(For Yana, who picked up on a plot point I thought everyone had missed.)
“Slaggit…” Rampage tapped the touchscreen with his finger in an exercise of futile hope. It blurred and reformed around his touch, proving that it was receiving input. Unfortunately, that input wasn’t going anywhere. AGAIN.
Across the bridge, a silver-blue ‘bot looked up from his own work as the crab threw himself back into his chair with a muttered invective against the ship’s lineage. “What? What is it this time?”
He glared at the screen without bothering to look at Depth Charge when he answered. “We don’t have any more spare console parts, right?”
“No.”
“Then I’m going to have to take out this Screen From The Pit,” the capital letters where enunciated with the frustration only hours of watching work fail could bring, “and rebuild it from scratch. The output leads are shot.” The red-purple ‘bot crossed his arms and attempted to incinerate the malfunctioning electronic with his optics alone. “And if it’s not the output leads, then I don’t having a slagging clue what’s wrong with it. This piece of soldered junk metal is going to get pitched out the nearest airlock at this rate, and I’ll be the one doing the pitching! Where the slag did I put the welding torch?! Rusting hunk of scrap…”
The Predacon twisted to get underneath the navigation console again, and Depth Charge didn’t try to hide his weary smile. Somewhere in the past week since they’re face-off in the ship’s RecRoom, things had changed. It was a slow, cautious change, with misgivings at least on his part, but the ray had to admit it made working together easier. Whether or not that was a good thing was yet to be seen.
It had started very simply: Depth Charge had kept the spark-box tucked away in his subspace compartment, safe from the crab…but also untouched by him. They hadn’t spoken of it, but there had been no attacks from Rampage to test the new arrangement. As if in return, however, the annoying multitude of questions about slang and culture from his reading had stopped, and the few times the crab had approached him, it had been over issues that he’d obviously needed help understanding. Some of those questions had turned into discussions. That often helped pass the time as they slogged through the tedious repairs, but time and time again they’d stared at each other in surprise as something one of them said suddenly made them aware that their topic was completely absurd from an outside perspective. Sure, it made sense at the time to talk about the affect Megatron’s time-warping plan might have had on the second Great War, but as a discussion between a murderer and his jailor, it was decidedly odd.
Even odder were the delicate skirting of certain topics they did. As a shared experience, the Beast Wars dominated their discussions simply because they could draw examples they both knew from it, but there were other things they shied away from in this unofficial peace treaty. Rampage didn’t talk about Omicron or Rugby, or any of the slaughters he’d caused, except in the vaguest terms. Depth Charge, in his turn, didn’t bring up the Protoform X Project or any of its personnel, except for careful, neutral questions he really needed answers for. The crab answered the questions like a computer, the sickening facts couched in a voice that dryly reported without a single emotion. The more the Maximal discovered about what had happened, the less neutral he could stay, and he could always tell when his nerves were beginning to fray because Rampage would abruptly stop talking, or even leave the room.
It gave the raybot a weird feeling of power, but one that left him struggling for control. He’d never REALIZED how often he became angry. Granted, he had just cause, but it wasn’t an encouraging sign, and he’d had to rein himself in from yelling after the Predacon more than once. If HE couldn’t control himself, how could he expect others to? Beside which, he was a warrior. Letting anger control him in the midst of battle was bad enough, but allowing it to direct his thoughts while planning the war was foolishness. Predacons used anger as a weapon, but Maximals could not afford to let their morality slip that far; it led to hatred, and hatred had too many blindspots to lead to victory.
Oddest yet, Rampage had been the one to point that out.
Morality, as Depth Charge had discovered through hesitant probing, was not something Rampage had a great understanding of. Half of the reason the crab had difficulty reading the books from the crew was because he had no grasp of the underlying framework of right and wrong that the characters stuck to. For him, there WAS no morality. He did what he wanted. Right? Wrong? He simply…lived. Without care for what his actions did to those around him, there was no basis for good or evil. That carelessness toward other people made it hard for him to understand how the stories meshed together, the character interactions and social niceties passing completely over his head. The crab’s confusion would have been hilarious if Depth Charge hadn’t been so chilled by it. From what he could tell, Rampage had little to no experience with living with others, much less Cybertronians, until Megatron forced him into the Predacon ranks.
