Flashback – Cities of Dust – Closed

[Deleted]

Iacon might really fall this time.

Sideswipe really accepted that as a possibility only after he lost half his unit in a carpet bomb of cold phosphex. The seconds preceding the bombing itself, he never saw it coming. He was too engrossed in the kill-or-be-killed helter-skelter of the firefight. The 34th Autobot Ground Division was fracturing badly and Sideswipe knew it. Sunstreaker had vanished at some point, the obnoxious yellow smear of him subsumed into a fight so thick the screaming baseline of violence seemed like the default sound of the universe. His internal chronometer was wrecked – an electrical discharge to his spinal strut knocking non-vital systems offline. He didn’t know how long he’d been fighting.

He staggered off the body of a tank-former, motor-oil and coolant running thick, sliding off his battle scythes and slicking his arms like a second paint job. He saw the west barricade erupt in a wall of blue smoke and knew, without having to really process, that all his friends were dead or dying… then a Con line-breaker body checked him into the side of a building.

Sides hit the wall and the Con hit him, pinned him and tried to drive what looked like a molecular-heat blade through his head. Sideswipe caught the offending wrist, stopped the tip short of his right optic, close enough to see the nimbus of super-heated air wafting off the metal, fresh motoroil sizzling down the length. He was yelling something. Sideswipe couldn’t make it out. A Cybernaught caught fire and erupted into a radioactive ball of green flame 100 technometers off, the blackened three story robot skeleton collapsing in on itself, then falling into the screaming thick of Bots and Cons.

Sideswipe grabbed at the Con’s abdominal plates, fingers hooking into an open wound.

“Iacon is ours!” the Con was saying.

Sideswipe braced his foot against the robot’s massive chest. “Go frag yourself,” he gritted. Then he tore the Con’s belly open in a gush of internal wiring, jammed his fist inside, turned that fist into a gun and fired. The Con dropped dead and Sideswipe opened inter-Autobot radio.

“This is Sideswipe. West barricade down! I repeat th’ west barricade is down. Half a Con breaker-unit comin’ down on us. Anyone not dead respond! I need backup to my position, now!”

[Deleted]

"Ask and you will receive," was the radioed reply.

Streaking along the Iacon speedway, Shiftlock was pushing her engines to the limit. Her sleek, bullet-like orange and black cyberspeeder alt mode was tearing up the road behind her; the automated transformation systems, already strained by powerloss, were struggling to keep stretching road in front of her. It wouldn't be long before the roads were collapsed all that would be left were the service tunnels.

Which, fortunately, Shiftlock knew like the back of her servos.

"Looks like you're in need of some specialized assistance. I'm closing in your position fast. Clench your aftplates and keep your signal open, I'm assuming if you're still alive you're gonna be able to hold your own for a couple of kliks until I get there. Hate to tell you this kid, but this may turn into a evac in short order."

[Deleted]

“Negative!”

Sideswipe, wiped coolant out of his optics and broke into a sprint across the artillery-shattered road, ducking bigger mechanoids and hurdling half a dozen dead as he pushed toward a better rally point. He juked left, scooped a class-one ion-rifle from a downed robot – Bot or Con, he didn’t know, the body-shell had been blasted open beyond recognition. He checked the mag, hissed to find it half charged, and slapped it back into the stock, auto-assembly snapping it smartly into armed long-range. There was a clutch of Cons between him and the remains of the west barricade, the first responders heading toward the now unguarded line. Sideswipe promptly opened fire, watched the biggest bot’s cranial case blow open in a burst of blue and shredded metal.

“We lose this point an’ we lose dis whole grid to th’ Decepticons!”

He didn’t recognize the voice on the airwaves and they hadn’t signaled their unit ident upon response. He broke off for a moment to pull a proximity grenade from his sub-space, pulling the mag-pin in the head of it before pitching fast-ball style at the Decepticons. They scattered instantly, the explosion throwing most of them and clearing a strip of road. Sideswipe hit that road on four wheels and rocketed up the ribbon of street toward the now empty gun-turret towers and the glass-sheeted barricade. He braced himself to find everyone dead as transformed, activated his jet-pack, and launched himself onto the barricade wall, hooking the edge of the wall and crouching there a moment.

“I’m at the west barricade now. I can hold 'em 'til we get air support.” His fingers peeled paint when he stood up, leaving a black handprint ion the glassy wall. “I got a control of th' guard turret. Can you get here?”

[Deleted]

Shiftlock continued following the signal. The end of the road came faster than she expected - the sudden stop of the expanding tunnel threw her straight out into the air.

