It Is A Poor Sort of Memory [Closed]

[Deleted]

[For Megatron, for starters. Explosions to be included later.]

It would take far more than a passing acquaintance to perceive the depth of Soundwave's irritation.

It was there of course, to be noticed; the dark, slender mech was poised off to one side and slightly away from the main bridge stations. The work station he was monopolizing was as isolated as one could be within the hive of controlled tension that was the nerve center of the great warship. Under normal circumstances, the crew would have eventually forgotten he was there.

But it was there. In the staccato, rapid-fire clicking as his talons flew over query commands for half a dozen holo-screens. The information was careening through at speeds that most any mech would have found impossible to follow, let alone read; it gleamed in multicolored hazes over the mech's blank mask. Soundwave was almost as perfectly still as his field, and like a bit of quicksand he'd become part of the larger beach that was the 'Nemesis' and its background sense.

Yes, he was irritated.

It wasn't the lack of results his searches all seemed to be offering; it happened. Sometimes you went looking for the wrong thing, and sometimes there just wasn't enough to be found. Sometimes the data couldn't be found; it had to be mined for. It wasn't the disruptions MECH had brought to Decepticon everyday; when war was your everyday, disruptions weren't so much expected as written into the schedule. No. Soundwave expected to be balked in his data mining. He expected everything to be going wrong all around him as he did.

What irked him, out of the whole escalating affair, was that humans were doing this. Measly, meter-and-change bags of calciferous infrastructures and bacterial hives, were hiding their whereabouts, their names, their locations, their very existence. They were behaving like ghosts, like shadows.

They were trying to beat Soundwave at his own game. He was angry because being insulted would have given them too much credit. He was coming very close, however, to being affronted.

Direct searching had proven fruitless. None of the communications he'd been able to acquire and analyze gave him anything he could trace back to actual identities. So he had switched to a more time-consuming, but true and tried method based on very practical concerns: armies need supplies.

MECH would need to feed, if not its people, its machines. It would need fuel and parts and ammunition. It would need medical supplies to care for its wounded, as human law was somewhat draconic and exceptionally rich in paperwork when it came to battlefield injuries without an accountable battlefield. It would need to move all these things to and fro, and while MECH sites might be well hidden and better protected, their suppliers might not be so careful.

The volume of supply manifestos Soundwave was sorting through was nothing short of prodigious. Patterns, however, were beginning to appear. Every foot soldier was, regardless of species, a creature of habit in the end; it was the crucial difference between them and an officer - the ability to go through the blunt sort of reprogramming army training inflicted upon you, and yet retain the means to think outside the box.

One of the screens shifted to a road map. Tiny flashes of energy began to race one another as Soundwave projected specific schedules, trips and cargo through them, tracking them sometimes from something so meager as the meal paid for on a specific credit card somewhere at a diner along Route 66.

It was not quite what he wanted, but if he could not behead the enemy Soundwave would gladly settle for starving it. And yet...

His helm shifted minutely, even as he left the map feeding on automatically sifted projections. One of the screens, moving at a pace that was practically a blur, garnered his undivided attention simply because of what it was not showing him. The pattern of travel was there, yes. The site had to be part of the anthill, for all the electronic (and likely physical) camouflage upon it. But the ants themselves didn't seem to know it.

Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to keep a secret, even from MECH itself. Soundwave's talons flicked over the command console, trying to force answers out of the source. After a moment he had to acknowledge simple fact: the answers weren't there. Was this the sign of something... useful festering within the ranks of their enemy? Or, more directly, a secret so literal that no trace of it had been allowed to reach the planet's communication hubs?

His talons went still on the console. Like a pebble skittering over glass, his field was suddenly there, just as calm, just as equable, separate from the whole and impossible to miss. He sent a brief, polite ping through the ship's communication systems to Megatron.

He'd much rather bring heads to answer the general's questions, but on lacking such, Soundwave was perfectly content to bring secrets as an offering instead.

[Deleted]

Megatron had been in his office adjoining the bridge, thus Soundwave's ping was responded to with his arrival through the blast doors at the rear of the command deck. He sensed something was off as soon as he approached his 3iC's console. Soundwave held himself with uncanny stillness - he'd fostered an extreme distaste for unnecessary expenditures of time or energy since they had met, and idly fidgeting fell under that category.

