Ep. 1.5 - Nevada - Going Nuclear - Closed

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<< OOC: Set a few days after "Let Go"! >>

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Area 12 - Rainier Mesa - had not been rocked by a nuclear explosion in over twenty years. Even then, that blast had been safely contained beneath the mesa within secured test tunnels designed specifically for that purpose, thus preventing the release of deadly alpha radiation particles into the environment above.

That did not stop anyone who was not part of the United States Department of Energy from studiously avoiding it.

Fortress Maximus stood on a rocky slope that overlooked the basin and glared into that dusty bowl of dirt and brush. Saw a few jackrabbits.

No humans, though.

Good.

Some ten miles to the northwest was Area 51. The crazies went there instead, with cameras and tents and high-powered telescopes. Rainer Mesa lay empty, just miles of dry and scarred foothills and scrubby little trees. It was visited only by the lonely wind, and by the occasional fighter jet, who would wander into the valley to use its abandoned bunkers for low-level bombing practice.

Not today, he hoped. He really wanted to blast something.

Maximus glanced south. Down on the flats, secured behind tripled-wired fences and some rather ominous warning signs was a sprawling complex - mostly abandoned now, save for dust and tumbleweeds. Once it had been a camp for Mesa-region workers. He saw giant steel-topped warehouses and hangers. Big, dirty white generators. Dusty roads that wound off into the surrounding hills, where they mysteriously disappeared. Telephone poles and slack lines. Tense little dormitory houses in rows, like combat-ready suburban neighbourhoods. In barred and hardened tunnels carved deep into the earth beneath it were stored- actually, you know what. Maximus did not want to know. Some things were best not dug up.

As he understood it, nowadays this base camp mostly served as a training facility for military units and government agencies conducting counter-terrorism exercises in the northern ranges. He supposed that, in their own vague way, the Autobots fell under this description. Perhaps that was why they had been lent the use of this isolated place for their own exercises.

Ha.

He lifted one hand and flexed it. The fine servos in his fingers hummed without a trace of resistance, finely tuned. It was hard to believe they had been stressed within an inch of structural failure only days ago.

With luck, the rest of him would operate as smoothly.

Maximus closed the hand into a hard fist and set his jaw. Then he lowered it and looked around at the Autobot who stood on the cliff side with him. Tried not to meet his gaze. Still wasn't quite up to looking anyone in the optic yet. It had taken him a day just to lift his gaze off the floor.

"Sorry about this," he said gruffly. "Expect you've got better ways you could be spending the afternoon."

[Deleted]

Jazz came up to stand next to Fort Max on the cliff edge. The abandoned little human complex below looked small with distance, and Jazz knew it'd look tiny even if he was standing right next to the tallest of those buildings. He remembered being able to walk out in the open, being able to wander in and out of buildings and shops and arcades that were built for someone his size (or, usually, larger) and was struck with an odd pang of homesickness. Even worse because it was a home that didn't exist anymore.

"I can appreciate a good round of blowin' things up, same as the next 'Bot," Jazz said with a grin. "Been needing to re-calibrate ever since the raid, anyway." He rolled one shoulder, then the hip on the same side. "Torqued something when I fell on top of that crazy seeker and his workbench."

Jazz's weapons weren't integrated like some of Max's and Ironhide's, but his targeting still relied heavily on his joints and limbs being in the expected alignment. The fighting on the Nemesis hadn't thrown him off badly enough to require Ratchet's tender mercies (at least not for THAT. The bitching over the acid damage to his plating had been another story), but it was enough that over distance Jazz wasn't hitting where he wanted.

OK, he was hitting CENTIMETERS off from where he wanted, which in the grand scheme of hitting Decepticons wasn't terribly large, but it was enough to make a day outside running around in the sun and blowing things up totally justified. After all the madness in the past few months, Jazz was ready for a little stress relief.

And Max looked like he could use some, too. Jazz, of course, had heard what had happened when he'd come back from chasing down a cold Decepticon lead. He hadn't been too surprised. Jazz could read between the lines in Max's file, after all. It didn't excuse the risks Max had taken and the danger he'd put them all in, but as Jazz had said to Cleaver bare cycles ago, Jazz thought that learning from the past to make the present and future better was more important than guilt or punishment.