Transforming mid-fall she threw out an energy grapple, grabbing hold of another support column for an overpass ahead. Swinging through laserfire upwards, her attention caught hold of incoming seekers. They were after her in short order.

"Hi fellas, can I hitch a ride?"

Releasing the grapple, Shiftlock began to fall forward; the seekers rushed in to take down what was supposed to be easy prey. "AUTOBOT SCUM!" the lead screamed. "DIE!"

The triad of fighters launched a volley of missiles towards the rapidly descending Wrecker. Smoke trails snaked through the sky, the warheads tracking Shiftlock's energon signature and rushing in for the kill. Astroklik after astroklik, closer and closer, the free-falling femme was approaching the ground, dragging the missiles with her; everything in her perception seemed to slow down and come sharply into focus - the seekers were lining up and preparing to fire, gun turrets along their fuselage opening, barrels slowly rising. She could see the bright flicker of the charges lighting up the dead black within.

Her right hand shot forward, grabbing the first missile out of the air.

Her left hand snatched the second.

Using the inertia from the two projectiles still desperately trying to collide with her brilliant orange and black frame, she spun kick upwards, knocking missiles three and four off course; four impacted five immediately after, and the concussive blast exploded six and seven, throwing shrapnel towards the triad of seekers, who immediately pulled up to avoid being scorched. Plasma slugs spiraled through the detonation, thrown fractions of micro off-course, snaking through the atmosphere and grazing down Shiftlock's back, leaving tiny trails of blackened paint drug up her backplate like a sadistic caress.

Completing the flip, Shiftlock's optics fixed back on the seekers. Through raw strength alone she turned the missiles midflight and launched them back the Decepticon jets, closing the gap instants after their course correction. The warheads of the missiles retargetted the nearest energy sources - their own points of origins - and struck dead on the mark. The shells of the screaming, shocked warriors rippled outwards as their internal ammo supplies ignited, hurling glittering fragments of corpse through the explosion-lit sky.

Launching her grappling hook once more, Shiftlock deftly snagged the tail fin of the final Seeker; her sudden weight stalled his engines and threw him into a spin, pitching end over end. Unable to recover he went roaring into the side of a building, a bright pop of released energy lighting the sky once more.

Transforming into a vehicle once more, Shiftlock slammed down onto a service ramp, cracking the roadway.

"UNGH!" she grunted into her radio. "On my way, kid! WRECK 'N RULE!"

[Deleted]

“Sorry to sound ungrateful,” growled Sideswipe, shouldering his rifle, “but are, like, Springer or Kup or maybe Impactor with you?

There was a large ignition of fire in the distance, neon orange clouds of flame blooming up somewhere on the strip of the Pancontinental Expressway, some two miles out from where he was. He didn’t give it much thought, too busy climbing over the shattered body-shells of his dead squadmates and attempting, for the next five minutes, to blind himself to the fact that some of them had clearly been hit with a chemical combination, firstly, of glass-gas to immobile them… then been hit seconadarily by what looked like – could be nothing but – Gideon’s Glue.

Sideswipe shut down his comms to swear through his teeth, jaw clenched so tight the cabling his in mouth strained. The gunner was melted into the turret somehow. The cold phosphex had, as it was designed to, bonded at the molecular level to the Autobot’s armor and made it brittle as glass. If the detonation of the bomb that followed hadn’t knocked his spark-chamber loose of its moorings, then then the crop-duster spray of vesicant hit, it had eaten through his upper body almost entirely. The grips of the gun were jammed up through the sludge that had been the other bot’s spinal column five minutes ago.

The roar of jet engines prompted Sideswipe to attempt to… unhook the dead mechanoid from his grisly post.

“Frag, frag, fraggin’ Primus-slotting, glitch-frakking…” The remains came apart in Sideswipe’s hands and the Bot’s upper torso split in half, sliding into a wet pile of motoroil and circuitry. The head rolled under the gun and down into a grate and something about the fragging awful absurdity of that pissed him off. “Ugh! Dammit!” Swearing, ignoring the slight burn of the chemical (it was only actively acidic for minutes after oxidation) residue on the gun, Sideswipe wiped liquid Autobot off the auto-fire control and tried to bring automated defenses back online.

He opened the radio again. “Be advised, they’ve dropped Gideon Glue. We need medical evac and air support. I cannot get auto-defense back online. The whole frakkin’ system’s melted. I’ve got one turret going but… there’s at least two cybernaughts and a heavy armor unit rolling my way.”