The peculiar angles of his frame were usually arranged with the kind of grace that precipitated movement, but currently the spaymaster's posture was stiff. Despite serving beneath him for centuries, Megatron doubted that the Vehicons in here would notice such a subtle indication of agitation in the mech. The awakened were, however, instinctively keeping their heads down, as petrorabbits sensed to look up when a cyberhawk was near.

It was their long history that gave Megatron this insight, just as Soundwave knew his subtlest tells. The warlord approached his longest serving and most trusted adviser in long, unhurried strides, coming to stand to the mech's right.

His optics narrowed on the flickering array of screens, though he had already anticipated not finding meaning in any of them. "What is it, Soundwave?"

[Deleted]

It was momentarily ironic to Soundwave that, where most mecha tended to shift themselves away from the tremendous presence of the Decepticon Warlord, he found said presence almost soothing. Megatron was always sure of himself, always sure of his place and the place of those around him. Temper might rise and fall, moods might pivot on some hapless glitchwit's mistakes or stupidity, but at his very core Megatron remained assured of both his course and his actions.

For someone like Soundwave, who was so often surrounded by the very waves of paranoia and treachery he was supposed to sniff out, it was like finding a quiet harbor in the middle of a never-ending storm.

He neither feared nor suspected Megatron; they had taken each other's measure and Soundwave knew exactly where he stood. If anything, some measure of the stiffness in his frame eased off as he realized how unreasonable he was being. He was one mech, and he could not watch everything, everywhere, all at the same time. He could look like that was exactly what he was doing, all the better for making others believe it was so, but it was not a charade he'd ever need around his leader.

The last of his irritation, subtle as it might have been, ebbed away as his talons danced over the console commands. Two screens remained active on one side - one the map, those few roads gleaming like pulsing energon veins as the adjacent holoscreen listed the suspect MECH deliveries at a less breakneck speed. Each listing included a brief gist as to why Soundwave suspected the delivery to belong to their human enemy, and flashing for attention were three deliveries en route through those same country-crossing highways.

That was the first of the data Soundwave had found: a brute force attack, a gathering of manifestos, and the endless sifting that had, in the end, led him to believe the cargo didn't just belong to MECH, but ranked high enough on their list of needs to be worth... attending to.

On a single holoscreen opposite the map, the spy projected the coordinates, overlaid with the seemingly unused area they corresponded to. Soundwave had borrowed the humans' eyes-in-space to discover the space not at all unused... and yet that was all he'd been able to find. Listed alongside the small topographical projection was a slow-scrolling list of every venue of information he'd tried, and found wanting - the place was such a closely guarded secret even those there didn't know what was going on. It was there, yes; it was exceedingly secure, yes. It was the nexus for the next step in transportation of... something. Whether it was going through, or staying, or leaving, not even those carrying it knew. No one seemed to know what it was, other than it was to be protected at all costs.

Soundwave had listed all three screens under a MECH identifier, writ large on each upper right corner. Once he'd set up the data at a speed where it could be examined, he stepped back to allow Megatron to examine it. No one could be in two places at once. But when the one place is chosen carefully, well... there's no end to what a good cascade effect can achieve.

[Deleted]

The significance of the site projected was underscored by Soundwave's singular focus upon it, the result of what had doubtless been terabytes of information scrutinized, filtered and assembled into this final output. A concrete location of a base of operations, and not one but three clearly high-priority transports inbound.

Megatron's attention lingered on the transports for a moment. Fairwinds and Roulette had been transported in similar high-security convoys, and though the base where they had been so ruthlessly 'studied' was destroyed, there was no evidence to suggest that there weren't others. Chatter at the Neutral DMZ hadn't suggested that anyone had gone missing from their own or Autobot ranks, but there was still a chance that powerful technology in the form of a Cybertronian frame was in MECH hands and currently in transit.

The warlord had almost no interest in saving anyone from MECH, but held a firm line on as primitive a race as the humans using their own bodies to advance their technology. Particularly as the advancements were directed at attacking them.

Even if there were no Cybertronian parts within those trucks, there was still valuable cargo of some description to be taken or destroyed. Soundwave's optics, unseen and even rumoured to be absent in the typical sense, would find no trouble in tracking the direction of Megatron's thoughts as his gaze moved across the relevant screens.

