(no subject)

[fascinationex]

A direct continuation from A Guilty Mind. (AO3 link to that here.)

Note: this is the beginning of my 2019 nano, and is not as yet available on AO3.

---

:Do you really think he knows where he’s going?: Skywarp wondered. The channel might have been a tight one, but with Skywarp’s habitually lazy routing and nothing but the three of them out here it hardly took anything to pick his comm out of the interference. Starscream deciphered it before he’d even thought twice about it.

“Better than either of you,” he snapped, before Thundercracker could reveal whatever he felt about Starscram’s dubious leadership.

“That’s not saying much, is it?” Skywarp responded, giving up on private comms and just speaking aloud. Thundercracker just sighed again through his vents, spitting dirt out of the upper left in a little cloud.

The landscape of the wastes still spread out before them, apparently unchanged from how it had looked when they’d woken two days ago: dull grey and red metals, shaped by some aeons-passed volcanic activity. The overall shape was broad and flat, but there were creases, old veins and clumps where the molten metal had once run - now dry, hard and misshapen with ugly jutting protrusions of strange alloys and quartz formations that had built and grown over time.

Everyone knew that there was nothing but this stark metal landscape for mechanomiles, but that distance seemed longer when it was stretched out interminably before Starscream and not merely a map in a textbook. They’d long since abandoned the little winding road through it, the path mechanisms took to reach Iacon from Kaon.

Above them, the sky was bright and cold. The whole clear sky stretching huge and empty overhead was a strange novelty even to Starscream, who had lived for years in the upper levels with civilians. Thundercracker kept glancing up and shuffling his plating, wings twitching in sky-hungry, abortive little movements. Their edges caught that bright sunlight.

Just like Thundercracker and Skywarp, Starscream had not had much reason to come out to the barren wastes before – the only reason anyone ever came out from behind the walls of a city was to go to another city.

They weren’t walled to protect from anything out in the wastes that Starscream knew of – the walls were just there to protect each city against attacks from other city-states.

The cities of Cybertron had each been built upon an energon well, and energon was the food and lifeblood of their species; whoever controlled a well controlled… pretty much anything they wanted. They certainly controlled the mechanisms who needed access to that energon to survive.

Actually, in hindsight, it was little wonder that Starscream’s proposal – that there was energon to be found in the wastes, that it could be refined into fuel to feed the masses as the wells produced less and less – had been so poorly received. He wondered, suddenly, if he’d mistaken outright hostility from the civilian assessment bodies for mere disinterest...

There was certainly nothing in the wastes that could threaten a whole city of regular Cybertronians, although some of the mechanimals out here could be a problem for lone travellers or small groups.

Mechanisms used to be exiled to the wastes to starve.

Starscream didn’t like the implication that he might have brought the three of them out here to the same fate. Not when it was really only him who had to run from the city. Thundercracker and Skywarp had just…

“It’s not like people weren’t starving in the cities already,” Thundercracker had pointed out, that first morning, when they’d rationed out what energon they had with an unhappy eye on their tiny stores.

“Bet they’re starving a lot slower,” Skywarp had muttered.

But for better or for worse, they were out here with Starscream now.

Astrotrain had sent the one broadcast, boosted somehow much further than a private comm line, just to let them all know that all three of them were wanted mechs -- they'd all be arrested and detained, if they came back.

Well, fine.

“I know where I am going,” Starscream snapped, “and none of us is going to starve.”

“Didn’t mention starving,” Thundercracker pointed out, just as Skywarp said, “Sure, sure, of course,” in a tone that sounded not at all as though he actually believed Starscream.

If he really did expect to die out here in the barren wastes, he was certainly acting sanguine about it. Starscream scowled harder.

He wasn’t lying to them. He did have a pretty good idea of where he was going. He had even flown over it, once, in a very great indulgence. It was a long way out, and he’d taken several tanks and still been running on fumes when he returned – it was why he’d never bothered to land. If he had, he wouldn’t have made it back.

