Ep. 1.5 - Live Spitfire - (Closed)

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The tank actually laughed at that.

"You managed to get Red Alert angry?" it said. "That's pretty impressive. I didn't think he knew how to get anything other than mildly exasperated with his fellow Autobots. Good work. Keep it up. He needs to get angry more often. He's a little repressed."

Its hull creaked as it rolled to a gentle halt. Immediately its engine wound down to a purring idle. Coiled wires swayed from the overhead instrument panels.

"Anyway, I've got a known issue with the Decepticons, like most Autobots I can think of, so I'm not gonna waste time giving you a lecture on why you should hate the 'Cons," it said. "It sounds like you've already got a pretty good handle on that yourself, and have found your own reasons to pick the side you want to help. That said, Bulkhead is a good 'Bot to listen to. He's got a decent head on his shoulders. But in the end, go with your gut. I don't think it'll steer you wrong. Maybe into trouble, but at least it'll be trouble on the right path."

There was a moment of silence as the tank paused, calculating something.

"On an unrelated subject: interested in firing a machine gun?"

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"Only all of my life, Max," Miko said a little too solemnly to be kidding. Who didn't want to shoot a giant gun?! Ok, maybe Raf. He had mentioned they made him a little nervous. Which was funny as he rode around in Bee who was basically sporting large weapons on his arms. But Miko wasn't going to win a semantics argument with the younger dude. He was too smart.

She was only too glad to drop the serious talk for something lighter. Thinking about the heavy stuff made her feel ucky and she didn't, as a rule, dwell on things that made her feel bad. Life was too short to get stuck on the complicated what ifs. Jack could take a page or two from her but he was too busy mister adult. Maybe he needed to go for a ride with Max.

"You ever go to any drive ins? I peg you for a movie kind of dude." Though, oddly, she didn't see him as a war movie type of guy. Max seemed more like he'd love the movies about animals or something. "They're showing reruns of the Jurassic Park movies this weekend. You can just roll up and watch. You won't even be out of place. Once someone parked a hearse there."

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"First, grab a headset from the panel above you," said the tank. "Before we get too distracted. I've been told the guns are a bit loud. Ratchet will skin me if I come back with you leaking from the ears."

Sure enough, a padded headset hung from a switch above her seat. It looked worn, but snug and comfortable.

A little odd perhaps that his vehicle mode included it. Then again, he had likely scanned a fully operational tank from a human military base.

"Once you've got it on, climb back up through the hull and out the top hatch," said the tank. "I'll pop the hatch now. The gun you want is on the top of the gun turret, to your right. The bigger one. .50 calibre. Might as well go for the gusto."

Sure enough, a moment later sunlight poured down into the tank. Dust eddied inside. The sound of its idling engine grew abruptly louder.

"And wait, what?" As inexpressive as the tank was, it somehow managed to sound startled. "A drive-in? What is that? An outside theatre you pull up to with your vehicle? I don't believe I've seen one yet. The only movie I've caught was showing on the television in the base one night. Foreign spaceships blew up your White House. A tall man in glasses talked very fast, and an Air Force pilot punched out an alien. I don't think I got it."

Another pause. "What is Jurassic Park?"

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Oh, hot dang! Was this ever her jam. Miko was practically on cloud nine. If the rest of the Bots would just come around and let her handle heavy machinery or explosives once in awhile, they'd see she was totally made for this kinda stuff. She was a natural at it!

As soon as she was given permission, she snatched up the helmet and scurried out of the hatch with the agility of a squirrel hopped up on sugar cubes. Her little hair poofs were smushed in the helmet but she didn't mind mussing her hair if it meant she got to shoot something. Sacrifices had to be made, after all. But she did pause long enough to answer his question about the movie thing.

"Oh ahm, Jurassic Park is about a scientist cloning dinosaurs and making a theme park with them. It goes about as well as you'd think. Stupid movie but the dinosaurs and music were really cool. Also, there is this chick who is like a badas-erm, she's a paleosomething but ends up doing her own thing because she didn't need an old dude to do it for her. Yeah, girl power!" She gave the devil horns before scurrying the rest of her way out of the hatch and sitting before the biggest gun she had ever seen in her life. Holy hell.

"Whoa....betcha that has a kick to it..."

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The helmet and headset were a little big for Miko, but she would find that it fit snugly enough to keep it from falling over her eyes. Which was good, because ahead of her lay another target.

Perhaps two thousand feet away, on the other side of a shallow dirt valley, was another thick cement wall. It stood easily twenty feet high and was sprayed with pock-marks from bullets.

Possible from a gun like the one Miko stood behind now. And it was a big black gun, nearly as long as she was tall. It could be rotated up or down, and rotated a full three-hundred sixty degrees on its protected mounting. But it was also very heavy; she would need to use both hands just to budge and aim the weapon. There was a bar grip at the back of it for her to hold onto. The trigger fit neatly under her thumb.

"Cloning dinosaurs," said the tank. "No offence, but you humans have a weird imagination. And yeah, you're gonna want to watch out for recoil on that gun. Stand on the commander's seat inside the turret and hold the grip in both hands to stabilize it. It's recoil operated, so it won't kick back and break ribs at least. Aim over the weapon using the iron sights, and adjust your position by flexing your knees and leaning forward slightly. When you have a bead on the target, hit the trigger. Don't worry about loading. I'll handle that. Just pulverize that wall."

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"This thing weighs a ton!" Miko grabbed a hold of the grip of the gun and could barely move the darn thing. Wedging her feet in the chair, at his direction, she hefted her weight and scant muscle into nudging the gun toward the target. No wonder the military people always worked out! What normal person could heft this fricking thing about?

