Flash - It's The End of the World as They Know It

[Deleted]

Clinging to the Aerialbot's dash, Fairwinds trilled a digitized 'squeeee!' at the near-suicidal move, the speed so much faster than anything she could acheive, and tuned into his primary sensors, she could feel the vibration of air coming back up from the speedway. She watched the whirl of grey flakes and white smoke peel away behind them through the window of the cockpit, red optics wide with delight. The lenses almost colour-matched her paintjob - likely, she thought, why Air Raid hadn't suspected anything from them.

She beamed when her ride rightfully surmised Megatron as 'pretty cool', then sobered when he raised the question of their separation. Nuzzling her beak back down between two conveniently spaced ridges, Fairwinds sighed through her front vents and splayed her wings out in a lazy sprawl.

"Yeah pretty much." The cassette sniffed, fidgetted a little as she made some more timing adjustments. The coolant issue was closed, at last. "Cuz I'm weeny I can't stay down in the thick of it, so I do surveillance and let Master know who's where with what. I got his back, front and sides."

There was a untripped Decepticon trap up ahead - it had been lying in wait on an irregularly used Autobot supply line. The ring of explosives would be set off by grounders only, ordinarily, but with all the upheaval of the last few days and with their low flight level and sheer velocity... Fairwinds didn't want to take the chance of them getting blown up by something of her own side's construction.

"Had to bolt when someone started peppering me - then a building fell down and it was just a mess." She circled the fast-approaching trap, submitting a course correction as well. "Give this area a wide berth. Some bad stuff there we don't want to trigger."

[Deleted]

Air Raid let out a sigh of relief when a new circle appeared on his inner HUD, along with instructions on how to avoid it. Land trap. Bombs. Those could be nasty - he had heard of a few rare cases where a low flying aircraft set them off just from the force of their jetwash. One poor shmuck had activated a radio-remote explosive device just by transmitting on the wrong frequency. Debris everywhere.

He dipped a wing to adjust his course and said, "Egh, lemme guess - a mined area on the supply line? Man, those explosives are everywhere, half of 'em still undetonated. I'd better radio that location in when we get to Dead End. Maybe the Autobots can send a bomb disposal unit out to take care of it, if there are any of 'em still left on Cybertron after the... Exodus..."

The Aerialbot trailed off. An awkward silence followed, during which the only sound to be heard was the roar of his engine and the howl of the wind as it rushed past his cockpit.

Air Raid felt a chill run through him.

Wait a minute.

Hidden bombs on an Autobot supply line. Only two groups of people would be able to precisely locate their position. The Autobots, who would have found them either with a disposal team or by driving over them. And the people who had laid the bombs to begin with.

"Me an' my Carrier used to go around Polyhex a lot - I know the layout real well!"

Decepticon-held Polyhex!

"AGH!"

With a horrified yell Air Raid did a frenzied roll in mid-air. Warning klaxons erupted in his cockpit, bright red and hollering.

"YOU!" he shouted over the din. "You're a Decepticon!"

[Deleted]

Fairwinds, clinging to Air Raid's flashing console with pede-claws, beak and every bending part of her working wing, stopped screaming just long enough to shout: "And you're going to kill us!"

She shuttered her optics against the terrifyingly fast spin, so wild and rocketing that it couldn't feel anything but suicidal, even to another flier. A grounder would have blown his chips and greyed out by now...

Not that cutting off her physical means of vision did anything to help the cassette's nausea. Tied in to the Autobot's systems as she was, Fairwinds was receiving a non-stop barrage of dizzying sensor data, pitch and yaw angles, and lurching views of the very-hard ground. That she had absolutely no control over the lunatic acrobatics made the whole affair an absolute nightmare.

"I am I am!" The shrieking was punctuated by a series of digitised yelps as Air Raid executed more of the 'cool moves' that Fairwinds had been weedling for by the holoboard. "But I don't want to die and I really do want to help you cuz then we'll both be alright and will you stop it or I swear to Primus I'll make you purge like a Praxian fountain!"

