Back to Main
       To Chapter Eleven
 

        Ravage growled and pawed at the door in front of him. Soundwave approached him from behind, flanked by Rumble, Frenzy and Ratbat. He looked from Ravage to the door and understood—the Autobot Scientist Perceptor was behind that door, most likely alone considering all the Autobots had been called outside to join the battle. Soundwave anticipated no troubles with this capture—his reports indicated Perceptor was a coward, a pacifist, and that was confirmed by his own observations when Megatron had had him captured to find a cure for the Cosmic Rust that had infected the Decepticons twenty Earth years before. He looked around, scanning the hallway to see if any unanticipated Autobots would be arriving to save their comrade, and readied his concussion blaster, then reached for the door.

        Perceptor frowned. Rodimus Prime had ordered him to remove key components from all the devices in his laboratory, to ensure that the Decepticons would not gain Autobot technology should it be that they drove the Autobots once again from Cybertron. He was having difficulty deciding exactly which parts were key enough to remove—after all, every component was vitally important to a functional device. He supposed Rodimus meant he wanted the component most difficult to replace removed, but he should have just said so in the first place, it would have saved Perceptor a lot of trouble. Of course, this led to him half-hoping that the Autobots would lose Cybertron, as then he wouldn’t have to replace the key items he was removing. He would be most perturbed if he had to reconstruct his laboratory for no better reason than the apprehension of subjugation.

        Suddenly, the door on the far end of the laboratory exploded inward, landing with a clatter on the floor and unveiling Soundwave and his cassette minions on its far side. Perceptor looked up from his diligent extraction of necessities to see this, then frowned.

        "Surrender, Autobot!

        "Soundwave! Do not expect me to submit merely because of a perceived tactical deficiency!"

        Soundwave replied by pointing at Perceptor and commanding his troops, "Capture the Autobot scientist immediately!"

        Ravage leapt forward toward Perceptor, who stepped back and kicked the subatomic deionizer he was working on at the Decepticon panther. The cylindrical device fell off its holder and rolled toward Ravage, who tried to leap over it but wasn’t able to get enough distance before it struck him, knocking him to the floor. Ratbat, who had been flying over Ravage, was able to avoid the tumbling machine and swooped in to claw at Perceptor’s face. Perceptor put his arm up to shield his face, and Ratbat’s claws found purchase on his forearm, leaving it free to snap at his face with its fangs.

        "Oh, no you don’t!" Perceptor cried, reaching out to his side and grabbing a wrench on a nearby worktable with his free hand. He swung it around, and it connected squarely with the side of Ratbat’s head. The little Decepticon didn’t seem to notice, and Perceptor continued to try to beat it around the head and wings.

        On the other side of the room, Frenzy helped Ravage to his feet, and Soundwave took careful aim with his blaster. It would cause him unbearable agony if he were to hit Ratbat, so he needed to make certain that he hit the Autobot. His optics focused, his finger twitched, and the impact from the blaster sent Perceptor flying backwards across the room into the laboratory’s large main computer. The shot hit the Autobot squarely in the center of his abdomen, tearing open a large gash in the red metal there, leaving gray internal components open to the air and sparking with broken wires and melted diodes. Ratbat disengaged himself as soon as Perceptor started flying backward, and even now perched on Soundwave’s outstretched left arm.

        "Autobot, you are defeated. You will come with us immediately."

        Perceptor gasped in pain and tried to stand up. The best he could manage was a shaky lean against the computer console. He looked around for something he could use as a weapon—and his optics fell on something.

        "I concede, Soundwave," Perceptor said, gasping in pain. "you have bested me." He reached forward with his left hand, covering his wound as if to keep his energon from leaking out. He then slipped a little on the computer, his right hand sliding downward almost to the very corner of the computer console. "Too well, I fear—my ambulatory motivators were damaged. I’m going to need assistance going wherever you want me to go."

        Soundwave nodded, and he and his minions began walking toward Perceptor. The Autobot scientist noted that Soundwave kept his concussion blaster aimed directly at him the entire trip. Frenzy and Rumble did the same from their positions flanking their master. He would have to be fast, then. He didn’t know if he could do it, but he would certainly try. He had to wait until they were a little closer, almost to the center of the floor.

        There. . .

        . . .yes. . .

        . . .almost. . .

        Now!

        Perceptor’s right hand came up behind him, and he swung his body around to face the computer as he reached out to grab a large, well-marked lever on the computer. He wrapped his fingers around the lever and pulled it down sharply, much of the strength he found to do it coming from the weight of his body as he fell to the floor. He had calculated that this would be enough to do what he intended while at the same time twisting out of the way of any shots from Soundwave.

        He was right.

        The sound of large steel doors disengaging echoed through the room, catching Soundwave and his henchbots unawares. They each looked around, giving Perceptor the crucial nanoseconds he needed. Then, the floor gave way underneath them, and all five of them disappeared into the refuse disposal tube. The doors then shut with another near-thunderous crash, trapping the Decepticons in the route to the recycling pits far underneath Iacon. Perceptor smiled. "Not so simple as you expected, was it?" He then winced in pain—he hadn’t been kidding about his ambulatory motivators. That, and one of his primary energon pumps had been hit pretty badly by Soundwave’s shot. He would have to get to work immediately on himself—he didn’t look forward to it, but he was the only medic the Autobots had on Cybertron at the moment, and he would have to do it if he were to be any good to the battle going on outside.

        He started pulling himself back to his worktable, where he had the tools he would need to fix himself.

