Ep1.5 - Acid Storm's Lab - "Drip" - (Closed)

[Deleted]

Though a gregarious creature fond of seeing her friends and comrades in their living and working environments, there were areas of the Nemesis where Fairwinds simply did not go. The labs were one of them: Shockwave creeped the inner-energon out of her, and Acid Storm annoyed the dregs out of her. If it hadn't been for the lazy Seeker's promising expertise in chemical weapons, she doubted her master would ignore his constant napping and refusal to do anything more than the absolute minimum for the cause outside of his research.

When Megatron had summoned her to the oft-sealed and recently repaired lab, Fairwinds had zipped from the Eradicon mess entertaining the thought that the scientist might have dozed off into a vat of something, melted his faceplate off, and she was being called down to make silly poses on the body whilst Soundwave took pictures.

When she cleared the locked-open doorway and located Megatron in the expansive space, Fairwinds chirred with a little thrill that there was, in fact, a body. Though it hadn't been Acid Storm's faceplate that had melted off. Twists of acrid smoke from where the peculiar chemistry of the Seeker's body continued to burn rose from the scorched melding of his torso and chair. Shot from behind, the dialed-down cannon blast had obliterated his primary internals and melted the rest into the semi-destroyed chair, leaving Acid Storm's pillowed arms and helm still intact atop the worktable.

"Extraction, Fairwinds."

The cassette did not need to look to know that Megatron was at the computer banks, scrolling through data after Soundwave had remotely hacked through the unsanctioned security. She perched on Acid Storm's right shoulder, admiring the view, before hopping onto the table and beginning to pry away the dead mech's helm plates.



<<OOC: Tag to Barricade. Fairwinds will tag occasionally, but primarily a Barricade/Megatron thread.>>

[Deleted]

“And here I was thinking all the dying had stopped.”

The comment originated from the opposite side of the lab where one of the side doors had just come open. Barricade was standing in the door looking precisely as irritated as one might expect a mechanoid who had not recharged in several days and been working back to back repair and infiltration shifts. His optics, still stubbornly Autobot blue, glowed eerily in the half-light of the laboratory. Knockout hadn’t exactly been available for cosmetic work and retooling the infiltrator’s optics to hold a different color refraction didn’t precisely sit at the top of the medic’s extremely long To Do list. With almost half the crew semi to critically injured, the medic had his hands full.

The offroader wandered into the lab, smacking his fist against the locking pad as he did, shutting the two of them in. The Nemesis engines were still struggling. Every time they shuddered the lights went out and the whole ship trembled slightly (more than slightly) and somewhere in the ship Soundwave probably did whatever his equivalent for swearing himself sick might be (AKA: not react at all). Barricade waited until the latest tremor passed before moving to stand behind Megatron, slightly to his left. The ozone stink of death and molecular acid didn’t bother him in particular.

“I found something.” He seemed to resent the fact. “Took footwork, holo-projection, and several vehicular homicides, but it’s enough to get me a location. The issue is footwork and vehicular homicide is my expertise and Reflector is still too skittish for the data extraction part of the job. I need Frenzy, but barring him I need one of Soundwave’s deployers and you know how he is about his things.” The ship shuddered again and groaned, the lights going out completely. Barricade’s optics glowed in the dark, bio light along his back pulsing slightly. “I am still not convinced," he drawled, looking at Megatron, "that I should be off ship hunting down humans while the Nemesis literally falls out of the fragging sky.”

[Deleted]

Megatron did not look to acknowledge Barricade, nor the solid clunk of the laboratory door sealing behind him. He was in a similarly ill-temper, unrested like the Infiltrator since their departure from the African DMZ and subsequent arrival on the crippled warship. His processor, though core-locked during his stay at Haven, retained perfect memory of everything that had happened since the malfunction at that start of the raid.

His hatred of the former archivist had not been so completely stoked in a long, long time. Even longer since the toxic matter of N05...

Megatron bared his denta in the dark, optics snapping away from the blank screen where he had been manually rerouting power from Acid Storm's lab into the main ship's systems. Consolidating assets. Cutting dead weight.

"Optimus will not hesitate to make a second attack on the Nemesis, with or without groundbridge coordinates." Megatron ignored the cloying stench of organic viscera audibly sluicing from the other mech's frame, infinitely more repugnant to his audios than the tacky sounds of Fairwind's activities. He turned to meet the cerulean glow of Barricade's tight stare. "With only one rumoured Aerialbot, they'll likely be using the human military air force to find us. That is why Starscream and every capable flier is out leaving ion trails whilst we get to the central reserve."

The emergency lights came back on eighty percent dimmer than they ought to have been. Then the Nemesis shuddered again, and even that illumination guttered back out. Fairwinds continued on undetered, silent and quick.

