Flashback - The Lower Pool - Closed

[Deleted]

[[Cybertron orbit and Polyhex - pre-war - before the Megatron/Orion split]]

Flareup remembered numerous meetings over the vorns with Elita-One, the head of the Order of Solus Prime. Yet memory was no substitute for experience, and this was the first time their leader would be actually coming aboard Bladeship Contour since she and Reburn had been replaced. Despite the horrible circumstances, Flareup was excited - it was a chance for the hive to show their worth again, a chance for the Rescue division to once again uphold the reputation of the Order and save some lives in the process.

Her excitement rebounded and reflected off Reburn, before being quelled a little by the others, who were amused at the thought they had something to prove. Contour's cool professionalism rose above all of them as she directed their movements. Flamewing sorted through the few feeds from the accident and plotted a response strategy to the disaster situation. Firebreak was watching the ship's condition, and Flashover preparing the medbay. Reburn held them together, as always. That left her to greet their guests.

All outside communication fell into her sphere, no matter who in the hive was speaking. She could take on another role if necessary, but this was what she was made to do. As she waited for the groundbridge, she scanned the newsfeeds in parallel, picking up information relevant to the hive and sliding it into their understanding.

All they knew now was that part of the cliff overlooking the Lower Pool in Polyhex had collapsed, dropping numerous high-caste estates into the molten metal and triggering a wave that had swept over lower class housing near the base of the pool before retreating. Casualties were numerous and climbing.

It was an extraordinary and unprecedented event. Polyhex was old and solidly built. The two pools, products of a deep heat source, were not known for instability in historic times. The city half-surrounded the old fortress of Darkmount, which contained the purer Upper Pool within its walls. The Lower Pool was set in a canyon around the fortress, a deep crescent moat arcing around a third of its periphery. Intended for defense, once. The city proper was at the elevation of the lip of the canyon but sprawled in all other directions from the fortress.

The awaited groundbridge finally opened in Contour's largest bay. Not before time, either. They would be dropping as soon as the groundbridge closed, using Contour as a temporary base for rescue and aid efforts.

Firestar and Elita-One stepped through, trailed by a handful of others. She felt the tension in the visitors' fields before she fully understood what was wrong. Headquarters must have gotten the news in advance, but the newsfeeds were updating as Firestar spoke. "They won't get away with this, Elita."

Someone had sent a message claiming responsibility.

This was no accident. This had been done on purpose.

"In the name of Solus, I welcome you to Bladeship Contour" Flareup said quietly, suddenly feeling very out of her depth.

They were already moving. Speed was of the essence.

[Deleted]

Elita-One was not often angry. Anger could motivate, but it also clouded the mind, and in these darkening days, the leader of the Order of Solus desperately needed her mind clear. She dared not let anything get in the way of her duty; lives depended on it.

She was angry now.

Supports bombed. Betrayed by guards, possibly by the construction mechs as well. Deliberate sabotage. Hundreds dead, perhaps thousands, homes destroyed, trust shattered.

Terrorism.

Her face revealed nothing; her body language and EMF, if anything, were overly controlled and precise as she paused to greet the hive's speaker. "Thank you, Flareup - all of you. Do we have the latest reports from the area?" The Contour hive were first responders - few if any rescuers would beat them to the site - but there were drone data-gatherers, Skyspy units, and various passive scanners that would note and record conditions in the area and show them any weak points in the superstructure. It was not unheard of for Order members to give their lives in the line of duty - especially recently - but Elita would not spend the lives of her people carelessly.

Too many had already been lost today.

[Deleted]

She knows my name! Flareup basked in that a moment as she gathered information and handled airspace clearance for Contour. Of course, this wasn't the first time Elita had met Flareup, but it was the first time she'd met this Flareup, and many didn't recognize her under the armor.

The deck plate magnetization warning blazed, and then everyone's pedes locked to the deck for the drop. They were going down fast, but it would still take kliks to reach the city. When they got there, though, they'd have a fully stocked, mobile base for operations.

