Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

She felt like she had a full-body hangover.

Caitlin Danvers, seventeen years old, knew hangovers, though she really wasn't supposed to. Having older friends made drinking easy and proved that she was adult. Though in the middle of the hangovers, she sometimes questioned that.

She was lying on a metal table. It made her back hurt. Mere air pressure made the rest of her hurt, and some leftover hallucination made her feel like she had at least two extra arms, which also hurt. Her head she could understand, but pain all over was new. At least it was quiet and the lights were low.

It occurred to her that she had been awake for some minutes now, but she hadn't blinked yet. She blinked. Light-dark-light, quick like that.

Caitlin wondered where she was. She didn't feel restrained, which was promising. She turned her head to one side and saw a sheet of purplish metal directly by her head. There was one on the other side as well.

She tried blinking again. It looked wrong. It went too quick, like flicking a light off and on. She never saw her eyelids close.

Caitlin blinked slowly. The room grew darker, went black, then lightened. Like a dimmer switch. Eyelids never came into it.

Through the haze of the pain of her body - it felt like a cross between a headache and the painful part of pins-and-needles on every bit of her skin - she realised there was a discomfort that was missing. Her mouth felt dry and the thirst was there, but other things weren't. She couldn't feel her teeth with her tongue because both teeth and tongue were missing.

Caitlin screamed and sat up, bringing her hand to her mouth. Her fingers scraped against her lips, then against the inside of her mouth.

She didn't notice the figure on the other side of the room until he turned and snapped, "Calm down this instant!"

Against all logic, Caitlin calmed down. Now she could see where she was. It was a large room that looked like a cross between a computer lab and a science lab in an artificial cave. The other person had been standing beside an alcove in the wall that held something that looked like a coffee machine. And the other person ...

... was Dracula?

By the time he walked over to her table, Caitlin realised that he wasn't human at all, and she had only seen a human because she expected it.

He was a Transformer. She had seen them on news reports, and had been expecting something taller. This one was probably about her size, with eyes like a red bar across a silver face covered with lines that made him look old. He was mostly black, with pinkish-purple arms and patch on his chest, and rust-coloured bat-wings. There was also a purple emblem like a face with a crown on his chest. Caitlin didn't know much, but she knew what that meant.

"My name," he said, and Caitlin's first 'Dracula' impression carried when she realised he had a Transylvanian accent, "is Mindwipe. You were brought here because I needed a subject for an experiment."

"M-me?"

"Oh, not you specifically, Keatranierdenyrarz. All I needed was a human."

It stung a little to know she was picked randomly instead of chosen. "That isn't my name," she sulked. "It's Keatrai. No, wait ..." She concentrated. "Caitlin. I'm Caitlin."

He scowled. "I said that."

"But ..." No, he did. It was an ... an accent or something. And his scowl brought her back to reality. "Um. Can I ask what the experiment will be?" Caitlin thought of herself as tough, but realising that she was facing down an evil alien scientist had robbed her of the last of her bravado.

"The difficult part is over, anyway. You've survived this long," said Mindwipe. "Look down, but please, no screaming."

Reluctantly, Caitlin looked down. She didn't want to affirm the suspicions that had been turning over in her mind since she woke up. Her body was strange and metal, mostly black and maroon with rust-coloured gloves. There was a panel of red glass in the centre part of her chest, the part that looked like a squared-off jet nosecone. The Decepticon symbol was stamped on it. She managed not to scream.

"A terribly common body, of course, for ease of finding replacement parts," Mindwipe explained. "Now stand. Speak your thoughts."

Even if she wasn't terrified, Caitlin had to obey. She managed to slide herself off the table. It scraped. "I feel heavy," she said. "Like I'm wearing a suit of armour. But not heavy heavy - I know it's heavy and I can feel it, but I can carry it easily. And I feel like I'm wearing a full backpack, but it's glued to me ... I have wings?"

Mindwipe nodded. Caitlin continued. "It's hard to balance. I've worn heels before, but this is worse. I can feel the floor. It looks like I'm wearing high-heeled boots, but I can feel the floor like bare feet. Only they don't squish down like feet. Looking down makes me feel dizzy. Everything's scaled to my height, but I know that I'm way farther off the ground than I should be. My eye-level is, I mean. Why am I wearing the same colours as you?"

"Because I like them. Continue."

She held the edge of the table and twisted a bit. "I can't move like I used to. And I can hear it when I move because bits scrape against each other. I can't turn at the waist. When I turn my head, these panels keep getting in my way. I have to turn my whole body to look at something beside me. Now that you've told me I have wings, I keep trying to find them. I can feel where they attach, but actually feeling them, like I feel my arms, keeps slipping away from me. It's like my mind's not letting me really look. And ..."

... And I haven't said a word in English since I got here. The realisation that she had been fluently speaking a language she didn't know hit her, and found she couldn't speak it any more. Once she noticed it and tried to use it, she couldn't. It was like looking at a word repeated so many times that it lost its meaning.

Mindwipe caught on to her distress. "Do not think, simply act. Walk to the next table and back. Continue to describe what you feel."

Walking was a lot more difficult than she expected, and concentrating on staying upright distracted her from the fact that she was speaking a strange language. "Heel-toe, heel-toe ... these feet are hard to balance on, and the floor's cold. Why don't I have ankles? It's like trying to walk in ski-boots - ski-boots with high-heels. At least the front part of my feet are flexible, so it's not exactly like ski-boots. And my legs bend wrong. If I want to turn my foot to the side, it turns at my knee instead of at the ankle or hip ..."

He worked her for what felt like hours. Pick this up. Sit down. Stand up. Tell me what you see. Do you hear this? No? Listen again. Describe this colour. Describe the texture of this. Jump. Tell me what this device does. It was mostly like a physical check-up, with some psychiatry thrown in on top. No single task was difficult, but taken all together it was tiring. Eventually, Mindwipe let her rest and went back to one of his computers.

Caitlin slumped into a low-backed chair. "I'm ... hungry," she said.

Mindwipe turned away from his computer and did something with the thing that looked like a coffee machine. When he turned back, he handed her a glowing pink cube, about the size of her head. Caitlin took it. It had looked almost solid, but holding it, it felt sort of liquid and sort of insubstantial and strangely heavy. The word 'ectoplasm' came to mind, and she rather wished it hadn't.

"Well?" asked Mindwipe. "Drink it, unless you expect me to feed you."

Okay, it was a liquid. It was glowing gasoline. The thought would have turned her stomach if she had one any more and if her body didn't crave the stuff in the cube. She could feel it - the cube was increasing her feeling of hunger. Caitlin raised the cube to her mouth, tipped it back, and nothing happened. Cautiously, she turned the cube over a few times. There weren't any openings. It was an alien juice-box without a straw.

Caitlin nipped at a corner and felt it give, but when she pulled it back to look at it, the cube was whole. This time, Caitlin bit off the corner, sealed her mouth around the hole she could feel was there, and tipped the cube back. The strange fluid filled her mouth, and she realised she didn't know how to swallow.

She coughed out of reflex, or tried to. The fuel was spat out, but the actual air of the cough came from lower, out of the vents on her chest.

At least she managed not to drop the cube, still holding it in her left hand. Mindwipe shook his head. "Hold still," he said, and Caitlin had to obey. Mindwipe took her right hand, opened a panel on the back of Caitlin's arm, pulled a tube out of it, and plugged it into the cube as Caitlin stared in horror.

"My arm is open."

"It was the easiest siphon for me to reach," Mindwipe said impatiently. "Or did you want to collapse from lack of fuel?"

"My arm is open and you pulled a tube out of it."

"Yes."

She couldn't do anything but watch as the liquid in the cube drained into her body. Mindwipe had told her not to move, after all. After a few minutes, Caitlin realised that it didn't actually hurt. She could feel that her arm was open and it was creepy, but it wasn't actually painful. Caitlin calmed enough to wonder if this was what an intravenous drip felt like, and panicked herself again when she realised she could taste the fuel in the tube.

She had nothing to compare it to. The best she could come up with was thinking it tasted like warm, thick water.

