Point Blank

[fascinationex]

Content: In which Starscream arranges to make a quick stop on Cybertron for personal reasons, and the Autobots intercept a fragment of a transmission between Megatron and his second in command that reveals that a superweapon is being built to threaten the Earth.

Notes: Follows on more or less from Backwards Compatibility although you don't really need to have read the one to understand the other. To summarise: all we learn in Backwards Compatibility is that Starscream and Megatron would like to interface, but that their frames are not naturally compatible so Starscream will need to produce an adaptor somehow. Crossposted here.

---

Starscream had not contemplated, at the beginning of his day, that he might never be able to look directly at Optimus Prime ever again.

No, Starscream's day, like so many days on this disgusting mudball, began with an argument with Megatron.

He, Thundercracker and Skywarp were flying, ostensibly as part of a scouting run. It was mind-numbing. Luckily he was an excellent multitasker.

"As I told you," he said over the comm line, "I will need to get-" he hesitated for a split second, because although he accepted that Soundwave knew almost everything, it didn't necessarily follow that a given topic could be mentioned on a line that Soundwave was monitoring.

There was a massive difference between Soundwave knowing a thing, and Rumble and Frenzy - who lived in a position of privilege in his chest compartment - knowing a thing.

And Soundwave was always monitoring.

Caution won out. "-components for the item. You do want it built, don't you?" he needled.

Megatron didn't even respond to that obvious bait. Pity. Starscream knew he was wanted, but that didn't mean he ever tired of hearing how much.

Instead of delightfully assuring Starscream that he certainly did want to plug into him enough to facilitate having an adaptor designed and built, Megatron said, very boringly: "The space bridge costs energon to activate."

He said it slowly, as though he was explaining it to - to Skywarp, or something. Like maybe Starscream was so slow he'd forgotten that little fact.

"Why can this - task - not be completed by the Constructicons?"

And now they were just flying old routes again. Megatron knew that Hook could certainly create an adequate adaptor. And so could Shockwave. Probably even Soundwave, if necessary. Certainly they all had more experience in the necessary engineering than Starscream himself.

Megatron knew it, and he knew that Starscream knew it. And both of them knew that the only thing keeping Starscream from having had it done already was sheer humiliation. Rumours were one thing - a thing he'd learnt to live with, since they'd been going around for millions of years at this point - but he was too proud to have it confirmed beyond all doubt for the brutal Decepticon rumour mill that he really was letting Megatron up his ports.

"These are very delicate components," Starscream flat-out lied. "I'm not letting Hook get his grubby claws into them. It's a single space bridge activation-"

"Two," Megatron corrected implacably, voice thick with the rumble of an engine far heavier than any gun actually needed. Starscream could imagine him, half-listening as he reclined in the throne aboard the Victory, reading his own field reports from a data pad.

He curled his lip. Really, Megatron should feel honoured that Starscream was so willing to desecrate his own equipment with a clunky, ugly adaptor just to let him plug in.

"We'd be sending supplies back anyway," Starscream dismissed that. "It's one extra space bridge activation. I do realise," he added, with spite and relish, "that the Decepticon army wouldn't function without me. With only your bullheaded, graceless little ploys to keep it aloft-"

"Spare me," Megatron interjected, sounding bored. And irritated.

"-but I'll be back before you have time to miss me."

"Of that," said Megatron, in a tone that was getting to be the perfect mix of irritation and grudging tolerance to facilitate Starscream getting his way, "I'm certain."

---

Communication lines were always vulnerable to listeners. It was one of the many ongoing struggles of the war: how to encrypt, how to store, where to store, the relative desirability of backups versus the security thereof... Every message, once committed to a line (and some even before then - Soundwave was notorious on both sides of the lines) was vulnerable not just during transmission but after as well. For of course comm lines must be monitored, and of course that data had to be stored somewhere - and not all in the processors of communications specialists, who were themselves vulnerable to physical attack and, generally, best kept reasonably sane and in working order.

So while Starscream's chatter had been censored for the likes of eavesdropping mini-cassettes, he had not considered its potential impact on any Autobot who might pick it up. Why would he, when that was so obviously Soundwave's problem, and when any breach could be blamed on him should it occur?

Unfortunately, in this case, it would turn out to have ramifications for Starscream.

It was Jazz who plucked a broken fragment of a transmission up out of the mess of staticky and half-captured messages ghosting along through the airwaves later that cycle. It wasn't very clear, but it seemed like cause for alarm.

'Get components for the 'item',' was a phrase that sent up some flashing red lights, but it didn't automatically scream 'weapon' to Jazz. There were a lot of other things that phrase could mean. Worse than a weapon would probably be some new energon harvesting technology - worse for the Earth and their human allies, anyway.

Of course, the moment Red Alert dipped his protocols into the de-encrypted transmission he said, "They're going to blast us off the planet from orbit!" and had to be coaxed back to normal operating parameters by a medic.

"I find that doubtful," Prowl assessed after only a few moments' processing, while Inferno hovered awkwardly over Red Alert in the background, mostly making a nuisance of himself with ineffectual 'there there's, "as that would risk damaging a great many of the Earth's valuable energy sources, and they would not then be able to drain the life out of it if they blew it up."

They were huddled for an emergency meeting in the officers' mess of the Ark, which was really the only place that fit everybody who needed to be there at once. The bright orange of the room's worn walls seemed to cast everything with a cheery warm glow.