Time was of the essence - those three deliveries would converge on that point within the hour. There were no Decepticon patrols, ground or aerial, within the vicinity to intercept. They would need to groundbridge directly there, requiring immediate overwhelming force. MECH would likely scatter to protect their cargo. An intelligent optic would need to prioritise targets at a speed beyond that of observation and direction over comm.s.

Megatron's hands tightened halfway to becoming fists, a gesture of intent. He cast the waiting mech a sidelong look. "I believe this warrants our direct attention, Soundwave."

[Deleted]

Soundwave found it oddly gratifying to know he could still be pleasantly surprised. Unpleasant surprises, those came by like clockwork, and he expected them with the sort of resignation anyone watching the comings and goings of hundreds of soldiers in an enclosed had to learn least sanity flee for safer ground. All the best laid schedules and plans from Starscream, from himself, from any sort of authority rarely survived contact with the enemy, as it were.

The data he'd presented was concise and critical both; he would not have drawn Megatron's attention to it otherwise. But Soundwave had also grown resigned to the unfortunate fact that, lacking any sort of counter-intelligence department, he was bound to the ether, to the channels both wired and wireless that could only be found on board the 'Nemesis'. He left the warship only when the need was so absolutely dire that nothing and no one else would do.

It felt like it had been aeons since he'd last found himself out on the field, and he couldn't remember the last time he'd been out with Megatron, wrecking havoc.

Ah, the good old days.

His actual, physical reaction to the General's words was minimal; the briefest tilt of his head, a subtle shift of his weight, and yet he had gone from sedate source of information to subtle anticipation. Large as his tolerance was, infinite as his loyalty was, neither made him permanently immune to cabin fever.

Nonetheless all he visibly offered was his usual calm nod. The projections for a groundbridge from their current location to the suspected MECH site appeared on the smooth emptiness of his faceplate; behind it, the keen analytic mind was gathering satellite and topographical data, minutely adjusting the arrival coordinates so as to find a spot that would bring them in unobserved and possibly undetected for as long as possible.

Soundwave also expected the enemy, no matter what their species or size or numbers or location, to do what he would do if a critical location became compromised and impossible to save - thus, another part of his attention immediately started reversing the groundbridge equations. What was colloquially known as his ability to open split-second bridges... more often than not, wasn't. Oh, he could, if he had to; but why chance it?

If they had to get out in a hurry, he wanted to be able to summon their way out with a single command to the 'Nemesis'. Just in case.

The equation blinked to completion on his visor. While it was entirely possible that Megatron had commands to dispense before they were away, it was also entirely possible that he did not. After aeons of serving with the Warlord's talons at its helm, both the 'Nemesis' and the many mechs onboard would serve efficiently whether Megatron prowled the hallways or the planet below them. Soundwave would not preempt his leader: he would await his order to open a 'bridge, and follow him dutifully through it.

After all, the first shot fired ought to be made to count.

[Deleted]

Megatron looked over the coordinates with a sound of approval. Ground-based, and as they were unlikely to require an abundance of fliers for this excursion, he comm.ed an order for a squadron of five Vehicons to meet them for deployment. Their smaller size would allow them to enter whatever facility they found without destroying the infrastructure, and extra hands to deal with swarming humans and packaged cargo was always beneficial. He himself would lead them through the groundbridge with Soundwave in the unlikely event of immediate fire.

Though the last time had been decavorns ago, they had run operations identical to this many times over. It was not necessary to iterate procedure, and he only murmured, "To work, then."

There was a definite note of anticipation in the Commander's voice and EMF. An Eradicon took Soundwave's place (though akin to replacing a flare with a matchstick) as Megatron directed them away and off the bridge.

The closest deployment space was immediately beneath the command deck. There were safeguards in place to prevent simultaneous 'bridges opening in the surrounding corridors, and space enough inside the wide room not to need to. There were two groundbridge generators inside subject to the same restriction. Though they could not be opened simultaneously, they could operate within seconds of the other closing and make the calculations to open a vortex in the interim. The system allowed for troops and equipment to be poured out rapidly and safely, though there had not been call for such a tactic in almost a century.