What Rampage really was, now, was a Predacon. A Predacon who, in the most extreme sense of the faction, would put Megatron to shame. Rampage had literally only the shakiest basic level of conditioning with how to deal with other ‘bots before Megatron forced him to become part of the Predacons in the Beast Wars, and for the first time, Protoform X had to work with others instead of merely using and killing them. That required a crash course in social conditioning, and the only community he had to learn from was a group of murderers and misfits stranded on Earth. There were no outside influences. Even the most isolated ‘bot in existence on Cybertron was surrounded by Maximals, Predacons, neutrals, splinter factions, offworlders, entertainment, history, and a hundred other things everyone took in without even thinking about it. Rampage had the Predacons, brief contact with the Maximals during pitched battles, some scientists, the victims he’d massacred, and--although Rampage didn’t outright say it--one Maximal hunter who wouldn’t leave him alone.
Except for those sparse guidelines learned elsewhere, however, Rampage became the Predacon a Predacon would fear. He’d become a Predacon without anything but Predacon values, Predacon ideals, and Predacon motivation. He was a back-stabbing, plotting, murdering ‘bot with the lack of morality most Predacons only mouthed because in reality, what the Predacon faction claimed to be wasn’t viable. Put two of Rampage in one room, and only one would come out. There wouldn’t be a faction, because they’d destroy each other before uniting to take on the Maximals. This was what Rampage had been taught to be, and what every Predacon WOULD be if not for those outside influences he’d been denied. Using what Megatron had to teach him about belonging to a faction, the crab had built an image of a social structure that couldn’t exist in society, and his bemusement when faced with the complex ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ of a wider community explained far too much about the workings of his mind to Depth Charge.
Yes, in theory the crab knew a lot about how social creatures interacted, but he’d never had a chance to apply it himself until enslaved by Megatron. Then his moral barbarism was actually encouraged. With that new insight into the crab’s mind, a lot of what Rampage said and did made much more sense. It also made the Predacon’s slow changes in behavior more recognizable, the shift from mass murderer to almost civil becoming apparent. The crab was IMITATING him. It gave Depth Charge an uneasy feeling to think that he was being used as an example for how to act, but he’d rather that the crab learn from him than continue to wonder why the things he did were considered ‘wrong.’ He may have been at a loss for words at the end of their discussion about ethics, but he hadn’t forgotten it. Rampage claimed he had no use for morals, but Depth Charge was betting it was because he didn’t truly understand them. The crab was a killer, but he was also stunningly intelligent. He HAD to see that the universe couldn’t function without something keeping sentient beings from each others’ throats.
Maybe that wouldn’t matter to an insane ‘bot, and Depth Charge wasn’t counting on it, but he let the Predacon learn from him. The scientists had kept him ignorant, after all, and look what that had gotten them: a psychotic killer who didn’t know what murder was. Perhaps Rampage now knew what murder was, but his depth of understanding was shallow at best. If he could just teach the Predacon that ethics were necessary, that was something won. What, he wasn’t sure yet. It was a gut feeling, a confusion of horror and pity when confronted with someone who would kill without hesitation, take pleasure in death, and then ask with childlike curiosity and experience why it was wrong to do something that felt good. Rampage had nothing but his own pathetic excuse for a life to draw on for his ethics, and Depth Charge intended to remedy that. With the knowledge given to him, Rampage’s bloody hands would no longer have a shield of ignorance. What the crab did from there would be his choice, with the consequences implied therein. Depth Charge told himself bitterly not to expect any changes…but maybe by educating Rampage, he could return to hate, so much simpler than pity when dealing with the crab.