Days passed like that. Sometimes Caitlin slept, because she thought she should, even though Mindwipe told her she didn't need to. Sleeping was strange. There were no dreams and no way to tell that any time had passed. For all she knew, Mindwipe would let her sleep for five minutes, then wake her up and claim that eight hours had passed. Somehow she didn't think so. Somewhere within herself, Caitlin knew that exactly eight hours passed when she slept.

At first, Caitlin was a bit nervous about sleeping in the laboratory, leaving herself helpless. That passed quickly. Mindwipe had already put her in a robot body; after that, anything else he could do didn't seem all that frightening. And he didn't seem interested in harming her, just asking questions and testing her physical reactions.

Mindwipe wasn't always around. Often Caitlin would wake up and find the laboratory empty. She always tried the door when this happened, though it was always locked. Sometimes she thought about just smashing everything in the room, but could never bring herself to try it.

At least Mindwipe left things for her to do when he was out, though at first Caitlin found them insulting. They were like toddler toys - magnetic blocks and little shape puzzles and large, brightly-coloured beads. She decided they were probably some kind of psychiatrist's test; if she built a little fort out of the blocks, it meant she had repressed memories or something. Mindwipe certainly seemed interested in the results. The alternative, which Caitlin didn't like, was that she was given baby toys because Mindwipe thought of her as a baby.

Sometimes he gave her math problems, generally algebra. She wasn't sure what the formulas were for, but they seemed familiar, like she had seen them before but forgot. Caitlin first wished she had a calculator, then realised that just thinking about inputting the numbers gave her the answer in her head. Still, she could only manage the easier problems - she might have had a built-in calculator, but that didn't mean she could understand the methods needed for the more complex questions.

Of all the tasks Mindwipe set for her, Caitlin was determined to master drinking. After a week, she was able to use the feeding tube in her arm by herself. She didn't like to, but she preferred doing it herself to needing to ask Mindwipe to do it. She would have really preferred to be able to drink normally.

"I've seen you drink with your mouth," said Caitlin. "Why can't I?"

"You can," said Mindwipe. "But you do not believe that you can."

"I do. I always forget that I can't. I'm used to being able to swallow."

"You still can."

She had seen him drink. Mindwipe just lifted the cube up to his mouth and drained it. But Caitlin didn't have a throat. She had examined the inside of her mouth with a mirror and there was no hole at the back of it. There had been a bit that looked like a closed iris, but she couldn't get it to open, even when she prodded it with a finger. Maybe this was all a test. Maybe she couldn't drink like he could and the test was to see if she'd get the sense to give up and stick with using the tube in her arm.

Caitlin held up the cube, glaring at it. She tried her nip-off-a-corner-and-drink technique again, which filled her mouth with fluid she couldn't swallow. She didn't cough this time, but she still had to spit it out.

"You need to want it, Keatrai," said Mindwipe.

"I do want it!" Caitlin yelled, frustrated.

The scientist frowned at her. "The body is yours. It must obey your commands. Force it to obey!"

She held the cube in front of her face. Okay, body, I command you to drink this.

Her body didn't do anything. Of course, that technique never worked on her human body, either. Maybe this one had instincts, or something like them. Caitlin kept her gaze fixed firmly on the cube and thought about how hungry she was.

Without warning, her mouth opened and she threw up her oesophagus.

Caitlin shrieked and panicked, painfully biting the tube in the process. It snapped back into her mouth as soon as her bite released it. Mouth empty, she could form words again. "What the hell ..."

"That," sighed Mindwipe, "is your primary fuel-siphon."

"Why didn't you warn me?"

"What kind of experiment would this be if I told you what to expect?"

She almost wished he would laugh at her. She would prefer being bullied to being treated like a lab rat. Furious, Caitlin put the cube to her mouth, jabbed her siphon into it, sucked it dry, and glared at Mindwipe in triumph. As usual, he didn't seem to care.

Mindwipe was the only person she ever saw. Or, at least the only one she ever saw in person. Sometimes he would call up friends or fellow scientists or whoever they were on his viewscreen, and once in a while he would let Caitlin talk to them. Most of them asked the same kinds of questions that Mindwipe did, though the one Mindwipe talked to the most - a purple one with no mouth named Bugly - tended to ask her about her religion. Caitlin couldn't answer his questions very well.

After about a month, Mindwipe gave her a new toy - something like a computer tablet. He hooked it up to one of his computers, the one with the biggest screen. It was pretty obviously an art tool. "What do you want me to draw?" asked Caitlin.

"Anything."

Well, he wouldn't get any good pictures, anyway. Art was never one of Caitlin's strong points. She scribbled a bit to get used to the feel of the pen. It worked like a marker. The lines were black, and got thinner or thicker depending on how hard she pressed on the tablet. Not sure what else to do, she drew her dog. Not very well. It was recognisable as a dog, anyway. Remembering her art classes from school, she tried drawing her hand. It was easier than she remembered, though that might have just been because her robot hand was simpler-looking than her human one. Caitlin doodled a bit more - trees, rabbits, a vampire in a cape like bat-wings. When she ran out of space on the screen, she found she could scroll it over by pressing the pen down near the edge of the tablet. When Mindwipe came back, he didn't say anything about any of her drawings, just looked at them, and Caitlin could practically see him taking notes in his head.

Every time she thought Mindwipe couldn't surprise her any more, he did. During the second month, he said, out of nowhere, "I would like to test your weapons. Fire on me."

Automatically, Caitlin half-raised her guns before realising what she was doing. As soon as she noticed, it all slipped away and her guns hung uselessly from her arms. "I can't."

"If you can incapacitate me, you will be able to escape," said Mindwipe. "All you need to open the door is my energy signature, and I will retain that for a time after death. Fire on me!"

He wasn't lying. She knew, in that same weird way that she always knew what time it was, that her guns were fully charged and that a good hit on Mindwipe could at least knock him out. She could escape.

If she could figure out how to fire her guns.

Maybe it's like drinking, she thought. Maybe I have to want to do it enough, have to hate him enough ... Caitlin focused on that. How dare this alien monster take her from her family and perform experiments on her day after day and he'll probably kill her when he's done and he didn't even let her say good-bye ...

With a screech, Caitlin threw herself at Mindwipe, guns forgotten. He sidestepped her lunge, letting her crash into a table. "You're using the wrong emotion, Keatrai."

"You've been playing your games while everyone I know is worried sick about me!" Caitlin attacked again.

Mindwipe leapt back out of range, pulled a small device out of the air, and threw it at her. Caitlin ducked and brought her arms up to avoid it.

The device exploded in a flash of light.

Caitlin slumped back against a computer, hatred forgotten, never taking her eyes from the spot where the explosion happened. "I did that? What was that?"

"A battery pack. If it had hit you, it might have chipped your paint."

"I thought it was a bomb ... wait." Caitlin frowned. "The emotion I had to use was fear?"

Mindwipe nodded. "A much more sensible emotion than hate, really."

Nine seemed to be an important number. For nine days straight, Mindwipe brought her nine coloured dice, which she would toss nine times. However, the dice had twelve sides, and three of the dice had symbols instead of numbers. She recognised the Autobot and Decepticon symbols, but not the others. She would throw the dice, and Mindwipe would get his note-taking expression.

He always seemed a bit impatient with the process, but that was because it wasn't his idea. On the first day, Caitlin had cast the dice and asked, "What does this test?"

The scientist had made a face. "Bugly asked me to do this, so now he owes me a favour."

"Is it a test for psychic ability?" Caitlin used to try to influence dice back in her black-magic-goth phase in when she was fifteen.

"No. For life."

Which didn't make any sense as far as Caitlin could see. At least Mindwipe didn't seem to think it did, either.

After a while, Caitlin discovered she could make the electric pen change colour by wanting it to. She wasn't sure how it happened - she had wanted red and suddenly there was red, or any other colour. With a bit of practice, she could draw a solid line in a rainbow gradient. Mindwipe spent a couple hours asking her about colours after that - why did she use this colour here? What did this colour mean to her? Why did she only draw in black and white to start with? Draw anger for me, or fear, or joy.

