(no subject)

[fascinationex]

Short, scrap. A few thousand words of attempting to figure out what Starscream Character Voice (tm) should sound like, since I maybe want to write a longer fic in his POV for April's camp nanowrimo this year? Episode tag for this scene is 'Divide and Conquer', episode 06, although obviously the aired cartoon is... not from Starscream POV.

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Megatron did not even come to see them off, which was just a typical display of his disregard for the work of the mechs under his command -- by which Starscream meant himself. Nevertheless, he was forced to regard this as essentially auspicious in its own way. His plans had a terrible tendency to go awry just as soon as Megatron showed an interest.

“Maybe if so many of them weren’t about killing him,” Thundercracker had suggested once, and of course Starscream had ignored him. But then even when he deigned to pay attention, however briefly, to Thundercracker's ridiculous suggestion, it turned out that after controlling for that little trend as a factor, Starscream’s plans were still statistically less likely to succeed once Megatron was involved in any capacity at all. The reveal of this information had been met with a shameful degree of disinterest from his trine.

“A good leader would be here to see his troops off,” Starscream hinted as they took off, with what passed for subtlety among decepticons. It was best not to get too subtle when you were talking to Thundercracker and Skywarp, after all. You had to make sure the stupidest common denominator could still understand you.

“Yeah, sure thing,” Skywarp agreed vaguely, in the tone of one busy thinking of pretty much anything else. So Starscream had, maybe, aimed a little too subtle.

He reset his vocal components with a peeved click.

Their take off was just as smooth and graceful as forcing the entire air corps out of recharge at the beginning of every cycle to fly drills until they dropped could conceivably make it -- luckily for them. It also looked good, and that made Starscream annoyed all over again that their only audience was the spectre of Soundwave’s surveillance, which loomed as a matter of course over the whole base.

Where was Megatron, even? What was their mighty leader doing that was so important he would favour it above looking to his own raiding parties? Polishing his fusion cannon?

The atmosphere of the alien planet offered enough resistance to make atmospheric flying pleasant: it gave them strange winds, odd drafts rising from the ground, the beat of the bright yellow star above them. It was also full of dust, dirt, strange organic matter and foreign chemicals, which would need to be scrubbed away later, but for the time being it was pleasant and harmless.

There was something soothing and homey about the roar of engines from Skywarp and Thundercracker thrumming so close, tightly in formation with him. This discipline was not likely to last long, but it did not need to. The raid would be fast. That was the point of taking only fast, light flight frames: no waiting for the infantry to trundle along catching up, no worrying about what ground vehicle their covering fire might hit...

The humans’ camera surveillance did not pick them up. Three seconds of work led Starscream right to the weakness in their security -- which was the people, because it was always people, and all he had to do was ask a human for access via a line of white text on a screen. Starscream did it on the approach, half paying attention, and made an unflattering staticky noise through his speakers when the human just hit return and gave him permission, apparently automatically.

It appeared for all intents and purposes that nobody was even going to notice him writing over today’s files with yesterday’s to cover their approach.

Well! So much for human ‘surveillance’.

“Foolish little insects,” he muttered darkly, feeling... curiously slighted. There was something to be said for a nice, easy raid, but they could have made a bit more of an effort.

Unappreciated on all fronts and spiteful about it, he lined up a bunch of delete directory commands and triggered them just as the trio of jets circled, swooped low and crashed into the wall of the humans’ dull little facility. Their impact took out most of one side of the building in a rain of concrete and dust and clattering rebar.

In amid the panic and chaos -- and the loud little barks of their tiny organic ventilation systems, which fought against the minute particles from the wall in the air -- the humans didn’t immediately notice the loss of a few thousand files, because... of course they didn’t. Organics.

The flex, whir and click of transformation with its humming compressions and predictable metallic shifts was familiar, but the crunch when Thundercracker landed was decidedly not. Starscream glanced his way reflexively, over the sharp polished angle of one of his own wings gleaming in the flickering overhead lights. Thundercracker was studiously not looking at his own transformed feet, with their thrusters coloured the alarming red of new rust -- new rust, or the similarly iron-heavy, organic ‘blood’ which went just as bright when it hit the oxygen in this planet’s atmosphere.

...Yes, well, that happened sometimes, didn’t it, when the natives were smaller than petrorabbits and half as clever. Constantly underfoot. Squishy. Messy, too.

There was a pause.

“Gross,” whispered Skywarp, into the moderately freaked out silence of their communications line.

Thundercracker ignored him. But he still didn't look down.

The humans did make a token effort at resistance, but it was more funny than effective -- funny for Skywarp, anyway, whose humour tended toward the juvenile.

“Ha! Look at them run, Starscream!” he crowed. He darted teasingly between the shots of the humans’ firearms -- not likely to do much damage, even had they encountered his armour -- and engaged his warp drive with a laugh that turned to breathy static when he teleported.

Teleportation brought him behind a little squad of the tiny, poorly-armed insects. The group of them jumped and whirled, opening fire again. It was equally ineffective as it had been before.

Skywarp’s mounted guns were a lot more efficient, even if he fired them wildly and giddily.

The more sensible of the natives rapidly commenced evacuation instead of resistance. This was a -- rudimentary -- military factory, and it looked like it was intended for fabricating weapons, so there would be a more organised response shortly. But they’d be gone by the -- there was no autobot presence, and their reports had indicated that there weren’t any outposts close enough to cause problems with a sufficiently fast raiding party.