Then again, he couldn’t afford hatred anymore. It was, as their wandering conversation about Megatron had illustrated, a weakness. Rampage had casually brought up a slew of aborted plans by Tarantulas, all turned down by Megatron because he hated the Maximals too much to allow any death that wasn’t ironic, excruciatingly painful, or preferably both. Megatron had probably lost the Beast Wars by hating too blindly. The rescue ship might have still come, but Optimus Primal and all his merry men would have been cold slag by then. When Depth Charge expressed disbelief (more like a doubtful snort between muttered curses at the computer he’d been working on at the time), the crab explained the simple physics of hitting an already-unstable cliff with one of his missiles. Boom. No more support for the Axalon, no more Axalon, no more protected base for the Maximals, and the Predacons could have picked them off at their leisure. It was how the Predacons had eventually forced the Maximals to take shelter in the volcano, but the idea had come about long before Ravage’s arrival. Why had Megatron turned this plan down?
As far as any of the other Predacons could tell, it was because it didn’t involve irony. Since none of them had ever understood the tyrant’s sense of irony to begin with, they simply scrapped the plan and ended up using one that failed miserably. Tarantulas tried to bring it up again afterward, but by then it only reminded Megatron of his defeat, which made him furious, which caused him to throw the spider through a wall. Nobody brought it up again. If the tyrant had used the plan before Ravage’s arrival, however, the Beast Wars could have been won and Megatron’s plans put into action.
Depth Charge had reluctantly conceded the point, and Rampage had surprised him by two further examples. They had been working on the main computer, the heavy paneling between them. As a barrier, it was pathetic, but that was a subtle sign of their wary alliance. Depth Charge still kept a cautious optic on the crab, but their attention was on the vital computer parts being assembled. The raybot’s upper torso was completely inside the wall, and the Predacon sat leaning against a gutted work station as he fed his captor/partner the next linkup.
“Megatron wasn’t the only one who couldn’t see what was right in front of his face,” the crab had said casually, hands full of wires and circuit boards as Depth Charge slowly reworked them back into the main computer. “Did anyone ever tell you about the alien device that made--no, try the red one. Red. No, the red! Don’t mess this one up, the reds are power transmitters--Airazor and Tigatron disappear?”
“The red wire’s dead,” the raybot complained, voice slightly muffled. Then, “No…wait, no, was that the plant-bomb thing? Cheetor mentioned something about Megatron trying to go back to Cybertron in a giant plant that blew up. Was that--it’s working again, but the yellow one’s out--it?”
Ah, the delightful rush of grief at the mention of Cheetor’s name. What a shame that the grief was becoming dulled with time. It always did. The cat was dead; the living moved on. It probably helped that this Maximal had experience working over grief. Rampage sorted through his handful for the yellow wire. “Hold on, it’s bent around the orange. Okay, try it.”
“…the red’s out again. So?”
“Slag. It might be the circuit board…that sounds about right,” he continued, thick fingers moving with astonishing delicacy through the streaks of color across his palms. “So, Tarantulas hated those aliens. I never cared one way or another about them, but every time anyone brought them up, he’d be silently sputtering with hate, oh-ho, such hatred.” He chortled and tugged on a thick, dark red cord experimentally. It disappeared into the tangle, and he couldn’t see what it led in or out of. “He seemed so calm, but I could feel how he seethed. If he had been--try it again--as calm as he tried to appear, he would have never left such a gaping hole in his plans.”
Depth Charge’s legs jerked as something shocked him. “Now they’re BOTH dead,” he yelped in a high-pitched voice, “and the computer’s live! Shut it off!”
Rampage blinked for a moment at the dark red cord and sighed. Reds were power transmitters. Right. Main power cord for the central computer. He berated himself mentally even as he backtracked the thick wire and reconnected it correctly; he should have known better than to pull on a red wire without knowing where it led. Auxiliary consoles were online, keeping life support functions powered while the two ‘bots worked, but by now, they’d had to splice wires in so many places that most power cords served at least two separate consoles. This one was a bristle of metal ends, six of which were carefully bent away from the power feed to keep the central computer off. Two of them had been brought back into contact by his tugging, and Depth Charge muttered a fervent “Thanks” as he flicked them away again.
