[ti]Ep 3[/ti]Gilding the Thunder [Sparkplug/Thundercracker]

[Thundercracker]

Long and messy story...pretty much how Thundercracker figured it would be based on his conversation with Starscream.

As he listened, he began to wonder. Starscream had blamed Flatline when Thundercracker had asked him for an explanation about why Scream had removed the older medic’s arms, something that Thundercracker had taken for Starscream trying to justify his actions knowing he was in the wrong. But now that he heard it from what he hoped was a neutral observer, Thundercracker wasn’t entirely so sure anymore.

It made sense that Flatline would be overseeing something similar to this...he was a medical and science officer. But unless he created the damned things why was he being blamed so much for the issue?

Something was definitely being covered up here. But Thundercracker didn’t say anything, merely watching Sparkplug as she worked on him and nodding.

“Sounds like whoever it was made the best call at the time. It’s just how it is sometimes, there is no right or wrong choice. It’s only a choice between bad option one and bad option two.”

He knew something about that, because he had to make those choices a lot. But the big one that always stuck in his mind was the big one. It hadn’t been easy leaving, but Thundercracker had felt that it was the best of a series of worse options. Now...he wasn’t so sure anymore.

[Sparkplug]

Sprays of sparks flew as Sparkplug worked, shaping and cutting, her toolbox arm flickering rapidly between forms. “Sometimes, all you can do is pick which slag pit to jump into,” she agreed. “Now, I started hearing about this after I escaped the Nemesis wreck and got picked up. All sorts of mad stories about how looking into an infected mecha’s optics would send you insane. But I only really got involved when Commander Soundwave signalled me that he wanted me, and I’d be collected in ten minutes. Just over a breem,” she added, converting to Cybertronian time units.

“So the bridge opens, I go through, and... scrap my aft, what a mess. There’s Commander Soundwave, fully infected, and holding onto his sanity by a thread. There’s Knock Out, who is also infected, but in the early stages and hasn’t gone crazy yet. One vehicon, cowering in the corner. And Flatline, messed up and gnarly, white optics, half dead and totally mad, strapped to a table. So now I’m in a small room with two superior officers, one of which is stewing in potent psychotics being manufactured wholesale inside his own frame, and the other who’s on a countdown to losing it and we don’t know when. Honestly, I’d have preferred a scraplet swarm.”

Sparkplug shook her head dolefully, her left hand collapsing back into its root mode. Crossing the workshop, she began plucking components off shelves, carrying them over to line up neatly in front of the half-assembled unit.

[Thundercracker]

As Thundercracker listened, it seemed that his worst fears were confirmed.

Starscream was telling the truth after all...

Scrap.

“Do you think Flatline was working on something and it just...got out of control?”

Despite Starscream blaming the older medical officer for the mishap, Thundercracker still refused to believe that it was nothing more than an accident, an act of Primus as they might say. That thought got his attention somewhat, wondering if this was Primus’ judgment on them for starting this war. Not that Thundercracker was especially pious in any way, but seeing as much death and destruction had made him somewhat of a cautious believer as time had worn on.

But he kept such opinions to himself. No doubt Megatron and Soundwave wouldn’t appreciate such a denouncement.

Still didn’t justify what had happened to Flatline though...

[Sparkplug]

“No. Knock Out was furious with him because he’d been having weird symptoms, but hiding them. You know, because he really didn’t like Knock Out very much. Don’t know why, that mech has a voice that could purr me right into my recharge rack, but that’s not the point. Point is, if Flatline had been messing with experimental nano programming, then started getting strange physical symptoms, he’d have known to properly panic. He didn’t.”

Bolting, welding... she picked up a tool from the bench, her hand transforming into a clamp that accepted it, and began boring threaded screw holes into the thick alloy.

“Knock Out was edgy, though. For one, he blamed Flatline for starting all this. Patient zero, and he’d been hiding symptoms. For two, he was stuck with Soundwave who was absolutely swimming in energon-flow psychotics and about to snap. For three, his system was getting on with manufacturing the same stuff inside him. Not really surprising he got violent. But he managed to put the brakes on before it got fatal.

