Having said his part, he picked up a gel ration and played with it, turning it over in his fingers. Armies everywhere hated them as much as they loved them: disgusting sharp taste, but the concentrated energon did wonders for your levels out in the field. On a supposedly routine bombing run, someone like Breakdown wasn't issued any, but his levels were still in the bottom third by now. If they were going to force their way out of here past some big mechs, which it sounded like... he scanned over Barricade, and decided to fuel up.

He nodded in acknowledgement at Barricade for the gels, then cracked two open and downed them at the same time, forcing the thick substance past his intake as quickly as possible.

[Deleted]

“Well,” said Barricade. “That brings me back to the whole ‘why did you join in the first place’ bit that you’ve deflected from twice now.”

He dropped the arm he’d been inspecting and sat back again, listening to the resuming rumble of engines from overhead and the sound of Autobot chatter over open radio frequencies, the airwaves thickening with inter-solider chit-chat as they passed. Dust shook from the ceiling, salting him and Breakdown slightly in rusty alloy debris. Barricade didn’t smile. He just tilted his head slightly, narrowing his optics in the dark.

“If you didn’t want to die, why the frag join a suicide squad with a 50% survival rate unless – by some stroke of infinite bad luck – you were already allotted such a raw deal that the prospects of 50% seemed like odds you’d want to take.” He shifted his weight a bit, rolling his shoulder cuff a bit, wheels rotating slightly in their mounts. There was a hiss of hydraulics and he sat back. “Which, again, brings me back to the bit about you and the K-Class: They have 100% odds of death. So, what were yours when your name came up on the Wrecker reservist roster?”

[breakdown]

"I joined up," Breakdown said, "BECAUSE the odds were so bad. The Council wanted us out of the way. Dead. Figured the Wreckers were close enough and we'd all get ourselves killed within the vorn anyway." He shrugged, playing with the empty casing from the gel ration.

What had changed? Even if you weren't K-class, this was war. The odds of getting out of this Autobot base alive NOW were probably only 50/50. Not even for anything good, just on a routine drop mission gone wrong, with Knock Out and their friends all the way back in Kaon unaware. He had beaten worse odds, but not like this.

Breakdown tipped his head back and tried to work out the last few drops of energon from his ration, then looked back at Barricade. "Probably thought the same thing about the Cons," he said lightly, "till we started winning."

[Deleted]

“‘Us’,” repeated Barricade, latching onto the very small piece of Breakdown’s response that was actually answering his question.

There was a rumble from overhead and a sheet of dust shook loose, sifting even over the roadster’s dark armored form. Breakdown wasn’t very good at side-stepping questions so much as diving away from them. Barricade asked again and again ‘why did you join up?’ and his responses ranged from ‘it’s not as bad as K-class’ then ‘you think too much’ and now ‘the Council wanted us gone’. The roadster tilted his head slightly.

“You and Knockout. A medic and a shocktrooper. Big troubles that: two common as dirt military occupations of no importance or political significance whatsoever. I can see why the most powerful ruling elite organization in our whole species specifically wanted the pair of you dead.”

The infiltrator’s optics never wavered from the bigger bot across from him, even when the dust became a cloud in the small space he sat in, glowing persistently in the dark. For a moment he didn’t say anything, letting the fact Breakdown had just admitted to him and Knockout being targets of powers-that-be that bordered on ludicrous. Megatron was a political threat, the Triple M, whistle-blowers, even that archivist puppet Prime if he mouthed off – they were worthy of attention. Who the hell, exactly, were Knockout and Breakdown in the scope of that?

“So,” he said, quietly, “what did the two of you see?”

[breakdown]

Breakdown frowned at Barricade and his sarcasm and his common as dirt.

"Combiner shock troopers ain't common as dirt," he shot back. "And neither are mechs fought against--" he trailed off, looking around a few times, and tried to play it off as nothing when he looked over his shoulder and came face to face with -- right, the maintenance shaft they were hiding in. Of course nobody would overhear.

"You ever heard of Anacreon B II? Inhabited moon? Didn't think so," he went on when he was met with the expected silence. "Never heard of the Anacreon system at all, right? Our unit fought some organics there. Lost bad. I think they were telepaths or... something. They got stronger the more they thought they were winning. So the Council wanted it covered up. What if there were more of them out there, right? So clean it up," he said, gesturing.