The Predacon eyed the power feed and scowled. If he had continued pulling on the cord, he would have disconnected the auxiliaries. He didn’t like making mistakes, but things like this were becoming more common for both ‘bots. They’d decided on half-rations of energon to stretch out the ship supplies, and their tired reactions were beginning to tell against them…
“Huh. Red’s live, yellow’s live. Next?” One magenta optic came into view inside the hole, along with an open hand. “And what holes are you talking about? The rusted thing blew up, didn’t it?”
Not so trusting, then, and Rampage concealed a smirk as he handed the next twist of wires and circuit board over under the raybot’s watchful gaze. The Maximal wasn’t as naïve as many of his brethren. The panel between them was a pathetic barrier, a gesture not of the ray letting down his guard, but of a growing belief in the crab’s intelligence. A symbol that they were both smart enough to know that they needed each other alive. Interesting. “Start with the blue wires. If Tarantulas had been thinking straight, he would have seen right away that Megatron would betray him the moment that idiotic saurian gained control of the device. Would that blasted spider really have blown up something so--gently, Fins, that one’s stripped--powerful if it wasn’t a last resort?”
Apparently no one had liked Tarantulas. All Depth Charge had ever known or cared about the spider was a manic chuckling and some nasty venom surprises, but he’d heard Blackarachnia talk once about his inventions. She’d almost sounded…wistful. He wondered absently what she’d felt when the Maximals had finally killed her creator. “Why’s it stripped? No, that doesn’t sound like him. Megatron betrayed him?” He snorted and slotted the blue wires into their correct sections. “Doesn’t surprise me. The main viewscreen should work, now.”
Rampage swept the room with a look. “No, but the console screens all lit up.” He poked the bundle of blue wires curiously and traced a series of paler blues back though the tangle in his hands. “It shouldn’t have surprised Tarantulas, either. If he hadn’t been so blinded by his hatred of the aliens, he would have planned ahead for--ah, that would be why. Somewhere on the stripped area should be a cross-section with a pale blue connector. Do you see it?”
“Yeah. I don’t remember putting that in.”
“I did. We don’t have power to waste running the main viewscreen, so I switched everything to the console screens. Speaking of which…hmm.” Despite the bands of wiring lying over his lap, the Predacon shifted one handful of colors to the floor and heaved to his knees. That allowed him to reach across the panel--
--Depth Charge’s internal computer beeped and warned him of the crab’s movement. The raybot’s fingers froze on the exposed wiring--
--and flip a switch on the computer facing. The consoles went dead. “We don’t need those on right now.” Rampage settled back down against his backrest, rearranging the ropes of wiring until he was buried among them again. He was perfectly aware that one magenta optic peered at him suspiciously from the dark hole in the computer’s base, but he seemed absorbed in sorting out the correct order for the rewiring. With computer guts looped over his beast mode’s legs to keep them categorized, he looked like a mad scientist, or maybe a psychotic technician.
The optic dimmed to a bloodier color, then rose out of sight as Depth Charge straightened and faced the section he was working on. An illusion, crafted to shift the image of a murderer out of the raybot’s focus. Or was it? Was this just another side of the Protoform that no one had ever had the chance to see before? “The green wire’s dead.”
“Is it connected to the circuit board?”
“Which one?”
“Baseboard’s blue, with green and white chips.”
He checked. “Not the silver one?”
“Uh…it should be slotted next to that one. There’s an output lead with a dark green wire already attached, but you’ll have to splice that one onto the same lead. The silver one’s for the missile magazine, and there shouldn’t be any wires attached to it.”
“Why not?”
“Because we don’t have a missile magazine anymore.” Rampage felt the abrupt tautness on the green wire and jiggled more loose on his end to feed to the raybot. From the bloom of anger coming from inside the computer, Depth Charge must be thinking about the missing chunk of hull and bulkhead the Center’s automatic systems had sheared off of the Cutting Edge as it fled into a Transwarp jump. It tempted him to bait the raybot, but he countered the urge with the thought of a weapon powerful enough to vaporize a missile magazine instead of detonating it. They were luckier than they seemed to have escaped with this much of a ship intact. What was a research center, however illegal, doing with that kind of firepower? He might not have been the most frightening thing on that moon, after all. It was a sobering, if intriguing, thought.