“Really interesting disease,” she went on thoughtfully. “The way it worked, every plague nanite was signalling the nanites around them, asking for a bit-summary of their onboard code. If they didn’t have the plague code, the plague nanites updated the other nanite’s code. So – one plague nanite becomes two, four, eight, sixteen- you know, standard exponential growth. The smallest contaminant took over whatever it was on.

“Now, what I came up with,” she went on, evident satisfaction in her voice, “were nanites that lied. When pinged for their code summary, they’d say ‘oh yes, I’m a plague nanite’, so the plague nanites left them alone. But they also used a side channel to authenticate between themselves, so they could recognise each other. If the other nanite didn’t reply to the side channel, they’d convert it. Exactly the same mechanism as the plague, same exponential growth. A contagious cure. Everyone’s nanites are resistant to that plague by now, even yours.”

[Thundercracker]

“I see.”

For Primus sake, Flatline.

Thundercracker let out a soft sigh of disappointment. He could understand hating Knock Out, or rather hating one’s superiors. It was something the mechs and femmes in his last unit had done on a pretty regular basis. But there was a limit. And you never put your brothers and sisters in harm's way because you were too stubborn to get checked out...

Unless it was as Sparkplug said, and Flatline had no idea what was going on...

Still though. Thundercracker was going to have to ask some hard questions.

But for now he said nothing. Sparkplug seemed to be on somewhat of a roll, and so the teal seeker merely leaned back and listened as she rambled on, only offering the occasional word of acknowledgement to show that he was indeed listening, just choosing not to speak.

“That’s good to know.”

Time to change the topic to something more cheerful.

“So how’d you wind up all the way out here? Seems...a bit remote.” Thundercracker noted. Remote was putting it lightly. This place was isolated, almost on the other side of the planet from Blackridge. Granted, not so much of an issue when you could break the speed of sound or teleport...but Sparkplug couldn’t fly so she had to rely on the groundbridge.

[Sparkplug]

One of the stranger aspects of the plague had been different mecha’s reactions to the energon-flow psychotics. Most mecha, when exposed to it, turned into snarling, deranged maniacs. Soundwave’s reaction had been... violent and self-destructive to their cause, but also weirdly coherent, planned. And her own reaction... she remembered well analysing a sample of her own fuel lines and coming up with a stew of chemicals that should have had her an incoherent berserker. And yet, she’d been... fine. Her behaviour was exactly the same as it always was. Now that, she considered, was pretty odd.

Sparkplug opened her mouth to remark on it, but Thundercracker switched the subject. She nodded along, the whine of tools stilling for a moment as she picked up the mostly-assembled ammunition assembly and moved over to a hand crafted laser jig, using ruler-straight beams of red light to check alignments.

“Oh, that? A few reasons. This place was one of the more extensive energon mines, before it was played out, and the rock is nice and stable. Even if it had been abandoned for a while, it wasn’t going to fall down around our audials. For another, I needed workshop space that just wasn’t available at Blackridge, and it’s a bad, bad idea to take a place that crowded and do experimental weapons research in it. Then there’s – well, it’s a bad idea to place all you’ve got in one cargo pod. Though it’d be a sorry sight if many mecha ended up seeking refuge here. And...”

She paused, thoughtful, then muttered to herself and transformed her left hand into a clamp, carefully bending a strut that wasn’t quite straight. “Before I was here, I was in a mostly-abandoned research base in an asteroid. Going from that to Blackridge, that was... a lot. I was pretty grateful for the escape from the crowd.” Sparkplug grinned, glancing at the custom chair built for a flyer’s large frame. “So it’s just me and Vee here, and – that’s pretty wonderful. Shame there aren’t any roads nearby I can stretch my axles on, but you can’t have everything.”