Sometimes she worried that Mindwipe was somehow going to try to use the things she told him to help take over Earth. She couldn't figure out how, though. Her liking dark red didn't seem like something an alien conqueror could use.

One day, a little over four months since Caitlin woke up as a robot, Mindwipe said, "I'm finished with you. You may go."

"Are you going to put me back in my real body?" Caitlin asked.

Mindwipe shook his head. "Your human body is dead."

She scowled. "You're lying."

The scientist shrugged, went to a section of wall, and pulled it out. It was like a drawer without sides, and sitting on it was a jar filled with greenish liquid. It was small enough that she could have cradled it in one hand. The naked body of a girl floated in the liquid, upright but unmoving. There weren't even any tubes or wires going into it.

Caitlin bit back the sound of a sob and bent down for a better look. It was her body - the birthmark on her shoulder, the scar on her elbow from her first bicycle accident, her twisted second toe from a poorly-set break. From her new size it looked like a fragile doll. Its nakedness made her uncomfortable, but it also showed that her body was unmarked - Mindwipe hadn't tried to dissect it, which she was thankful for. Caitlin knew she wouldn't have been able to take seeing just bits of herself. Beside the jar, her clothing and everything she had in her pockets was neatly laid out and labelled.

Until now, Caitlin had held the hope that somehow she was just wearing her robot body, that she could simply find the hatch and climb out of it. Or, at worst, that her body was just in a coma somewhere. But her body was dead. There was no breathing, no heartbeat, no life.

Behind her, Mindwipe said, "There is no deterioration - I saw to that. In theory it could be made to function again, but I cannot guarantee that you would survive a second transfer. I could make the attempt ..."

"No! No, that's okay." She did not want to be put into a dead body.

Even though that meant she was going to be stuck as a robot for the rest of her life. "What are you going to do with it?" asked Caitlin.

"I intend to keep it."

For a minute she considered challenging him, telling him that this was her body and it was her decision what to do with it, except she wasn't sure what that would be. Her instinct said to take it with her and give it a proper funeral, but ... but she couldn't bring herself to do it. It was just too strange. She touched the glass, lightly. "Just ... just don't cut it up. Please."

"It will be left intact."

"Thank you. Um. Can I take my things?"

He looked her in the eye. "No."

That was all right. Caitlin wouldn't be able to carry the tiny things anyway. At least she knew where they were, and she wasn't going to need those clothes again.

The laboratory door opened. "Follow the lit tunnels. Nothing will harm you. If you stray into the darkness, the only penalty is that you'll get lost and I'll have to come rescue you. I would rather not need to go through the bother."

That was it, then. Caitlin decided to be a good girl and follow the lights. There were plenty of side corridors stretching off into the darkness. The place was probably a maze. She walked slowly, thinking. The first thing she was going to do was figure out where she was. Then she was going to kick up such a fuss that the Autobots would have to come - they were the good guys after all, right? She could tell them what happened and they'd deal with Mindwipe. Then she could go home. She wasn't sure how she was going to explain things to her parents, though.

Eventually she reached a door. Caitlin stepped outside and into the twilight of an alien city.

Somehow, she had expected that she was still on Earth. Caitlin took stock. Okay, she was a robot. She was big and strong and the wings on her back and the rockets on her feet meant she could fly, and the guns on her arms and the symbol on her midsection meant that nobody would mess with her. She could figure everything else out as she went along. She picked a random direction and began walking.

She had to get back to Earth somehow. She knew that everything would be better if she could just get back home. Her parents were there. Autobots were there. Mindwipe would pay for doing this to her.

The Transformers seemed to be able to get from one planet to another. There had to be spaceships somewhere. She could ... well, maybe she could quietly book passage. Caitlin certainly couldn't fly a spaceship, and she didn't want to try to hijack one. Anyway, she would see what her options were when she got there. She had to find a spaceport first.

Caitlin stopped. Unless she found a map with a clearly-labelled spaceport, she would never find it. She glanced back the way she came, thinking of Mindwipe, and decided she couldn't ask him. He'd kicked her out after all, and she didn't want to ask the one who got her into the whole situation for help. He would turn it into some kind of test, if he was inclined to help at all.

She heard the noise of the engine too late to duck into an alley and hide. Something like a stunt-car appeared around a corner. Instead of just passing by, it transformed into a blue and cream-coloured robot, smaller and bulkier than she was, with wheels on his arms. He was looking around, though thankfully he didn't seem interested in her.

He wore a Decepticon symbol. Caitlin took a chance and hoped he wouldn't somehow realise she was human. She approached him and asked, "Where's the nearest spaceport?"

She needn't have worried. He barely gave her a glance and grunted, "Jekka." Before Caitlin could ask how to get there, he had ducked into one of the buildings.

If it was the name of a place at all. For all she knew, 'jekka' was an insult. Even if it was a place, Caitlin had no idea if it was a street, a city, or even a country.

Mindwipe had kept her too busy to think about her problems. It was just sinking in now that she was trapped on an alien planet in a body she could barely use. She had no money ... she didn't even know if Transformers used money. And if they did, she didn't know how to get any. Caitlin had considered herself worldly and independent, and was starting to realise that she had been deluding herself. Watching action shows and playing video games didn't mean she knew how to fight. A high school education was worthless on Cybertron, even if she had been any good at her electronics or science courses, which she hadn't. She hadn't even taken a shop class in two years, and then she had been terrified of the sparks that came off the spot-welder.

She had no job-skills. She had spent a summer sorting files at a friend's parent's office, and she sometimes baby-sat in her neighbourhood. Caitlin wondered if Transformers had children.

Caitlin realised that she didn't know anything about the planet she was on. She saw Transformers on television often enough, but she had never really paid any attention. She knew the names of the faction leaders, had heard a few other names, knew that the Autobots liked humans and wore a red symbol while the Decepticons were trying to conquer Earth and wore purple symbols. But it was like watching footage of any other foreign war on the news - it wasn't her problem and it didn't affect her.

She knew that she looked like a Decepticon, but she had no idea how one should act beyond not liking humans and wanting to take over planets.

Mindwipe had created her, done some experiments, and then he abandoned her. Caitlin ducked into an alley, sank down against the wall, and fought back tears until she remembered that she couldn't cry.

Caitlin realised she must have fallen asleep when she was awakened by a rough kick to her shin. She looked up into the face of a being who looked like he had a pink jet for a shirt and a brown tank for pants.

"What are you doing sitting around out here?" he demanded. "Get back to the barracks! What's your name, soldier?"

She was too startled to lie. "K-Keatrai."

The pink-and-brown Decepticon waited, obviously not buying it. Caitlin thought, All the ones I've seen on TV have had names like Jazz and Starscream and Bumblebee. She had no idea what 'Caitlin' meant beyond that it was a variation of 'Catherine', so she took a wild stab and used her e-mail name, minus the numbers. "Darkstar?"

"Fhn. Whatever. Get up." He kicked her again. Darkstar neé Caitlin got up.

"I ... I don't know where the barracks are," Darkstar admitted.

He had no visible irises, but Darkstar knew that he rolled his eyes. "Dumb jet. You new or just drunk?"

She seized an option gratefully. "I'm new."

"Come on."

He led the way. Luckily, the place was close enough to walk to. Darkstar might have had wings, but Mindwipe never taught her how to fly. They soon reached a place that was obviously a military base - it was surrounded by a high wall with spikes and gun turrets on. Her guide led her past the guards and to what looked like the main building.

Darkstar found herself marched up to what she figured was the security desk. An irritated purple Decepticon with wings glared at them from behind a computer. "What do you want, Flywheels?"

Flywheels shrugged and gestured to Darkstar. "I found him out on the street," he said. "He says his name's 'Darkstar', but doesn't seem to know anything else."

Darkstar was about to protest that she was a 'her' rather than a 'him', and decided not to. She wasn't sure if there were any female Decepticons, and if there were, it might be even worse to be thought of as one. The officer on duty tapped a few keys on his computer. "I've got nearly two-hundred Darkstars listed. He's not one of them."