“Slagging--ow!--space-hopping rust-bucket…”
That brought him back to the reality of here-and-now. “Green wire’s live?”
“NOW it is.” Depth Charge shook his zapped hand and muttered to himself. “Alright, what’s next?”
“Yellow to green output leads, except for the spliced one. That goes to the blue lead on the main switchboard. You know, they blinded themselves.” Yellow wires slid through his hands, and he sorted through the coils for the next circuit board in the series.
Optics bright in the dim interior of the computer, the raybot wished they had power to spare for a detachable light. Even with the emergency internal lights, he had difficulty keeping the colors straight. “Who? I need more,” he said with a pull on the wire in question. “It’s not going to stretch enough to get to the switchboard.”
A frustrated noise answered him. “How much more? Tarantulas and Megatron.”
“It cost them.” They’d been doing this for too long to bother with exact measurements. He used his hand, thumb to the end of his third finger. “Two lengths.”
Rampage translated that into the size of his own hand and compared. “Improvise. There isn’t any to spare. It cost you, as well.”
Magenta gleamed out from the computer, instantly cautious. “What are you talking about? I could jump the current if there’s a length of extra wire, but it’ll have to go outside the facing.”
“So we’ll watch for it when we put the panel back on. Hold on…” He bent over the sparse components left to one side, their dwindling supply of extras torn out of doors and entertainment centers throughout the ship. “The closest I have is half a length,” emerald optics narrowed, the mind behind them calculating, “but if you reroute through the silver circuit board, it should work. Your hate blinds you, Fish Face. I’ve told you that before.”
His hand grabbed the proffered wire with more force than strictly necessary, and the Maximal straightened back to his work, twisting the ends into the silver board. “At least we’ll get some use out of it, anyway. You’re talking slag. You’ve said that hatred is strength, but--it worked, but now the other yellows are dead--never that hate blinds.”
“Try switching ends. Maybe it’s corroded.” Rampage judged the ripples of rising anger coming from the raybot and decided to keep talking. The slow rage was different than the previous sparks of anger that came and went. This was something that would provoke him, too. “Hatred IS strength, but strength isn’t everything. You let your hate blind you from the obvious.” Oh, the anger. The fishy didn’t like being examined, his weaknesses probed, but it was Rampage’s specialty even as it swirled him into matching anger. His grip tightened on the wires. He saw it happening, and consciously relaxed. “You only started to see ME recently. How many clues were there that I wasn’t out to get you? How many files about me did you dig up on Omicron? About the Protoform X Project? Yet you didn’t put it all together until you had to put your hatred aside to survive and work toward vengeance.” He coughed politely, mocking, “I apologize; ‘justice,’ is it not?”
His hands were still on the circuit boards. His voice sounded harsh, bouncing back from the shell of the computer, “What’s your point, Rampage?” Not ‘X,’ not his first instinct. Rampage. Little things that helped them work together, kept them from each others’ throats because there was something more important they had to finish first. The goal was the end of the Center, the end of the Maximal High Council, and he was beginning to understand what the crab was getting at. He didn’t want to, but then, he never did.
The ripples were faster, but under tighter control. The Maximal obviously was aware that his anger should be self-directed, not turned on the revealer. “My point is that you’re letting your hatred blind you, first with me and now with this. It destroyed Megatron and Tarantulas, and we barely escaped your failure on my part. You didn’t see how far the High Council would go to keep me until it was nearly too late. Are you sure that you haven’t overlooked anything else?” He toyed idly with a broken circuit board, riding the emotional waves down to relative calm with the ease of experience. Same game, same players, just at a different level. “Let hatred give you strength, Fins, but open your optics before you try to use it.”
