Captain Venara looked at the moon in her viewscreen and shuddered. Orbital defenses and small attack ships filled the orbit of the joint Predacon/Maximal owned moon, and from the attitude of the orders she had received from the commanding CO of the operation, they were all more than a little trigger-happy.
With good cause, mostly. Half of those defenses were aimed at the moon itself. The A.L.H. Research Center took up most of the moon, and there was a reason for the amount of space they had. If one experiment went rogue, the defense systems could destroy that part of the Center. And apparently they had just had to do that, except that the ‘experiment’ was already half-way off the planet when they targeted it.
Venara didn’t know what it had been, but by the general jumpiness of the crews on the defense grid, it had been big and dangerous, and had almost gotten to them. Their nervousness was understandable.
Unfortunately, understanding wasn’t the same as being comfortable, and Captain Venara was VERY uncomfortable. She looked at her orders again and sighed. The Cutting Edge was being assigned to the Center for the time being.
With all those defenses she could see, it was obvious that the facility didn’t need any more protection. Why else would the starship be ordered to stay here, though?
Several answers suggested themselves to Venara as she stood up. None of them were good.
"Welcome aboard, Admiral Jirex, Sir." Captain Venara saluted the whip-thin, red-colored transformer who had just walked on board her ship from the transport shuttle. He gave her a thin smile, but didn’t return her salute. He seemed to enjoy her discomfort at the lack of military protocol.
She awkwardly lowered her arm. "Um, do you wish to see the prisoners now, Sir?" she asked.
His smile widened. "Just one prisoner," he said. "X."
"Ah. In that case, shall we proceed to Sub-Level C, Sir? That’s where we put him." Venara stood aside courteously, allowing him to walk beside her.
"You should know, Sir," she said gravely, "that Depth Charge is very upset about the decision to make Rampage a scientific project again."
He gave her a sharp look. "Rampage?"
"It’s what X is known by, now, Sir."
The thin transformer’s eyes were hard and cold. "X," he stressed, "is nothing but an experiment. He doesn’t have a name, he has a label." He waited until Venara nodded unwillingly before continuing. "And as for this...Depth Charge. What exactly does he think we should do with X?"
"Execute him," came a voice from ahead of them. Depth Charge was leaning against the wall outside Rampage’s cell, looking tense and angry.
"He deserves to die. Sir," he added belatedly.
The Admiral nodded. "I see," he said thoughtfully. He gave the ray-bot a considering look. "I see," he repeated. Then he turned to the door Depth Charge was guarding. "This is it?"
Captain Venara nodded, "Yes, Sir."
"Do you have that...spark-box you referred to in your report?" He held out his hand as Depth Charge nodded. "Give it to me, please, and open the door."
"You’re going in, Sir?" Depth Charge frowned. "Just a second, I’ll radio for more guards--"
"No," Admiral Jirex said. "I’ll go in alone."
Depth Charge seemed about to object again. His experiences with higher management was that they were reluctant to see pain in person. If Rampage saw an opportunity, he’d use it.
At the last second, however, the ray-bot looked in Admiral Jirex’s eyes and recoiled. Something hard and cruel was looking back out at him. He wordlessly handed over the spark-box and keyed the door open.
The Admiral walked inside, and the door closed behind him.
Rampage looked up from his consideration of his chains when the door opened. Someone walked in, and Rampage squinted against the light pouring into the cell. He couldn’t see the person’s features. He leaned to the side a little, trying to see at an angle to the light.
He froze in mid-motion as the door closed.
"Hello, X," the thin transformer said. His smile was unpleasant.
Rampage swallowed hard. "Captain Jirex," he said faintly. "What a nice surprise. And here I though you were dead."
That brought a grimace to Jirex’s face. "I’m an Admiral, now," he said haughtily. "The Admiral in charge of this sector of space, in fact. And obviously I’m not dead."
"Too bad."
Jirex’s lips twisted in a snarl, and he lifted his hand. Rampage’s eyes widened at the sight of his spark in the box the Maximals had made. Jirex smiled again at his expression, and he studied the box contemptuously.
"I was informed at how well this thing works on you," he mentioned. "I hear the scientist down at the Center are drooling over the design and the possibilities of enhancing the effects. Of course, there will have to be experiments and lab work done, so I will probably miss seeing when they start probing and cutting apart your spark core for that fragment of you that will make you the easiest to control. That’s too bad, but I’ll take comfort at the thought of your pain." The unpleasant smile was growing as Rampage flinched at the description of the fate for him.
If it had hurt when Megatron had done it, how much more would THIS hurt?!