Walking, like they now were, conserved much more fuel – but it was so very, very slow. Still, beyond Thundercracker’s first scouting flight early on that first morning, not one of them had flown. Even Skywarp, despite his… entire personality, really… knew that the had to conserve what fuel they had. Starscream wasn’t sure about he others, but he keenly felt the weight of the remaining energon in his fuel tank.

“We won’t make it today, though,” he admitted after a long, unhappy silence.

Skywarp groaned loudly, and was ignored as he deserved.

Thundercracker looked up at the position of the sun above. For the first time in any of their lives, the sun had become more meaningful than the number spat out by their chronometers. It didn’t matter if it was 14:00:23 or 34:00:23 anymore. What mattered was nightfall.

At dusk, after the long, bright, cold light of day, the wastes came to life – and it was no longer safe to traverse them in so small a group. Not that it was completely safe in the daytime, really, the dangers of fuel exhaustion being what they were.

---

That first night, they’d tried walking on through the night when the sun set. It had been reasonable then. Astrotrain was long gone, so it hadn’t been as though there had been any civilised place left to recharge – although, Starscream had supposed, civilisation would not be waiting for them when they reached their end destination, anyway…

They would have to make do in some way, then, but a big part of Starscream shuddered to think of recharging on the ground like some kind of a mechanimal might. Even turbohounds, should a person keep them, had berths.

Although Skywarp and Thundercracker were used to much rougher living than Starscream was, he doubted either one of them had the necessary skills to build a shelter and an adequate berth out of scrap and whatever metal existed out here – and he further doubted that either of them had anything useful in their subspace. They were lucky that Thundercracker had even thought to grab energon before they left to get Starscream and run the night previous.

As it was, that would be used up if any of them tried to fly…

Which was all the more reason to keep walking and arrive at their destination as quickly as they could possibly manage. Their supplies were insufficient as it was and wouldn’t last.

That was why, in that first night, they ignored the change from golden afternoon light to soft mauve dusk. Starscream had even thought it was quite pretty, in its stark and wild way: a soft mauve light that gleamed on the endless, smooth metal and dips and gentle bumps of the landscape, catching brightly on the occasional mineral nodes that stuck out. It was hard to appreciate any degree of beauty under their miserable circumstances, but he’d noticed it all the same.

“Can you hear that?” Thundercracker had wondered, only a moment or two later, tilting his head. His blue plating was a downy grey in the half-light, which looked very well on him.

Starscream paused and listened, and decided he could indeed hear something. It was soft at first, but the noise of it rose and rose over only a minute or so, until ‘can you hear that?’ seemed like a stupid question to bother answering.

It sounded like the dull, ground-vibrating hum of some great engine, but the landscape was so flat and expansive that it seemed like anybody with such a powerful engine would be perfectly visible.

Starscream looked up, even though it certainly didn’t sound the first thing like a shuttle, and –

“Oh,” he said, unable to come up with anything else in the moment.

It was not the hum of one huge engine – it was the combined sound of many, many smaller creatures. What light remained came multicoloured in endless refraction through the curved and fast-flicking wings of a great many small, flying mechanimals.

“Hey,” Skywarp said nervously, knocking wings with him to get his attention. “What the pit are they?”

“I think,” said Starscream slowly, “they’re… insecticons?”

He’d seen them in a couple of image captures, and viewed a greyed out, dead one in the university once – but none of that did justice to the light trying to filter through their translucent little wings, or the sheer number of them fluttering up above, or the noise of them.

“What the frag is an insecticon,” Skywarp said.

Starscream glanced sideways at him and then rolled his optics up again. “That, you cretin.”

“Right, right,” he muttered. “But what do they do?”

“Do?” Thundercracker repeated.

And that, of course, was when the first of them dived upon them and took a chunk out of Thundercracker’s wing.

“Scrap!” he snarled, and smacked it off one-handed. It slammed into the ground with a sickly crunch, and while Thundercracker clamped his hand over his sluggishly-leaking wing, the sky went absolutely insane with sudden, wild activity.

Little metal bodies dropped to the ground and swarmed their fallen fellow, releasing high chittering noises – communication, Starscream figured, although not in any language he knew. The shrill screel of tearing metal made his back strut crawl and his insides cringe.