When the commanders arrived, Theta squadron were already present and waiting.Their arms were poised for transformation into weapon mode, and their fields mingled in readiness and alert synchronisation. Their forge-type permitted cohort intuitiveness between them, whatever their number. Though individually the Eradicons were relatively weak, together they were formidable.

Megatron strode ahead of the smaller mechs, Soundwave a pace behind at his side. He nodded for his Third to give the command. Immediately the swirling vortex bloomed ahead of them, then they were in and through.


<<OOC: With regards to MECH and the situation on the other side, it's your rodeo, Moon! Rumi, feel free to dive in with Thana when you see an opening. Both please feel free to puppet the Raddies. >>

[Deleted]

Thana, Codename Odile, didn't often spend nights at a MECH base. She balanced a strictly normal and unassuming side life that required early mornings and career. MECH, while rigid in militant concordance, did not give leeway to other pursuits. Silas spent the majority of his time traveling from one installation to the next and had little time for passive peacetime.

So it was left to others, including Thana to go out of their way to maintain the guise of normality to redirect suspicion of the members of MECH. How would it if ex-military and active personal suddenly disappeared while MECH grew in power and credibility? No, that certainly wouldn't work. But as the threat level rose, with more hostile arrivals monthly, Thana was forced to set aside the side job and take a "vacation."

It was her turn on rotation in this hangar along with a fluctuating number of personnel on ground that could be as large as forty. She wasn't exactly certain how many active members were in the compound at the moment and her office in the steely confines of the building was quiet and barely lit. A migraine had forced her to turn off all lights but her desk lamp. The sallow glow still felt like it was putting a vise around her eyes.

Around the building, the layout of the installation was desolate looking in appearance. They'd chosen an abandoned airfield with overrun taxis bristling with weeds and crabgrass. The tarpac was uneven and jagged with the constant heat of the sun and shifting of the land over time. Every building (two hangers, a tower, and a maintenance shed) had a weather beaten, ugly appearance and an empty facade that MECH worked hard to maintain. Crickets added to the quiet solitude of the empty looking plot of land. It wouldn't have been out of the way to see a solitary tumbleweed rolling across the lot.

Thana lay half curled on the sagging sofa in the corner of her office and resented the moon glaring down at her from the sky. The luminance slanted through the blinds and painted her hair silver. She focused on breathing in through her mouth and out through her nose and fought against the pain pressing in against her temples. Which was further compounded by the slam of her office door.

With a silent grimace, she half rolled off of the couch and glared at the imposing personnel. What part of "do not disturb" did this halfwit not understand?

"Something large tipped the radar on the edge of the property, ma'am."

Perhaps he wasn't that much of a halfwit at all. Thana was on her feet and moving to the door before he'd finished his sentence. She pushed past him and headed for the end of the hall at a brisk stride bordering on a run.

"Everyone on high alert. We do not welcome guests," she ordered and sidestepped as the man ran around her to bark orders to the rest of the station. They didn't need her heading to maintain defense of the base but Silas had left her in charge of this particular location and she would oversee every command in his stead.

<<OOC: Holy crap, I hope that's ok. I'm completely guessing at what this place should be XD; If I need to change anything, let me know.>>

[Deleted]

Soundwave had always relished those few moments spent in the no-space of a groundbridge. Surrounded by the green vortex of light and folding space, he'd always thought of being in a strange place directly between making a decision and enacting it. It was as if time had conveniently stopped to allow him to refine plans and objectives, to add a final few touches onto the personal list he carried into every battlefield.

Even as the groundbridge resolved itself into a planetary surface, he'd already roused Laserbeak (to the usual two microseconds of protest). When the first warm bit of a night-time breeze touched his frame the cassette was ready to take to the air.

Soundwave found the ground giving slightly underfoot - gravel, sand, and traces of heavy fuels. The moon was up; it would add extra shadows to any local lighting. The breeze was fitful at best.

It was best to assume the groundbridge had been detected. Weapons were immediately readied, and Laserbeak took off with the quietest of hums, headed upwards in a steep ascent to provide aerial recon. Soundwave filtered the cassette's data, refined it with his own and re-transmitted it as he moved forward, keeping pace with Megatron. Roads, heat-signatures, potential weapon positions, it all began to feed into a short-wave, shared channel for the squad and their leader.