"Oh! Um. We have some. I've put in data requests for everything I can find, but I can't pull information in the middle of re-entry and we're about to lose comms." Flareup's focus had been more on the air clearance, but she was fully capable of handling this conversation at the same time, or she ought to be. She needed to be every bit as competent as she remembered being before. Elita-One was counting on her, and she could not disappoint. "We'll have to wait until we get down and our comms are working again for a full update, but I can give you a rundown of what we have."

Drawing information from Flamewing on the mission planning, Flareup continued at Elita's nod. "The media's there, so we have live footage,. Polyhex's civil response forces are responding to the landslide area. A few residences on the margins of the landslide are in danger of falling into the pool with Cybertronians inside, and that's what they're focusing on right now. Four estates and several smaller houses are already in the metal. They're not quite swamped yet, since a lot of structural elements from the cliff went in with them. Some are partially afloat, others are sinking." The fall wouldn't necessarily kill a Cybertronian, but the pools were hot enough to melt them through if they weren't crushed by the landslide or destroyed in the explosion.

"The damage around the base of the pool is less serious but more widespread. A surge went through at this height." Flareup sent a cue to Contour, who obligingly moved her hand to between her waist and knee. "More injuries than deaths, massive property damage. We expect melted lower limbs, burns, and overheating damage will be typical, and possibly some individuals will have gotten partially encased in the cooling metal. Hazards include a fairly hot coat over everything and possible residual pooling of molten metal, including in sublevels under the settlement. Structures may be weakened and collapse.

"It's possible another surge may go through if more of the cliff goes down. Given the number of trapped individuals, there would likely be more fatalities in that case. I don't think we have enough information right now to know how likely that possibility is. We'll have to evaluate it when we get there."

"The other hazard is a secondary strike," Firestar said quietly. "There's no guarantee this was a one-off explosion."

[Deleted]

Elita rocked a little as the magnetization took and Contour began her descent. Her optics remained on the viewport display, but she was listening to Flareup's report. The picture she painted was grim, but not unexpected. A disaster calculated not only to maximize the pain and terror of its victims, but place any rescuers in danger as well... someone, somewhere, had a talent for terrorism.

If ou thinks even this will stop the Order of Solus, ou has another think coming.

"Thirty percent of the fliers will be sent into the pool, equipped with thermal regulator armor." 'Armor' being a loose term, the loose, flexible material not so good against blows but it wouldn't combust or leak heat into its wearer. "The rest will be sent into the surrounding area and onto the cliff with ground rescue, in case more of the cliff falls. Based on the population division between above and below, the ratio will be 75 below to 25 percent above. Everyone will be equipped with thermal regulator drapes as well as the standard emergency medkit."

"As for the danger of a secondary attack..." Elita favored Flareup with a smile. "How are you at bomb disposal?"

[Deleted]

I/we? Flareup wasn't sure whether that was aimed at her or the hive. "I've worked controlled demolitions," she offered hopefully. It was a job she liked - blowing things up gave her a tingly feeling all over. "We likely have the expertise, though it's not our usual duty. We could send Flamewing to go look for more bombs. Or a deployer."

"Like looking for a bolt in a screw pile," Firestar muttered. She glanced at Elita. "I have a team of fliers staging out of headquarters, but they have to get to the groundbridge and into their gear. The drapes will protect against radiative heat from the pool, but anyone who gets dunked in the main pool is still going to be in trouble." She frowned. "I want a look at the situation before sending anyone into buildings that are on or in the pool. Flareup, the pool's too hot for Flashover, right?"

Flareup sent an affirmative glyph. All of them were heat-hardened to a certain extent, but only she and Reburn had been refit with the new composite armor and shielding system. "We think she will be needed more as a medic. If you need a look at what's going on beneath the surface, my deployer should be able to survive ten kliks under there."

"Do you want us and Contour over the pool or over the shore areas?" Firestar asked Elita. "She has heavy-duty hoist capabilities that could be quite useful either way."