Both he and Skywarp automatically closed in with Thundercracker, and just in time, too – the insecticons, having sensed food, flew into a frenzy of screaming, trilling, buzzing violence, and it was all they could to do to smack them off.

“We need cover!” Thundercracker yelled.

That was true, but the issue was that there was no cover. The whole plain was flat!

“There’s nothing out here!” Skywarp yelled back, voice increasingly strained over the cries of the little monsters.

Starscream bared his teeth and flung one of the little monsters into two of its fellows before it could bite through his armour. His fuel levels weren’t that bad – he’d been topped off before they left, and all the high-grade he had consumed the night previous had, for once, helped something.

He let his onboard weaponry charge with a whine that was drowned out entirely by the swarm, set it to its broadest range, and shot, cutting a swathe through their ranks.

The air filled with the smells of ozone and burnt metal wiring, and the sudden thud thud thud of small bodies crashing to the ground was accompanied by a change in the insecticons as well: they shifted targets, hungrily diving for their downed and dead fellows.

More tearing metal.

Ew.

“Here, I found it, here –”

Then Skywarp yanked on his arm, and Starscream turned and stumbled after him, following blindly where he led. He found himself squirming into a little – a very little – space between two rising mineral outcroppings, grown so close that he might have mistaken them for one big rock jutting out of the metal with only a casual glance.

Darkness closed suddenly in overhead as a huge polyethylene sheet was hurled over him. “Shove something through the hole at the edge, and then move over.”

“There’s nowhere to move over to!” Starscream felt out a grommet in the dark and shoved a scrap of metal through, jamming it into the ground below with as much strength as he could muster. It held, and then Thundercracker was beside him, and then a half-second later Skywarp was shoving in.

In the end he couldn’t pull the tarpaulin the whole way over their minuscule hidey-hole with him just next to them, and his legs had to be hauled over Starscream’s cockpit to allow him to slam a persistent insecticon into the ground with one balled fist – crunch – and then pin the tarp down around them.

There was nothing for a moment, but the ticking of their systems, the roar of their fans, and the noise of the insecticons outside. Without the rattle and clank of scrambling bodies and colliding metal pieces, it seemed suddenly very still and silent.

Starscream shuddered. Thundercracker’s leaking wing was close. In the dim illumination provided by their tiny, twinkling bio lights, Starscream could see into the bite. It had dented the armour – even Thundercracker’s armour, as thick and heavy as it was – and torn in the middle, where the pressure had been greatest.

It wasn’t deep, thankfully, but Starscream could see how many mouths would make light work of even a heavily-armoured seeker.

“So,” said Skywarp cheerfully, wiggling his thruster, which was very nearly in Starscream’s nose, “that’s what insecticons do.”

“Apparently,” said Starscream, and shoved his thruster. It clanked into the rocky wall, but didn’t move very far. He tilted his head out of the way of Thundercracker’s wing and rested it instead on Skywarp’s leg.

“Uh. Hey there,” said Skywarp, shifting.

“Don’t move,” Thundercracker said, flatly.

“How’s the wing?”

“It’s shallow. It’s fine.”

“The bite is leaking,” Starscream corrected. “But it’s not big. Are you getting any errors?” An error in his reads from the injury site might indicate that there was something in it, some kind of poison or contaminant, which was absolutely the very last thing any of them needed to have happen right now. He stayed very still, leaning hard against Skywarp’s wayward leg, waiting for the answer.

“I don’t think so,” Thundercracker said finally.

His vents opened wider of their own accord, a soft sigh.

That was fine, then. “I think they only came out because the sun went down,” Starscream said, letting his optics turn themselves on again. Their red glow bounced off Skywarp’s plating, very close to his face. Better, he supposed, than seeing it hit the rock wall three inches away. He hated the thought. He already missed the sky.

“You think? It’d be better than them just showing up now because of the season or some dumb scrap,” Skywarp said.

Starscream hadn’t thought of that, and the idea filled him with dread. How were they supposed to get anywhere if those things filled the sky all season? Oh, they could out-fly them – but they didn’t have the energon. Would they crawl, covered by their stupid plastic blanket, across the wastes? Preposterous.