There were plenty of mechs that thought Soundwave did not do enough of his own fighting; it was a accusation he found deeply amusing, and true to a certain degree. Unless he were alone afield, then no, Soundwave limited his fighting to tactical strikes and backup. To try and take a frontliner's approach side by side with the juggernaut just a step ahead of him would have made any mech look deeply inadequate. Soundwave knew enough to not bother trying; he liked his dignity more or less intact.

His attention as they came out went immediately up; much as Laserbeak was doing, he was looking for either power channels or communication nexii. He found the latter first, only a moment before Laserbeak reported it to them.

The base's antenna farm, meager as it was, was immediately shunted to Soundwave's priority list and he opened fire on it neatly.

[Deleted]

The obliteration of their communications hub in two clean strikes triggered a frenzy of activity across the MECH base. Megatron was aware of it only as a scurrying of organics a quarter mile ahead of them, too small for his targeting systems to lock on to and too insignificant for him to wish to.

They would be converging on vehicles and weaponry, however, to mount a defensive assault. It was difficult to tell which of the structures ahead might contain anything of value to Soundwave or himself, and which contained munitions and transportation. Intelligence on MECH suggested that this facility would continue underground, thus it was logical to assume that anything of any tactical worth would be kept there.

The tactical worth of the transports were another matter. They were still incoming, at present, and Megatron awaited notice from his Third as to what to do about them. If they continued their approach with all the racket these humans were making, then they intended to join the fight and protect the base. If they broke away and retreated, then whatever they were moving was of more value than what this location already held.

If soldiers from the base moved out to intercept them, then they were of significant value.

The Commander brought his canon up to a relatively low setting and bore it on a small collection of helicopters at one corner of the airfield. Until they had determined whether or not there was a subterranean level, he did not wish to reduce the ground to craters.

Without prompting, the Vehicons slid into vehicle mode and tore off in formation, their comm.s snapping to one another on a closed channel. Megatron and Soundwave made no effort to keep up.

His arm remained raised as he strode forward, watching the black-clad humans beginning to cluster and climb into armored vehicles. He did not look at Soundwave to ask, "Where are the transports?"

[Deleted]

For one wavering moment, Thana almost blistered the air with a tirade of curses. But the loss of control was only shown for the briefest of moments in a facial tick, the bunching jump of her jaw muscle as she ground her teeth together. She'd made it down to the ground level where most of the staff had vacated. Most were either digging into the subterranean floors below to fret over the databanks, or they'd fled to the vehicles scattered across the small base. She didn't care about the people in the building or outside. She cared about the transports due to arrive.

The timing of the wretches couldn't have been worse and at the back of her mind, she filed that away as something important. Someone had good intel on MECH. But for now she had to focus on the group of soldiers surrounding her and awaiting orders. A radio was placed into her hand but she hesitated using the easily hackable signal.

"How far out is the next two transports?" she snapped.

"Second shipment is two minutes out and the third is still on the highway, give it ten at best to get here." The grunt shifted, clearly at unease with the pressing danger looming closer. Outside men shouted to one another as they rallied around their perspective vehicles and aimed weapons at the approaching Vehicons. At the first threat of violence, they would erupt into attack akin to a bee nest being riled.

"Second shipment is lost. Let it come. It'll be the decoy. Send two out on bikes and turn around that last one. Sent it anywhere but here." She shoved the radio back into the chest of the grunt and headed out across the room. "Where is the first shipment?"

"Um, hanger B, ma'am." Footsteps shuffled behind her, even as two men broke off to go find the fastest bikes they could to warn off the other arrival. Once they were out of headshot, Thana glanced at the other men surrounding her. "If they fall, send two more. And so until two get through. And leave hanger B alone. Treat it as if nothing is there. You and everyone out there do everything in your power to distract them and take down those foot soldiers."

"Wh-what about the other two?" From the soft tenor voice, Thana would guess the masked man was young, just out of field training at best. Pity that.

"...leave them alone for now."

[Deleted]

Soundwave measured the camp ahead, his perceptions overlapped internally with Laserbeak's overview. Someone else might have been dizzied by the just-divergent-enough viewpoints, but he'd have been disoriented if he didn't have them.

The surface was as nondescript as he'd expected. But then again, so was an anthill. The antenna farm dealt with, Soundwave had started scanning for the high-density waves bound to be coming from any sort of energy junctions --

"Where are the transports?"