[Deleted]

Fairwind's voice echoed in his audial sensors. She sounded frightened, not to mention nauseous, and after a pause Air Raid grudgingly rolled level.

They were over the speedway now, roaring past the steel and glass wreckage of a collapsed overpass. Dust hung thick in the air. It hazed the road, whited out much of the landscape in a ghostly fog. It would be all too easy to lose visual reference to the ground and smash directly into the rubble, which was exactly what Air Raid planned to do if the little Decepticon in his cockpit made so much as a funny twitch.

He silently berated himself. A Decepticon! In his cockpit! Tied into his neural net! Air Raid, you idiot! He cursed himself up and down. He did not doubt she could act on her threat and send all of her own sensory feedback along the line. But through the link-up she could have easily taken over his flight control systems too, fed false data into his avionics, corrupted his self-repair - a dozen things that would have sent him crashing helplessly into the ground a long time ago. But she hadn't.

And she genuinely did not seem to want to die out here in the badlands of Iacon's ruins. So, they had that in common. At least.

Air Raid thought hard.

"Okay," he said tersely. The klaxons stopped but the red warning lights remained lit. "Okay, okay. Okay. Okay, so... you're a Decepticon. Which, under most circumstances, would be really bad news for me. But you're stuck out here like I am, and probably low on energon too. So that means getting to Polyhex is in both of our interests. Okay. I can deal with this. Hold on a tick. How do I know you won't call a Decepticon patrol down on my position the minute I get us to the medic camp?"

[Deleted]

Fairwind's response was immediate and scoffed. "Because that's stupid."

The cassette's vents continued to labor to syphon the panicked heat from her systems, a high whine to accompany the lingering disorientation from Air Raid's insane maneuvers. After another few kliks wherein the crazy Autobot didn't fly them into the scorched ground, Fairwinds began to gingerly extract her talons from the dents her terror-induced grip had made in his dash.

"All the high priority targets have more or less fragged off on the Ark, and we're already going after that with the Nemesis," she went on, her tone drawled as she pointed out the obvious. "Everyone left here now is either lying around busted, fixing the busted, migrating to camps where their bustedness can be fixed, or dead. 'side from some half-sparked pot-shots, no Con patrols are gonna mount a strike. Not now, an' not on wounded."

In a show of good faith, and to remind Air Raid of the kind of damage she was not inflicting, Fairwinds updated his navigational systems with the co-ordinates of buried amunition stashes that were at risk of going off following the last battle, and flagged some code errors in his auto-repair that he should have a medic look at.

"Right now, you and me are seriously on the same side." Gingerly, Fairwinds unclenched her body from his dash and resettled with only her hardline-connected undercarriage resting against his interior plates. She turned her optics upwards, taking in the two-moon sky through his canopy. "The 'don't want to starve to death all busted and slag' side."

[Deleted]

Air Raid studied the uploaded co-ordinates with a mixture of suspicion and interest. The ammunition caches did seem to fall within known areas of former Decepticon activity. And it would be within their best interests - both of their best interests - for him to avoid them if they were currently unstable and at risk of detonation.

Code errors too. Huh. The Aerialbot prodded the diagnosis. He never would have spotted those either, not on his own.

In silence, he mulled over her words. It was true. With the Ark and the Nemesis gone all that was left on the planet were the dead, the injured, and the terminally confused. All of them were stragglers at this point. Command was gone. All high priority targets were gone. He did not doubt that pockets of intense resistance remained, on both sides of the front, but for now most of the fighting appeared to be scattered. Chaos ruled the field.

In which case, finding energon and repairs did seem to be the most logical priority for those left behind. Autobot and Decepticon.

Wow. Did he just use the word 'logical' in a full sentence. Air Raid nearly let out a laugh. He must be losing it.

He nosed up, just enough to lift them out of the worst of the rubble below. The threat of diving nose-first into the wreckage of the speedway diminished somewhat.

