Plays of Shadow

By: Amber Dawn

PG-13

Disclaimer: Beast Wars is a product of Hasbro. I don’t own it, but I do own my characters and my parts of the plot.

Full Introduction and Description:

I don’t know if it’s just me, but I’ve noticed that in the show and especially in fanfiction, the emphasis is on the male characters of Beast Wars. I have therefore decided that to indulge my feminist whims I am going to write a fanfic that centers around the lives and emotions of the femmes of Beast Wars: Blackarachnia and Airazor. I have also created an original character to spice things up. This will by no means be a trashy, Mary-Sue romance story. It will have action, a plot and things blowing up. I will also try my very best to keep the canon characters in character. However, readers be warned: this story will include good-natured male-trashing, sexual banter, sexual themes and ‘girl-talk’. Not for the chauvinistic or faint of heart.

The rating is rated PG-13 for sexual themes, some language and allusions to rape.

Prologue

Gun blasts and energy pulses resounded off the buildings of the mine complex, lighting the hot night air as if it were midday. Transformers ran every which way, the Masters trying in desperation to control their enraged slaves.

Former slaves, unit 29-A2V corrected herself. She dodged a stasis missile meant to take her down and it went sailing past, hitting one of her former captors in the chest before he knew what hit him. He immediately shorted out and fell to the hot desert sand in stasis lock. Unit 29-A2V flew over him, her optics focused on her goal: the landing pad.

Casting a look behind her, she had to grin at the carnage her fellow former slaves had created. The normally-immaculate slave compound was in ruin. The low buildings where the captives had spent most of their lives when not in the mines were burning, sending columns of toxic smoke into the night air. Power pulses rocked the ground, creating chasms in the sandy terrain.

May Primus have mercy on the planet of Marajo, Unit 29-A2V thought, reveling in the feel of the night air against her metal.

Out the corner of her optics, she spotted Unit 28-H5G running behind her. Hot on her trail were five Masters, bellowing hollow threats and firing not-so-hollow stasis missiles, trying to take her friend down.

Unit 29-A2V skidded to a halt and felt the power rise within her. She felt it build, waiting to be released upon the ‘bots that made her life a living Inferno. There wasn’t a lot of buildup left after the initial blast that had freed them, but there was enough to take down the Masters that trailed 28-H5G.

She knew that to release the power in this melee was to target her friends as well as her former captors, but she couldn’t let that stop her. She had to escape, had to get off this Primus-forsaken rock tonight. If she didn’t, there was no Master in the universe to stop her taking her own life.

“Brace!” she screamed, her voice hoarse from years of sporadic use.

Those nearest to her heard her cry, and stopped dead in their tracks, ready to absorb and redirect her surge. Those who didn’t hear her…it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered anymore except getting free. And that meant eliminating her pursuers.

A2V gave herself up to the energy within her, letting it seek release into the world.

A brilliant pulse of light erupted from her chest, causing her to take a step back to regain her balance. The blue light spread in all directions like a shockwave, which was essentially what it was. Where it hit her former captors they screamed in pain and fell to the ground, in stasis or dead. Where it hit her fellow escapees, it was absorbed and re-released upon those Masters nearest them.

Havoc ensued, but much as she wanted to stick around and watch her revenge being wrought, A2V turned and took off toward the landing pad once more.

There was a single craft parked there, its pilot passed out cold beside the hatch as a result of her energy pulse. A2V didn’t bother slowing down as she reached the ship: she slammed full speed into the button that released the hatch, then kicked the body of the unconscious pilot aside as the hatch opened outwards to admit her.

She whipped around, hearing footsteps beside her, but relaxed when she saw that it was only 28-H5G. Her longtime friend puffed up to her and enveloped her in a fierce hug.

A2V returned the affection she had never been allowed to show while the two had been captive. H5G had been like a sister to her all these years, and it hurt more than she could have imagined leaving her here.