Actually pretty smart of them, if Breakdown was thinking about it. And if he hadn't been on the wrong side of it. Not that his memory from back then was the best, but he was pretty sure Cybertron hadn't heard from those organics again, not since Anacreon B II got blown out of the sky a few cycles later.

[Deleted]

“So you and Knockout,” said Barricade, his face perfectly calculatingly calm, “got on the wrong side of inter-species military op in a post-Nova Prime administration.” He took a moment to convey that he did, indeed, comprehend how comprehensively screwed – to the wall in fact – that made the pair of them, getting slaughtered by organics and disproving to an ever-weakening Primacy the myth of Cybertronian superiority. A low laugh. “I can see how that might not have worked the frak out for you.”

Another sheet of dust shook loose from the ceiling, pebbles and metallic shavings pinging off the infiltrator’s helm and shoulders for a moment. Both Decepticons froze, optics turned briefly upward at the suspect ceiling overhead. Once a reasonable couple seconds had gone by, Barricade turned the bright glow of his stare back on Breakdown, a kind of amused hum in the pitch of his engine noise, but beneath that there was a note, a single clear and persistent buzz of intent because wasn’t that interesting? It was completely irrelevant really – they were in a hole in Autobot turf and the existence of a psychically gifted organic species meant nothing to either of them really.

Likely why Breakdown dropped his guard enough to talk about it.

“I am literally incapable of crediting you with the ability to make that up, so must be true. Guess that blows a hole in the notion of Wreckers who join up with suicidal intentions of heroism. Or is it just you who joins a suicide squad out of cowardice?”

[breakdown]

"Me and Knock Out," Breakdown refuted, and looked up to make sure Barricade didn't get him wrong... and came face to face with a set of unmistakeable blue optics in the cracked ceiling above his head.

Breakdown froze and thought about his choices.

Tell Barricade that they were found and ask if he had an escape plan in him -- no, the Autobot would hear. Comm Barricade and -- but he'd intercept that too. Could. Probably. The Autobot was just sitting there still, watching them. Was he just going to look, or waiting for reinforcements? Bad enough either way. Maybe Breakdown could do some sort of move with his optics to get Barricade to look up, and THEN the escape plan. Yeah, that'd work. Except he was making optic contact with the Autobot himself. He'd notice if Breakdown did anything.

Reason to go all out... except they were one frontliner and one pilot, in a maintenance shaft where Breakdown couldn't even stand up, under a base full of Autobot heavy guns, in the middle of Autobot territory. So, could be worse.

In one burst of motion Breakdown put a fist through the top of the maintenance shaft and the floor above it and about halfway through the Autobot, too, getting out every weapon and twisting his faceplates into a fearless grin while he was at it.

[Deleted]

Barricade was moving before the Autobot’s body even hit the floor, snapping across the room in a burst of hydraulic push, leaping up into the gap breakdown had in the ceiling and like a photovoltaic cat was up through it to the surface instantly. From below, where Breakdown was no doubt wiping dead Autobot off his fist, it was impossible to see what precisely Barricade got up to but it involved seven proximity grenades and a chunk of C-4 the size of the infiltrator’s fist. Then Barricade was back down the hole in the ground, diving into the maintenance shaft so swiftly he very nearly landed on top of Breakdown.

The resulting explosion brought down whole chunks of the tunnel. Smoke and the death-stink of ozone flooded through the hole in the ceiling and Barricade shook a layer of metal-flakes and dirt from his frame as he stood up, optics glowing over-bright in the darkness, engines humming as the sounds of screaming and transformation sequences overhead funneled down to him. That explosion took out, maybe, twenty or of them, wounded another ten perhaps, but he’d had no time to account for any shielders or dense-mass builds. He looked to Breakdown.

“Run. Back up the tunnel, we can bottleneck them. With the damage I did, they’ll need either evac or a medi-unit. They can’t spare a big pursuit unit.” Meaning, there would be fighting, just hopefully of a size they could handle. “They will still, you know, really out number us.”