        "You fly like a broken-down energon tanker!" Thrust flew in behind Silverbolt, unleashing a spray of cluster missiles that hit their target and sent him careening down toward the battle on the surface. With the Aerialbot leader out of the way, Devastator would face little opposition—he saw none of the other combining Autobots, and what Autobots were around were no match for the might of the largest of the Decepticons. The battle was going extremely well—the surface of Cybertron was littered with the bodies of fallen Autobots, while hardly a single Decepticon had fallen before the Autobots.

        "Thrust this up your tailpipe!" The black F-15 suddenly behind him was filling the air around Thrust with laserfire, occasionally striking the Decepticon. Even if he wasn’t badly damaging Thrust, he was making certain that the Decepticon couldn’t move for fear of being torn to shreds by the attack.

        "Stinking Autobot!" Thrust didn’t bother to maneuver—he put on his airbrakes and angled himself so that the Autobot would pass over him. The gambit worked, and Air Raid skimmed over him and was now lined up perfectly in Thrust’s sights. "I think you meant to do this." Thrust launched one of his air-to-air missiles, and it bore rapidly down on Air Raid’s hide.

        The Autobot tried shaking his tail loose, to no avail. Thrust’s heat-seeker kept closing the distance, 50 meters to 30, 30 meters to 10, 10 meters to barely a single meter—

        —and then Air Raid made a sharp turn to his right, and Thrust saw what he had been flying toward while making a show of trying to shake the missile. The explosion echoed over the battlefield, and Thrust’s fellow seeker, Dirge, screamed in rage and pain as he fell toward the surface of Cybertron and crashed, knocking himself unconscious. Thrust saw a swarm of Autobots surround him, their guns pointed down at his smoking fuselage—

        —and then he himself was attacked, and his engines flamed from their intake valves, through the holes in his armor, and in great tongues belching thick, black smoke from his exhaust vents. He transformed in mid-air, switching from his ruined jets to his repulsorlifts, and swung to the side to face his attacker. There, bearing down on him like the Four Horsemen of the humans’ imagined Apocalypse, were Air Raid, Fireflight, Skydive and Slingshot. He knew he was outgunned, and tried to flee, but was shot down by the four Aerialbots, crashing to the ground to join Dirge in unconsciousness.

        It had taken Soundwave nearly a minute to grasp his bearings well enough to activate his repulsorlifts and stop his descent. In that amount of time, though, the Autobot would most likely have fled. Nevertheless, his best bet for tracking Perceptor was to return to the laboratory, then have Ravage hunt him down again. It was a good thing he had summoned his cassettes back to himself once Ratbat failed to escape the trap.

        He flew back up the chute, stopping a half-dozen meters away from the doors that barred his way back to the laboratory. Leaving such a distance in order to avoid the explosion and the most destructive debris the shot from his concussion blaster would cause, he looked away from the doors and fired.

        The door exploded, jus as he knew it would, and he looked up to the laboratory he had been tricked out of. Looked up, straight into an enormous piece of equipment that had apparently been sitting on the doors, which was now—even damaged as it was from the explosion—hurtling downward at Soundwave. It struck him dead-on, and they both went tumbling down the garbage chute.

        Perceptor spared a glance at the garbage chute, then immediately got back to work on himself. It was awkward, using the probes and laser scalpels on himself from this angle, but he didn’t have much choice in the matter. He was just glad his failed attempt at constructing an anaphasic distorter had already been on the lifter, so he could simply set it to rest on the garbage chute doors via the remote control. That would keep Soundwave for a while longer—the Decepticon would quite possibly be stuck against the enormously heavy device all the way down to the smelting pits, which would suit Perceptor well enough.

        With one final snap, the last of Perceptor’s gyroscopes returned to its place, and he flexed his legs to test their mobility. They seemed to be working well enough—he would just have to live with the hole in his chassis for the time being. He stood up and took one last look around his laboratory. He had done what Rodimus had instructed, and had either destroyed or hidden the missing parts. All in all, it was better than destroying the laboratory, and he was grateful for that—but now he had to get topside, and do what he could to help the Autobots win this battle, so he could repair the damage he had done and return to his work as soon as was possible.

        The Aerialbots landed next to their leader, who lay smoking and sparking in one of the craters caused by Galvatron’s powerful cannon. Slingshot transformed as he landed and walked over the crumbling ground to help Silverbolt stand up.

        "You all right, fearless leader?" Slingshot asked, a cocky grin on his face.

        Silverbolt shot him a look that could melt steel, then stepped away from the smaller Autobot to check the mobility of his arms. He walked with a pronounced limp.

        "The Autobots need Superion to get rid of Devastator. I’ll barely be able to transform, but I think I’ll be able to hold it together once we’ve combined." Silverbolt’s voice was pained, as if he had to concentrate to keep from feeling the full pains of his body.

        The Aerialbots nodded grimly, wondering if Silverbolt would be able to do what he said he could do. None of them wished to press the matter, however.

        "Well," Skydive asked, looking at his fellow Aerialbots, what are we waiting for? Aerialbots, transform and merge to become Superion!"

        The Aerialbots all transformed and flew into the air as their vehicle modes, then began to transform again once they were high above the battle for Cybertron. Silverbolt had some trouble with this second transformation, and sparks flew from him as he twisted and rotated to form the body of Superion, but he was able to lock himself into that form so the other Aerialbots could join with him as Superion’s arms and legs. Finally, the masked head of Superion rose out of his shoulders, and the second gestalt to join the battle flew down through the laserfire dancing in the air to attack Devastator.
 

       To Chapter Thirteen