Starscream saw no need to wait around for combat with the quaint local life forms.

“Drain the factory of its energy,” he commanded in a ringing voice, surveying the sparking electronic bays and flickering screens imperiously.

“There may still be some buttons we can push!” he heard one of the humans declare in a tone of utmost determination, and he scowled. Buttons they could push. Since they still hadn’t noticed the ribbons he’d sliced their directories into, he rather doubted it. His red eyes narrowed. Stupid, conceited little things.

Starscream returned fire to 'cover’ his comrades (and more importantly to send the humans squealing and scattering like the lesser life forms they so evidently were) and then supervised closely while Skywarp and Thundercracker activated the protocols that would turn the crude energy at this facility into proper energon.

The soft, welcoming pink light of it cast a dull but warm glow against the textured metal floors and scuffed walls, and shone on the plating of the other decepticons. This energon was of a very low grade, the kind used for fuelling machinery and weapons more than for giving to mechs, but even so, it was clean of the impurities you saw in the energon recycled from dead frames.

Starscream had looked at more than one fuel ration with a deep, internal urk before. Most decepticons had at one point or other -- before the war, or during.

An internal alert reminding him to check in with basecom distracted Starscream from the comforting glow of the new fuel.

“Keep going,” he said, waving indolently at Thundercracker, and turned away to report in. “Mission leader to decepticon headquarters,” he said, making sure that the increasingly large pile of energon cubes showed up in the background of his frame. It was a steadily growing monument to the success of Starscream’s current mission, and he intended for everyone in the control room to see it.

Basecom usually meant Soundwave, of course, but when his request went through, Starscream was immediately confronted with Megatron’s huge, shiny, clunky head. Even through the tiny viewscreen and against the roomy backdrop control room of the Nemesis’s control room, Megatron gave the impression of enormity.

It was actually worse in person.

Megatron made that face. The one where his brow ridge twitched and his glowing red eyes narrowed. Starscream could almost hear the soft hum of their zoom. “Report, then, ‘mission leader’ Starscream.”

“I," Starscream said, graciously ignoring the unnecessarily hostile manner in which Megatron drawled his designation, “have achieved complete success.” Obviously.

“Return with the cubes, then,” said Megatron, without so much as a perfunctory 'good job'. “We’ve received the new coordinates for the space bridge.”

“Surely,” Starscream bit out, “you wish to commend me for my efforts. After all, I was --” responsible for every part of this mission from concept to planning to execution, he didn’t get to say, because -- well. Because, of course, the second he began his report -- thereby involving Megatron’s stupid face in his mission -- it all began to unravel.

“Slag,” said Skywarp, loudly, and both Megatron and Starscream froze upon hearing it even though Starscream had a whole argument lined up for why he deserved recognition for this highly successful raid.

There was a certain tone of ‘slag’ that could make anyone twitch and take notice.

Starscream turned and glanced over one wing and, through the hole in the wall by which they’d so subtly entered, saw the approach of a huge, heavy semi. His first thought was an absolutely inane ‘I definitely didn’t call for ground troops,’ and then the light glinted from the shiny red finish of the semi’s cab, collecting in his photoreceptors and triggering a cascade of memory files, and then he, too, thought: oh, slag.

At the same time, he hissed aloud: “Autobots.”

Except, no, not just autobots: somehow -- and Starscream was attributing this to the catastrophic factor of Megatron’s involvement in one of his plans, again -- worse.

Despite all intel and logic to the contrary, it was Optimus Prime, boiling in from outside with his lights on high and his engine screaming in the settling dust.

As he went, a human leapt out of Prime’s cab, scurrying away from the impending battle. Grotesque, squishy little things. Starscream couldn’t imagine letting one of them inside him. His wings rattled with a shudder.

“Optimus Prime!” cried Thundercracker from somewhere behind him, amid the soft glow of the energon cubes they had extracted from the factory’s energy supplies.

“Very perceptive,” drawled Prime, with his voice booming out from behind his face mask. He was rendered blank and expressionless over it, just a glowering pair of blue-lit optics and a blank space where his mouth should have been. He thundered toward them, transforming on the fly. His engine, always heavy, was now an incredible roar that shook the components in the walls. The dull vibration communicated itself right up Starscream’s legs, which unintentionally but very effectively carried the implication of just how great his maximum power output might be.

Prime’s momentum brought him careening forward, right into the cubes, and Thundercracker staggered sideways, narrowly avoiding being sent flying with their spoils.

Starscream’s cables and joints creaked gently with his tension. This could not have been a planned response -- Optimus Prime was all alone, and even a Prime would have trouble with all three of them. Starscream was still tempted to call an immediate retreat. Optimus’ arrival meant, inevitably, that someone was getting slagged, and he’d rather it wasn’t him.

Megatron must have somehow read the hesitation on Starscream’s faceplates, because he sounded outraged when he snarled from the com line. “You outnumber him three to one! Get in there and destroy him!”

Starscream’s wing twitched. He was right -- this time. For a change. For once. “With pleasure,” he said, insincerely. His processor was already calculating. Prime had a lot of power, but he didn’t fly -- and he certainly couldn’t be in three places at once. They had this. “Skywarp -- Thundercracker --” his voice cracked and screebled unpleasantly, “attack!”

Decisively, Starscream cut the communication line. Nothing about this situation could be improved by more Megatron.