"I'm very new," Darkstar tried. "I-I was built by Mindwipe. He'll tell you!"

The duty officer looked sceptical. Flywheels shrugged. "He's wearing the kook's colours, anyway. Give it a try. Worst he'll do is hypnotise you."

"Shut up." The red light in the duty officer's eyes went out.

If that meant he was blind now, it didn't seem to affect him. A few more taps at the keyboard, and a familiar voice came through the speaker: "Yes?"

"Look at this." The screen was swivelled around so that it faced Darkstar. Mindwipe had his face resting on his hands so his mouth was covered, but Darkstar was certain he was smirking. The duty officer turned the screen back around to face him. "We've got a Seeker here with no identification who claims you built him," he said.

There was a short chuckle. "Ah, him. Yes, I built him a few months ago. See if you can find something for him to do, would you? Prepare to receive the necessary documentation." The connection cut. The duty officer's eyes lit up again.

Darkstar's relief lasted less than a second. Mindwipe doesn't know my name. I didn't start calling myself 'Darkstar' until after he threw me out. He's going to call me 'Keatrai' and they're going to know something is wrong ... But I called myself that first, so maybe Flywheels will believe me ...

The duty officer's frown grew deeper the longer he looked at the screen. Darkstar tensed. Eventually the duty officer snapped, "Didn't that idiot give you any useful skills at all?"

"Better than him being another silly mystic like his creator," chuckled Flywheels.

"Oh, here's a note at the bottom," growled the duty officer. "'I have created Darkstar as raw materials to be shaped and moulded by his experiences.' Thanks a lot, Mindwipe! Ugh, just stuff him in with Discard's crew. He won't need any skill for that."

Flywheels cocked his head slightly. "There's an opening there?"

"I'm pretty sure. If there isn't, just wait a skirmish."

The two Decepticons laughed before Flywheels motioned Darkstar to follow him. She hadn't liked the way they talked about where she was going. Still, it was currently the number two priority in her mind, underneath, How did Mindwipe know what to call me?

Third on the list was, Why did he bail me out at all? Near the bottom were such questions like, 'Mystic'? I thought he was a scientist, and, What did he mean by that 'raw materials to be shaped' line?

Flywheels led her through various corridors and down two floors before they reached their destination. Flywheels tapped the door control and walked in unannounced.

The room was ... a room. It was rectangular and made of bare metal. There were five beds - or shelves, they were flat metal as well - arranged around the perimeter of the room. There was a large table with a flatscreen computer monitor and keyboard on it. There was a chair in front of it. It was the only chair in the room. "Got a new one for you. Mindwipe sends his love," said Flywheels.

There was also a person sitting in the chair, who snorted. "The jets are next door, Flywheels."

"Yeah, the three jets," Flywheels retorted. "You ever try to tell a Seeker trine to take on a fourth? You're down one, anyway. You get the jet. His name is Darkstar, and he's absolutely useless. He'll fit right in."

Flywheels left, leaving Darkstar and the other Decepticon looking at one another. "Are you Discard?" asked Darkstar.

"'S me. I lead this group," he said, standing up to walk over. "You're allowed to disagree with me, s'long as you like looking for your own head."

"I'll ... I'll obey you."

Discard was ugly. He was a little shorter than she was, but twice as broad. He made Darkstar think of a troll made of junk. Nothing about him matched. His tires all looked the same size, but were of different makes. He had two cannons on his back, one bigger than the other. He had patches all over, and even his eyes weren't the same. One was yellow and the other was red, and shaped differently. Only his hands seemed to be a matched set. They were huge, like gorilla hands, and probably as strong.

Relatively, she meant. Things were so confusing ...

He noticed her staring. "So I do my own repairs and upgrades," he said. "I don't trust the techs."

"S-sorry. I shouldn't have been staring ..."

"Enh, go ahead, Jet. You'll get your share of it - you're the prettiest one to join this crew in ages."

Darkstar took a step back. "You ... you can tell I'm a girl?"

Discard looked confused. "You look like a jet to me."

"Jets are female? But Flywheels and the other one kept saying ..."

"Jets are jets." Discard seemed to squint. "Oh, I see. So they decided to give me another crazy one. Fine. Why not? Keep 'em coming."

"What?"

"You'll meet the others whenever they come back. Your berth is that one," said Discard, pointing at the shelf opposite the door. "You can check the storage compartments if you want, but we already cleaned 'em out. If you put stuff in 'em, we won't steal it until after you're dead. Come over here and hold out your hand."

She did. Discard took Darkstar's hand as if to shake it, but instead there was a flash between their palms and a pain in her head. She stumbled back. Discard nodded. "You're up to date on the codes now."

Darkstar was about to protest when she realised she did understand. Level Twelve military clearance, and these were the numbers you had to say to get past the sentries and these were the numbers you had to say if someone demanded you identify yourself and these were the numbers to and these were the numbers to. It was like a memory, but crystal clear.

Uncertain what else to do, Darkstar sat on her bunk. Right. She was in the army now. Hopefully they would get posted on Earth, and she could escape at the first chance. Mindwipe seemed to be a recognised person, but it was probably a bad idea to name-drop him unless she was desperate. She couldn't count on him to help her again.

She still had a body she barely knew how to use. But now she had a name, a job, and identification. Legally, she was a Decepticon citizen.

Chapter Text

Discard had left on some business of his own before the other three returned. Darkstar heard them before she saw them - two were arguing while one occasionally interrupted softly. Given the slightly-strained tones of the other two, the third one was keeping an argument from getting out of hand. Since she was right across from the door, they noticed her immediately when it opened. None seemed particularly surprised.

"So you're the replacement No-Hoper, eh?" asked the orange one.

"Y-yes," she stood up to greet them. "My name's Darkstar. I just arrived today."

He shrugged. "I'm Clunker. These are Stopgap and Smashup."

Clunker and Stopgap were both fairly short - Darkstar could have used either as a chinrest. They looked similar, in that they were both what she thought of as medium-build and had tires on their upper arms and lower legs. Clunker was mostly orange and had what looked like he was wearing a doctor's mask in metal. It moved a bit when he talked. Stopgap was gleaming white with green stripes and odd patches of rust-colour. After a moment, Darkstar realised that they actually were patches of rust. Aside from that oddity, if he wasn't an alien robot, Darkstar would have called him handsome.

Smashup, on the other hand, was much bigger than she was. He was mostly brown and maroon, and had tank-treads for legs. He also had a tank-like cannon attached to his left arm. He had a mask, but it was flat, like he didn't have a face under it at all. And instead of eyes, he had a red band where his eyes would be. "Finally, we get some real air-support," he said, and while his voice was as deep as Darkstar expected, it gave the impression that he was of at least average intelligence. She had immediately pegged him as a near-brainless thug. She made a note to try to stop judging people by appearance.

"Um." Darkstar paused for a second, unsure of what to say next. How were Decepticons supposed to act in this situation? "I hope to bring glory to our unit," she said.

There was a pause, then the other three cracked up. Stopgap grinned. "Good one, Jet. Set your sights low enough and you can't fail." He had a very nice voice, soft and low. He was the one who had been mediating, she realised.

It was settling into Darkstar's mind that she wasn't exactly with an elite team. She laughed with them, out of defence. If they thought she told a joke, she wasn't going to argue. Trying to keep up the mood, hoping it was a safe subject, she asked, "So, how about this team leader of ours? He didn't say much to me."

"Oh, Discard's fine. He seems to think we're better than we are, but he doesn't smack us around much. Besides, he fixes us when no one else will," said Clunker. "Sometimes the techs will, but not if there's anyone more important to fix first, which is everybody."

"He always does mine," Stopgap added. "At least if it's stuff too fine for Smashup to fix. The techs don't know how to mind their own business."

"Discard told me he does all his own repairs on himself," said Darkstar. "What if he's too hurt to do it?"

Smashup chuckled. "Oh, then we drag him down to the repair bay and the techs fix him up to the point where he can do it himself. But first he yells at them for touching him and then yells at us for letting them." He suddenly whacked Stopgap on the back. "I'm done with Clunker. Let's get out of here."