He did not hesitate, his mind shifting so he could focus on the answer to that question as well; he'd been trying to find a satellite feed that would follow the trucks, but humans were absurdly spotty with their surface coverage. With Laserbeak airborne, however, human foibles became very unimportant.

Schedules were brought up, matched against the existing structures both small and large. Far above, the cassette whirred and projected the data his partner requested: one shipment was located immediately, at the poor excuse for a gate the compound boasted. The natives were running around and beyond it, but it did not seem to command their attention, and he affixed to the location a glyph that would command the attention of the Vehicons. Soundwave added a secondary glyph - if it were possible to acquire the contents of the transport, rather than destroying them, so much the better. But if push came to shove and they could not take MECH's prize, then he'd ben perfectly happy settling for MECH not having it, either.

Even as he acquired the information, a projection of the transport and his glyph instructions flashed on the blank screen of his face for Megatron to see, geodesic coordinates attached.

An then a straight vector of activity brought him up to sharp attention. Two bikes, roaring away, skirting the transport at the gate. En route, more likely than not, towards the transport still on the road. How interesting. Human vehicles, however, were such fragile things. Soundwave ran a swift calculation and, while he loathed going forward on the field without aerial recon, he nonetheless instructed Laserbeak to dismount the riders. With extreme prejudice, if he had to.

The two vehicles in their red vectors, as well as the thin violet vector that ID'd Laserbeak moving to intercept, flashed over his face-screen, scrolling sideways to the marker where he calculated the transport would be, just a few moments down the road.

But he still couldn't find the last transport. That he might be wrong, that he'd mistakenly detected three deliveries where only two were due did not even occur to Soundwave: he'd sluiced down the information for three transports, and just so. There would be three transports.

Rather than a facial projection, he lifted a needle sharp talon and tapped it on his screen, where the glyph for the third transport's location blinked; the screen went dark and he tipped that same talon downwards. It had become something of a standard to expect MECH to burrow, like the vermin they resembled; it was entirely possible that the last transport had been moved into a building, or entirely underground.

The way they were closing in, it really wouldn't matter where they'd hidden it - not for long.

[Deleted]

Of course the vermin would burrow. It was ridiculous of them to believe they could hide anywhere from them.

Megatron glyphed acknowledgement then broke off into a longer, faster stride, bearing down on the base and its amassing humans with intent. The Vehicons separated with hard turns and snarling engines, moving to secure the assets unless Soundwave directed them otherwise. They gave the warlord a wide berth.

The sharp edges of his pedes tore up the soil and then the asphalt. His canon was raised, steady and hot, blasting thick plasma bolts into the gun-mounted jeeps that were beginning to converge. A malicious, unexpected heat was curling in his spark, prickling at the cables and jacks where Fairwinds would dock. Megatron paid it little thought, used to emotion running hot in battle.

His focus remained on the ground.

It was an intuition D16 had been forged with to sense changing compositions underground. In the alleged 'Golden Age' of Cybertron, the Functionalists had asserted that every spark was sparked for the role of their frame; there was no need to aspire to anything else, anything more. Of course there had still been helobots afraid of heights, scouts with no sense of direction and claustrophobic miners.

D16, however, had been a goodminer. His move into the Arena and then revolution and warfare had been the pursuit of aspiring for more, not a failure as his forge-assigned role. He detected the cavernous space below when his field made contact, thirty feet through concrete. The Eradicons would find the vehicle entrance sooner or later, but creating a direct route down would be far more expedient.

Megatron cycled his canon back into standby, unwilling to risk sending that much charge down when they didn't know what the transport was, or how delicate. Blunt force seemed the appropriate approach.

Leaping, Megatron raised one massive fist and brought the blow and the solid weight of his frame down through one knee. The ground fractured into a shallow crater, dust and earth frothing up in a gritty cloud. He dragged his claws through the deepest fissure, feeling the cracks that ran down into the bunker. Shots that only bordered on painful began peppering his back as he raised his hand to punch down again.

[Deleted]

This is a direct attack and they want something.

