Ep1 - 'The Great Escape' - Closed

[reflector]

Reflector was constantly at work, from a purely data standpoint, Barricade's systems were far beyond those of your average bot, built to store as many secrets as possible and hoard them like a dragon might gold. In a way Reflector could respect that, however they were ancient garbage as far as the minicon cared, compared to his own systems they were laughable, at least that was his opinion. However he did his best to enhance every bit of the larger mech he could, to the point that he had a feeling Barricade could now process about a hundred insults per second or ips for short. No doubt if they weren't about to die horribly the scout would use him for just such a degrading task, but at the moment there were bigger things to worry about.

<I'll hold back, but if this goes too far I'm going to come in and come in hard. I'm not going to let some sub-par hacker get very far...> Even on the mental planes his voice sounded timid and unsure. He recognized the other bot, Reflector had a bail out strategy which would be about the same as turning Barricade into a digital bomb to cripple Soundwave's sensors long enough to find the nearest vent. The downside of this plan was that the now linked Receptor would most likely feel everything Barricade went through.

Settling back to manage everything behind the ones and zeroes while ramping up Barricade's systems as far as Reflector could manage, he then did something he thought he would never do. He began to pray, he knew Primus owed him what amounted to slag and his life had been insanely rough until this point...but he wished for a break, just a single break...if the frightening Soundwave could be turned into a coconut, everything might turn out alright. Of course the minicon was at the end of his wits to resort to this and it took all his restraint to try and resist in some fashion, feeling Soundwave's invasion almost as personally as his host did.

[Deleted]

It was frightening to be within the crosshairs of the Decepticon Third's attention. Soundwave was unobtrusive to a masterful degree - so much so that he was overlooked as a physical threat. A former gladiator in his own right. It was as a hacker and a spy that Soundwave was most readily perceived as dangerous. When he lifted Barricade and held him pinned, crowding in close with those cables, massive and powerful, Fairwinds flinched down into the infiltrator's plates.

Then the avian cassette detected the tell-tale signs of a massive data transfer. Plates still flat, beak wedged into a gap in Barricade's armour, she chirred a quiet, warbled note.

::He's helping he's helping he's helping he's helping...::

[Deleted]

Soundwave was not ignorant of the stress inflicted by the data dump. The thread of him that bore inside the infiltrator digging out and building up the mental walls enclosing the back up also monitored feedback from Barricade's straining systems. Only vaguely though. The specialist knew exactly how much the mech's mind and body could take before splintering, and he had no intention of crossing that threshold....though he skimmed it mightily. As far as Soundwave was concerned, there was no reason not to, especially with the current time constraints.

Eventually the data strings tapered off and Soundwave released Barricade from his grip without fanfare, hardly giving the still twitching mech a second look as he re-cached his tendrils back into their housings. Already moving back to the locked door, Soundwave paused only long enough to pin Barricade final string of glyphs sharped with the force of command:

--Find--Revive--Retrieve--

Then he slipped out the door.

The patrol, already more than half-way down the hall with their methodical sweep, paused only to positively identify the figure appearing from the side room before continuing their task. Soundwave ignored them as they did him. They were only 4 more rooms between them and the one in which he'd just left Barricade.

"Ok, this one is clear," called a one of the Vehicon, apparently the groups leader, redirecting his team's attention back to their task. "Next room."

Soundwave passed by the group at his usual unhurried pace, heading back to the comm center. No one noticed him remotely access the ground bridge controls or sensed the portal that opened in the room he'd just left.

[Deleted]

Barricade, to his extreme fragging credit, did not lose consciousness. Another gate-crash of data shocked through his upload jack and snapped his back into an arc that threatened to break something. Soundwave ignored this, simply pinning him tighter to the wall as he force-loaded the remaining data into Cade’s head. Indelicate was a word for what the comm officer was doing to the infiltrator. Glitch-frakking horrific was another couple of words, but since Soundwave pulled slag like this on a regular basis one had to adjust the usual base-line for unreasonable working conditions. Cade bit back another noise when Soundwave disconnected at last.

Cade hit the floor on his knees, driven there by a wave of nauseous agony. He swallowed the scream that swelled up in the back of his throat, choked on it until his vocoder was full of static and epithets, then he shoved himself to his feet and stood there a moment, on hand braced against the wall while his body tried – in violent, almost debilitating starts and stops – to adjust. Barricade, being well acclimated to pain, sorted himself out more quickly than most might. Fairwinds was chirring something at him. The infiltrator could feel the top of her head pressing into the bottom of his jawline, against the space beneath his audio.

“I hate that guy,” said Barricade as the groundbridge spun open in front of him.

Blue optics flickered darkly before he shrugged off his nausea, his dread, that shaky gnawing feeling in the base of the neural stem – instead zeroed in on the singular and all-consuming blackhole that was his mission. Megatron. Find him. Fix him. Bring him back. Do indecent things for a hours and hours and hours afterward until all the frakking trouble he’d been through stopped eating through him like battery acid in his fuel pump. The data was arranging itself, taking a proper configuration in his head. Cade growled, stepping though the bridge.

“I’ll remind Megatron when we have him back,” he said.

And the bridge closed behind him.

fin