Jazz was maybe not the only one who relaxed a little, hearing that assessment. Red Alert's logic circuitry wasn't what you'd call reliable, so nobody believed every security concern he brought up. But when he was right he was, unfortunately... horribly, catastrophically right.

Then they all tensed grimly back up when Prowl added: "Starscream's insistence on maintaining control of the project is a concern."

'Decepticon science' usually meant some insane new invention from Shockwave or, increasingly, the Constructicons. Most of the time it was safe to forget that Starscream had ever even attended the science academy.

"His interests are political, not scientific. That means that whatever this 'item' is, he finds it important enough to want to take credit for it."

"So it is a weapon," Ironhide growled, looking thunderous.

Jazz considered it, but he doubted it. Starscream's specialty had never been in weapons engineering, after all. A more advanced energon harvester seemed abruptly closer to reality, and the thought chilled his circuits enough that he fought the urge to clamp his plating down to preserve what heat remained in his internals. He knew it wouldn't help. It wasn't a physical cold.

It didn't matter if the Decepticons made a new super weapon or not, if they got limitless power for their current weapons - which, after all, did plenty of damage on their own.

"Possibly," said Prowl, in a neutral sort of way that Jazz took to mean he was thinking along the same lines as Jazz. Ironhide's steadfast courage was an inspiration throughout the long years of the war, but he didn't have much imagination. The two might have been related.

"It doesn't matter what it is," Optimus Prime interjected gravely, cutting through the back and forth so that the whole room went silent to hear him - even Red Alert, who had otherwise been hurling his exploding planet theory at the bulwark of Ratchet's benign disinterest. "For now, it's just component parts - ones rare enough that Megatron would send his second in command back to Cybertron to get them."

The implications of energy expenditure were big. They didn't know quite how the space bridge worked, but it did require power, and that meant energon. The Decepticons did not have friendly humans to supply their energy needs, so whatever they spent on this was coming from their raiding. Jazz tried running the numbers himself, but their understanding of how much energon the Decepticons were actually getting, as well as how much they were sending back to Cybertron, was incomplete.

"It's our responsibility to make sure that these parts don't make it back here into the hands of Megatron and his Decepticons."

"Right," came a chorus, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, from around the officers' table.

"Guess I'd better get to work finding their next space bridge coordinates," said Jazz cheerfully. At least if they stopped them from completing the damned thing, whatever it was, it didn't sound like the Decepticons were going to get another shot at it.

"Indeed," said Prowl gravely, but his optics were already dim, his processor chewing through probabilities at a ferocious rate.

Jazz left him to it, feet clinking softly as he retreated. He had the exact bot in mind for this particular job.

---

"I seem to remember," said Starscream silkily in the wake of his extremely boring scouting report, "that you weren't concerned about the energon used up by the space bridge when it was you Shockwave was sending back to this," he flicked his fingers, "quaint little mudball."

He was, as it was always wise to be when intentionally antagonising Megatron, outside of easy grabbing range. This did not put him outside easy shooting range, but being aboard the Victory helped a bit there: if Megatron's fusion cannon hit it in the right spot, they'd all be swimming.

The throne room was already dim around the edges, lights at minimum to allow for a low energy expenditure. The Decepticon cause was sending much of their supply back to Shockwave as it was.

His precaution paid off when Megatron's huge frame turned toward him with a hiss of pressure and a soft whir of mechanisms beneath his armoured plates.

Starscream watched the glowing embers of his optics track his frame, track his position. Megatron was big and graceless, and beneath that broad, dull unlovely frame was an infuriating amount of raw power. Starscream wanted to dig his fingers into his seams, bathe in the heat of his frame and feel the crackle of all that power in his own circuits. He smiled, and his combat systems never once dropped out of standby.

Instead of raising his arm, Megatron bared his teeth, just as Starscream had hoped. "A necessary expenditure," he sneered through his clenched teeth, "given the state of my army upon my return!"

Starscream's contemplative smile fell away.

Ah, yes, well. There was that. The Decepticons could be... hard to control, in Megatron's absence. It wasn't Starscream's fault they were so disobedient, of course. Megatron had clearly been responsible for the state of military discipline among the rank and file for too long, and it had suffered for his gross negligence. Never mind. Starscream understood this now, and could plan around it in future. (He did not think persuading Megatron of the value of military discipline was a good plan - for one, Megatron would never go for it. And secondly... on the off chance he did go for it, he might think to apply it to Starscream, which was just not the idea at all.)

Still, despite their moronic disobedience and collective, ungovernable temperament,the Decepticons under Starscream's leadership had suffered no worse than they had under Megatron.

"Whose leadership led us to a derelict ship stuck at the bottom of the ocean?" he wondered aloud, carefully positioning himself in front of a valuable control panel.

Megatron's expression suggested that he was about half an astrosecond from taking a gamble on the ship's integrity just for the sheer pleasure of shooting Starscream, so Starscream went quickly on: "Not that any of that's important right now. Honestly, Megatron," he wheedled, leaning back comfortably against the panel, and if the overhead lights gleamed on the covers of his interfacing equipment, drawing attention to where the cables and ports were tucked away, well, that was just a vagary of the Victory's poor lighting. "It's, what, a few extra astrolitres? We'll make it up with one successful raid on a soft target. Now you're just being recalcitrant."