"Feh. Don't think you've won," grumbled Clunker. Stopgap flashed Darkstar an apologetic smile, then left with the tank-person.

Clunker went over to his bunk, drew a cord out of his side, and plugged it into the bed. Darkstar sat on hers. "You said I was a replacement. Who did I replace?"

"A motorcycle named Berserk. He was as dumb as his name," said Clunker. "But he served his purpose. If it wasn't for him running ahead like an idiot like he did, we would have all been ambushed."

Darkstar didn't have time to get bored. Early on the second day of her drafting, things managed to get worse.

She was in the room, watching Discard fix something on the table. Clunker was lying on his bunk, just looking at the ceiling. Suddenly there was a voice in Darkstar's head, as clear as someone speaking to her normally, and she decided that she'd finally cracked. It said, < Attention, soldiers. This is your commander speaking. The Autobots have attacked the city's central oil refinery. Go there and destroy them. >

Discard set down his tools and shrugged. "You both heard Windsweeper. Let's go."

"Does he expect us to clean up afterwards?" asked Clunker.

"Don't we anyway?" Discard replied.

"What about Stopgap and Smashup?" Darkstar asked. That voice in her head must have been some kind of radio transmission then. Or maybe Transformers were telepathic. She didn't know. At least she wasn't going crazy.

"They'll be along."

She followed them out of the barracks. It was twilight again. She wondered where this oil refinery was. She would just have to ...

Wait. They can transform. If they transform and drive off, I'll never be able to keep up.

Luck was with her - the roads where they were headed were in terrible condition. Or at least, she felt lucky until Clunker stepped off the ground.

Discard caught the car-person by the foot and hauled him back to the ground. "You know I hate flying. Besides, what hurry are we in? We'll just clean up what's left." So they walked.

The sounds of explosions were noticeable after about fifteen minutes. Another ten and they were peeking out of the shelter of an alley at what looked like a demolition site. "What's the plan?" asked Darkstar.

"Plan?" asked Clunker.

"Shoot anyone with an Autobot symbol," said Discard. The two Decepticons ran off.

This was it, then. She had thought that her time with Mindwipe had been bad enough, being forced to perform for his experiments. But she hadn't been in any danger then. Darkstar stood by the alley wall, trying to look everywhere at once, until an explosion just above her knocked her to the ground and covered her in scrap.

This wasn't a dream or something on television happening far away. This was a war, she was in the middle of it, and people were trying to kill her. Autobots - the people she had hoped could help her - were trying to kill her.

She had landed face-first on the ground, so she tried to push up with her arms. The weight of the scrap should have been easy to shake off, except her wings were like a table and covered with more junk than would have just been on her back. With effort, she managed to tilt her body enough that the scrap slid off her wings.

Her wings, which ordinarily she only knew as weight, made themselves known in complete detail as the metal junk scraped her. She was certain they had to be in tatters.

And somebody probably heard her. She could hope all she liked that the noise of the battle drowned out her struggle, but someone probably heard it, and maybe whoever blew up the wall was going to come check to see if he hit anything. She had to get out of there.

Darkstar shook off the last of the junk and stood up. She took two steps, turned a corner, and almost ran into the Autobot.

He was smallish, in orange and gray-blue with a red face, he had a cannon on each shoulder, and he seemed to be just as surprised by her as she was by him. Darkstar tried to bring her guns up, but couldn't - like her wings, she could only sense them when she wasn't trying to. She could feel where they attached to her arms, hanging loosely and pointed uselessly at the ground. In desperation, she used her right hand to lift her left gun. "Fire! Dammit, fire! Oh, sh-"

The Autobot panicked, fired one of his cannons, and missed. Darkstar screamed and dove away from the resulting explosion. She scrabbled back as the Autobot aimed again. She held out her hands to shield herself. "I don't belong here! I'm not what you think I am! I'm not really a Decepticon! I just look like - Eeeeeyah!"

The Autobot jerked sideways as a missile slammed into his side and exploded. Something like an armoured minivan with cannons on top drove up, and Darkstar only recognised Discard because he was all patchwork. "Focus, Jet!"

"How am I supposed to focus when things keep exploding around me?" she yelled after him as he drove away.

That was it. Darkstar made up her mind to find a place to hide until all the noise stopped.

Pain suddenly burned all down her side. Darkstar realised that she had been shot, and fainted.

Darkstar became aware of pain, and of hands ...

She sat up suddenly. "Don't you dare touch me like that!"

Overlarge red eyes glared at her and a hand pushed her back on the table. "And how am I supposed to fix your inguinal without touching your pelvis? Dumb jet."

At least the medic had a female voice. Darkstar relaxed a little at that, even though she knew it was silly. There wasn't anything under her metal shorts but cables and circuits and things, but taking off bits of her armour felt like she was removing her clothes.

It was easier to think of it that way than thinking that they were removing her skin.

It hurt, though. Darkstar whimpered. The medic glanced at her. "Damp your pain receptors."

"I - I don't know how ..."

"Grah. Stupid."

"Aw, the draft-dodger's all grumpy because those inconvenient Autobots have turned Porphuras into a warzone," heckled a medic at the next table. "Afraid you're going to have to work for a living, Steelcast?"

"Dunk your head in a smelter, you slab," Steelcast snapped back. She noticed Darkstar staring at her. "What? You want to add something, Jet?"

She squeezed a handful of cables for emphasis, causing Darkstar to gasp in pain. "N-no," Darkstar managed when the pain went back to tolerable levels. "People don't have to be soldiers? Could I get a job like that?"

The medic shrugged and went back to repairing her. "Depends. You good at anything?"

"I could ..." Darkstar searched her options. "I could be Cultural Ambassador to Earth. I know all about it."

Steelcast stopped working for a moment, perplexed. "What would we need one of those for?"

"Um." Right. They were planning to conquer Earth, not make friends with it. "I could open a museum dedicated to the planets the Decepticons have conquered?"

Steelcast snipped out a few burnt cables and started soldering the new ones in. "You know, I don't think we have one of those. Probably because no one would visit it except xenoscientists."

"Can you tell me which ones are studying Earth?" asked Darkstar.

"Slot, how should I know? Why're you so interested in the place, anyway?"

"I ... I just think it sounds interesting. Different."

"It's resources, Jet." Steelcast snapped the front and left side pieces of Darkstar's shorts back on. "There, you're done. Out."

Darkstar got off the table, then looked down at herself. "But my armour's still all scratched up."

"Your nanites will take care of the surface damages, dope." To Darkstar's extreme surprise, Steelcast swatted her on the butt. "Now get out. I've got work to do."

Still confused, Darkstar went back to the room she shared with her team. Discard was at the computer, Stopgap was lying face-down on Smashup's bunk while Smashup changed one of his shoulder-tires, and Clunker was missing. Discard glanced up when she walked in. "You're going to have to do better in the next battle. If you don't start being useful, the next time you're in the repair bay, they're going to scrap you for parts."

Darkstar blinked at him. "What?"

"You. Dismantled. Parts used to fix other jets that can actually hit things. And if you broadcast like you did back there again, I'll do it myself. You nearly got me killed, screaming in my head like that."

"I did what? When?"

Discard shrugged. "Dunno. Near the beginning. I'm trying to fight an Autobot and suddenly you're on the team broadcast frequency, screaming."

"That was probably when the wall fell on me," Darkstar said slowly, trying to remember. All right, so her radio could send as well as receive. Useful to know if she could control it. "But I didn't think I screamed."

"Maybe not aloud," grumbled Smashup.

"You were all over the frequency, Darkstar," murmured Stopgap.

"You both shut up," Discard suggested, then returned his glare to Darkstar. "And what did you think you were doing, trying to talk to that Autobot?"

"I ... I ..."

Fortunately, Darkstar didn't need to think of an excuse. Discard kept talking: "Those ones we fight, they're the Autobot equivalent of us. If they're doing their jobs right, they don't think, they don't question, they just try to shoot as many enemies as possible. They don't make deals and they don't take prisoners."