Megatron cycled a vent that issued as a non-vocal growl, abandoning the console to give Barricade his full attention. "Which is also why I need you on the ground finding their human allies more than I need you here. Take whichever deployer you think best suited."

He sent Soundwave a comm. burst informing him of the same. Then, finally, he asked: "What did you find?"

[Deleted]

“Soundwave was right,” said Barricade flatly. “The problem is not everything is digital and not everything digital is accessible to Soundwave. I did some footwork and followed up a few…” He paused a moment, optics flickering, “...leads. Granted, I followed those leads onto county roads then drove them into ditches, but I got what I was looking for. It’s all incredibly boring tedious detail work of the most mind-numbing variety, but it boils down to the money and their international partners. The organization specifically responsible for inter-species military operations with the Autobots is, as we’ve suspected, an international cooperative and as such there’s bound to be a trail to follow. In this case, like many, it’s the money.”

Barricade was interrupted briefly by yet another violent shudder as the Nemesis listed suddenly starboard, pausing to tilt his head and listen with the attentiveness of a physician to the failing bio-pulse of an old patient. He dismissed the groans from far parts of the ship as, likely, nothing Soundwave and their remaining technicians couldn’t handle. For now. The real issue was their running imminently out of energon. With their fliers deployed enmasse to the task of distracting any air borne attackers, their groundbridge barely functional, and their shields close to failing, their only course was to make for small energon caches and limp their way quietly to an emergency reserve.

This was dangerous. This was the closest to gone he could remember them being in a while. Which was why it was hard to explain something as dull and tedious as his intelligence gathering even if it was toward an end like finding the Autobots.

“Subsidiary shipping contracts in Munich. The problem is the subsidiary company isn’t real and it’s funded by the American military, specifically the branch under General Brant and connected to William Fowler, the Autobot liaison. It’s not much, but it could get me to their front door and that’s all I need.” Barricade optics flickered a little, his field shifting across the edge of the other mechanoid’s sensor range. “I’ll find him for you,” he said, casually, electromagnetics flaring slightly. “I’ll find him, and his little team, so you can kill them in front of him.”

[Deleted]

Megatron's field rippled in response, though nothing more. His hand lay flat upon the darkened console as if he could feel the Nemesis hurting. "Your conviction is noted."

There had been no time for anything other than getting back to the ship and burying their hands into the critical damage control, repairs, and organizational triage to compensate for diminished numbers when double the hands were needed to keep the flagship airborne and cloaked. The warlord had had four million years locked out of his processor and spent days on an alien world with Cybertron dead, his brother a mortal enemy and a scant handful of their race left alive across the galaxy. Had had the events so methodically and catastrophically carried out to seek the swiftest victory and end to the war in an ignorant and nauseatingly troubled light. Then Barricade had shown up and dumped those four million years of bloodshed, struggle, rage and bitterness back into his brain.

Megatron retained perfect memory of his thoughts whilst so compromised. The confusion and denials, the conviction that the slaughter had been unjust and unnecessary, and that it could not have been only him to have caused it. Ignorance had been agony.

Since Barricade had arrived in the mine with his weapons in his arms, a dataslug loaded into his systems and grim conviction in his stare, up until this first meeting more or less alone, they hadn't spoken of it.

What they had talked about was the lingering disaster field that the Autobots had made of the ship in their Raid. Barricade had full damage reports, repair schedules and acidic opinions from his time performing repairs before Starscream had had him brigged.

The Infiltrator had been gunned down and hacked for the failsafe codes to the Phantom, destroying their assured victory above Chernobyl and Optimus Prime's team. He'd become exactly what he'd feared in the worst conceivable way: the chink in the Decepticon machine, and in the armor of its leader.

They hadn't spoken about that, either.

Barricade had been held down, methodically and catastrophically tortured, spark-raped and left for dead. Had come so close to it, in fact, that he'd been stuck in core lock waiting to heal for weeks - whilst his fully aligned conjunx endura went psychotic.

They definitely hadn't spoken about that.

Across the quantum link passed impressions of the pursuit of the Lucky Thirteen; of the last of the team - Shadowrunner - in Haven's central atrium; of watching blue sparklight bleeding up and through fingers drenched with energon; of raw-circuit and scorched-neural pain so sharp and complete that it bleached out the universe.

The fractured crystals of the warlord's optical assembly rotated, spiraling outwards and then inwards in the space of a second onto Barricade's upturned faceplates. He shifted his weight forward a little, closer, helm tipping.

"Is your focus where it ought to be?"

A tight, appropriate rephrasing of are you sure you're alright?'.

[Deleted]

“My focus doesn’t suffer from the causalities of war,” said Barricade, baring fangs at the other mech in something that looked like a smile but wasn’t quite it, even for him. “This kind of thing is what I do.” His right hand flexed, claws scraping slightly against the alloy of his thigh guard. “The Autobots are going to regret not killing me, like they always regret not killing me.”