[Deleted]

"You must have bearings the size of a moon to be asking that question right now," Shiftlock grunted across the radio, speeding through underground tunnels, running over Decepticon ground pounders as she zeroed in on Sideswipe's position. The noises of combat were bleeding over through her communication channel. "The commanders have their servos full with Devastator, sorry, you're gonna have to make do with a squad leader."

The femme rolled out of vehicle mode in a fluid transformation onto her feet, skidding to a halt in front of a service hatch leading up to the turret controls. The security lock scanned her, recognizing her immediately and opening the hatch. Shiftlock pointed her grappling cable up, latching onto a higher level ceiling, and swiftly ziplined up several floors at a time.

"Looks like we have bad news to trade then. Central command's just been bombed and we can't rouse any up the CoC. Until someone steps up.... we're on our own."

[Deleted]

“Typical,” Sidesswipe muttered, pulling a panel off the sides of the auto-defense control. He eyed a couple prospective trouble-spots in the slightly melted sections, yanked a few wires out, cut the corroded sections and clamped them between dental plates while he rummaged in the wiring. “Sunstreaker! I know you aint dead, an’ I know you fraggin’ heard me. You got an ETA on ground-assault back up?” One slightly sarcastic comment later, he had a timeline. “If we can keep the Cons out for five minutes, then I’ve got re-enforcements inbound with two tank-alts.”

He found the jacks he was looking for and jerry-rigged the power lines into the central gun, gluing the new wires in place with what was supposed to be a medical bonding strip. Green lights on the control, Sideswipe scrambled to the turret in time to see its holo-display come up, showing him live-feed of what was going on behind the heavy metal shield that protected the gunner roost itself. It flickered badly, but he had an otherwise clear view of the two steel giants plodding slowly into weapon’s range.

“Primus on a piston, they have two Cybernaughts. I didn’t even see a Worldsweeper land, godsdammit. Hey, Wrecker, I’m about to drop this out post’s remaining missile payload on these glitch-fraggers, then I’m ditching my post to try my luck with… I dunno, something dumb an’ heroic.” He laid his thumb on the trigger. “Here goes.”

Then Sideswipe fired twenty air-to-ground missiles at once. Five seconds after that, he was in the air.

[Deleted]

Shiftlock ziplined up the last floor between her and the auto control room, just in time to see Sideswipe fire the missiles and leap from his post.

She vented heat like a frustrated sigh. "I'm getting too old for 'form-sitting."

Touching the side of her helm she brought up internal coms again; she heard good news and bad, and expected as much.

"If you guys are done on your end follow my signal. We've got two heavies coming in near my position and a jolly glitch-wit tryin' to tackle 'em by his lonesome. This is officially a Class Fragged operation. And try to remember not to give your names over an open com this time?"

The radio crackled and returned. A deep basso rumble replied, "Class fragged huh? Sounds like my kinda operation boss. Be there in two turns of an engine."

Shiftlock smiled, watching Sideswipe continue his decent as she dashed to the edge of the platform and joined him in the air. "Gotta hand it to you kid," she radioed to him. "Dumb and heroic sounds like you could have been one of us. And from where I'm lookin' it seems like you know how to fall with style."

[Deleted]

“Aint fallin’,” said Sideswipe lazily.

And at precisely that moment his back came apart and the jet turbine built into his back ignited nitro blue and spiraled the Autobot straight up over the smoking battleground of Iacon’s other streets. His stabilizers caught up high at the zenith of his upward arc and held him, hovering, the fires of the burning buildings below throwing orange into the dirty metal of his face. The smoke from the missiles had continued to screen him from the Cybernaoghts and their ground-units, but from here he could swing his ion rifle from his shoulder and sight down through the thin nimbus of cloud to the scorched ground below.

Farther behind, Sideswipe could see the vehicular purple glow of Decepticon reinforcements closing in. If their Cybernaoght van guard broke, this grid was going to fall. The dead burnt too fresh in his head to accept that just then.

“Oi, Wrecker, tank alts took th’ worst of th’ payload.” His voice over Inter-Autobot radio wasn’t exactly pleased, satisfied maybe. “It’s just the Cybernaoghts now. So, you take th’ one on the right an’ I take th’ one on the left or you think you can rope one of their legs for me?” He swapped the setting on the ion rifle, checked the power levels. “Aint a Wrecker, but I got enough dumb-Wrecker style, might be able to pull this off.”