There was a long silence, and Rampage waited through it, knowing the raybot was thinking. He knew that the Maximal would understand. Already the anger was becoming more subdued, and he knew the power of repressed anger. It suited him that Depth Charge be filled with it, as long as he knew the risks of limited vision caused by it. They couldn’t afford to have the artificial margins caused by hatred right now, but the hatred itself...
Other ‘bots spouted advice about hatred and goals, touting that they were anathema, but he knew that on the coldest side of life it was often the only way. Seeking vengeance on something like the High Council was like reaching for the stars. His old friend had to hate intensely enough to not care how many people lay in the pile he climbed to the top of, using them as a means to the end, and when that end was close enough to touch, he had to see clearly enough to know that grasping it would leave him with nothing but a molten hand. In the meantime, Rampage would climb beside him, prisoner and ally, perhaps even guide…with a set of solar panels, to gain something of his own in process. Only time would tell if it would be enough to power his plans.
The raybot’s legs moved, turning him slightly inside the computer. “The yellows are live. Where’s this pink one go?”
He laughed silently at his own thoughts. Such a poetic way of disguising brutal reality. “Splice it into one of the reds.”
“Here we go.”
With those simple words, the broken hulk drifting helplessly in space drifted no more. Small jets fore and aft lit, flaring blue and white in the darkness like sputtering stars that fitfully eased the starship Cutting Edge into a preprogrammed position. In the bridge, the ‘bot sitting in the captain’s chair had relocated it to a work station sprawling with additional screens and keypads, doing the work of a navigator and engineer as well as running the numbers through the computer. Right now he frowned at the sums. “You overshot. Correct 3.45 degrees.”
“Stabilizers #2, 5,12, and 14 are either out of fuel or jammed in their ports. I’m compensating.” Red fingers ran over the jury-rigged console with deceptive proficiency. Only two and a half weeks ago, they would have been lost on anything but the most obvious of the buttons, and completely hopeless in the rewired mess this board had been turned into. “Lost #15, but that should be the right heading.”
Depth Charge checked and nodded absently, optics locked on what the computer was telling him. Considering how much damage it had taken, he wondered if he should bother consulting it at all. “Keep us right there. Initiating engine start-up on three from my mark…Mark one.” He felt the presence of the spark-box in his subspace compartment, and the raybot glanced across the bridge in a gesture more automatic than needed. At this moment of truth, the crab was practically trapped inside the still-frame explosion of wires, paneling, and cables that made up his station, bent intently over the screen reporting their status. If Rampage was going to attack right now, he’d trip and fall flat on his face.
He repressed a bark of laughter at the image and managed, “Two,” in an admirably controlled voice. He blamed the flash of silliness on the short rations of energon. There was really nothing funny in the current situation. Really. “Three.”
Hands of red and silver moved as one, the Predacon preparing for course compensation needed when the main engines kicked online under the Maximal’s command. The giant rockets on the back of the ship should have lighted as Depth Charge directed them to, a contained ignition blast that should have rocked them but immediately dimmed down to ready-status. They were prepared for that. Considering their luck so far, they should have predicted that it wouldn’t happen. Instead, the ship shuddered, and a deep grinding noise chunked from somewhere inside right before everything began to shake.
“TELL me you know what that is!” Rampage shouted, struggling to keep the ship steady as more stabilizers burned out. The grinding changed pitch to a rapidly-climbing series of clanks and screeches. Wide green optics looked up to see the silver-blue ‘bot slam his hand down on the already-battered control console.
The sounds cut off abruptly. The shaking stopped. Depth Charge collapsed in his seat, cradling his head in his hands and whispering something to himself. It sounded faintly like a litany of curses, or perhaps a prayer.
The crab stared at him, part of him focused on monitoring the ship but the rest marveling at the blistering mix of hysteria and hopelessness rolling off his playmate. “What was that?” he asked, voice low in the renewed silence of the bridge. He wasn’t good at ‘soothing,’ but he gave it a try. Right now the Maximal was a nudge away from snapping, and while the sadistic side of him was ready to match anything the ray would throw at him, he knew better. This was neither the time, nor the place. “Fins?”