Skywarp seemed to be taking Starscream’s guess as gospel, though: “We can just find somewhere to hide every night, right?”

“Sure,” said Thundercracker, shrugging his wings. The heavily-armoued flats of them scraped on the metal in the dark, and Thundercracker flinched at the change in pressure against the shallow bite. “If there is anywhere.”

“That will slow us down.” Starscream was aware of their limited supplies, and already determined to get to the gorge of the singing crystals. If nothing else, he had a point to prove.

“I’d prefer to be slow than eaten,” Thundercracker pointed out.

Skywarp whined, a low stressed sad little engine noise, but nobody paid that any attention.

Starscream’s guess proved to be true: at dusk, in the fuzzy grey light between day and night, the insecticons swarmed. Prior to this misadventure, the only occasion upon which Starscream had even seen an insecticon was a preserved and long-dead frame in the university library. It sat in a titaniplex case where nobody could touch it, and existed as a strange and curious artefact of the only, long-passed, Autobot scholar who’d had a great interest in such things. ‘Weird stuff that lives in the wastes’ wasn’t a well-loved field of study, unless somebody had proven that the weird stuff could be useful to city mechanisms – and insecticons were virtually the opposite of useful.

But now, Starscream had encountered more insecticons than he ever wanted to. They came out from wherever they hid at dusk in great, humming dark clouds, and they scoured the landscape like a plague of hungry, winged scraplets.

As far as Starscream could tell, the only thing that an insecticon loved to gnaw on better than an unwary seeker was another insecticon.

And then, at full dark, the ferrowolves came out. This would have been fine, if they didn’t travel in packs, and if they weren’t so capable of scenting fresh energon – of the kind an unwary seeker might be leaking, had he been set upon previously by hungry insecticons.

After the first full night out here, huddled together in their awful little shelter, listening to the ferrowolves outside sniff and growl and pace, slavering at the smell of Thundercracker's leaking wound, they had unanimously decided not to travel in the dark. It wasn’t worth it.

Rather, the three of them would huddle behind some structure that kept them out of the iron dust that blew on the howling wind, cover themselves in a tarp, and huddle miserably until dawn. Perhaps, when they stopped moving, they might find a way to construct some less pathetic a shelter. But until then, it was the miserable huddle or a chassis full of rusting bites. And one thing none of them had brought out here was a rust prevention kit for wounds. Pit, they didn’t even have a grinder for debridement.

If – no, when. When Starscream proved that they could get energon out here (cementing himself as a brilliant scientist in exactly nobody’s mind, back among his colleagues, since they’d probably never even learn of his success), the next thing they would need was oil. It mattered little what kind of oil to begin with. It could all, as far as Starscream understood, be refined. But metal joints required it, and he could already feel the grit in his joints.

Seekers were military models, but that didn’t mean that their systems were hardy, exactly – it took a lot to prevent them from functioning entirely, but it was relatively easy to disable systems. Their systems were… ‘finely tuned,’ might have been a better description, really. Followed closely perhaps by ‘delicately balanced’ and then even ‘finicky’. And Thundercracker and Skywarp hadn’t been in perfect condition to begin wi –

Thundercracker snatched Starscream by the arm before he could faceplant into a burrow. Primus only knew what had dug through the lumpy metal that made up the surface in this part of the wastes.

“Easy,” Thundercracker said neutrally.

“Yes, yes,” Starscream muttered as he regained his balance, embarrassed and dismissive. He brushed him off. Thundercracker rolled his optics.

“How do you think people know where to drill for oil?” Starscream asked them.

“What,” said Skywarp blankly. Then, “Wait, oil comes from the ground?”

Starscream made a low, annoyed noise and raised his optics to the sky. “Why did I bother asking you,” he complained.

“I bet Scrapper would know,” Thundercracker said, “but this far out, we’d need to boost our signal to ask.”

Starscream had vaguely heard ‘Scrapper’ mentioned as part of a construction crew Thundercracker had done courier work for, but knew only that the whole group was Decepticons and had, therefore, been poorly paid and paid poorly in turn.