Thana could see their intentions in the focused, malicious movements of the machines. They could have been targeting the upper buildings and destroying them with massive force. They had the fire power to do so. Instead, the scouts were directing their attention ahead to distract the manpower of MECH away from the two in-charge things while they dismantled and searched. She had no way of knowing what they could be looking for but it was a good bet their intentions were to cripple their tech and release them of weapons.

The woman had yet to step outside of the building into direct line of sight of the mechanical creatures. She felt the tremors of the approaching behemoth as she directed the collected group of MECH personal inside. Fortunately everyone was trained enough not to lose their heads during a crisis. But they were soldiers to the core and looked to their CO for direction.

Tone clipped and tight with building rage, Thana directed the man power of MECH to cede defeat this time around. Everyone inside the building would retreat to the lower floors and escape via the emergency exists after gathering and destroying valuable intel. Everyone above with a weapon was to attack and marshal their defenses until non-military personal escaped. The men outside were decoys, holding the attention of the enemy, while the think tanks escaped in the long tunnels leading out into the surrounding landscape. Multiple exists led into hills footing the compound and to rural highways. If they weren't blockaded or already detected by the hostiles. If they survived, they too were to flee and rally again. A dead soldier was no good to MECH.

A telltale crash and shuddering blow rocked the very floor they stood upon. Thana's eyes widened for a fraction of a second, distracted by the familiar sound. It brought to mind excavation machinations... She cursed then, as her brain made the leap into intuition.

"Its going to dig into the hub." She couldn't exactly say what infuriated her more. The invasive gall that these nasty wretches possessed or the fact that there was very little they could do about the pointed attack besides flee. Nauseating helplessness started to prickle her insides like a spiny burr which only added to the animosity growing inside like an ugly sprout. Thana's hands shook and she balled them into fists and glared at the collected faces around her, barely registering their features.

"Move!" She barked with enough force to send them skittering to their designated assignments. Eye twitching (possible lingering effects from the migraine), she grabbed a nearby mask most of the soldiers preferred to wear on the field and slammed it down over her head as she headed for the exit on the side of the building. Prudent advice would be for her to escape now as she was commanding officer of the base. But the irrational urge to strike out cleaved through any training she had. She was going to strike back and to hell with what followed. With a grunt she elbowed open the door and headed out into the active firefight.

"Aim for their faces," she directed into the radio as she stalked her way from the main headquarters to the nearby hanger, nearly within touching distance. She gave no heed to the nearby creatures or her men engaging in a rapidly over-powering fire fight. MECH was good but they were caught open handed and would not win this round.

She ducked into the hanger quickly, just as the ground just past her boots was peppered with enemy fire. Shrapnel from the shots peppered her calves with a stinging salvo that only hastened her steps to the cargo truck lying innocently behind the hangar doors. Unknown to Thana, she was climbing into the back of very vehicle the enemy was searching for. With a wordless noise of exertion she kicked open the back of the large truck and ripped the canvas from the prototype.

The weapon was built like a overtly complicated howitzer. Chance had the barrel pointing towards the exit and right toward the beast trying to dig up their very compound. She had no clue what the weapon would do other than that is was experimental and supposedly capable of penetrating the hardest of armor. At the moment, she didn't care what munitions it carried. All she cared about was finding a large enough weapon to put that over large brute down. It was already loaded, in preparation for a trial run it would never get.

Field testing starts now, she cynically thought as she pulled her pistol from a hip holster and aimed for the chains holding up the hanger doors. Two shots, barely heard over the firefight outside, took down the segmented doors with a tortured squeal of metal on metal. Without waiting for the element of surprise to wane, Thana covered her ears with her hands and kicked the trigger on the prototype as hard as she could. The resounding shot was forceful enough to rock the very truck back a scant inch and nearly toppled her from the back. Even with her hands covering her ears, they still rang from the blast of the weapon.

((OOC: Oh my gosh, I hope this works for everyone. ^^;; If anything needs to be changed, let me know. Also, feel free to have the prototype crap out. A billion things could go wrong with the shot up to including the shot itself being a dud.))

[Deleted]

Soundwave's mind was an overlapping maze of tactical feedback.

He had the steady stream coming from Laserbeak as his cassette fired at the tires of the two motorcycles, and he had no doubt that if necessary Laserbeak would do his level best to attempt containment on the truck coming towards them.