Barricade knew what his commander was getting at – that was the closest they’d ever get to a direct question and it was closer than Barricade needed. Their departure from the DMZ had been hasty and their return to the Nemesis liken unto a bomb dropping – or at least Megatron’s return had been liken unto a bomb dropping. Megatron’s action in general had deep impact on everyone around him, the way block holes or solar flares tended to reshape the verse and Barricade was accustomed to the continental shifts the other mech caused just by existing. Barricade, by design and dysfunction, was a hard-to-kill shadow.

It didn’t suit supernovas to wonder after shadows.

The infiltrator had lingered too long. He was done here. There was nothing left to report, but he stood still while the lab lights flicked and dimmed and watched the light catch the tarnished patches in the warlord’s armor, the still-visible welding and metal-mismatch of his repairs. The both of them showing their damage these days. The Nemesis groaned again and Barricade let the shudder pass through him like it were his own systems aching, EM field hitching as his frequency shifted, a red-electric tang of electromagnetics hung invisibly between them.

“You mistake what distracts me, Megatron.” His tone was almost amused. “What dissuades my focus is not Autobots trying their hand at atrocities. What disturbs my focus is waking up from shut down and remembering why my Spark runs hot.” His claws flexed again at this side. “I can no longer afford to die, you see. That is new.”

[Deleted]

Ah.

Megatron held Barricade's stare for a few moments, acknowledging the weight in it, and then moved towards where Fairwinds was working. The little cassette was just finishing up, processing the last of Acid Storm's data logs and the hard-sealed memories that indicated secrets one silicon wafer at a time. It was messy work: the split-razor appendage between her prying mandible and internal jacks sprayed the exhausted hardware across the desk and floor.

Fairwinds took her head out of the shell of the Seeker's cranial casing when her Master was at her back. After a moment's consideration, she refrained from the shaking off the fluids glossing her plates. "Three crates of circuit boosters hidden in the back that he hoarded. 'splains his overclocking. Rest is stuff Knock Out and Shockwave can make use of. Formulas and equations are gonna take a little longer." She shuffled a little.

"Decontamination, and prioritize the former scientist's stock for distribution." Megatron hadn't missed that the flier's plates were beginning to hiss from the peculiar chemical cocktail of Acid Storm's corpse.

Fairwinds bobbed her head in a nod, glanced momentarily at Barricade, and then jumped with a blast of her thrusters towards the back of the lab. Once she had left Acid Storm's primary work station for the 'rack, Megatron turned back to his waiting Infiltrator.

"You have proven that you are now more, resistant to death." There was an odd, subtle smile behind the words. The larger mech crossed back to the console bank. "Your resilience in addition to your usual tenacity should assuage your concerns over any kind of risk to me that you now perceive. As should my own. We are stronger together, Barricade, but you are right: you cannot afford to die."

Megatron lay one heavy, scarred hand on Barricade's shoulder. Felt the tickle of Reflector cringing underneath and ignored it.

"The Decepticons need you. I need you. Here, as my first lieutenant and most specialised and skilled infiltrator."

[Deleted]

“How can I be an infiltrator if I cannot afford to die?” said Barricade, turning his head slightly, optics glowing phosphorous blue in the shadow of his helm. “At the very root of my function is my expendability. My value is in my having no value whatsoever and that makes every move and step I take so easy to calculate the risk. There is no risk and I can move in ways that other Decepticons don’t.”

His frame pulsed with latent EMF, seething beneath the alloy of his armor, set as burning lines of electricity in the skeleton of his frame all leading back, inexorably, to the burning core of him. That alien frequency threaded through him so thoroughly he didn’t know where the other ended and he began and he was selfish enough to never want to give that up. He conceded his greed. He wanted consume and assimilate the sum total of their quantum entanglement, cannibalize his own Spark until there was nothing but that other. He wanted to hollow his skull so he could stop poisoning that instinct with tactics.

He’d cut himself in two. He’d done it on purpose. The worst part: the part of him that didn’t regret it. Barricade felt nothing but spite and satisfaction because he didn’t need cause or a god or a soul because he had this and fuck the future and this war and the cause. He would annihilate the rest of their species in the name of this… And then there was the rest of him saying – Yes, and you will.

“You would not believe the things I think now,” said Barricade. He laughed, a short staccato sound. “What I think about you.”

[Deleted]

Barricade's assertion that expandability was at the core of his function was, in Megatron's opinion, about three million years of warfare out of date. In the distant past, there had always been another shadow lying in wait to replace one lost, like shark's teeth lined in rows. Infiltrators were burnt through like matchbooks, sparked to die where they didn't belong.