He had a better idea of how to boost a comm signal than of how to find oil, though…

“The sun’s setting,” Thundercracker reminded them.

Skywarp whined softly through his vents. “Nnooo.”

“Fine,” said Starscream, ignoring him again. “Let’s find somewhere to stop.”

---

Starscream was the smallest of them. It wasn’t exactly a matter of frame type – it was that, in rejecting the usual Decepticon occupations and trying to pursue research among the civilians instead, Starscream had intentionally forgone thicker armour. Any upgrades that his native nanite colonies had tried to build over time, particle by tiny particle, had been carefully curtailed with medications – sometimes not obtained so legally – and painful debridements of the kind usually only required for injuries that had been allowed to rust.

In his career as an alternative energy scientist, it had served Starscream adequately – but out on the barren wastes, he was more fragile, less powerful and easily chilled. The only benefit he now saw was that in being smaller and lighter, his systems required relatively less energon to move. And that was not much benefit, really, because Thundercrakcer and Skywarp needed more and he wasn’t about to leave the safety of the group.

The days out in the wastes had so far been bright and cool and crisp, but when the sun set there were no clouds to trap heat, nor any walls or generators or layers of roofs above. It was a blessing to see the open sky with its incredible array of colours and sparkstopping, inviting breadth. But it was unmercifully cold after dark.

Starscream’s lighter, more efficient systems worked against him.

“No,” Thundercracker insisted, waving their shared tarp meaningfully, “you get in the middle. The shivering of gears will keep us awake again otherwise.”

“I didn’t shiver,” Starscream protested, baulking. Skywarp shoved him – not very hard, but enough for the impact to sway him forward, towards Thundercracker. He shot a glower over his wing even as he went.

Their shelter that night was to be a tall outcropping of metal – an alloy so mixed as to be largely unidentifiable just by touch or sight, although the green edges suggested oxidising copper. It was tall enough that it rose above their helms when they sat curled up with their wings pressed back to it, and sharp enough that the cold wind didn’t reach them over its top. They settled in, three in a row with Starscream reluctantly squished in the middle between the others, and pinned the large, worn tarp over their frames.

This part was suffocating, but as soon as the sun’s dying rays stooped below the horizon the buzz of insecticons flying filled the air. The high, thin sound, Starscream was pretty certain, was from their thin wings sliding rapidly across each other, rather than any irregularity of their engines. He wouldn’t have minded examining one in the wild himself, actually, but they were not exactly friendly and they ate their own dead struts and all, so it didn’t seem like he’d get the chance any time soon. He didn’t want it badly enough to brave the swarm.

They sat in tense silence, listening to the metals in their environment tick unpredictably as they contracted in the cooling dimness, and beyond that, to the rising drone as the insecticons took flight all across the land.

“This sucks slag,” Skywarp muttered, leaning heavily over on Starscream. The muffled darkness under their tarp was full of the taste of static and the smells of three mechs who needed a wash too badly for the close quarters in which they found themselves.

Starscream grunted. He shoved back against the extra weight, but he didn’t say anything by way of protest. Skywarp was right. It sucked slag. He reached for something comforting. “This time in two days we’ll be refining energon in a way no mech has dreamed of in recorded history,” he said, encouragingly.

Skywarp heaved a deep sigh through his vents. “Yeah,” he said. It did not sound very encouraged.

“You didn’t have to come,” Starscream sniped, before he could catch himself. Neither empathy nor impulse control were strengths of his, as his Autobot colleagues had told him over and over.

Skywarp didn’t recoil in hurt as one of them may have, though, and even Thundercracker just hummed.

“Yeah, usually when you’re courting a trine mate they go for, like, ‘bring me fancy polish’ or ‘prove you can crack the sound barrier in under three astroseconds,’ not ‘run away from our entire society with me’, Skywarp said, smacking Starscream’s wing with his. It sent a powerful shiver through Starscream’s wings, which almost distracted him from the chill that settled into his tank at the actual content of Skywarp’s words.

Trine courtship was – not a thing Starscream had ever even considered fr himself, for the simple reason that civilians did not trine.