[Deleted]

"The pool. The need is greater there, and time more limited." Elita wished she could pace. No matter what the Order did, they wouldn't be able to save everyone. It was something Elita had always had a hard time accepting. "We'll be able to make firmer plans for deployment once those reports come in, but I need a team searching for and disposing of any additional bombs. And if the ones who set those bombs attempt resistance..." She smiled thinly, hefting her war hammer. "I will be there."

[Deleted]

Flareup could distantly feel the heat of reentry on Contour's skin, but it diminished as they finished their dive into Cybertron's atmosphere. Their speed was still very fast as they arced over the metalscape, soaring across the Polyhex highlands and then over the city itself. It was there Contour came to a halt, hovering over the canyon walls, her Solus sigil gleaming white on her red and orange armor.

The ship began to unfold, and the roof of the bay parted over them and dropped beneath the floor level to transform into arms, claws, and tendrils on the underside. They were left on a wide balcony on Contour's dorsal side, illuminated by both dim ambient light and the ominous red glow of the pool below. It was hot - Contour's skin was still radiating from the re-entry in a visible shimmer.

Flareup's visor clicked over her face, reducing the glare from the pool to a level her optics could cope with better. There were still buildings out there, but eventually they would sink. They were denser than the pool, and the debris they were lodged on was already melting.

More of her hive was here now, emerging from their work cells in the ship. Reburn clicked over on his several legs to the edge, while Flamewing transformed and took to the skies. A pulse from Contour commanded her to deploy, and she focused inwardly, dividing her spark in three different directions at once. Her armor transformed away over three of her deployer slots, as she felt the deployers' primitive drone awareness join the hive. The spider-drone crawled to her shoulder, while the flight quadrotor grasped the submersible and dove off the edge towards the pool, dropping it in with barely a ripple.

Both deployers began a mapping pattern as Contour slowly reduced her altitude, her own scanners flickering over everything. Seek. Find. Report.

[Deleted]

Reports were one thing. Seeing it was quite another. Feeling it, that hellish heat on her face even from this distance, was enough to make even the indomitable Elita-One experience a momentary contraction of her spark. Not for herself, but for the people below - if it was this intense from this distance, it must be a horror for those below.

There wasn't a second to waste; yet leaping right in would only mean more death. The Order's smaller fliers were already descending, thermal armor fluttering in the rising warm air; more detailed reports were coming in. Elita dimmed her optics, sorting data as efficiently as she could. By the time she was finished, she felt much steadier.

She cast her gaze out over the scene again: the shattered cliff, the optic-searing lake with a few (slowly shrinking) dark splotches near the shore, the red glow tracing the streets of the shore dwellings as metal warped in the heat. She couldn't hear voices beyond the ones on her comm line, but her processor was more than willing to supply the screams and cries of those awaiting rescue below.

"Suit up," she ordered, fitting actions to words by pulling out her own thermal suit. "How's the cliff integrity?" If that blast had caused enough damage, the culprits might not have to set off another bomb to cause another collapse.

[Deleted]

A thermal suit wasn't necessary for Flareup. After the accident that had killed her and Reburn last time, the hive had rebuilt both of them to an extraordinary level of heat tolerance. Not to say that that she had nothing to worry about... she was not buoyant, and the metal conduits driving the pool were rooted very deep.

Flashover and Firebreak were suiting up in the medbay, waiting for the inevitable casualties. Flamewing, up on the cliff, was in bare armor, but you couldn't properly put a thermal suit on someone with rotors in any case. There were always tradeoffs with this kind of work, and she necessarily would stay high.

As for Contour... "Don't worry about tracking metal onto the deck. There's no way around it if we're bringing casualties aboard." The metal would cool fast once it was out of the pool, but Contour would probably pick up a few more scars.

She was still gathering information on the other question when her submersible deployer breached to shed heat and give a more detailed report than could be transmitted through the metal.