[Deleted]

"Oh sure, all you new kids get the best toys," Shiftlock laughed over the com back to Sideswipe. "I have to make due with grabbin' a seeker's aft-fins and ridin' 'em until they stop buckin'!"

The orange and black femme angled herself down and transformed, slamming into the ground again, ramping out of the crater she just made and continuing forward on four wheels.

"If you're willin' to take orders, there's three more fighters on their way for backup, and at least one of them should be able to handle himself against the cybernauts on his own. I can coordinate our efforts and make sure all of us get out of here alive. Are there any other Autobot survivors around here or is it just us?"

Behind the two Autobots, a huge blast of energy roared out of a gate in the wall, streaming towards the cybernauts and the onrushing hordes of Decepticon troops, grazing past Shiftlock who had swerved out of the way only astrokliks before. Eradicons caught in the blast were immediately vaporized, as a massive dual-cannoned tank alt rolled out onto the ground, right gun barrel still trailing plasma-steam.

[Deleted]

“Any survivors behind the barricade aren't functional enough to fight,” said Sideswipe, carefully lining up his shot. The rightmost Cybernaught had staggered in the face of the energy blast, the pilot in the almost-indestructible head of the the machine struggling to keep it on track. A smirk, slightly ugly, mostly nasty, touched his mouth. “An’ who th' frak you callin’ ‘kid’?”

He pulled the trigger. He'd shorted the power-converter and over-loaded the limiter so the resulting ion slug discharge at four times the recommended power level, dissolved the weapon to molted slag in Sideswipe’s hands, but only after the shot hit its mark in the Cybernaught’s right collar guard, tearing a superfluous hole about the size of a fist. Barely scratched it, really. The ruined weapon was tossed and in the time it took the gun to fall from half a mile up, Sideswipe divebombed the massive metal giant.

The Cybernought pilot didn’t miss the attack, a small armory of missile housings flipping up from its shoulders and launching a hornets nest of proximity missiles. Sideswipe zig-zagged, burning nitro-fuel to hook a hard left then bee-line straight down beneath the cloud of artillery, streaking a blue contrail of heat and ion cloud in his wake. Through peripheral sensors he caught the other Cybernaught getting hit with artillery of some kind. He blocked it out, hooked a hard loop up and around behind the first Cybernaught and slammed feet-first down on its damaged shoulder. The pilot in the head of the benemoth, safe behind bullet-proof glass, stared.

Sideswipe grinned at him like a kind of demented red parrot.

Then he drove a battle scythe the length of his forearm into the armor breech, through the Cybernaught’s main fuel line, and ripped it out. A chemical spray gushed neon blue and, not waiting around to get swatted, Sides kick-flipped off the three story behemoth, fell back, right arm reformatting into a gun. He fired as he fell. The shot ignited the raw energon and the resulting explosion – the force of a level 4 K-class bomb –hit him like a sledge hammer. Threw him three-hundred technometers, end over end, across the street. The impact knocked him offline, agro-tech brought him dizzily back out, the bowl of the sky spinning crazily overhead. Damage reports flagged through his HUD.

“Ow,” he said.

[Deleted]

"Kid is just something I call people I like. Name's Shiftlock. Glad to see you're still part of the functioning."

The black and orange femme was kneeling beside Sideswipe, looking him over. Another unfamiliar blue and orange mech was crouched beside the wounded red and white Autobot, this one equipped with a medical scanner, assessing damage. "He needs immediate medical attention, commander. He has so many cracks in his frame he'll fall to pieces if he doesn't leak out first."

"See to it, Clutch Kick, and if he fights you, put him under. We're not losing anymore today," Shiftlock ordered firmly. Looking back at Sideswipe, her black and orange lips parted in a warm smile. "Do me a favor and stay on your backplates for just a few klicks. Feint and Dirt Drop will have these scrapeaters slagged in short order, so you can relax."

Explosions were going up behind the both of them; true to their word, more heavy cannon fire was being launched in the distance, the screams of the dying mixed with the reveling war cries of the two distant warriors..

[Deleted]

“Nice ta meetcha,” gritted Sideswipe, struggling to sit up.

His gyro-stabilizers immediately protested by knocking the world loose in his head, the whole span of his vision fritzing promptly with static before he took the Wrecker – Shiftlock’s – advice and laid back down in the ditch of slightly smoking rubble he’d dug himself. His jet-mod, buried into the plating of his upper back now, steamed slightly, heat-warnings bubbling up grumpily through his self-repair sub-diagnostics and informing him, as usual, that he’d burned too hot and too fast and he was in for a long painful few days of internal re-morph. Grimacing, he rebooted his optics several times before they stopped banding with static.