A trine was, as far as Starscream knew, a military unit, based around the capacity for a rotating watch schedule. Three members had simply been accepted at some point among Decepticon flyers as the smallest stable social unity. Among Autobots, social units of more than two equal partners (not including dependants) were rare and occasionally considered to reflect poorly on their members.

“If we’d wanted to trine with someone easy, we’d have picked someone else,” Thundercracker said placidly, evidently misreading Starscream’s sudden tension.

Skywarp snorted, blowing iron dust out through his vents. In the enclosed space between them, it lent a rusty, sickly smell to the air.

Outside, an insecticon smacked into their tarp.

Starscream flinched.

The warm shape of it sat heavily on the cover for a moment, graspers scratching at the smooth outer coating. All of them went still, more with disgust than with actual fear that it might get through. Starscream could imagine every one of its weird, spindly appendages – the strange mandibles with their naked gears and hinges, disgusting – as it crawled. It sniffed and then gave a low, spiteful buzz when it recognised the tarp between itself and their delicious metal frames.

A second later, it took flight again.

He felt Thundercracker shudder.

“Stupid things,” muttered Starscream darkly.

The removal of that distraction, unfortunately, allowed him to concentrate again on the matter at hand. He’d known intellectually at least that Skywarp and Thundercracker had formed an incomplete family unit on their own – at least according to the standards of their own culture, if not according to any of the civilians with whom Starscream spent the bulk of his time. But foolishly, he had never imagined that they had intended for him to be the missing piece.

He had – intentionally, really – spent no time with any flight-capable Decepticon before meeting Skywarp. He had only vague ideas, mostly inferred from popular media (rarely produced by Decepticons themselves at all) about how trines worked, and almost none about how they were actually formed. And of course neither Skywarp nor Thundercracker had thought to tell him because – what kind of seeker wouldn’t know?

He wondered if he should tell them now that he had no idea what a trine courtship actually entailed. What would happen then? Would they leave him and return to the city, knowing that he had not entered into whatever agreement they had inferred existed between them? He shuddered.

“Are you still cold?” Thundercracker wondered.

“No,” said Starscream shortly. His processor was working so hard, fuelled by mixed emotional feedback, that he was probably running warmer than usual, actually. His fuel pump was certainly running faster than it should have been, just sitting here.

If he pretended he knew what a ‘trine courtship’ looked like, Starscream ran the risk of failing at some expected task or role before he even knew what it was. If he’d still had access to the university, perhaps he might have been able to view the sociology materials and work something out from there. It was certainly where he would have chosen to start…! But he had no such access and he would not at any future point that he could see.

He rapped his fingertips gently against his cockpit in a quick, nervous staccato beat.

Would they leave him out here if they knew? And was that risk significant enough to take the alternative flight path and risk making a mistake in his ignorance…?

“Screamer?” Skywarp prompted. He sounded drowsy, despite the infernal noise of the swarm overhead. Starscream himself was too high strung to sleep until the sounds stopped later in the dark cycle. “’S wrong?”

“What could possibly be wrong?” Starscream asked rhetorically, snide. Skywarp just grunted again.

“Recharge if you can, Skywarp,” Thundercracker advised, equally weary-sounding. “You’ll keep listening for trouble, right, Starscream?”

With both of them deep in recharge and therefore unwary, there was absolutely zero chance of Starscream relaxing enough to slip accidentally into recharge. “Yes,” he agreed.

“Don’t forget to wake me when you get tired this time,” Thundercracker added.

Starscream hummed, a sound with no commitment in it. Their systems wound down slowly, dropping from the subtly uncomfortable whine of stressed engines to a much duller, lower sound of fitfully recharging mechanisms at rest.

With them both out, nothing but big warm metal frames on either side of him, in the suffocating dark under their shared tarp, the night seemed very long indeed.

He rested there while the other two recharged, with his sides uncomfortably warm and his back and front cooling unpleasantly quickly. The atmosphere outside was full of buzzing and scuttling, a sound that seemed to prickle dramatically right down his back strut. It went on and on, and with nothing to do and nobody to talk to, Starscream’s anxieties, usually held back by the performance of his ego, bubbled up to the surface.