"Cliff looks stable on a macro level for now. There might be some splashes, but not enough to swamp anything." She relayed the rest in a tactical burst as the hive started moving. Reburn went over the side, hanging onto one of the dangling claw-arms. Contour dropped further, hovering over an obviously sinking segment that was being pulled off one of the larger islands of black by the currents in the pool. A silver-dark skim of solid metal could be seen in places around where the landslide was blocking flow. That much cold material introduced suddenly had cooled the pool... to an extent. But the pool was winning.

"Movement detected. Hold on!" Contour was trying for a hoist of the entire melting structure, but wasn't quite managing. She did manage an inelegant drag, though, pulling the building up and over the body of the main landslide and leaving a trail of half-molten slag. "Sonar indicates there's structural material still holding this section up. Based on current pool conditions we should have eighteen kliks. Nobody but fliers should approach anything else on the pool."

After the hive sensed the guests were all suited, Contour raised her dangling confusion of appendages up and dropped lower still, down to an altitude a mech could jump from. Reburn leaped off the arm he was attached to, testing the surface, which Contour then blasted with high-pressure liquid to cool further.

"Clear to disembark," Flareup said. "We have confirmation from Polyhex that the target seems to have been High Councilor Ratbat's estate."

[Deleted]

Elita sighed reluctantly. "The Order will be certain to send him a letter of condolence."

She launched herself out over the sinking island. There was a moment of (very hot) weightlessness, then she landed hard, hydraulics hissing as her lower body felt the impact. Hammer slung over her back, she climbed up the listing walkway, clearing the landing zone for the next femme; it may have been only imagination that told her that the walkway gave slightly under her pedes, but she didn't want to linger.

"Scan for life signs," she ordered. "Don't go too far inside any of the buildings unless you have a confirmed - oops." She braced herself on her hammer as the ground shifted underneath her, the horizon spinning sickly. "Confirmed life sign," she finished determinedly. "The thermal suits won't help you if you're trapped inside when this island goes under."

When, not if. It was only a matter of time.

Hyper-aware of their limited window, Elita got started right away, throwing her scans as deep into the buildings as she could. For good measure, she shouldered open the nearest door and called, "Hailing any survivors, this is Elita-One of the Order of Solus! We're here to help, please call out if you can hear me!"

[Deleted]

"We detected movement on the section we pulled over here," Flareup said after she rejoined Elita. Contour was dousing that section in bursts, not that it'd do much good. Her climbing deployer jumped off her shoulder to head around the side of the landslide, and Reburn went bounding off in another direction. A pair of Order fliers carrying someone between them flew past, aiming for Contour's deck.

Contour began to move her towards the warped building, navigating her over the rubble and twisted support girders while she integrated a pulse of information from her flying deployer."We think we have multiple life signs in a collapsed structure near here, as well." Flareup didn't mention the dead her flyer had found. No time to retrieve them. Only the flyer's scan would survive to identify them after they slipped below.

[Deleted]

Elita nodded sharply to Flareup as she cast another scan into the building she'd entered. No life signs - just heat. "Show me."

The building Flareup led her to was a half-collapsed ruin, and even as she approached she could hear a voice. "We hear you!" she called, in the loud, resonating register she'd first learned on the parade ground. "Where are you?"

"We're here!" came the reply, high with panic. "Please hurry, he's hurt!"

"Call evac," Elita told Flareup, and scrambled over the rubble toward the voices.

'He' turned out to be the groundskeeper of the collapsed manor, nearly incoherent with pain from his melted legs; the speaker was his employer, an older femme who, despite her own injuries, had tried to wrap them both in thermal blankets to prevent further damage.

"Is anyone else in the house?" Elita asked as she prepped the groundskeeper for liftoff.

The femme shook her head. "My partner ran to the back of the house when the floor started tilting, trying to save his own shell, and the wall collapsed right on his rusted old head," she said, her voice bitter with pain that had nothing to do with her burns. "The useless fool." Elita made a gesture of respect for the dead and lifted the groundskeeper into her arms.

Selflessness and cowardice, in the same household, she thought, watching the rotor-femme descend. We'll be hearing plenty of stories of both today.