He examined the tips of his fingers. There was a paint scuff there. His auto-repair would take care of it in a cycle or two, but he didn't like seeing it.

Megatron was eyeing him still, he knew, without even looking up. If he had to break it down, he'd call the expression on Megatron's face fifty per cent irritation and frustration, ten per cent grudging amusement and forty per cent pure thwarted lust.

"As I've said," he rumbled, electing not to pay attention to Starscream's insults and temper for the moment, "Hook could-"

"Hook's not shoving anything up any one of my ports unless I'm actively in danger of becoming permanently deactivated."

He had no doubt that Hook would be delighted to help.

He wasn't sure if the inevitability of every Decepticon on the planet - and a few who weren't - finding out that Starscream was willing to have his outputs measured (and recorded for posterity) just so he could be fitted for an adaptor that would allow Megatron to plug in was more or less mortifying than the Constructicons' likely enthusiasm for the... the measuring process.

"That could be arranged," Megatron rumbled to him, leaning back in his throne.

Starscream's optics flickered to the huge fusion cannon mounted upon one arm. Megatron's smile was less subtle and more vicious than Starscream's.

He shuddered. It was mostly internal, but he was pretty sure one of his wings shivered outwardly, because its sensors gave him a whole host of new information about atmosphere, pressure, temperature and nearby obstacles.

He knew that if Megatron truly threatened him, if he really powered up that huge gun and pointed it at Starscream's helm, he'd back down - as he always did in the face of greater power. He'd scramble, and he'd whine and argue and wheedle, and, at length, he might even beg, but he'd submit. Eventually.

He watched Megatron, wings straining and trembling for more data, eyes alight, and waited for it.

His insides felt inexplicably, traitorously hot.

He waited for it.

And then Megatron grunted, and although he didn't say it, he shot Starscream a sneer like he thought Starscream was being absolutely ridiculous, and he was just too busy and important to bother correcting him.

"Fine," he growled, a rumble that Starscream could feel in his armour, "You can organise that 'single raid on a soft target' to account for it then, Starscream."

Starscream's plating shifted, almost imperceptible in the dim light. He relaxed back against the console. His wings were still again. And his internals were still soft and warm. He let his optics dim.

Having to take on an additional raid was annoying, but better than a smoking hole in one of his wings, or Hook's instruments up his ports - or both. As loath as Starscream was to admit it, Megatron was being astonishingly biddable on this one specific point.

Too bad it wasn't one Starscream could use for leverage. Pity that the plans for Megatron's next move against the Autobots didn't hinge on access to Starscream's ports.

(He tilted his head thoughtfully.

Megatron was being astonishingly biddable because he wanted to plug into Starscream as soon as possible with as little argument as possible, and Starscream could almost taste the heady power of that knowledge.

He could feel himself getting all hot under his armour just thinking about it.

...So the plans for Megatron's next move didn't hinge on access to Starscream's ports yet.

He filed a reminder.)

Outwardly, he scoffed. The big idiot made it sound like Starscream was going off on some personal jaunt, and not just fulfilling Megatron's own orders. There were scores of mechs he would not need an adaptor to interface with. His own trine, for example. It was only Megatron's clunky hardware causing this problem.

This was a thought Starscream elected not to analyse too closely in the hopes that he wouldn't come to any uncomfortable but inevitable conclusions. His day was going so well, after all.

Starscream would take a short raid and a lot of whining over the indignity of an examination. "My pleasure," he said, in an ambiguously sincere tone.

"Go," said Megatron, grumpy and dismissive.

Finally.

Stascream smirked, pushed off the console with an only-slightly-exaggerated stretch, and sauntered away. He could feel Megatron's optics lingering on him. Mmm. Satisfying.

---

"Wait," said Skywarp, while Starscream was psyching himself up for the trip through the space bridge. "Why are you going?"

Starscream eyed the big purple gate. Sure, Megatron had survived it. And several unranked Decepticons. A few Autobots. A human, even, that one time. That did not mean that this time would go fine. In fact, it would be entirely in keeping with the general trajectory of Starscream's life if this was the one time the stupid space bridge did malfunction.

"Obviously," Starscream drawled, watching everyone who was not him loading the transport, "I have business on Cybertron. Is there a maximum load for this thing?" he demanded, turning toward Soundwave. This suddenly seemed like a question he should have asked much earlier. This space bridge technology was some half-baked invention of Shockwave's, wasn't it? Who knew what could happen.

"Maximum tolerance not exceeded," Soundwave reported blandly. Everything he said was said blandly, in synthetic echoing tones, so it was hard to tell if he was making fun of Starscream or not.

Starscream usually chose to believe he was. Today, he glowered at him but he also chose not to respond to this fresh antagonism.

He looked around instead. The local star- Sol, it was called - was shining brightly through the atmosphere today, lighting the planet in colours that Starscream was at last beginning to grow accustomed to: the changeable blues and greys of the daytime sky, the strangely bright greens and browns of the earth.

The space bridge coordinates were located in a gorge this time, and the shadows provided strange texture to the light. The components of the bridge had been set up with practised familiarity, forming a big purple ring out in the middle of nowhere. The path was clear, and it would fall to Starscream to direct the transport manually - Megatron had refused to require another soldier to do it, since Starscream 'was going anyway', even though dull grunt work was not exactly Starscream's area of expertise.