He had more significant concerns, unfortunately, than whatever cues he had clearly missed from Skywwarp and Thundercracker: their dwindling supply of energon, the life and career he’d left behind, the creeping worry that, despite his best efforts and considerable genius, his theory about the singing crystals was utterly incorrect and he was leading them all to ruin and starvation out here…

He couldn’t muster the self discipline to kill the processes properly, sunk too deep in self-indulgent pity, and so he sat there, listening to the insecticons and checking his chronometer over and over, simply wondering at how very slowly time could pass.

At length, at about the same time as he managed to shore up his anxieties with the reminder that, despite what anybody else may have thought or felt, his research was good and his theory was sound and it made good sense because he actually was just as clever as he thought he was, the noise of the insecticons began to die down and lessen. He let his vents clear in relief to hear it, blowing out warm gasses and cycling new ones through his frame. It chilled him a little but the change in the noises let his plating loosen up a little anyway – cooling down was inevitable.

Distantly, a ferrowolf howled, sharp and clear like metal sliding on metal, and the noise went straight through the lingering buzz of insecticon activity.

The sounds of the insecticons cut off completely at that stimulus, plunging the night into eerie silence.

A moment later another, more distant cry answered. Despite being fiercer individually, the ferrowolves posed less threat to them than the insecticons in general. They hunted in smaller packs, as far as Starscream knew, and they’d only ever shown interest (so far) when Thundercracker had been leaking fresh energon out into the open air. Otherwise, they seemed to regard the seekers as something too large and well-defended to bother with.

Starscream swept the tarp down away from his face and uppermost vents. It was brutally cold outside now that the sun was no longer shining, but at least the air was clear in his vents and he wasn’t just cycling through whatever Thundercracker and Skywarp were blowing out.

The metal parts of the landscape still gleamed indistinctly in the light of the two moons. There was a dull glow from several varieties of crystal, which could not be seen easily during the day, and occasionally the distant, sharper light of a mechanimal creeping by.

Starscream had heard of places where it was truly lightless after dark, but though the wastes of Cybertron became dim and the loss of the nearest star’s rays leeched all the colour from the landscape, there was still plenty of light. His optics shifted sensitivity modes, more concerned with calculating depth and seeking patches of shadow and light than with colours, but he was still better off with them on.

Unless he was trying to recharge. But he wouldn’t even bother with the attempt until Thundercracker came back online to full function. A ferrowolf cried again, like a siren in the distance. Again, a distant voice answered it. Starcream tipped his head back and peered up at the moons, and the dim light of the stars. Nothing stirred nearby.

He wasn’t sure how long he was awake, listening and watching the landscape. The most interesting thing he saw was a retrorat, scurrying over a nearby lump of greenish copper alloy. Its little biolights were greenish, too, although they were dim and flickering – it, too, was probably hungry out here.

The insecticons would eat anything, and the ferrowolves hunted the retrorats and crunched essential metals out of indigestible stones, as far as Starscream remembered, but he didn’t really know what the small things like retrorats ate out here. If he’d seen one in his laboratory, he’d have been shocked and disgusted, but out here… well, retrorats were just one more vile indignity to suffer out in the wastes.

He felt filthy, and without anything better to concentrate on his processor had the opportunity to catalogue every bit of grit in his joints. Starscream contemplated the polish in his subspace and wondered if he’d ever feel clean enough to use it. Maybe they –

“Ugh,” said Skywarp. “Did you let Thundercracker sleep through his turn?”

“What?” Starscream startled. He’d heard the change in Skywarp’s engine, but he’d attributed it to all the rubbish in their vents, not him waking up.

“Ah… it’s fine. He’s tired, anyway, let him. You should recharge, too, I’ve got it.”

Starscream wasn’t sure he could recharge, actually. But he rapidly proved that concern unfounded. It seemed only moments later that he was being roused once more – this time by Skywarp standing up, removing all support from his right side. Half-aware, he sagged sideways, cracked one wing into the ground, and yelped in surprise. Right next to him, Thundercracker jolted awake.

The sun was rising over the ridge of hills in the far distant horizon.