Drained. He felt so drained. The weariness had been building as he worked, cutting back on rations as they ran short of time and energon, but he’d lost everything he had left. Computers he could repair. This? “That sound,” he said dully, “was the sound of a power cell refusing to charge.” His hands dropped, and tired almond optics met Rampage’s confused emeralds. “One or more of the cells is dead, and the Transwarp drive won’t operate without a full charge. Turn the stabilizers off. We’re not going anywhere.” He hung his head down, elbows on knees and hands limp, and beneath the despair was the thought that the conserved power would keep the life-support systems online longer. For what purpose, he wasn’t sure anymore.
Ready lights flickered downward until they stalled out on the screen. Rampage brought the last of the stabilizer jets offline with a deliberate slowness, and the Cutting Edge barely swayed out of the course heading. It was a satisfying thing to accomplish, and he was proud of the steady numbers on the computer. They’d stay relatively still until a solar wind inevitably swept them away again; not bad for someone who had no experience piloting, even with such a minor maneuver. Unfortunately, more important matters were at hand. He freed himself from the mutated console, its work area expanded to include all the functions that had previously been attended by separate people. Keeping his footsteps deliberately loud and sure, he approached the slumped figure of his enemy-ally.
It disturbed him that the raybot didn’t even look up. If he attacked right now, he could--no. Appearances were deceiving. Numb resignation could easily snap into berserker fury with this Maximal. Rampage leaned over one of the ray’s viewscreens, accessing the engine stats with one optic always trained on the ‘bot seated so temptingly near. “This says that all the cells are functional,” he said after reading through the screen.
Depth Charge nodded without raising his head. “There’s an error somewhere in the computer. I’d bet this chair that if you ran a test, it’d insist the engine’s fully powered.”
“I don’t understand.” He turned and propped his hip against the side of the screen, crossing his arms as he faced the Maximal. “We weren’t trying to bring the Transwarp drive online yet. If the engine runs off of the fuel rods, and the fuel rods run off processed energon, what happened? We have enough energon for this!” Their supply was low, but not that low. From what he’d seen of the engine plans, everything should have worked, but he hadn’t been the one working on that area of repairs. That hadn’t been something covered by the manuals the raybot had given him to learn.
“Yeah, we do.” Depth Charge finally looked up, face pained. “But with a dead Transwarp cell, none of that energon matters. This is a long-distance starship, not an in-system ship; the jets are secondary, meant for minor usage between Transwarp jumps. All the energon is directed through the cells to bring them up to full power first because the drive is the main propulsion system. After that, it goes to the fuel rods. A dead cell interrupts the flow line, and the computer automatically shuts down the engine before the fuel rods short out.” One silver hand waved vaguely at the engine stats. “Except that the computer’s busted, and it let us try to start the engine without adequate power. That sound? That was the engine attempting to operate with emergency power only. The dead cell didn’t charge, the fuel rods were blocked, and the entire engine seized up. At the very least, the power cells were just flooded with a backwash of reactive energon spit out of the fuel rods. At worst, the cells are flooded, the engine’s trashed, and the Transwarp drive blew out. Either way, we can’t make a Transwarp jump. Without that, we’re stuck here.”
Rampage’s optics were wide, his manibles slack with shock. “…oh.” He hadn’t expected such a…bleak explanation.
A humorless chuckle came in agreement with the crab’s surprise, and the raybot nodded once before letting his head sag forward again. “Oh.”
Green flashed in a blink, changing shock to consideration. “Wait a nano--okay, so the Transwarp jump is out. If the engine’s fixable, I could still aim us toward a trade route, and we set the jets for a slow burn. You said someone would look for the ship’s beacon if it’s activated, and all we have to do is go into stasis while the ship--“
“Won’t work.” The interruption was quiet and exhausted. “Weren’t you listening? The dead cell stops power flow to the engines. We can’t activate the jets without bypassing the power cells and cutting the Transwarp drive out of the propulsion system to make the jets primary in the lines.”