"What if they did take someone prisoner?" asked Darkstar. "Do Autobots torture people?"

Discard shrugged. "Maybe. I don't think they're supposed to, though. I think they just lock people up until they can be put through therapy."

"They must have a lot of prisons."

"Nah. They use mind-prisons like we do."

"They use what?"

"Take out your processor and laser-core and store 'em in a box," said Discard. "How come you never know anything?"

That was a question she had thought of an answer to the day before. "I think I'm an experiment to see if someone can survive without any programming."

It satisfied Discard at least, and he went back to looking at the computer. Stopgap and Smashup didn't seem interested in talking. Darkstar sat on her bunk so that she wouldn't fall over - her knees had gone weak. She was lucky that she hadn't been captured, then. She knew, with absolute certainty, that if they turned her into a disembodied brain, she would die. The robot body was hard enough to accept. No body at all would break her mind.

And it got her thinking about something that hadn't occurred to her yet. Discard already thought she was crazy because she said she was a girl. What would someone think if she tried to convince them that she was really a human, kidnapped by the Decepticons and transferred into a Decepticon body? They would never believe her. Unless this sort of thing happened all the time ...

... No, it couldn't be a common thing. People would know. At least, she had the feeling this was the only time Mindwipe had done this experiment. Flywheels and the duty officer seemed to imply that she was the first 'child' that Mindwipe had created. Though he might have done so before, somewhere else, so they wouldn't know. But it would be difficult to move his entire lab ...

... Around and around and around. Darkstar could invent as many theories as she liked, and she would never know which one was right, if any were. Maybe she had always been a Decepticon, and Mindwipe just did something to her to make her think she was human.

No. Darkstar clenched her fists. She was human. She was. She remembered her parents and being a child and growing up. She remembered the names of friends from Grade Two. She remembered the names of the three dogs that her family had owned during her life. She remembered getting into a fight with her mother - "We won't extend your curfew unless you stop breaking your current one, Caitlin." "You don't understand!" - and putting on all her 'punk' clothes and storming out of the house and just walking somewhere, anywhere ...

... And waking up on a table.

She was human. There was no way Mindwipe could have invented all that. The Decepticons didn't even seem to understand the concept of 'female'; there was no way one could have written a human life with such detail that she could even remember what was written on her shirt on the day she left ...

She was human. She had to hold on to that.

If she wanted to survive, she had to know more about where she was. A planet that was all mechanized had to have an Internet, right?

Darkstar sat on the room's single chair and looked at the computer. Fortunately, it looked like an ordinary computer instead of anything strange. There was a screen and a keyboard. The keyboard had Decepticon glyphs instead of letters, but she could read them if she didn't remind herself that she shouldn't be able to. There was no trackball or mouse. Apparently mice never evolved on Cybertron.

She bit back her giggle. "Are there any passwords or anything I need to get into the system?"

Clunker, the only other one in the room, shook his head. "Just plug in. The computer will recognise you."

Plug in? There was what looked like a disc drive in the front of the monitor, but that probably wasn't it. There were two ports on the table on either side of the keyboard, like sockets for headphone jacks. Probably one of those. "Which one?"

"Any."

Right. Next problem - where did she keep her jack? She'd seen the wire connecting Discard to the table when he used the computer, but she never looked to see where it came from. Well, Mindwipe had pulled a cable out of her arm on her first day. It was a place to start.

Darkstar tried her right forearm, like Mindwipe had done. Her back-up feeding tube was there, but gentle tugs on the other wires just hurt. She closed that up and tried her left.

Bingo. There were four cables in different sizes in there. Darkstar selected the cable that looked like it ended in a headphone jack and tried it in one of the table's sockets. It fit.

Her triumph was short-lived. Information flooded into her mind. In a panic she thought, No, no, put it on the screen!

It worked. The flood ceased. Instead of information going directly into her mind, it appeared on the screen. However, all it said was: Darkstar: MND-000-001-2000 - Soldier: 2000AKR385.6852.

All right, she found the 'Welcome, User' page. There weren't any menus. There wasn't even a cursor. She typed, "Hello," which appeared two-thirds of the way down the screen, but didn't seem to affect anything.

It had stopped pouring information into her mind when she thought the command at it. She tried again. Answer my questions, but show the answers on the screen. Where am I?

Her name and the word 'Hello' vanished, replaced by: Define parameters.

Computers, thought Darkstar, were the same everywhere. What city is this?

On the second line: Porphuras.

That was what the one medic had said. All right. Show me a map of the city.

The text vanished, replaced by an aerial photo of the city. No, simpler. Not so many details. Just streets and things, with the streets and major buildings labelled. And a point showing where I am, she added.

The map obligingly simplified to something approaching maps that Darkstar knew. Only the biggest streets had names, but many of the buildings did, and different sections of the city were labelled. Her 'you are here' marker was in a building labelled 'Porphuras Military Base, Barracks'.

Zoom out, she told the computer. Show me the next largest size map. But keep it simple.

The map changed, showing what Darkstar decided was the state or province. The closest thing she could come up with to compare the shape to was a fat electric guitar lying on its side. It was labelled 'Tyrest'. It also seemed to be an island, only instead of water around it, there was a canyon. If there weren't any bridges, she would have to learn to fly if she wanted to get away.

On the other hand, maybe she didn't need to. On the western edge of the province was a city labelled 'Jekka'. The city with the spaceport.

I want to memorise the map of Tyrest, thought Darkstar, and the computer didn't realise she wasn't giving it an order.

Darkstar screamed and flung herself backwards, causing her to fall out of her chair and smack her wingtips on Stopgap's bunk before she hit the floor. Her jack had torn free of the table socket, but too late. The download had been nearly instantaneous.

Clunker was beside her in seconds, grabbing her arms as if to help her up, but it was only to shake her. "You idiot! You tried to go too deep into the system or you tried to peek at classified files and the Monitor caught you, didn't he?"

"W-what Monitor? I downloaded a map by accident and I was surprised by the sudden information!"

He stopped shaking her long enough to look back at the computer screen. The map of Tyrest was still there. Clunker let her go. "If the Monitor had noticed you, you wouldn't have had time to scream."

He went back to his bunk. Darkstar got up, picked up the chair, and decided to give the computer another try. Her jack wasn't damaged, so she plugged in again. Even the Decepticons' Internet was dangerous. Great. Well, Clunker had named one of the dangers. She asked: Is general information on Monitors classified? Answer on-screen.

The screen typed: No.

Define 'Monitors'.

The 'No' vanished as the screen filled with text. Basically, Monitors were a dozen high-ranking Decepticons who could plug into and control computer systems. They dealt with the defence and administration of entire Sectors. Darkstar asked: But I'm plugged in and controlling a computer.

The average Cybertronian could interface with computers, the screen told her. The difference was one of scale and skill.

Darkstar unplugged herself and put her jack-cable back into her arm. "What's a Monitor?" she asked Clunker.

"Ghosts," said Clunker. "They live in the Worldnet, and they're territorial. If they catch you in their territory, they'll kill you. I never use computers that I have to jack into."

"The computer said they're just Decepticons who're really good with computers."

"Yeah, the live ones are almost as bad. Just stick to the surface levels when you tap into the Worldnet."

"Do they send assassins after you?" The 'administration' in the description was the opposite of scary.

Clunker snorted. "They don't need 'em - they'll kill you through the system. Put it this way - I knew someone who knew a hacker who went too deep, and just before all his processors blew, he turned to smile at his cohorts and it wasn't the hacker looking out from behind his optics."

Without thinking, she scooted the chair back a bit. "You mean people can get into your head through the computer system? And what do you mean, 'the live ones'?"

"The living Monitors will just kill you, but sometimes they die while in the system and they stay there, looking for a new body to transfer into." He read the expression on her face. "There's public access terminals in the common rooms that are manual-interface only."

"Maybe I'll try that next time."

Darkstar would have killed someone for a hot shower. Or at least severely roughed him up.

Not that she didn't appreciate the showers - they got the dirt off and they refreshed her psychologically if not physically - but they were freezing. In her mind, showers should be hot.