"What business?" Skywarp prodded cluelessly - because he was, in fact, clueless.

"Classified. Aren't you meant to be loading cubes?"

"They're loaded. You know I'll find out eventually, right?"

I hope not, thought Starscream darkly.

This thought was the triumph of hope over experience. Hoping Skywarp would never learn something wasn't quite as futile as hoping Soundwave didn't know something, but he did like to stick his overly long nosecone into everything. This would be fine, but he used the information he gathered for moronic pranks instead of something respectable - like, say, giving Starscream material for blackmail. Idiot.

"Then you can wait," said Starscream loftily.

Skywarp synthesised a noise of exaggerated despair, and Starscream ignored it. Business as usual.

"Is it embarrassing?" he asked then.

Starscream shot him a sharp sideways look.

Appallingly, Skywarp seemed to take this as assent rather than bewilderment. His wings gave a telltale little tick, shifting upwards, attentive, on point. "Starscream?" he prompted, slinking one step closer.

Starscream could not help but interpret it as a predatory step, like a prelude to the hungry circling behaviour one saw occasionally in feral cybercats.

"No," said Starscream steadily. "Are you malfunctioning? I said it was classified."

"Classified can mean lots of things."

The sky turned black, and that gave Starscream the excuse to pretend that his audials had gone temporarily offline and that he could not hear Skywarp's frankly concerning line of questioning. Space bridge interference! Just terrible.

He fairly leapt upon the transport, earlier discomfort forgotten. Then he hit the beam, and it turned out that space bridge interference actually was terrible, and that, along with the screaming static in his audials and the unpredictable flashing of his visual field, was all Starscream thought about for what seemed like hours upon hours.

The space bridge was between many things, slotted into unpredictable reaches of reality, where light moved at a very different pace. It was... cold.

He arrived in Shockwave's workshop with all his plates clamped down tightly and his internals positively shivering to produce more heat.

Well, that was unpleasant. No wonder the drones were always kicking and screaming about being forced to drive the transport.

"Megatron! Supplies received," Shockwave was saying when Starscream stepped out of the receiving chamber.

"Very good, Shockwave," came Megatron's familiar voice, and, realising that he was likely on the view screen, Starscream forced his plating to unclamp and lifted his wings before moving into view.

Megatron glanced at him exactly once before making a face and closing the connection. Charming, as usual.

Shockwave turned from the screen, abandoning his perusal of the console and its flashing lights and cascading figures on-screen. The height of Cybertron's architecture - so much larger than anything on Earth - made Shockwave seem smaller than he was. Like Megatron, he transformed into a weapon, but unlike Megatron's vastly overpowered mockery of an Earth gun, Shockwave did not shift mass in the process. He was smaller than Megatron - but not by much.

Also unlike Megatron, Shockwave couldn't hit a retrorat in a barrel. Starscream smiled at him.

"Starscream," he said with a delicate balance of both confusion and guarded hostility.

Starscream did not take it personally: hostility was very normal from any Decepticon of a certain degree of ambition, and one didn't get to be the trusted guardian of all that remained of their whole home planet by being unambitious. So he didn't take it personally. But he paid attention.

"I was not aware that you were expected," Shockwave said.

"Yes," drawled Starscream, flicking one wing idly, "how strange that you might not be privy to every command decision made by your superiors on the Earth base." The emphasis on 'superiors' came out without his conscious permission - but he meant it and it was true anyway, so he didn't bother to try to smooth it over.

It was hard to read anything from Shockwave's face, since it was just a giant optic, but the light of it grew larger as the iris spiralled further open, taking in the details of Starscream's appearance.

That could have meant anything. Starscream did not let it unsettle him. Much.

"I have business for Megatron in the city," he said finally, which was more of an explanation than he felt he was truly required to give to Shockwave. "I will return shortly, and you will alert the Earth-side base to the new co-ordinates for the space bridge for my return."

Shockwave gave him a long, steady look. Of course, all of Shockwave's looks were long and steady.

"Stascream. What, exactly," he began.

Starscream cut him off before that question could get out of hand. "What Megatron chooses to make his senior staff aware of is not my concern," he flat-out lied, in blatant defiance of the entire history of his association with Megatron and indeed the Decepticon cause in general.

Shockwave's pause invoked a hint of incredulity, which Starscream ignored.

Evidently logic, or at least expediency, must have dictated that there was no more to be gained in arguing with Starscream about it. Megatron had clearly seen him when Shockwave had confirmed receipt of the supplies of energon, and had made no comment on it. Any further questions were not as urgent as Starscream's business must presumably be, given the resources expended in conducting it.

"I will await your return," Shockwave said neutrally at last, which was what he should have said from the beginning. He returned his gaze to his console, apparently no longer interested, but then he added, like an afterthought: "The drone can remain to unload our supplies."

Starscream stilled.

"The drone," he repeated slowly.

Shockwave also stopped typing.

The room was very quiet for a second, just the dull hum of machinery and the soft sounds of their own internals.

"Yes," said Shockwave, "the one who accompanied you through the space bridge."

He gestured to the screen of his console where a series of figures that Starscream did not have the requisite expertise to understand were displayed.

"There was no drone," he said. "I was controlling the transport."