"Still," Admiral Jirex mused, "I find that I am curious about how this little thing works against someone as large as you." The smile was downright cruel, now. "Let’s find out, shall we?" Before Rampage could protest, he crushed the spark in his grip.
Rampage screamed in agony as jagged spears of pain seemed to rip through his very being. Jirex let him suffer, watching in amused cruelty as he weakened steadily until only the chains held him upright. Then he released his tight grip.
Breathing raggedly, Rampage glared hatred at Jirex. "I swear I’ll kill you so slowly you’ll--"
"Ah-ah-ah!" Admiral Jirex admonished him. "You’ll keep a civil, in fact, RESPECTFUL tone around me, or..." he paused dramatically.
Rampage sneered, still swaying with the after affects of the spark-deep pain he had just gone through. "Or what?"
The expression on his face was beyond gloating and cruel. "Or I’ll just have to talk with my good friend Dr. Kilju, who just happens to be in charge of your project now thanks to your slaughter of his colleagues." Rampage’s expression of horrified disbelief must have amused Jirex immensely, because he broke into peals of laughter. "That’s right! Your favorite," he stressed the word sarcastically, "doctor is the only surviving doctor with experience with dealing with you, therefore, he’s been promoted! And if you don’t learn to speak to me with the respect I deserve, well then," he leaned forward menacingly, "I’ll just recommend to my doctor friend that you don’t speak at all."
"No..." Rampage stared at him in stunned denial.
Jirex nodded. "Yes. After all, why does an EXPERIMENT need a voice box? I seem to recall the project doing just fine without you needing a voice for, oh, quite a long time after you were brought online. Perhaps it would be easier if the project went back to that. Hmm?"
Rampage’s eyes were about ready to take over his face. Things were happening too fast! Jirex was ALIVE, and so was Kilju, and now they were both in positions of extreme power over him!
Admiral Jirex smirked. "What do you think of that idea, X?"
There was a pause, and then Rampage closed his eyes in defeat. "I’d really rather not...Sir," he said in a strained voice. Jirex laughed in satisfied pleasure and turned to go. Rampage stayed behind, fuming with hatred and, just possibly, something that might have been called fear.
Threatening to remove his voice box had been beyond a low blow by the Admiral. Jirex knew how much he had been elated when the scientists in charge of his project had deemed it necessary that he get one, and they had overruled people like Dr. Kilju in the process. The then-Protoform X had been ecstatic when he was finally allowed to start speaking like all the scientists he had seen around him. He had ALMOST felt something other than hate for them, then.
Of course, talking hadn’t been all that easy, as X had stuttered and struggled to say and pronounce words he had only heard before. That just made him seem even less like a sentient being in the eyes of the scientists around him, for they had to train him to speak before he understood the language. He never really had learned anything more than the basics he needed to use to live his life...
Still, it had been a taste of freedom that had made him crave for more, until he finally broke loose. By threatening to take that small, but extremely essential, freedom away, Jirex had just emphasized how much power he had over Rampage.
Depth Charge and Captain Venara snapped to attention when Admiral Jirex emerged from the cell.
He turned to Venara. "Please escort the prisoner to my shuttle at the earliest available time. There are guards on board who will take him from there. The other prisoners will be taken down to the facility at a later time."
Venara nodded. "Yes, Sir."
Jirex then looked at Depth Charge. "Now, I would like you to be available to my Security Teams. They’ll be the ones setting up X’s new containment area, and I’d like your input." He waited until the ray-bot nodded in acceptance, and then continued, "Perhaps if you are needed, you might join one of the Teams...at a later date, of course."
Captain Venara cleared her throat. "What about the other Maximals we rescued, Sir?" she inquired. "They’re probably not that happy with having their return to Cybertron delayed."
"Yes," Jirex mused. "Well, they’ll have to live with it while this ship is staying here. If they get too impatient, they can always come take a tour of the Research Center. I hear it’s fascinating." He glanced around at the corridor.
"This isn’t exactly the best place to be talking over future plans, though. Is there some other area we could go to?"
"My office is this way if you’d like to follow me, Sir," Venara said. They walked off.
Admiral Jirex chatted calmly as they walked, but his mind was simmering with gloating delight. X was in his grasp again!
Jirex was one of those people who would tear apart the galaxy or anyone in his quests for revenge. That was what really got him promoted to his current rank. The A.L.H. Research Center had needed an Admiral who was ruthless enough to not care what was happening in the facility.
Now Jirex did care. He cared quite a lot, in fact. The Protoform X project would have gotten him killed if he hadn’t been lucky enough to be assigned courier duty for a certain doctor at the time. He had been away from the original facility when X had gotten loose, so he had survived.