She had just got back from her third battle and she still wasn't dead. This time it was thanks to Flywheels who shot an Autobot sniper she hadn't known was there. She was about to thank him, but he grinned first and told her that if she survived one more battle, he would win a bet with the duty officer she had met on the first day. Then he split in half and took off in two different directions, so Darkstar lost any chance of a comeback through sheer surprise.

The liquid that was too cold to be water evaporated as she walked back to the No-Hopers' room. Darkstar wasn't sure where else to go. The others in her team were in and out all the time, doing whatever it was Decepticons did when she wasn't looking at them. She would have to work up the courage to ask to come along sometime, if only to find out where she was allowed to go and what there was to do when she wasn't being shot at or repaired.

When she got back to the room, only Discard and Stopgap were there. Stopgap was sitting on his bunk, polishing himself. He seemed to spend a lot of time carefully cleaning and buffing himself, or at least the non-rusty parts of himself. He was so white he practically glowed in the dark. It confused Darkstar that someone so hung up on his appearance wouldn't do something about the rust. He never went to the showers with the rest of them, either. Maybe he didn't want to get his rust wet.

Idly, Darkstar wondered where he got his polish from. She knew it would get scuffed off and ruined as soon as the next battle happened, but there might be a psychological advantage to looking good and she'd always been particular about her appearance. Smashup seemed to use the stuff as well, though not nearly to the degree Stopgap did. Maybe Smashup just seemed particularly shiny because Darkstar didn't expect a tank-person to be careful with his grooming. Discard and Clunker didn't seem to be nearly so picky. They wore the same dull, basic-cleaning-only shine that she did.

Maybe she could trade something to the medics for some. It seemed reasonable that they might be the ones in charge of the polish supplies.

It clicked in that she was worrying about her appearance, but in a robotic way. Without thinking, half-sarcastically, Darkstar sighed. "I need a drink."

Behind the computer, Discard snorted. "I keep telling you to drain corpses, but you never listen. And you already used your ration for today."

"I know, but I think it was all used up in repairs," said Darkstar, glad to have something else to think about to deliberately ignore the suggestion to take fuel from the dead. The others did it, but she couldn't bring herself to. Thinking about watching her self-repair systems work was a much nicer topic. There was something hypnotic about seeing the scratches on her armour fill in.

"Plug into your berth, then."

Darkstar glanced back at her bunk. "I still feel hungry if I just recharge." That, and plugging herself in felt weird. Everyone had it beat into their heads as kids that they aren't supposed to put their fingers in light sockets. Just because she had a plug now didn't change things.

"Yeah, well, welcome to the army." Discard started to settle back, then seemed to think of something. "You know, we might be able to get one. Come on."

He got up and started out. "Shouldn't we invite Stopgap along?" asked Darkstar.

Stopgap looked up when he heard his name, but shook his head. "He doesn't want to and he'd be a liability anyway," said Discard, walking out the door.

"That wasn't nice," said Darkstar before she could stop herself.

"I might look low-class and weird, but he's obviously a freak," said Discard. "Besides, he'll be happy to have us gone. Clunker won't be back for hours, either."

Something about Discard's tone told Darkstar not to ask any questions. She followed him out to the edge of the base. Tucked in between two larger buildings was a place that could only be a bar. Discard pulled her into an alley where they could watch the place without being seen. "This place is for higher-ups passing through, though by 'higher-up' all I mean is that they actually graduated from the War Academy, not that they've got any real rank. They don't even go into the base if they can help it."

Discard suddenly had a pistol in his hand. Darkstar wished she knew how the others made things appear out of thin air, but didn't have a chance to ask about it when Discard handed her the gun. "What's this for?"

"'S a prop," Discard explained. "Always have it out, play with it a bit, and point it at anybody who looks at either of us wrong. But lazily. In a, 'Oh, I just happen to be pointing my gun in this direction and testing my sights, I don't really care about you,' way."

"We're robbing the place?" asked Darkstar.

"Technically, yeah. But not really. We're just giving the impression that we're more important than we are, and thus are owed a drink," said Discard. "Now hang off my arm and look dangerous."

"What?"

Discard did the expression that implied rolling eyes. "You could look elite if you tried. I can't. You're my prop. We swagger in there like we own the universe, and people are going to think, 'That one doesn't look like much, but he must be dangerous if he's got a high-level Seeker as his ornament.' Besides, I'm your superior officer and I don't trust you to do the talking. In fact, once we're inside, don't talk at all."

"What if someone recognises us?"

"Anyone who could recognise us shouldn't be in there. Come on."

It sounded like a plan, even if she didn't see how it could possibly work. Despite their height difference and the gun attached to her arm, Darkstar managed to slip her arm around Discard's. He frowned. "Primus, you got screwy energy fields. Touching you is like touching something dead. Whatever, maybe it'll be an advantage. Come on, and remember - you are a gorgeous, elite, killer jet, and you're superior to everybody."

Trying not to bump into the tires on Discard's legs as she walked, Darkstar tried to think Bond-girl thoughts. Swaying her hips wouldn't work because she would just crash into Discard and trying to slink was impossible with her joints. Besides, she had no idea what a Transformer considered sexy, if anything.

Just act like you used to back on Earth, when you knew everything and everyone else was just stupid, Darkstar told herself. Pretend you're wearing your 'It's All About Me - Deal With It' shirt. You can do no wrong because you know better than everyone.

They walked into the bar. It was small, and there were only maybe a dozen people there. Darkstar forced herself to calmly meet the gazes of the few people that looked their way. She used her nervous energy in the arm that held the pistol, always keeping it moving, trying to make the motions smooth despite her robot joints. When he led her to a seat at the bar, she rested her elbow on the counter and continued lazily twirling her gun in what she hoped was a dangerously sexy way.

Discard didn't place an order so much as make a demand, though it sounded like a chemical formula rather than a drink. It seemed to work - the bartender didn't tell them to get out or pull a gun on them.

He set their drinks in front of them a few minutes later. These weren't the bright pink cubes that they got back at the base and that Mindwipe used to give her. These were smaller and purplish. Darkstar wasn't going to put her pistol down, so she had to let go of Discard. To make up for that, she leaned against him instead, and heard him chuckle. The small, purple cube tasted different from the pink ones, somehow. It still tasted sort of like thick, warm water, but with an aftertaste like the smell of battery acid.

The drink made her think of alcohol, warming and relaxing. Darkstar found, to her surprise, that it was actually kind of fun pretending to be the Sexy Evil Spy to Discard's James Bond. Well, if James Bond was short and built like a gorilla and snarled at people who looked at him wrong. It was like trying to see how long she could stay at a club before someone carded her and found out that she was too young to be there.

It dimly occurred to her that she was feeling slightly drunk, but she couldn't bring herself to care. Besides, Discard was right. She was better-looking than most of the people in the bar - there were a few jets, but most seemed to be tank-people or other blocky, ugly types. And she was tough - why, she'd survived three battles without any training, so there. And she was clever. After finding out that Discard didn't like to fly, she could avoid flying herself by tagging along with him to battles; he might have had wheels, but she could run as fast as he could drive.

Discard had been right about her. Everyone else had just better watch out.

Everyone else seemed to be watching, at least. It gradually started to cut through the haze that no one was looking particularly impressed.

Suddenly, one of the jet-people left his group and sauntered over. He could have been Darkstar's mirror-image, only he didn't have arm-cannons and he was green and covered in gold designs. His body was so highly-polished that he would have been blinding in the sunlight, if it was ever day on Cybertron. He settled himself in beside Darkstar and gestured the bartender over. "Your sight is going," he hissed, "if you cannot tell a garbage collector from a warrior."

"He can't tell a garbage creator from a warrior either if he let you in, Skyblade!" heckled someone from a nearby table. Skyblade snarled at him.

"Get lost, artist," said Discard lazily. "Some of us earned this drink on the field of battle."

The green jet-person smiled like a snake. "You are from the base and lack the rank to be in this establishment. But if you truly deserve to be here," started Skyblade, then he reached back, took off one of his wings and attached it to his arm. It looked unnervingly sharp. "Prove it. No mere garbage collectors of Windsweeper's could best me."