His first thought was an Autobot incursion, but it didn't make much sense: there was not much for the Autobots on Cybertron. The planet was long since dead, that was why they'd left it in the first place. And if they were trying to spy on the Decepticons, well, Megatron was on Earth - that was where all the command decisions were being made.

Intelligence would come secondhand through Shockwave, and Shockwave's own security was not at all to be sneered at.

Unless they'd known Starscream was coming? But how likely was that? Most of the Decepticons hadn't known that until he'd shown up at the bridge site.

...More likely, Starscream thought suddenly, expelling a rush of warmth through his vents that he immediately felt the loss of, it was Skywarp, making a nuisance of himself because Starscream had thwarted his curiosity. He felt a cable in his neck creak ominously. Skywarp was too easily distracted to send on actual stealth missions, but the ability to teleport made him very hard to locate, when he wanted to pull something.

"Is it likely to be a false report?" Starscream asked.

But he was already resigned to the alternative even before Shockwave said, "Negative. My system does not glitch."

No, of course it wouldn't.

"I will have the facility searched," Shockwave said, although his optic lingered on Starscream as though he thought he might be up to something nefarious. Hardly.

Starscream drew himself up to his full height and lifted his wings proudly. "See that you do, Shockwave."

If Skywarp got caught sneaking around where he wasn't meant to be, that was his problem. And just in case he didn't... Starscream took off, letting the extra fuel fire through his engines so he could effortlessly crack the sound barrier. Top speed was brutally energy inefficient - but on the other wing, Skywarp couldn't teleport to him if he didn't know where Starscream had gone in the first place.

If he had lingered, however, he might have noticed the footprints of a mech with a light ground alt mode pressing into the metal dust outside Shockwave's tower. Quietly, Mirage lamented Starscream's absurd top speed, which posed a much more difficult problem to him than Shockwave's security sweep...

---

Cybertron was different: Starscream remembered the great glittering spires of Vos and intricate, winding streets of Polyhex, filled with the soft collective purr of engines and the gleam of light on chrome. Flying over now, the whole planet felt deserted, derelict and dark, with not even a faint glimmer of light - except that which came from Starscream's own frame.

When he landed, his bio lights glanced off motionless shapes in the dark. Sometimes it was debris, sometimes just the shapes of sagging buildings in need of maintenance. And sometimes it was the reflective, wide optics of a slumped Cybertronian, left where he fell and permanently offline. Once, he startled a retrorat that had been fruitlessly scavenging in the dark - but that was the only life or movement he encountered.

It gave Starscream a sort of savage pride to see: war was what the Decepticons were, and they were good at it. Good for it. Every dead frame was a triumph to their cause, and one more soldier Starscream had personally outlived. An Autobot might see lightless Cybertron as a symbol only of despair, but Starscream's feelings were more complicated.

Yes. It had been beautiful in places. And yes. They had destroyed it. But that destruction was just testimony to Decepticons following the demands of their own nature; a victory.

He had to kick a dead triple changer out of the way to get to the entry of his old apartment. Its chest and helm came away from the rest when he did, clattering on the metal sheeting. The movement exposed dead and severed connections in its pelvic segments and a hideous swathe of ugly, crumbly rust.

Starscream stepped over their still arms and into the apartment. With a roof overhead, not even starlight could penetrate so far, and certainly nothing that used energon was still running in the place. It was black.

He dialed up the brightness of his own bio lights to compensate, but the chief data on his surrounds came through his wings.

The apartment was as much of a catastrophe as Starscream's quarters upon the Nemesis had been, and as much as his quarters on the Victory yet were - every place Starscream had stayed on every vessel he'd served upon had this in common. He complained about needing more space, but ultimately the truth was that clutter was that rare solid that behaved exactly like a gas: it expanded to fill the space available to it.

He toed aside an empty tin of polish, rolling it along the floor with a dull hollow sound, and tried to remember where he might have kept an adaptor. Interfacing primarily with other seekers meant that he had not needed one in millions of years, so... Berthside, probably.

He picked his way through the things strewn across the floor - data pads, the packaging for an energon treat he had not seen in forever, an empty container of Sleekstream's speed wax - and toward the berth, which had not been made before he left. The soft, breathable microfiber covers were still crushed against the far wall where he'd left them.

The berthside table was similarly cluttered, but he did find an adaptor eventually, buried beneath a history of atmospheric sciences that he'd never gotten to finish.

The adaptor was an innocuous looking thing, if you didn't know what you were looking at: a bulky grey box with the same kind of ergonomic handle used in virtually every kind of mechanical product. Beneath the glossy cover, which retracted with a click, would be alternative plugs and ports, made in a variety of shapes and sizes. The purpose was to allow charge to be swapped directly between incompatible frame types. Tactile overloads could be fun, but they took a long time to work up to and a delicate hand. And even then, often a mech craved...

Starscream's fingers drifted over the closure of the adaptor, optics dimming a little. In the deathly stillness and absolute privacy of this old forgotten place, he could lick his lips and contemplate the delicious sting of Megatron's charge singing through his circuits.

His fingers clicked open the adaptor, deft and dextrous, and slid across the plain and uninteresting aperture of a fake port with intent. It wasn't the same. It wasn't even close. But it was an aid to the higher processor where his imagination matrix threw possibilities up to think about. He could feel prongs against his thumb, disappointingly lifeless - but later, once he'd taken it back, broken it open and done a little engineering of his own...