"So!" Jazz said, grinning down at the eminently blow-up-able terrain below them. "You got a preference here? I gotta shoot at targets for a bit, and so do you, I imagine, but we're kinda on different scales." He unsubspaced his blaster and looked at it, then pointedly at Max's huge rifle and leg guns.

<<Feel free for them to do their own thing for a bit, take the edge off, whatever, and then come back together later, if you want. Jazz might suggest sparring, with the acknowledgment that Max can say hell no, if he wants.>>

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Maximus cast an appraising glance back at that. 'Fell on top of a seeker' sounded like a hell of a story, but for the moment he let it pass. Jazz was right. Wrecking a few targets was just what he was in the mood for at the moment.

He stared down at the abandoned compound. Amidst the routine buzz of his battle net powering through its usual checklists he heard Arcee's curt words resounding in the back of his mind. He thought of the moment where he came online in that heart of the demilitarized zone, in that strange medical bay that had once filled him with such dread. He thought of the neutral Cleaver, who had saved his life - and he thought of Optimus, whose life still hung on a thin line.

One big hand clenched into a fist. Maximus caught it and forced himself to relax with an audible vent. Think later. Concentrate on what you are here for.

If he could pass this test run without a system or structural failure, a line breach, if nothing seeped - he would be placed back on active duty. That was his understanding of the situation. With Optimus down every Autobot was needed on patrol, on monitors, sharp and alert and combat-ready. He was fit. He was ready. He would prove it.

He had to prove it a lot harder now.

"Just spare the eastern side of the compound," Agent Fowler had said in his sour way when asked about the availability of Rainier for a trial run. "We've got a team coming in two weeks from today who will be bunking down there. From the main road west you can blast whatever you want. Their combat engineers need some wrecks for their construction and demolition training anyway."

Maximus had been taken aback when Jazz had volunteered to escort him to the test range. Even more so to see that the Autobot seemed game for a little target practice of his own. He was not sure why that surprised him. Maybe it was because he had seen so few spec operatives in action before. They worked dark, behind unseen lines. Before the prison, Maximus had fought squarely from the front.

Had to admit, he was curious to see what Jazz could do.

"A little," he said, thinking of the big rifle on his back. He did not unclip it for the moment however, merely shook out his hands. He looked down the steep hill they stood upon, then took a step back. "Don't really know myself yet. Get a basic system test outta the way, and then… maybe I can give you some targets to fire on."

Maximus leapt.

He hit the slope and skidded downwards, his feet extended in a power slide. Dust roared in his wake. When he struck a shelf of rock the big mech leapt again, launching himself into open air. The wind howled in his audials as he dropped through his own cloud of dust, and then he struck the basin floor.

Without pause Maximus rolled to his feet and jogged to a halt, shaking dust from his plating. He turned back to the hill and looked up, his optics shielded with one hand. He was interested to see how a smaller mech would handle the sheer drop.

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<< OOC: That sounds fab! Max is all up for some sparring. He kinds wants to see what Jazz can really do Mysterious spec ops bots are mysterious! >>

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By the time Maximus looked up, Jazz was already moving. There were, of course, nice, SAFE ways to get down the cliff face, including using his claws or the gear in his subspace as pitons.

But why let Fort Max have all the fun?

Unfortunately, Jazz's best asset for these types of ascents and descents, his EM grapple, was off the table. What allowed him to turn the metal buildings and wreckage of Cybertron into his own personal jungle gym plain would not work on the organic and silicous rock here, unfortunately. Jazz mourned the loss.

Jumping straight off like Max had was a bit too long a drop for Jazz's comfort, but he trotted back to a slightly shallower, rockier slope, and gleefully leapt out into that instead. He slid for a bit, kicked off a rock outcropping, hopped down another, slid a bit more, caught another with his claws extended, swung and landed on another and LEAPT.... It wasn't the most graceful descent he'd ever made, but Jazz hopscotched down the cliff slope easy enough, breaking his fall with a foot or a hand on outcroppings as he went.

He kicked off the final rock and landed with an utterly unnecessary backflip. Just for fun, he threw himself into a series of fast, tight cartwheels and flips that ended with a long handstand, turning himself around on his hands, and falling down in a slinky arch before pushing himself to his feet a few mechanometers from Maximus.

Jazz grinned, twisting his torso and stretching. "Man, that felt good. No space for proper acrobatics in the base."