"All right," he said grudgingly. "All right, I must be insane, but... I believe you. For now. Because I am seriously all up in that side right now, if you are too. Busted and starving. Yes. We are Team BS. I'll tell the Dead End medics that you're a Neutral or something when we get there. I don't know if they'll treat Decepticons or not. And if we do run into any hostile 'Cons en route that feel like taking a pot shot at random Aerialbot, you think you could do something to my IFF to trick them into believing I'm just another Con Seeker...?"

[Deleted]

The small rise in altitude felt enormous to the plate-rattled and queasy cassette, and she shuttered her optics automatically even though it was Air Raid's rather graphic sensor data that had been the problem. Still, it felt less like they were going to fly into an unyielding vertical obstruction at any nanoklik. Yaaay...

"Yeah, I think I've got summut in your size," Fairwinds replied, whipping up an extra partition whilst she found the transponder code of a Seeker of relative mass. Fullthrust had done frequent runs of this area before being reassigned to the departing Nemesis, but the deception would stand up to a quick scan should any lingering Decepticon follow up on the identifying signal. Datapack prepped and tailored to slot into the bot's systems, she pulsed ready/covered/it's-cool-I-got-this across the hardline connection.

"Better if we run by your lights for now, though. Since we're heading for an Autobot camp an' all." Fairwinds extended the physical line from her undercarriage and took a few halting steps across the Aerialbot's dash, finally pressing the flat space between her optics against Air Raid's canopy. "If you drop me off a hic away and bring me a few cubes and a decent repair kit, then I won't tell anyone that you let me hitch a ride all up in your processor, and I won't get taken prisoner and shoved in a box. Fair trade?"

[Deleted]

Air Raid felt the appropriate codes dial up and nearly sighed in relief. Not that he couldn't tackle any stray Decepticon Seeker that might cross his path. Hell no. But he was honest enough to admit to himself that he was not feeling a personal best at that moment. And that a strong 'Con might just beat him while he was in this state.

Ugh. It was a good thing nobody like Slingshot was around to hear him say that. He'd never hear the end of it.

"Yeah," he said. "I- yeah. That's fair. You got a deal, sister. Because you know what? I understand that Autobots have got to be hard and shoot 'Cons and take prisoners. I get that. No skin off my wings. But I have a suspicion that most of the war just packed up and blasted off the planet. I think I'm done looking out for the best interests of the 'Bots for a little while. I think I'm gonna look out for my best interests for now. And that means no shooting anybody willing to lend me a hand. Unless that mech intends to do harm, at which point there will be lots of shooting. And I also think I'm not gonna get another flier stuck in a box, 'cos no flier deserves that. Not now. Not with things in this state."

Wow, rambling. Must have hit his head harder than he thought.

And now, straight ahead of him a thick bank of smoke churned across the speedway. The air smelt chemical, acrid. Likely from a smouldering electrical fire, still burning within the rubble. Air Raid tried to peer through it but the smoke was a grey wall that rose thousands of feet into the sky. It could extend for miles along the speedway. Was probably full of ruins too. Crap.

He grimaced. If he tried to fly over the smoke he would put himself squarely into whatever radar coverage remained in the area. Had to stay low, hug the terrain. Into the smoke, then.

"And you might want to hold onto something, because in two kliks I'm gonna run smack into a bad area of smoke," he added in warning. "Dunno what might be in it, but it will probably required some fast dodging."

[Deleted]

Despite the accumulated dangers of: a: being effectively held captive inside the frame of an enemy bot; b: hurtling injured and low on fuel in an evacuated warzone; and c: relying on a damaged flier about to dodge in next-to-zero visibility, Fairwinds let out an excited 'Eeee!' and a flurry of sweet/awesome/can't wait/YES! glyphs at the prospect of high speed maneuvers.

"Aw yeah, Autoscrap - let's see what you got!" the tiny red cassette squealed, hunkering back down on the Aeriel bot's dash and securing herself with magclamps. "Between my awesomely awesome modded radar and your flippy turny divey moves, we're gonna tear. It. Up.."