He was going to sink deep into Megatron's processor, sprawl luxuriously out through every process and protocol. He was going to drink him up like high-grade, to dig deep into his processing and never relinquish his hold, to seep into Megatron's thrumming, overwhelming, powerful frame until...

Starscream blinked slowly. Optics off. Optics on. His fans were humming, a soft and gentle sound that was nevertheless loud in the dark.

This... was a thought he could finish later.

At least he wasn't cold anymore.

He subspaced both the data pad and the adaptor, and then went digging for another. He knew he had, at one time, had one for the different sizes and power capacities in arrays between himself and Skyfire - wishful thinking, in the end, and present-day Starscream bitterly wished his naive past self had not wasted so much time pining pathetically - and that would be a much better model to work from, practically speaking. Megatron was smaller, and his power capacity - perhaps - greater, but it would operate similarly in principle.

Starscream completed the bulk of his mission undisturbed by anything except his own memories, despite the spectre of Skywarp's interference looming like a cartoon anvil waiting to drop.

This alone should probably have tipped him off that something was not quite right, but he wouldn't let it. Instead, he flew back to Shockwave's lonesome post in the old fortress and landed lightly, ignoring the ugly burns his thrusters left on the ground outside. If the original builders of the building (who had certainly not been Decepticons) hadn't wanted scorch marks, they'd have chosen different building materials.

Symptoms of the severity of Shockwave's security sweep made themselves evident two steps inside the entryway, where there was the still-smoking little body of a fried retrorat. Starscream picked his way delicately around it. Megatron may call him squeamish, but there was such a thing as being civilised. Starscream might kick a dead mech out of his way, but he certainly was not about to step in vermin.

"No intruder has yet been found," Shockwave warned him when he sauntered into the command centre.

If it was Skywarp, and Starscream had no reason to suspect otherwise, it stood to reason that Shockwave would not be able to find him so easily. Skywarp's rank would probably even have let him right into some of Shockwave's files.

"Well," Starscream said lazily, unwilling to share this insight, "at least your - ah - 'security system' will reduce the number of vermin scuttling around, even if it catches you no actual spies."

Shockwave gave one short, full-framed shudder - plates flaring out and clamping back down again rapidly in time with his own conflicting urges. "Starscream," he said in a low voice, and Starscream abruptly remembered that he was more or less alone here, and that the whole building was under Shockwave's control, and that Shockwave turned into a rather large cannon. He might not have been able to aim for scrap, but at a certain range, he didn't have to.

He waved one hand dismissively. "Send them the new co-cordinates. Megatron will be expecting me back as soon as possible."

Actually, he rather expected that Megatron enjoyed an occasional reprieve from Starscream's relentless snide criticism - all the more reason to disappoint the old fossil. And better, he judged, to remind Shockwave that he was expected back.

Shockwave's single, unreadable optic stared unblinkingly at him for a few long moments, and then at length he turned back to his console. "Sending coordinates," he said flatly.

Finally. Starscream could hardly believe that he wanted to return to Earth - via a hideous space bridge journey, at that - so much. But anything was better than the empty cities of Cybertron with nobody but Shockwave and dead vermin for company. Truly, he thought as the space bridge buzzed with building energy, if Skywarp was going to sneak around trying to find out what Starscream was up to, the least he could do was to come out and offer a distraction from the silence.

"The space bridge is fully operational," said Shockwave, minutes later. "I wish you success in your mission, Starscream."

Unlike when he whimpered it pathetically to Megatron, that phrase really meant 'please leave immediately,' when it was levelled at Starscream. Starscream did amuse himself for a moment thinking what Shockwave might have thought had he known the true nature of Starscream's 'mission'.

This moment of distraction cost him, because it was then, as he was only steps away from the unpleasant beam of the space bridge, that someone clobbered him over the back of his helm.

"Starscream!" barked Shockwave in alarm, a few astroseconds too late for a meaningful warning.

"I'm afraid I cannot let you return with those components!" said a voice, and even if Starscream had not vaguely recognised that posh elocution, he would have known from the tone - so grim and righteous, how embarrassing - that the invisible speaker was an Autobot.

Starscream swore, stumbling and off balance. He'd been so sure that the infiltrator had been Skywarp pulling some juvenile and moronic prank that he'd dismissed the possibility of a real enemy infiltra-

Wait.

"With these components?" he shrilled. He was both alarmed, and, peculiarly, deeply offended. The Autobots were trying to control who he linked up with, now? "Why the pit not?"

He whirled on Mirage, whose expression registered a brief, unsettled confusion. Good! That made two of them!

"How did you even -" No, he wasn't going to ask how the Autobots had known he needed an interface adaptor. There was no situation in which knowing how they'd come by that information was good for Starscream, because it came perilously close to asking why they thought it was important, and that was the information he was really trying to avoid.

Instead he regained his footing and reached into his subspace for his blaster. His fingers closed on a familiar feeling handle, and he yanked it out without looking.

"It doesn't matter," he said, bracing and narrowing his optics as his software settled and targets bloomed bright, ominous energon-pink in his visual feed. He raised the weapon. "If you come here, Autobot, you're nothing but a victim."

Mirage stared at him, at first in determination, and then - and then in strange, detached, dawning horror.