[Thundercracker]

Hearing that they were in a tapped out energon mine suddenly brought back some of Thundercracker’s anxiety of being underground. Decepticons weren’t exactly known for their adherence to safety standards when it came to mining, at least in his experience. The focus was on extracting as much energon as possible...and if the roof caved in it was just bad luck and you moved on.

But he kept silent for now. If Sparkplug had been here a while, then it must be safe for the most part. The bit about workshop space made sense as well. Blackridge was quite small...

“How many do you think you could fit in here, reasonably?” He asked.

He hadn’t gotten the full tour of the facility, but if it was a former mine that had been tapped out it was possible that a lot of individuals could fit into this place. Granted...that very much depended on the size of the deposit. And if he was a betting mech...the deposit hadn’t been that big, otherwise it was highly unlikely that Sparkplug would have been granted the site.

“Probably for the best though. Roads could give away your location.”

It was an old trick that they’d use during the war. If you wanted to find an underground bunker complex, look for the roads that they were resupplied from. Once you found those, stake them out until someone foolishly pops their head out. An easy trick for fliers who could loiter for a couple of dozen megacycles waiting for the right moment...

Plus what was the point of building a road when you could just teleport there?

[Sparkplug]

Sparkplug stepped away, moving down to a thick, bulky workbench clearly made out of scrap metal trimmed and welded together. Opening drawers in a honeycomb of small sliding boxes, she digs out a couple of motors and a microcontroller. Trotting back over to the framework assembly of the ammunition loader, she began bolting the motors in firmly, binding cables along a strut to protect them.

“Depends what kind of facilities you need for a mecha to ‘fit’ in here,” she replied with a shrug of her shoulderguards, without looking up from her work. “Everything got stripped out of this place that wasn’t too much work to shift through a bridge. There’s a former dormroom a little down the main shaft, on the right, but it’s just an empty room with a lot of bolt holes in the floor. Probably held, oh, twelve, fifteen miners when this place was in use? But – no racks now, nowhere to refuel. Past that, the mining tunnels branch out, but they’re bare. So you could cram a good number of mecha in here, but they’d be lying on the rock and getting low on fuel pretty quick. If you mean how many could stay here sustainably, that’s probably just me and Vee.”

By the time they’d had to fit racks, they’d been close enough that the idea of separate racks didn’t really seem necessary. One big rack, in what had been the supervisor’s room, and a decent little supply of energon to tide the pair over between resupplies; that was as fancy as it got.

Sparkplug pulled a circuit tester from under the bench she stood at, clipping it to the wires of the new motors. One optic on the design still displayed on her tangle of salvaged screens, she watched the mechanism rotate smoothly through its loading and racking sequences. “Hm,” she murmured to herself. “That’s looking good. Mount the controller, and then it’ll be over to Blackridge to beg the use of Knock Out’s operating room.”

[Thundercracker]

Thundercracker couldn’t tell if Sparkplug was being completely honest in her assessment or if she was just trying to maintain her own little kingdom for her and Vega. And...if he was being honest about it, he didn’t care enough to press any further on the issue. What she and Vega had was something special...something that many Cybertronians wanted but never got...

So he wasn’t going to begrudge Sparkplug’s wanting to preserve her own slice of paradise. Hell, he’d help her keep it. They’d already lost one home to the war, he wasn’t going to help take someone else’s home again.

Not if he had anything to say about it.

Hearing her say they were almost done caused Thundercracker to blink in surprise. She certainly moved much quicker than he thought she would have. Either that or he had greatly overestimated the complexity of such a procedure.

“Already?”

Knock Out...well...maybe that wouldn’t be an issue. Granted it was highly unlikely the Chief Medical Officer would halt such a procedure when it already had mostly happened, unless there was some sort of climactic emergency like Megatron offlining. Though Thundercracker would gladly wait if it meant that that would happen, because that would mean the war might be over sooner. Unless Starscream had his way...

“If Flatline is on duty I might be able to pull some strings with him, get you the time and equipment you need.”