Their kind was so decimated now that they could barely be called a civilization. Cybertronians were roaming refugees-come-warmongers, blacklisted from half the universe and bringing death and destruction everywhere they went despite their dwindling numbers. There were no more new specialists of the particular psychotic bent that made infiltrators so dangerous. Many of them had been killed or simply broken during the first million years of the war. Resources were treated a little more carefully now.

Barricade was highly trained, experienced, innately resourceful and wickedly intelligent. He would be a genuine loss to the Decepticons.

Megatron did not correct Barricade's opinion on the matter, now. The Saleen's bemused remarks interested him, and he lifted his hand back away from the cleanest part of the mech's shoulder he'd been able to see. Pink and cloying, the stink of organic parts mashed up with a hot engine and chewing components was disgusting. He didn't know how Barricade could tolerate it polluting his systems like this.

The warlord folded his arms, one large and angular brow shifting upwards with amused curiosity. "I couldn't even hazard a guess. Are you still disturbed by the link?"

[Deleted]

“Of course I’m fragging disturbed by it, and so should you unless you’re buying into the theories that you’re immortal now.” Barricade eyes burned briefly brighter in the dark before evening out again. “It is not the business of military leaders to make their assassinations that much easier. It was idiotic to begin this.”

But you did it anyway.

That last thought gnawed at him, like a viral spike spreading through Barricade's neural net. Maddening – like when your instincts betray you. A mechanoid four million years alive following his instincts and his instincts this time had led him to a dead end. It wasn't like he hadn't seen the dead end, he had, but he'd walked down that narrow alley anyway and here he was.

Barricade snarled, bared every fang in his mouth, radiating a dark tangle of electromagnetics, enough to fill the room. “It has occurred to you that I am an ill-suited kind of spark to this, yes? A phase sixer, some other one-point-one percenter – that would make some kind of sense.” He stood there, agitated, plates hot, claws at his side tensed in need of something to tear apart in the vanguard of his anger. “I make none.”

[Deleted]

Any other mech might have responded to this series of statements with reassurances to the contrary. Emphasized their core compatibilities, how they now strengthened one another, and that they'd been engaged in mutually enjoyed violence and trysts on-and-off again for millennia.

Megatron's mind did not work that way.

"Neither does the decision to align with a mech when you may been required to kill them immediately after, but here we are." The warlord turned back to the flickering screen. Slamming a hand into the terminal sharpened the image, attesting to the fact that the Nemesis responded to percussive maintenance as well as fine handling in situations like this.

Megatron turned his attention back to the scrolling glyphs. This was not the conversation he'd been expecting, but then Barricade often preferred to operate against another's grain. "However suitable you think this may be is immaterial. It's done, and has already served to benefit us both."

Something wet sluiced down from the Infiltrator's frame in a long, stretching thread towards the deck. Megatron's mouth curled in barely restrained disgust. "Go find a washrack before you get back to work. We cannot have organic viscera contaminating the ship via a structural breach."

[Deleted]

“Glad to see your priorities are straight on.”

Barricade did not roll his eyes, nor was he done with this conversation but Megatron, like most mechs who have – in the past – used star cruisers as battering rams, wasn’t going to hear him over the sound of A: his own rumblings and B: the sound of the godsdamned ship going to pieces under their feet. (Though, arguably, that didn’t bother the warlord nearly as much as one might think given the star cruiser thing.) The Nemesis almost literally falling apart was, Barricade was willing admit, a relevant distraction at the moment. The agonized sound of engines failing and jump-starting again from the engineering deck was impetus enough to put a stop on what might have been a remark smart enough to get Barricade punched into a wall before mission brief.

“I’ll report to Soundwave in a click and pick up the mini-con. Then I’m off this ship.” The infiltrator was already on his way out the door, shaking something wet from one of his wrist rotors. “See if we can keep ourselves flying long enough to make this conversation relevant again, Lord Megatron.”

[Deleted]

Megatron did not acknowledge Barricade's exit, nor his parting remark. They both had significantly more important things to do than crash through a conversation that neither of them were particularly well equipped to have. It was, from the Infiltrator's perspective at least, one that they needed to have.

Barricade's specialism required that he imagine the worst in every scenario and plan around it. He saw foremost every danger and flaw in a spark-allignment. Megatron, by contrast, was a brutal sort of optimist. When he saw potential in some circumstance he battered it out to his advantage, aware of the risks but assured that they could be weathered. He understood the reasoning behind Barricade's deep reservations about the bond, but he didn't share the anxiety. Aware, but not to such a degree where the risks outshone the many benefits.

They would return to this topic of the incomplete but inarguably affective spark bond when the Nemesis and its crew were no longer in such need of their focus and energy. Likely it would be the first of many such conversations where Barricade would refute the warlord's assurances. For now, though, Megatron was content to focus on the defined and urgent problems with the battered Nemesis and its crew.


<i>[fin?]</i>