Eyeing the distant target, she narrowed her eyes and sighted down the barrel of the gun. That seemed sort of right. She'd seen it done in the movies before. But wasn't there something to worry about the kick of the weapon when aiming? And she knew she wasn't supposed to squeeze her eyes shut or something. She scrunched her face up and bit her lower lip as she concentrated on trying to line the gun up with the wall.

Welp! Nothing for it. She wasn't going to find out what happened unless she hit the trigger. Which she did with a firm downward squeeze of her thumb. As completely expected, the gun was loud and her aim was god-awful. She barely hit the wall at all and the entire gun made her small body shake. Narrowing her eyes, she backed off of firing for a second to adjust her grip and aim and started again. This time the aim was closer to a kill zone...just a sloppy, novice kill zone.

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The machinegun chattered at the press of a thumb.

The padded helmet and headset muffled the worst of the noise, but even the vibrations would ring noisily up her arms and ground themselves in her bones. Luckily the mounting absorbed most of the recoil and prevented the heavy weapon from kicking back into her face.

It was difficult to aim. But Miko's second attempt was much steadier than the first, and she would be rewarded with the sight of an explosion of dust from the wall as the big bullets hit their target and tore a cluster of holes into it. By the time the breeze had cleared away the worst of the dust the tight hive of impacts were revealed.

The tank rumbled.

"Not bad," it said. "The first set went wide, but you hammered down the second round. That's a pretty good cluster. Hard to aim that thing, isn't it? It's not the most precise weapon out there."

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"This thing is stupid heavy!" Miko shoved the helmet back from her forehead and leaned against the side of the hatch, sagging away from the hot gun. She wasn't panting, but thought if she were a cartoon character, she just might have been. Her arms actually ached a little from holding onto the gun. How did army people do it??

"Wouldn't it be better to have one big, accurate weapon than this thing? You can barely aim it. I wasted half of the shots." Unfortunately to Miko, everything could be solved with a bomb of some kind. Much to Bulkhead's chagrin. She hadn't quite wrapped her mind around the concept of using the right kind of tool for the right kind of job. Everything was always better with an explosion.

"...so yeah, you should go to a drive in. You'd probably like it. Don't know what kind of movie you'd like. Maybe a western. You seem the type to like John Wayne." She nodded to herself and made a mental note to check the local theatres for their viewings.

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In response, the turret shifted from side to side. The giant main gun waggled with it.

"This is a big and accurate as I need," said the tank. "The machine guns are just to kill anything that tries to get into close quarters."

He said it casually, as if speaking to another Autobot and not a fifteen year old girl.

On the other side of the valley the dust blew away from the wall and settled back to earth. In the distance Miko would be able to hear the rattling pop-pop of live fire elsewhere on the range. Every now and then a reverberating thud echoed down the valley - artillery fire, most likely. The air was hot and dry and carried a chemical smell, but the breeze would be cool against her sweaty forehead. The tank idled beneath her with a quiet rumbling sound, like a turbine engine.

"Maybe I could manage a drive in with my avatar," said the tank. It sounded dubious. "Who is John Wayne? Is that an actor or a character? Wait - are westerns the movies with horses and guns in them? My exposure to television has been limited so far."

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For a young teen, Miko seemed far too comfortable near a live weapon range. She lounged back against the open hatch in that languid way that was part feline, part teenage girl. Her elbows were propped up on the edge and somehow kept her in place. Every so often she'd tilt her head or turn to listen to the nearby sounds.

"Eh, tv is kinda lame anyway. John Wayne is a actor though I think that's a stage name." She narrowed her eyes in thought. She was definitely sure that John Wayne was a stage name since most actors during that time period refused to go by their regular names. Which was weird but then again, so was the time. "Anyway, yeah, that's kinda what a western is. They're horrible but they're also kind of appealing at the same time. Like this awful machismo but there is like this kind of honor stuff in it. There is always a leading hero who is this pillar of humanity."

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The tank seemed oddly comfortably on the range as well. One rear FM whip antenna twitched back and forth with each distant blast, but that was the only indication the big machine gave that it acknowledged the gunfire.

"Honour is good," it said. "Machismo I can live with, if it's directed towards productive ends."

It sounded approving.

"I suppose it's good that humans construct those kinds of heroes to look up to," it said. "Maybe that kind of character is a little unrealistic in the real world, or idealistic, but it's still good to keep that image of an admirable warrior alive. I couldn't tell you if we had those kind of figures in our entertainment back home. That was before my time. I only saw the war propaganda. It wasn't very riveting."

There was another contemplative pause. "I suppose Optimus Prime is that ideal personified now, for us anyway."

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"You guys had propaganda? Huh..." She supposed it made sense that in a war, larger than life truths were used to inspire fear in the enemy. At least, that's what she'd learned in her history classes. Everyone seemed to use it, and it was still used in social media during politics. Miko had just thought they were...sort of above that kinda stuff.

"Optimus is like the stern dad figure everyone wishes they had." Miko grinned despite herself. Sometimes the Prime could be pretty harsh on her. Though, if she was honest, sometimes she did get into trouble. Just sometimes though. It wasn't always her fault. But he was still rad. She just wasn't going to tell him that anytime soon.

"Like, right now if he knew I was out here practicing to shoot a tank gun he'd make that face he makes. Like the whole world just disappointed him but he can't say it out loud." She had a feeling June would be less quiet about her feelings on Miko firing a live weapon. But, seriously, she hadn't killed anyone! She hadn't even injured herself!