Unfortunately, the terrain around here was too rough for Jazz's low-slung alt. But, one final bend one way, then the other, and Jazz wandered over to the road, where he collapsed into his alt form and rocked back and forth on his tires a bit, revving his engine. "Race you to the turn-off?" His glyphs playfully acknowledged that this might be a bit of a one-sided contest.

<<Jazz is likely to tear into the western side of the compound like a bat out of hell and start using it for target practice. >>

[Deleted]

Primus, that mech was fast. Jazz had come down the hill like a shot, all casual speed and acrobatic ease. Judging from the look of the car that now sat humming on all four tires in the middle of the dusty road, he was even faster in his alternate mode.

This was a race that Maximus stood no chance of winning.

But he did not let that thought stop him from transforming into his own vehicle form. The big blue and grey tank crashed into the dirt and rocked on his treads. The sound of his massive engine firing up echoed back from the empty buildings, a loud and reverberating roar.

Dust billowed out from underneath the tank. It was not built for speed. Over the level desert he could accelerate to maybe sixty miles an hour. But as Maximus surveyed the road ahead and observed the way it bent and curved through the neighbourhood of rundown dormitory houses he realized that he did have one advantage over the spec ops agent. He doubted that it would win him the race, but he knew that this was not about winning. Or losing.

"I'm game," said the tank in a rumbling voice.

His drive train engaged with a snarl. Maximus lunged forward without a further word, his treads throwing up chunks of dirt and asphalt as they tore into the hardtop. He was destroying the street, but Fowler had said nothing about leaving it intact.

Black smoke swirled over him as he hit second gear. He clipped a street sign and flattened it. His engine bellowed as he charged through an intersection. Maximus knew that his head start was short lived. Jazz would likely overtake him in the pulse of a spark and blast off, leaving him behind in a cloud of dust. Directly ahead the road swerved back and forth between the abandoned dormitories. A car could manoeuvre the curves with ease. A tank could not.

Maximus did not even bother to try. When he hit the first curve he barrelled through it, launched off the side of the road and kept going, straight into the wall of a house.

The impact pulverized cinderblocks and sent chunks of concrete smoking and erupting into the air. The tank rolled through the debris as it collapsed around him and smashed out the other side of the dormitory. Rubble was still streaming off his back and flanks as he swung his main turret around and blasted through the next dorm in his path. Two seconds later the shell exploded out the last house in the row and kept on going. Four miles away it struck a hill with a tiny, distant burst of dirt and dust.

As he roared over the ruins left in its wake and crushed them beneath his treads, Maximus had to admit to himself… this felt pretty good.

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<< WOO, Jazz! Do some damage! XD That sounds awesome - Max will definitely toss some targets his way once he's a robot again XD >>

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Cybertronian engines were not Earthen engines. That was something that Cybertronians who were even remotely built for speed (like Jazz), never forgot, simply because, depending on their alt, they COULD floor it and go 0-60mph in an obscenely short amount of time that no Earthen engine could manage.

Jazz HARDLY EVER got to prove that, though. So opening up the throttle and shooting down the road felt SO GOOD. Probably as good as blasting through that building did to Fort Max. Jazz swerved around the curve and shot ahead of the debris as Fort Max turned it into rubble, his field a gleeful buzz as he cut in and out of the buildings faster than was possibly wise (even for a Cybertronian). He was not built for power, but he was built for speed and agility, and he used the human compound as a high-speed obstacle course, his tires screeching on the hot tarmac. When he'd shot out the other side of the compound, he fishtailed around headed back in, rocketing toward the highest and sturdiest-looking of the buildings, a three-story structure that might have once held offices.

On Cybertron, Jazz could use his EM grapples to climb and almost fly between the buildings. Here, he was stuck with only his own frame. He transformed, flipping up and hitting the ground running, then leaping onto the building with claws extended. Glass broke as he used windows for handholds and scaled the building fast and furious. He heard the structure groan a bit under his feet as he stood on top of it, but it held, at least.

Jazz couldn't say as much for the building that Fort Max was venting his frustration on. Jazz lifted his face to the sun, then turned so the star's radiance wasn't in his optics. He marked a few likely targets on the outskirts of the compound, pulled his blasters out of subspace, and queued up his targeting calibration algorithm. Time for some target practice.


<<Jazz'll blast away at things for a while, but that doesn't need to happen onscreen. Feel free for Max to get his attention or for Jazz to come up to him when he's done. >>