So had the doctor he had been assigned with. Doctor Kilju had also been promoted after the incident, and now he was the only surviving expert on the Protoform X project. When the news that the experiment had been captured again reached High Command, the doctor had been brought into the project once more.
Dr. Kilju and Admiral Jirex were thrilled at the opportunity to get their hands on X again. He had ruined their lives and their jobs at the time, but now they held direct influence over what would happen to him, and the government didn’t care. X probably cared, though.
The doctor and then-Captain had been X’s most hated enemies, and they had loved it. They had liked to participate in the most painful and humiliating of the tests on him, and they, as a team, had been the ones most against treating the Protoform as anything really sentient. It hadn’t been anything personal at the time; they just liked to have power over someone. It was personal now.
X had been sure the two had been destroyed in the general collapse of the original facility. He had thought it was a pity; he had wanted to kill them slowly, a piece at a time, with his own hands. The thought that his chief tormentors were dead comforted him, however.
Rampage straightened in his chains as the door opened again. This time, the light was blocked by figures armed to the teeth, headed by one particular figure.
"Let’s go," Depth Charge snarled. The other guards in the escort fanned out in the hallway and the room, training their weapons on Rampage. Depth Charge himself held the crab’s spark-box, and another two guards cautiously walked forward to unlock the chains from the wall.
Rampage stood quietly as they worked, staring at Depth Charge with hatred in his eyes. When the chains finally came loose, he did as he was told and walked out of the room and into a circle of armed guards, keeping his eyes on the ray-bot.
The armed escort quickly moved along the corridors, bringing him to his next destination--the transport shuttle. Depth Charge was slightly uneasy with Rampage’s unexpected compliance, but saw how the crab was looking at the spark-box in his hand. Perhaps he just wanted to avoid more pain...
The escort stopped at the shuttle as they were met by the shuttle’s guard team. Depth Charge stepped forward to hand the guard in charge the spark-box...
...and Rampage lunged, taking both escort teams completely by surprise as he showed himself not to be the obedient and cowed prisoner they had automatically assumed he was by his behavior. Depth Charge was the only one really prepared for any move by the crab, but he was at the wrong angle to fight his charge, and Rampage’s kick took him squarely between the shoulder blades.
His arms raised in reflex as he lurched forwards, and Rampage cleanly swiped the spark-box right out of his hand.
Then he turned and punched the nearest guard, stealing the gun he was carrying with the same hand as the guard collapsed. Instead of using it to shoot the others, however, he quickly pointed it until it was pointing towards the ceiling, brought it to his shoulder that way, and blasted the transformation lock that was there to smithereens. The guards were starting to fire their weapons, and Depth Charge was climbing to his feet. Rampage laughed and transformed to his tank mode, aiming his missile launcher.
Tank treads crushed those who couldn’t or stubbornly didn’t get out of his way, and his missiles outclassed any weapon in the room. True, there were about 30 guards in the room with more pouring in, but that just made the odds a little more even. Depth Charge had been the first target of Rampage’s missiles, and the three he had put in the ray-bot’s stomach while he was still getting up had knocked him offline, depriving the panicked guards of his experience in fighting Rampage. Now they fought and died, or at least were injured, in formations that would have worked against any other fighter, but Rampage simply smashed through them.
With his spark in its box safely in his subspace compartment, the crab was free to destroy anything in his path, and he went at it with a will. There was no real way he could win, he knew. The research facility had to have some kind of heavy defenses in place that could blow the ship away, if necessary.
Those thoughts were distant in the present, though, as he left carnage in his wake.
The whine of a heavy laser weapon powering up made the tank turn to see that someone in the guards had gotten organized. The person standing behind the operating crew of the lethal weapon told him exactly who it had been; Captain Venara was livid with rage at him as she looked at her slaughtered fighters. Behind her, Admiral Jerix was expressionlessly watching.
"Rampage, I’ll give you one chance to surrender," she said clearly.
Treads squealed as he charged their position.
She nodded and calmly ordered, "Fire when ready."
The operating crew nodded back, carefully aimed, and fired. Rampage slammed to a halt as a laser that could kill any normal transformer burned into him with a fiery pain not even he could ignore. He roared with anger and pain as the laser continued to slice through him. In desperation, he transformed to his robot mode and tried to lunge forward again.
The laser stayed with him, and his systems began to shut down into emergency stasis lock. The room dimmed slowly to black as he sank down to the floor. The laser turned off, and someone walked into the room and over to him. That person looked down at him as he went offline.
Admiral Jerix smiled.