[Deleted]

Even Air Raid had to grin at that, even as he braced himself. The smoke whirled directly ahead of him now, thick and dirty. But Fairwinds' enthusiasm was addictive, and it plugged straight into the part of his processor that thrived on the high-octane thrill that only danger provided.

Junkie excitement rushed through him. He could do this. They could do this. Oil lines were haemorrhaging and he was pretty sure he'd punctured a fuel tank somewhere in there, but pffft. He would survive. It was a long way from his spark. And this was going to be totally sweet.

"All right, girl, lay that radar on me," he crowed. Already a coating of ash was beginning to cling to his nose. Air Raid filtered his intakes before the worst of it could clog them, and switched on his interior cockpit lighting. A red glow suffused the dash around Fairwinds. "Because we're gonna go down to zero vis in about four... three... two...!"

The white jet plunged into the smoke.

The rest of Cybertron vanished. The wartime sky vanished, taking with it the tracer fire still needling between the last of the Autobot and Decepticon aerial combatants. The speedway vanished. Smoke churned around his canopy, dense and choked with ash. A scrap of plastic slapped against the glass and flew off again, still burning.

Even the jet's wingtips were gone, obscured by smoke. Only the red glow pulsing off his port and starboard side indicated where his running lights were strobing.

"Holy slag," breathed Air Raid. "Holy-!"

He banked hard onto one wingtip. His nose dropped, just as a giant shadow roared past his cockpit. For a moment a thunderous sound echoed all around them, and then the shadow was gone and they were flying through nothing but smoke again.

"Okay, that was close," said Air Raid with a shaky laugh. "I think I just flew through what was left of a underpass. Ha!"

---

A vortex of ash hung in the air. The white jet was gone, smoke gently whirling in its wake. Streamers of dust trickled down from the lip of the collapsed tunnel it had just flown through. Blindly.

Not bad. A grudging seven out of ten.

A soot-caked creature hunkered on the edge and touched the side of its head.

"Rack 'em up," it said.

[Deleted]

Fairwinds didn't shriek when Air Raid saved both their afts with a strut-jarring turn and, yes, did fly blind through a semi-demolished underpass. What she did do was freeze like she was docked, talons gouged into the bot's dash to anchor herself as much as to stabilise the hardline they were volleying data across. His sensors flashed through her most recent patrol data of the area, picked up some pointers from her radar, and fed straight back into his flight computer with enough speed to dodge the hanging debris and lurching spikes of dead metal that emerged from the dust every few seconds.

"Raid, that was totally, like - frag and whoa," Fairwinds keened quietly, vents rasping as she dumped overly heated air through damaged and clogged filters. She wondered if a barrel of oil large enough to take a bath in was completely out of the question. Certainly Air Raid was going to owe her more than a few cubes of energon and a patch kit for allowing them to not get dead.

"Kay - we stored the shells for the gun batteries in a warehouse 2.7 hics thataway." An image of two bullets smiling and holding stick-hands appeared on the increasingly colourful map, labelled with the precise coordinates. "Lord Megatron had it emptied two breems ago. Could be a good spot to stop and clean out before you overheat and explode, maybe."

[Deleted]

Air Raid rolled level and risked a glance back at his map. Fairwinds' terrain data had already given him a good shot at dodging the debris that lurked in the haze, and so he now looked upon the new co-ordinates with approval rather than suspicion.

A warehouse. Excellent. That would be the perfect location to land and take cover in, just for as long as it took to rid himself of this ash. The filters were doing their job of keeping it from his engine and other vital systems, but it would not take long for the filters themselves to clog - and then he was at a serious risk of overheating. And that was bad. Running hot was hard on his engine, which was already in enough trouble as it was. His earlier crash had not done it any favours.

"Let's go check it out," he said. The cockpit tilted as he dipped his wing and altered his course, trusting his radar to steer him through the smoke. "I gotta get this ash and dust and crap outta my intakes before I melt something. And warehouses are always promising. Maybe there's still some good stuff left behind in there that we could loot. Well, that I could loot anyway. I mean, if you're a Decepticon and you rummage through one of your own warehouses, is what you're doing technically called looting at that poin-?"