And then Starscream realised that, in groping in his subspace for his blaster, he'd neglected to think about all the other things with which he had so recently filled it.

What he had pulled out to use to threaten Mirage was not, in fact, a blaster. It was a large capacity interface adaptor. There was a frozen pause. An expression of absolute mortification crossed Mirage's haughty features.

"Excuse me?" he demanded.

Starscream looked from Mirage's scandalised face and then down at the heavily insulated adaptor with its thick, unadorned cover.

"You heard me!" he snapped back. He felt oddly detached, and was mostly running his mouth by rote.

He shoved his hand back into his subspace to find his actual blaster. He closed his fingers around what seemed like a familiar grip, and only managed to pull out a second, even larger capacity, adaptor.

This one wasn't even closed properly. Its thick, insulated cables tumbled right out over his hand, over his wrist, in the open. Their connectors dangled lewdly. Its ports gleamed under the lights.

Mirage made a noise that was mostly static.

It could not even have come close to what Starscream was feeling right then.

"Shockwave," he snarled, because apparently Shockwave had decided to stare in mortified horror as well, "shoot him!"

Mirage flinched, Shockwave unfroze himself and began using the unattractive cannon that made up his entire left arm for actual shooting, and Starscream clutched his adaptor to his chest plates and hurled himself into the beam of the space bridge before anyone could get the bright idea to shoot at him.

Distantly, he heard Mirage begin to yell urgently into his comm even as he rolled away from Shockwave's blasts.

But then the space bridge had him, and there was only colour and light and icy cold. The time and space hurtled past him in a dizzying rush. Whatever was going on in Shockwave's command centre was no longer Starscream's problem.

In hindsight, however, he probably should have expected the Autobot ambush on the other side.

He stepped out of the space bridge's broad purple gate, letting his plating unclamp a little under the heat of Sol permeating the clouds above, and had only an astrosecond to think there's nobody here, before it occurred to him that this meant they had been drawn away.

He twitched, gripped whatever he was holding - the stupid adaptor, he thought, bemused - harder to his chest plates, and dug for his blaster again. This time he grabbed the barrel, so he knew it was the right damned object when he whipped it out of subspace.

It quickly went flying when a golden sports car slammed into his back.

"It's like jet judo," someone screamed giddily as the force of the impact sent Starscream tumbling, kicking up dirt and dust and shrieking fit to murder someone through sheer volume, "but on the ground!"

...Sunstreaker was heavier than he looked, Starscream thought dizzily through a haze of errors and warnings.

He discarded them, which was enough to allow him to register sensory data again: the smells of oil and hot metal and energon, the steady grind of organic grit and dirt migrating into all his seams and joints.

He shoved back against Sunstreaker's weight, trying to wiggle out of the dirt. He didn't budge, and since they were in a ditch in the dirt, it wasn't as though Starscream could drop altitude and roll.

"Don't even think about it," Sunstreaker growled.

Starscream thought about it. His engine gave a deep, unhappy cough with the effort.

First Mirage, and now this.

This was an unprecedented degree of aggression from the Autobots on Earth. Starscream wasn't even leading a raiding party. There weren't even any humans involved. He was just making a return trip from Cybertron, via space bridge, yes; but it was a... personal matter.

"Just what do you think you're doing?" he snarled.

"For the good of the Earth," intoned Optimus Prime in his obnoxious, deep tones somewhere above Starscream's head - from where he wasn't sprawled in a ditch. "I'll be taking this."

And then he pried loose the object clutched in Starscream's claws.

"For the good of - I-" Starscream squawked. "You-!" In desperation, his afterburners fired, throwing him forward and bringing him, and Sunstreaker, skidding through the dirt and grime.

"Holy -" whatever curse Sunstreaker was yelling was cut off by a mouthful of dirt, hurled into his face by one thrashing wing.

His momentum was quickly arrested by the addition of at least one more Autobot to the pile in the ditch. Sunstreaker grunted sourly, and Starscream's plating groaned under the extra weight. A compression error flashed red. He ignored it.

"Are you malfunctioning?" Starscream howled, arching his back as far as he could so he could really screech it into Optimus Prime's stupid face. Someone got a wing to the head, which served them right.

This meant that he was looking directly at Optimus Prime's face when he turned the object over in his hand. His battle mask hid much of his expression, but his optics went wide and paled a little, and his heavy engine turned over, primed to flee the sudden surge of what Starscream certainly hoped was his well deserved mortification.

"This..."

"Is that the weapon?" a wet, meaty voice asked from somewhere near Prime's foot. Starscream hadn't noticed it there. He wasn't sure which one it was. Humans were all so small and damp and warm. Very hard to tell apart.

"No," said Optimus Prime slowly, in a tone of synthetic calm, the sort that usually covered some other, much less flattering emotional state, "No, it's not. I think there's been a misun-"

And that was as far as he got, because Soundwave arrived and shot him with an enormous, echoing thoom that rattled the ground and, more importantly, rattled Starscream.

Prime jerked. The scent of charred circuits and hot energon hit Starscream's chemoreceptors. Prime made an unhealthy noise through his vents, then dropped the adaptor in favour of scooping up the human.

Starscream flinched against the familiar roar of Megatron's absurdly overpowered gun alt mode being fired once more at close range, and then Ravage hurtled full tilt into Sunstreaker, teeth-first.