"Primus bless you," the older femme told her, squeezing her gauntlet, as they helped load the injured mech in the cargo hold. "The Order can count on my financial support."

"Take care of yourself first," Elita told her, returning the gesture. "You and your employee. Go on now."

The femme gave her a brittle smile, and entered the cargo bay; Elita moved aside to make room for more rescuees, and to continue the search for survivors.

[Deleted]

A groundbridge opened up with impeccable precision above the Order of Solus ship, and Ratbat sailed through, accompanied by two flying minicon bodyguards and a camera drone. The heat was uncomfortable. Not as uncomfortable as it had been when the cliff went down, but fortunately his groundbridge remote had been functional. His first priority had been his own survival, of course. He hadn't lingered.

He'd spent the time since trying to figure out what had happened. It could hardly be Megatron, despite speculation. The upstart demagogue had no love for him, but knew how well Ratbat was... controlled... by his closest adviser. It was likely some vaguely affiliated group of disgruntled peasants too low in the revolutionary hierarchy to be aware of Ratbat's secret affiliation with the cause. A category that encompassed most of Megatron's followers, really.

He found a perch on the ship and surveyed the destruction wreaked on his estate. This was... inconvenient. Not crippling, as he'd already begun the process of moving assets to the moons in preparation for the inevitable civil chaos. His longtime household manager would be a significant loss, and hard to replace on short notice.

Ratbat narrated a short statement for release to the media as the camera drone recorded him and the Solus rescuers in the background. The High Council honors the victims of this terrible tragedy. Our sympathies are with the mecha of Polyhex in the face of this senseless act of violence... and so on. He sent the clip to his communications director to clear with the Council's press office, then went back to surveying the wreckage.

Drop-caste savages.

[Deleted]

Elita had never been inside Councilor Ratbat's estate. Outside it, once, during a meeting with the honored Councilor that had amounted to a little more than a publicity stunt; she hadn't been One then, which was all for the better for she doubted she would have had the ability to hold her glossa without her superior there.

No publicity opportunities to be found here, just strut-breaking, spark-rending, hot, dangerous work. Ratbat's estate was on the edge of the sinking island, molten metal lapping ominously at his front step, and the front of the building was starting to sag like an undercooked oilcake. Elita had to climb up to the roof and slip in through a skylight to enter the intact portion of the building. There, the single life-sign she detected was strong, and fluttering with pain-signals.

It was not Ratbat she found - somehow she hadn't expected to - but one of his house staff, who had suffered severe burns to her face and neck, damaging her vocalizer so she couldn't call out. She'd summoned Elita's notice by banging a steel pipe on the wall. "Well done," Elita told her, and set her hammer aside to lift the fallen girder that had blocked her in the dispensory room.

They exited the way Elita had entered, the femme reasonably mobile despite her injuries. "Your employer will be contacted," Elita promised her, "in due time, but our first priority is the rescue effort." She had to get the femme into the care of the evac team quickly. The doomed island had very little time left.

[Deleted]

Flareup continued coordinating hive communications as everyone went in six directions at once. She spoke through Firebreak and Flashover to the injured in medbay, answered some comm chatter with Flamewing, listened to sixteen different channels through Contour's comm gear, and kept up with necessary emergency communications for Reburn's team, all while knee-deep in molten metal.

Contour finally directed her out of the less intact portion of the estate. Nothing was left alive in there. Unfortunately.

She listened as her deployer breached again. The heat was getting to it, and the tiny portion of her spark within it would gutter out soon. The hive stilled for the a fraction of a nanoklik... then Flareup had Contour sound the evacuation siren.

The twisted supports were melting. They were going to be flooded out faster than predicted. The Order needed to get out of here now.

Flareup contacted all the teams on the island at once, getting their situations and passing it to the part of the hive that was planning how best to extract everyone. She also contacted the groundbridge at Order headquarters and the other Rescue command of flyers, in case they were needed.

The hive had noticed Ratbat, of course. They had no interest in a confrontation and there were more important things that needed doing, so they ignored him. They would inform the Order's leader once she was out of immediate danger.