“Are you sure you won’t come with me?” A2V whispered, not trusting her voice. “This craft has room for two.”

“I’m sorry, but no,” H5G replied, choking on her own emotion. “My place is here, cleaning up this scrap heap.” She jerked her head toward the carnage in the mine complex. Her face split into a feral grin and her optics glowed with revenge and thinly veiled sadness. “You go. Find your family. Be free and live long. ‘Till we meet again, my friend.”

“Till then,” A2V echoed, squeezing her friend tighter then releasing her. Not trusting herself to say anything more, she darted into the spacecraft and didn’t turn around until the hatch had hissed closed behind her.

Taking a steadying breath, A2V sat down at the control console and looked over the complex array of buttons, levers, monitors and gauges in front of her. She had no clue how to fly a spacecraft, but hey, how hard could it be?

Her thin metallic fingers hovered over the console for a few seconds before she was jolted by an explosion. She could hear shouting outside the spacecraft, and knew her former Masters were trying to stop her from escaping.

No! She pressed a large red button on the dashboard and felt the thrusters flare to life on either side of the craft. Grinning, she punched a few more buttons and the viewscreen crackled to life in front of her eyes. She saw the desert of Marajo stretched out in front of her, dark desolate and ugly.

A2V took one last look at the place that had been her Pit for most of her remembered life, and then hit the button labeled Takeoff.

The craft jerked with another explosion, and a dent appeared in the hatch from the outside. But it didn’t matter, because just then the spacecraft lifted from the tarmac and rose into the sultry night air over the deserts of Marajo.

Staring into the viewscreen, A2V got her last visual of her fellow former slaves, fists raised in the air as they watched her ascend into the stratosphere. Their cries of triumph and defiance reached her aural sensors and then she was away, accelerating automatically out of the atmosphere of the desert planet and into the cool void of space.

She didn’t let herself relax until she was clear of the atmosphere and looking down at Marajo through the viewscreen. Then she raised her hands from the console and threw them up over her head in elation, screaming out her joy at being free and alive.

Suddenly, the spacecraft jerked violently to the side. A2V lowered her arms to the console and pressed the button labeled Manual Steering.

The console split in half and through the center came a steering wheel type device. She gripped it hard and banked left, away from the sight of the planet that had been her prison.

Her optics scanned the viewscreen for any pursuit, but found none. Only then did she allow herself to search for the true reason she had stolen this ship.

She found it fairly quickly. It was a small device positioned at the top right of the command console. A transwarp drive.

A2V leaned over the device, mentally calculating the coordinates she needed. It was rumored that a transwarp drive could transport ships not just through space but through time, and she considered this for a moment.

No. She shook her head violently as she punched in the desired coordinates. Even she knew the consequences of toying with the past.

She finished programming the transwarp drive and closed her optics, the reckless feel of freedom making her slightly giddy. When she was steady again, she hit the Initiate button.

The transwarp drive hummed to life, and before she had a chance to reconsider A2V was thrown backwards into her seat as the ship jumped through a wormhole and into hyperspace. The viewscreen went blank as the craft was whisked out of the space-time continuum, and A2V relaxed into her seat for the trip.

She still couldn’t believe she was free. She could remember only vaguely the time before she had been captured. Her family had belonged to a remote colony of Transformers on the planet of Bedon, nestled away in the peaceful Carron nebula. She remembered a father, a mother and two brothers. They had lived in peace, away from the wars that shook the rest of the universe. That was, until the day the slavers had come.

They had destroyed the colony and took every ‘bot hostage. A2V had been separated from her family and sold as a worker in the energon mines of Marajo. There she had stayed for two hundred years, awaiting the day when she could break free and reunite herself with her lost family. Provided any of them were still alive.

That’s why she had stolen this ship. She had to get as far away from Marajo as possible, and what better place to start the search for her family than their old home?