Above the squeal of tortured metal he could hear the whir of Megatron transforming again and then the boom of his voice across the field. "Optimus Prime!"

Starscream was more or less free - only partially tangled in a pair of angry, if shiny, Lamborghinis, which he quickly threw off when he transformed and took off at maximum thrust, afterburners firing. He heard someone swear loudly behind him at the resulting force, which was a beautiful side effect.

His sensors picked up the tiny scuff of his adaptor as it went skidding across the dirt. Starscream had not subjected himself to this entire farcical experience to see either of his adaptors crushed beneath some vile little Autobot wretch. He felt his emotional subsystem glitch and ignored the sensation entirely. He killed the resulting warning without looking at it.

Starscream's lips pulled into a fierce snarl. "That's mine!" he shrieked, and he performed an acrobatic twist in mid-air, let himself plummet for a terrifying second of roaring wind and heaving fuel tanks, and then scooped it up from almost underneath Brawn's clumsy feet.

"Starscream!" the Autobot yelled, jerking back from his unexpected dive. Then, actually paying attention, he added, "Wait, is that an ada--"

Starscream was already in the air again. He fired with his onboard weaponry, sending Brawn crashing.

"Hey!" bellowed the Autobot from below, "Get back here and fight me! Coward!"

It was not a compelling argument, and neither was the chunk of concrete he ripped up from the ground and hurled at Starscream. It went whistling past his wing, close enough that he had to bank sharply to avoid being struck.

"ENOUGH," roared Optimus Prime in a voice fit to carry over half of Polyhex. "Autobots -- retreat!"

"But Optimus!" yelled the human's disgusting meaty voice over the sudden confusion of clanging metal and clean synthesised questions, "It's Starscream! He's still got the components!"

"There's been a misunderstanding," Optimus Prime said, in a voice thick with strain but which nevertheless carried. "A -- misunderstanding. Let -- let Starscream go."

He said it as though he was having trouble parsing 'let Starscream go' as a complete sentence, and several voices rose in equal confusion.

"You've gotta be kidding me," growled Ironhide, even as he shoved Skywarp away hard enough to facilitate his own retreat.

"-- oh, gross," yelled one of the sportscars, the red one with the flashy finish. He was already in vehicle mode, engine revving crudely at his own twin, "Sunny, that's disgusting--"

Surprisingly, Megatron also called a retreat -- the completely pointless nature of the conflict having apparently won out over the innate urge to do glorious violence.

"Aww, come on," Frenzy complained, loud enough to carry. Soundwave, impassive behind his face mask, ordered him back even as he warily disengaged from Jazz.

"Was that an adaptor?" Jazz yelled, brazen and loud over the sounds of melee.

"You can't just ask him if that was an adaptor," someone else hissed back to him.

"Negative," said Soundwave flatly, smoothly rising on his antigravs just as soon as Ravage shot out of the nearby foliage to leap for his chest compartment. Whether this answer was intended as a 'negative, it certainly wasn't' or a 'negative, I am not discussing this with you or anyone' was harder to tell.

"I'm pretty sure--"

"Starscream!" crowed Skywarp over a trine channel. "So when you said classified--"

Starscream turned tail and flew at speed toward the Victory. Unfortunately, though he could flee the Autobots, he couldn't escape his own trine.

---

"So-o-o," said Jazz into the silence of the officers' mess. "That... happened."

Nobody responded. Optimus Prime did lift his head from his hands, briefly, to eye Jazz.

Then he put it back in his hands.

"Who," began Ironhide, face scrunched up in confusion.

"Come on, mech," said Jazz, trying, delicately, to spare them all that conversation, at least. "You know who."

Ironhide's face did something complicated that Jazz thought probably indicated he did indeed know who, just like the rest of them.

Optimus Prime made a noise, muffled from behind the hands that were still covering his face. It ...was not a great noise.

"At least it wasn't a weapon," Prowl said. He sounded uncertain, like perhaps his battle computer was telling him that this was a good thing, but his social programming was significantly less sure.

Jazz knew how that felt, but he nodded encouragingly. "Right, at least it wasn't--"

"What if they were using it as a decoy," Red Alert interrupted urgently.

Everybody politely ignored him, except Inferno, who twitched in his seat and patted him gently on the arm. "Red... It was not a decoy."

"But what if--"

"So it wasn't a weapon," Spike said, loud enough to drown out Red Alert's fretting.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but if there really was one bot on Earth who could use an adaptor and a nice, friendly bot to use it with, it was probably Red Alert. He was so high strung one day his wires were gonna snap.

"But what was it?" Spike finished.

Hmm. Explaining that sounded like a job for someone else.

"Oh, oops, sorry," said Jazz, standing up with a degree of cheer that indicated that he absolutely was not sorry, "I've gotta debrief Mirage." He waved at Optimus and Prowl. "Wouldn't want to be late on that report, right?"

And he headed for the door. Smooth.

"Jazz," said Prowl urgently, apparently realising that Prime was in no way fit to respond, and that Ratchet was off patching Suntreaker.

Since Prowl was neither Optimus nor Primus himself, Jazz elected to pretend he hadn't heard -- and by the time he'd done that, he was already halfway down the orange corridor of the Ark. Crisis averted.

At least it hadn't been a weapon.