There was no warning.

The white jet lurched. Metal screamed and the wind howled as, directly behind Fairwinds, a steel harpoon punched through the side of the cockpit with a torturous sound, missing her tail by inches.

It's grapnels snapped open and clamped into place. Immediately the Aerialbot veered hard to the right, circling helplessly downwards like a ball on a tether. Black smoke poured into the cockpit, choking and arid. Red warning lights erupted all over the instrument panel while a cacophony of alarms wailed in the background.

Shapes loomed in the haze - skeletal girders and shattered roadways. Unable to stop himself, the jet plunged towards the tangle of wreckage.

But a part of Air Raid seemed to keep its head. There was a pneumatic hiss and then a rush of wind as the canopy blasted off and was torn away in the slipstream, giving Fairwinds a chance to eject herself before the jet smashed nose-first into the rubble...!

[Deleted]

It was ingrained into circuit and spark in cassettes to allign with their carriers. Her original carrier one with the Well, she could no more leave Megatron when he had need of her than she could cut off her own helm. Air Raid was not her carrier, but with Megatron gone and the terrain she was negotiating expansive and dangerous, she needed him. Just like he needed her.

She turned with a shriek when the harpoon invaded his cockpit, the lower part of her beak already shifting into a mini blaster to fire upon the latching hooks and the punctured metal in general. Black smoke and fine sprays of energon were torn away by the howling wind, adding to the cacophony of alarms and screaming engines.

Finally the tangled mass of shredding metal and grappling hook gave and spun off away from them with their connecting line. They were still falling, still spinning wild and fierce towards the ruins of something so war-wrecked it couldn't be identified, but they were moving away from whatever had fired upon them.

Hugging tight to the Arielbot's cockpit, Fairwinds sent an override command that Soundwave had given her, coded to overcome Megatron's firewalls should need be, and clamped every armor component down hard. SImultaneously, she triggered his lines and pipes to relax and extend as much as possible, so they'd bend and give on impact. They were going to hit the ground hard, there was no avoiding it, but that didn't mean her ride had to shatter apart.

They were in this together, and they were going to survive.

[Deleted]

The harpoon and hook were gone. Air Raid gasped and sucked in a desperate breath as the spearpoint of agony receded, but it was too late to alter his trajectory. The ground roared up to greet him with dizzying speed, talons of rubble and broken rebar extended in readiness to snatch him from the sky.

And Fairwinds was still inside his cockpit.

She was not going to save herself and abandoned him to his fate. Shocked, he had only an instant to reflect upon this before he made his decision.

With her silent command to relax pulsing through his neural net, he transformed. There was no hesitation as he clutched her to his chest and curled his frame around her, already braced for impact.

When it came, it was with a tremendous blow that thundered through his chassis. The Aerialbot hit the speedway on his shoulders and plunged through it, into the wreckage below. Dust fountained upwards as he smashed through another level - wham, wham - before cratering into a pit of fire-blackened debris.

A terrible impact, pain and soot and shrapnel. And then - darkness.

Silence. Slowly, the dust settled. Smoke wrapped thick around the crater. Bits of scree plinked down from the gaping hole overhead.

Fairwinds would find herself in an uncomfortable position: pinned between steel and concrete wreckage. Throughout the crash Air Raid had kept her cradled to his chest, and thus his body had sheltered her from the worst of the impact. Now however, his battered frame was a dead weight above her. Sparks of consciousness frizzled briefly through his field before fading offline.

Trapped!

At least there were chinks around his body that a small cassette might be able to wriggle through. It was hard to see through the smoke and the debris, but it appeared that they had crashed into the underlevel beneath the speedway. Ruddy light and shadows danced on the tunnel walls from the scattered fires burning in the rubble. They lit up a nest of graffiti painted crudely on the walls - well, painted, gouged, burned, and shot into the walls. Someone had evidently tried to spell out their name using bullets on one slab of concrete. They had gotten as far as 'Spinefo-' before running out of ammunition.