“Then why can’t you--“
“Because the cells have to be bypassed manually to take the Transwarp drive out of the system. It’s something that’s supposed to be done in a shipyard, not by two ‘bots stranded in the middle of nowhere!” The brief spark of anger in his words faded, and Depth Charge sighed. “Look, IF the engine is salvageable, and IF I could bypass the cells, there wouldn’t be enough energy left over to get us close enough to a trade route to be spotted and picked up. Even then, if there’s a warrant out on us, we’d probably be caught in the transfer to passage on another ship.”
The crab shrugged. “So we aim for an occupied planet and get a working cell there,” he said impatiently. “All we need is one Transwarp jump to get to Rarmet, right? Planetary security should wake us out of stasis, and if we’re quick, they won’t have time to fill the warrant before we grab a cell and make the jump. We’ve done things with this ship that probably shouldn’t be possible in or out of a shipyard, so why is this impossible?”
Slowly, the Maximal’s head rose as he thought that over. A planet? There was the risk of running through a star or asteroid belt, but that depended if the Astrology section could give them an accurate heading. Rampage had been feeding it information, but that had been for a Transwarp jump. If they could find a planet close enough…no. “It might work, but that’s beside the point.”
Rampage tapped his fingers against his upper arms. “The point being..?”
“I can’t get to the power cells without venting them.” Depth Charge looked up at the Predacon and shook his head. “Right now, they’re flooded with fuel backwash, and if I flush that out into space, there won’t be anything to restart the engine with. There has to be something keeping the engine working while the fresh processed energon is brought into the lines, entered into the fuel rods, and mixed with reactives. That’s not something I can do manually. The additives are toxic, and the engine won’t run off pure energon if I tried injecting that. It has to go through the fuel rods, but the fuel rods are blocked because of the dead power cell. Until the cells are taken out, there’s no way to get more energon into the fuel rods, and I can’t take the cells out unless we vent the backwash sitting in them.”
And then the engine wouldn’t start. “Blast.” He turned away from the raybot and studied the engine stats again. Everything LOOKED like it should work, but he knew that was wrong. He sent a query into the computer for a schematic of the engine. He still didn’t quite understand what the raybot was talking about. “Is there some way of shunting the backwash off somewhere until you need it?”
“No. The fuel rods are the only things designed to safely contain the stuff.” He didn’t want to keep fighting a hopeless situation, but the crab’s continuing questions prodded him into tired thought once more. “They closed as soon as the engine seized up, and there’s no way to open the locks without powering up the propulsion system.”
“Why?”
“The mix is highly reactive. The rods feed it directly into the engine, and the engine burns it completely. If someone accidentally opened the fuel rods up, it could be deadly.”
“’Could be’?” Rampage gave him a sharp look, switching between the engine plan and the aqua-silver ‘bot. “Exactly how dangerous is it?”
Limp hands barely twitched in a listless shrug. “The energon is stable, but the additives aren’t. Everything in the engine system is pressurized, but the fuel rods and power cells are kept at a minimum of six times the actual engine pressure. If the mix is allowed to expand without burning off, it reacts and emits a gaseous form that corrodes most metals. The engine and power cells would be fine, but Cybertronians aren’t commonly made from starship alloys. A few minute’s exposure would eat through and kill a ‘bot.”
“So it’s like a strong acid?”
“I suppose you could think of it that wa--wh--by the Pit!“ He whipped upright so fast his chair went over backwards. He didn’t seem to care that it sent him sprawling on the floor. His oblong optics were almost round with pure revelation, the shock audible in his stuttered gasp as he gaped.
Standing above him, the Predacon shifted his weight uncomfortably and swallowed. Hard. “You’d better check if the engine is repairable,” he rumbled, voice sinking as his mind looked forward to what he needed to do. He did NOT like pain. What made it worse was that he’d suffered this pain before. Anticipation added to agony for those who could feel fear, but reserved for him was the torture of memory. He knew exactly what was going to happen. “And…you’ll have to tell me what to do.”
Depth Charge jerked a nod, too stunned to say anything.
Looking down at the ray, he mused that it was too bad, really, that he had to ruin that lovely despair by reintroducing hope.