He had both visual and over-comm. data from the Vehicons as they swept aside the meager resistance the fleshling ants were trying to assemble. He was assured the truck and its contents would be within Decepticon control in no time at all.

He was still searching for the heavy signature of the outpost's power source, but even as he searched, he opened fire at full force against the seemingly-battered airfield tower: he did not wish anyone from MECH to have a vantage point from which to fire on them with height.

When Megatron suddenly broke into a loping stride, Soundwave turned to watch him. He was not entirely what was prompting his General - a sense of urgency on securing the transports seemed exceedingly unlikely, and closing in to a more... physical exchange of violence, while usually a favored tactic, lacked a visible motivator.

Nonetheless, he turned and picked up speed himself, following at a prudent distance. One just didn't close in when the Decepticon Warlord was putting on his runaway freight train act, particulary with guns hot. That was just asking for a whole new definition of 'friendly fire' to be written with one's shrapnel all over this sad little bit of MECH's domain. He was still not going to take any chances, though, and so he kept exactly that prudent distance and not a decimal more. When Megatron's slammed down like a depth charge onto the ground, the shockwave and the hollow it revealed brought his attention up sharply. Ah, so that was why. Leave it to Megatron...

Soundwave leapt lightly aside, and past him, targeting any source of MECH gunfire trying to bear down on them. One hapless fleshling went flying one way while his sad little vehicle kept careening towards him, losing momentum so that Soundwave merely used a pede to tip the ATV aside when it finally reached them. The spy's idea of cover fire was absurdly accurate; after all, no better cover than the smoke and wreckage of your opponent's equipment.

It was that rising cover, as much as anything else, that betrayed him.

The shot boomed over the impromptu battlefield as only heavy weaponry can when the fight has been limited to small arms: thunder over a desert.

Whatever it was that had fired cut a tunnel through the smoke, the dust and flattened several humans with the wind of its passing. It was stupidly easy to follow its path back to the source, but only after the fact: the hangar, doors flung aside by the force of the attack; the transport.

A gun. Something big, something heavy, something unknown and --

No.

The denial was moot, silent, and Soundwave knew it useless even before he could turn and give Megatron any kind of warning. A vast sense of disbelief sank sharp talons into him faster even that the shot was traveling, and still he tried to turn and do something...

[Deleted]

Megatron was aware of Soundwave passing him. He heard the thundering blast of a high-caliber weapon being fired. Then he saw static, and one side of his helm felt as though it had been spattered with Gideon's Glue.

The slug was a two-stage weapon; designed, developed and tested on parts taken from Breakdown's frame. Upon impact, just below the warlord's left optic spanning into the curving edge of his helmet, the incendiary layer immediately beneath the shell shattered and ignited. Hydrofluoric acid sank pits into the mech's faceplate and burned through the optic crystal and the first layer of relays underneath.

Then the electrical charge of stage two detonated, temporarily igniting the hydrogen fluoride fumes and sending an overloading surge straight down the channels that the acid had made. The whole, horrendous impact took 3 seconds to complete, and immediately micro-plateless released and swarmed on the area to contain contamination. Cybertonians were hardy, but the damage was already down and critically located.

Megatron's vision blanked to static reflected in every neural line in his face and neck, as if it was pain he could see. Hardline connections at the edges of his CPU were melted and fused, misdirecting the energy of his own neural pathways across his processor and causing further shorts. A flurry of warnings, damage reports, bypass notifications and scrolling system glitches filled his HUD, and he dropped to his hands and knees hard. Five seconds after the shell had struck him, his vision shivered to black and every external vent on his frame heaved a gasp, trying to dispel the escalating heat his glitching sensors thought was building in his core.

He was blind, unable to move or think. The instinct in his spark, however, urged a clear directive: get up. Megatron had been blinded, partially paralysed, almost bled out, had his primary fuel tank ignited and picked up his own arm as a club in the Arena. His processor may have gone into a fit, but his spark-born will to survive was undisturbed.

Megatron pushed himself to his knees, hunched and with no idea where he was or what had happened, energon welling behind his gritted dente. He tried to lift his hands to his helm but couldn't sense where they were, of if he was even moving them at all. The error messages were now streaked with static and full of odd glyphs, errors within errors. A cascade of failures was building momentum, travelling towards a complete shutdown if it was not stabilized soon.