Wire and cabling had been scavenged from the ruins and strung up overhead. A few emergency lamps dangled from them like kludged-up Christmas lights.

Voices echoed down the tunnel. Shouting.

"-ver here! The slagger must have crashed by the T1 junction. Start looking! Bring the arc cutters and torc- that's the compressor, you idiot. No! Put that down! Put it down! For god's sake, it's the box on your right. That's my right!"

[Deleted]

Okay: OW.

Fairwinds had disengaged from Air Raid's systems as soon as he'd begun to transform, and shuttered her optics as he'd curled around her to protect her much smaller form from the impact. And a Pit of an impact it had apparently been. Crunched up beneath the Aerialbot, she couldn't see much - and what she could pick out was a whole lot of dust and debris.

"Air Raid, 'm gonna go take a look where we are," she whispered, as that seemed to be an appropriate volume just then. When the talkative mech didn't respond, Fairwinds scanned him over and pulled a face at the mess of damage and busted and fragged that came back. Not dead though. Good start.

She ran a system check of herself and the results weren't much better, though without his protective cocoon she'd have been rendered a smear upon impact. The femme needed to get out from under him, start sealing off the worst of both their leaks - maybe if they were really lucky they'd 'landed' somewhere with an emergency repair kit.

Fairwinds started to squirm out from beneath his dead weight with a series of grunts and whines, but only succeeded in bringing up a major red flag in her system stats. Her previously damaged wing was now utterly ruined, the major struts shattered and joints crushed. It was highly unlikely to be salvagable - which was fortunate, as it was also completely trapped between Air Raid's chassis and the floor and pinning her in place.

With shuttered optics, the cassette set about detaching the limb: deactivating neural lines an inch into her chassis from the point of amputation; dumped meshplatelets into fluid lines to stem fuel and coolant loss; and finally disengaged hydraulic lines and actuators. After that, it was just a case of planting her pedes against what used to be... something in the Aerialbot's chassis, and pushing until the disconnected limb popped off.

Unpinned, Fairwinds finally wriggled and squirmed her way out from beneath the Autobot and staggered away in a lopsided lope. She examined the ragged strip where her wing used to be attached, crests flat to her helm, and then flicked a scan across Air Raid. Whilst not... well, he'd be alright. Few clamps, bit of tape - they'd be back on their way to the med camp in no time.

"Oh give me that before you kill yourself with it!"

Fairwinds jerked to look down the tunnel, towards the voices. Not close yet, and plenty of debris in the way, but they were closing in.

The little red cassette narrowed her optics.

What would Master do if he'd just been shot out of the sky, and the ones who did it were scavenging around for his parts?

A smirk.

He'd tear their fragging heads off with his bare servos.

The smirk faded, and Fairwinds tapped her talon-tips against the ground.

.... What would Master do if he was also a tiny cassette with a limb missing, no backup coming and dwindling fuel supply?

Fairwinds eyed the ceiling, scanning across the width and length of the tunnel. Space just big enough to run cable through, and for a cassette to wriggle in on her belly. The corners of her beak twisted up, crests flaring in anticipation.

He'd find some otherway to tear their fragging heads off.

Locking her remaining wing against her chassis, Fairwinds ducked her head and scampered up a fallen loop of cable - pede over hooking pede. At the top, she scrounged around for an opening big enough to slide through and dragged herself into the tight space. She didn't need her scanners to locate their attackers - they weren't exactly being quiet.

For the sake of readiness (and to just plain check it still worked), Fairwinds transformed her lower beak components into a blaster. Optics, fuel lines and what goes bang in the wrong place on charged tech'. Right. Never know what hit'em.

Fairwinds began to edge forward, maneuvering around cratered metal where heavy weaponry had been fired into the ceiling until the space opened out. Back for you in a few, 'Raid.

Low and elongated, the cassette scampered up the tunnel.

This 'Con's got some huntin' to do.