He looked between the two mechanoids sitting over him, aware of his own relief that the job was – for all that he could do – done, and the Decepticon breech had been routed for at least another day. The black-banded femme with the bronze paint job and filed dental plates matched the voice from the radio. He looked at the Bot currently shining a medic-scan into his left optic.

“They dropped Gideon’s Glue,” he said,struggling to show them his blistered hands, the paint stripped down to the protoskeleon beneath. “Glue and Glass. I’m fine. I can do a field patch. They need a medic more.” Whoever wasn’t dead already. “Behind th’ barricade. I’ve had worse; can you check for survivors?”

[Deleted]

Shiftlock touched the side of her helm again, looking out over the battlefield. "Feint already did. You're it."


Clutch Kick slid an antigrav plate beneath Sideswipe; the field gently lifted the wounded Bot off the ground, relieving pressure on damaged motors, frames, plates and actuators. Using energy and field manipulation, the medic set to work prepping Sideswipe for restoration. "You are -not- 'fine'," Clutch Kick grumped, glyphing authority and displeasure, then switching to a gentler tone, continued. "My name is Clutch Kick, field medic to this squadron. What's your name, soldier?"

A shot streaked above the three huddled bots. Clutch Kick cursed. "Primus! I can't work with people shooting at me! Is Dirt Drop getting lazy?"

Shiftlock stood up quickly. "No, he's just getting in over his fat aft again. I got it, you just keep working. One hand on the restoring beam, one hand on your gun, as always."

Clutch Kick snorted. "You say that like it's not standard operating proceedure under your command."

"I wouldn't have picked you if I didn't think you could snipe and work at the same time," Shiftlock grinned, her field resonating with encouragement, confidence and calm. "Keep prettymech here restrained until he's transform-worthy, then we'll get him out of here. I'd say after watching him take down that cybernought we owe him a swig of the good stuff."

The Wrecker squad commander snapped a wicked-looking force blade from her right wrist at the same time the medic suddenly turned, mid-operation, gun in hand, and in a perfectly excuted combination, Clutch Kick had nailed one Decepticon with a perfect headshot, dropping him mid-run, as Shiftlock sprinted towards the Con immediately behind him, slashing him groin to helm in a messy spray of energon and bursting internals. From there Shiftlock did not stop; she ran headlong into the surge of Vehicon troops, ducking and weaving through them, her blade flashing like tiny arcs of lightning, limbs and gore flying along with sparks and bodies dropping, twitching and expiring in a trail behind her.

Clutch Kick returned to his work, gun still in one hand. "'Prettymech', huh? Commander must have taken a real shine to you."

[Deleted]

“That’s cuz I am really, really pretty,” said Sideswipe, adopting his Sunstreaker patented I-am-a-god-behold-me tone.

And then, because it was physically painful to be that full of himself, he dropped the pretense and watched Shiftlock ran off. Hadn’t seen a femme-Wrecker before, but you never saw Wreckers mostly. It was all so much hush and barrack talk, the Wreckers; a tangled up ball of myth, black-ops, and bullshit. Sides just watched her go and wondered if maybe she was Pit-femme. Outta Tarn? Kaonese maybe with all those spikes, or an excommunicated blade-class. You never wanted to meet a blade-class in a fair fight, or a Pit-femme in an unfair fight and you never ever wanted to meet Strika.

“Name’s Sideswipe by the way.” The red warrior grinned up at Clutch Kick. “An’ I know that was a stunnin’ level of sheer gears an’ glory right there, but, no: I am not on the list so don’t get any ideas.” He eyed the battle going on beyond Clutch Kick’s shoulder with a kind of jealous… well a pout wasn’t the word, but he looked put out to be benched, even if the worse of the fighting seemed to be dying. “Not recruitable.”

Sides wondered which iteration of the Wreckers this was. He knew they were coming up on at least fifteen iterations at this point, not that anyone believed him. Sideswipe sat up properly, his internal-repairs burning his energon reserves – what he hadn’t burned with the jet-mod – to knit circuitboards back together. He could feel the hair-line cracks inside himself, like fault lines preparing to grind and send shockwaves through him. He distracted himself from the pain by laughing and leaning back on his elbows.

“You got any stims or somethin’?” he demanded, cheerfully, “Or engex? You got engex? Yur right, I’m in pain, doc, need somethin’ ta take th’ edge off.” His expression was pure wounded virtue. “Lookit me, I’m hurt.”