A2V was jolted from her daydreams by the sound of an alarm. Her optics fixed on the viewscreen, which should have been completely blank. But it wasn’t. There, straight ahead of her, was a large dark hole in the white nothingness of transwarp space. That wasn’t supposed to be there.

She gripped the navigation device and tried to turn before remembering that one couldn’t steer while in a transwarp jump.

"Oh sla-"

Before she could even finish her curse, the craft was sucked through the dark hole and went into a rapid spin, causing her to lose control. Panicking, she realized the set coordinates on the transwarp drive were changing. Her fingers flew to the controls and she tried to change them back, but could only punch in a few numbers before the spacecraft bucked violently, causing the safety restraints holding her to her chair to snap.

She screamed as she flew across the cockpit, hitting the wall behind the command console and sliding to the floor. Before she could try to regain her footing, the blank white of hyperspace disappeared from the monitors and the familiar black of normal space filled the viewscreen.

The spinning ceased and the craft steadied automatically.

A2V returned to the control seat and checked the coordinates on the transwarp drive. They were completely unfamiliar to her.

She let out a string of the vilest curses she had learned in the mines and slammed the flat of her hand against the offending device. It blipped once and let out a shower of sparks, causing her to recoil. When the sparks faded, A2V could easily see that the transwarp drive was slagged.

“Great.”

Fighting the urge to cry, she put her head in her hands and darkened her optics. Just then, another alarm went off overhead.

“Warning. Large obstruction in grid Zeta, three hundred meters and closing,” the feminine voice of the computer intoned calmly.

A2V’s optics flew open and she saw it: a huge chunk of space junk headed straight for her! Now that she looked, she realized there was slag floating all over the place! It looked like the remains of a space port that had recently been blown to the Pit.

Grabbing the navigation wheel, A2V banked sharply to the right, weaving between the hunks of metal and other strange materials. Just as she thought she was clear, the alarm went off again.

Before she could react, she heard the unmistakable scrape of metal against metal and the ship jerked to the side. Fighting to stay in the command chair without restraints, A2V realized that she was getting pulled to the right. Her first panicked thought was that it was a Marajan pursuit ship’s tractor beam, reclaiming her for the mines. But as the nose of the spacecraft rotated to face the source of the pull, she realized it wasn’t a tractor beam at all, but gravity. She wasn’t sure how she hadn’t noticed a gigantic blue and green planet before, but now it filled the whole screen, its atmosphere pulling her toward it like a nail to a lodestone.

As the ship accelerated steadily toward the surface of the unknown planet, the cockpit started to heat up very rapidly. The ship was burning up! She was going too fast!

A2V searched the command console for anything that could slow the vessel down, and found only the Landing button. She punched it with a shaking finger and the air breaks released. The craft pitched violently from side to side as the brakes fought to slow it down. It helped a bit, but after a few moments the friction caused them to incinerate. Though she was falling slower than before, she was still falling. The ship’s alarm systems wailed in her audio sensors, mocking her.

“How could you have thought that you’d escape alive?” they seemed to jeer, “You who are fit to be nothing more than a slave? Now you will be die for your few moments of freedom, and you will never find your family. You will never be anything but a slave and, for a few moments, a renegade. You have failed…”

“…failed. Repeat, all systems failed. Emergency powerdown commencing. Impact in twenty nanoklicks,” the computer stated as the cockpit lights blinked out, casting A2V into darkness.

A2V shut her optics. She was a failure. She was going to die. As she braced for the final impact, she was grateful that at least she would die a free ‘bot and not a worthless slave.

The flashing of the alarm and the bleating of the computer had ceased, and the only sound was the rushing in her audio sensors as the ship closed the distance to the surface of the planet. She felt the impact, felt herself being lifted into the air, felt herself hitting metal and going through it. Then she felt the cool bite of night air on her metal as it rushed by her, felt the sting of something - water?- hitting her shell and smelled the rich scent of the forest before she hit the ground with a sickening crunch and felt no more.