"Um." Darkstar drew a little closer to Discard. "What do we do now?"

Discard pulled another gun and snapped off a shot at someone else's drink, which exploded. "Run."

They managed to get outside without injury. "Now transform and fly us out of here!" Discard ordered.

"I don't know how to transform! Or fly!"

"WHAT?"

The sounds from the bar were getting dangerous. Discard folded up into his armoured-van form. "Come on!"

Darkstar ran after him as Discard drove away. Discard cursed all the way back to the barracks.

When they got back, Discard transformed, and started to march Darkstar back to their room. He suddenly stopped, and lead her down to the basement instead. He seemed to pick an empty side-corridor at random and practically threw her in. "What the slag kind of Transformer doesn't know how to transform?" he yelled.

"Mindwipe never told me how," she tried.

"It should be part of your basic programming! Flying should be the easiest thing in the world for you! Transforming should be automatic! What kind of useless jet did Flywheels stick me with?"

"I'm sorry! I don't know anything!"

"I noticed that!"

Discard still seemed angry, but didn't say anything. Darkstar wasn't sure what to say next. "Can I go back to the room now?" she asked, and cursed herself for sounding like a sulking child.

Discard shook his head. "Wait a few hours. There's some things you don't want to walk in on. Let's go up to the target range instead. Maybe you can learn something."

Chapter Text

She had been lucky up until now, managing to avoid being called on to fly or transform. Now Discard knew she couldn't do either, and he seemed angry about it. But he already thinks I'm crazy. Why would this be worse?

Because it's part of the name. Transformers transform. It's what they are. They just thought she was stupid when she didn't know how to work the computers or deactivate her pain receptors. But she wasn't just an alien robot, she was also a jet, and jets should know how to fly.

No. Transforming was out of the question. Darkstar was just about able to accept feeling her wings and her arm-guns and opening panels on herself, she knew she couldn't handle folding in ways the human body wasn't meant to fold. She could never actually be a Transformer, just someone who looked like one, and they were always going to think less of her for it.

But Decepticons could fly no matter what they turned into. She had to learn to fly - if not to fight, then to one day escape. Discard had mentioned that the next room had a trio of jets. Maybe they could help. It couldn't hurt to ask.

No, it could. These were Decepticons. Still, she would never figure it out on her own.

Darkstar went to the next door and pressed the call button. She pressed it two more times and was about to assume no one was in when someone inside called, "It's open!" Glad that no one had hit or shot at her, she stepped in.

There were two of the jet-people in the room. One seemed to be sleeping on the floor while the other sat on his stomach. They were surrounded by a dozen pots of paint.

The unconscious one had been painted the same purple-gray of the buildings, then covered with graffiti. The orange jet was crouched over him with an airbrush, mumbling to himself, delicately putting the finishing touches on the words Battletrap Is A Pervy Circuit-Fancier.

He didn't look up from his work. "Mph. I should have known it wasn't Flee. He knows he doesn't need to knock. Who're you?"

"I'm Darkstar. I'm with Discard's team."

"He must love that. I'm Haze, this is Gash, and Fleetwind is out. You'll forgive me if I don't bother to remember your name, given the rate of turnover in the No-Hopers."

Haze stood and turned around to face her. Except that he was orange, he looked like the other on the floor, and both looked quite a bit like Darkstar. The main difference was that they had nosecones on their heads as well as on their chests. Mindwipe said I looked 'common'. This is getting confusing ... "Why would Discard care?"

"He's got a thing for jets," said Haze. "He thinks that, somehow, a jet will always be superior to a groundbound. Ignore that two of the three highest-ranked Decepticons are guns. Ignore the number of nobody jets in the army. Why Discard never bribes the techs to put him in a Seeker-shell is beyond me ..."

Because he doesn't trust the medics and he doesn't like flying, thought Darkstar, but didn't say it out loud. Secret or not, it wasn't Darkstar's place to tell. But small-talk wouldn't get her anywhere. She decided to take the plunge. "I was wondering if ... if one of you would teach me how to fly."

Haze stared at Darkstar as if she had just grown a second head. "You can't fly?" He shook his head. "Well, I suppose it's not entirely unheard of in upgraded groundbounds, or maybe ..."

He trailed off until he was muttering to himself. Darkstar waited a few seconds before interrupting. "Um. I mean I can't fly in this form. I'm an experiment in minimal programming by Mindwipe," she added, since the excuse had worked before.

"Blazing stupid experiment," said Haze. "Here. We're close enough to the same model, unless you've got some invisible upgrades."

He held out his hand. Darkstar recognised the gesture by now, took his hand, and braced herself for the lightning-flash of information.

It hurt worse than it ever did with Discard giving her password updates. It felt like the lightning-bolt punched her in the brain. There was a voice in her head that sounded like her own and like the computer: File cannot be overwritten.

Haze staggered slightly and gasped, "Can't ... Ow ..."

"I ... I thought I didn't have the programming," said Darkstar. "Sorry."

Haze shook his head and waved her off. "So you've got the programming but don't know how to access it. That's step one, anyway."

"What's step two?"

"Off a building," said Haze.

Naturally, Darkstar had assumed he was joking. When he led her to the roof of one of the outbuildings, she clued in that he wasn't.

Darkstar looked down. It looked to be about three stories, though a little voice in the back of her mind was telling her that three stories here was several times higher than three stories on Earth and that a human wouldn't survive falling either distance. "You want me to jump?"

She had to repeat it before Haze noticed she had asked a question. He shrugged. "If you crash and get stuck in the ground, I'll pull you out."

"What if it kills me?"

"The only way a three-story fall can kill you is if there's a smelting pit at the bottom," said Haze.

Doubtfully, Darkstar looked down the side of the building again. She knew her body was strong, but it was also very heavy. She thought of Mindwipe's advice for using her body - you need to want it. Well, she didn't want to crash. And she'd be terrified. Mindwipe seemed to think that fear helped.

Holding her desires firmly in the front of her mind, Darkstar stepped off the edge of the building.

Eight seconds later, Haze landed lightly beside her. "At least," he said without a trace of sarcasm, "you've felt the feeling of speed and air rushing past you."

She felt like a pot that a toddler had just banged with another pot. Her entire body was rattled. "I hope I damaged the sidewalk," she sulked.

"If the sidewalk wasn't there, you would have fallen farther," Haze pointed out. "Though that might be a good idea. A longer distance would give you more time to recover ..."

"Let's just try it from the roof again."

Haze flew her back up to the roof, though Darkstar could feel him straining. She couldn't ask him to catch her, then. Darkstar jumped off the roof and crashed six more times, Haze patiently helping her up and giving advice, before Darkstar decided to call it a day. Besides, they had attracted a few spectators.

"What'd that sidewalk ever do to you?" heckled one. Darkstar had seen him out on the field before - he was half her size, looked sort of like he had a tape-deck for a chest, but he turned into a weird, dog-like monster.

Fed up, Darkstar staggered to her feet and stepped back into a fighting crouch. "You want to make something of it, bootleg?" she snarled. She thought it was a dumb insult, but the medics used it a lot.

He spread his arms in a universal 'bring it' gesture. "What're you going to do? Land on me?"

Darkstar flipped him off and stomped back into the barracks. She figured her meaning would be clear even if the gesture wasn't known on Cybertron. Behind her, the short Decepticon just laughed.

Everyone took pieces of the dead. These generally weren't very good pieces - the Autobots they fought were as badly off as the No-Hopers were. Once in a while a dead Autobot meant a minor upgrade for whoever looted him. Same for the fallen Decepticons. If someone was dead, he was fair game.

Darkstar caught on fairly quickly and hated herself for it. This was desecration of the dead, it wasn't right, but it raised her chances of survival. She didn't keep much for herself. Darkstar was leery of the idea of upgrading, but she did carry a laser pistol now. She couldn't aim it as well as the guns built into her arms, but at least she knew it would fire when she wanted it too. Generally when she took parts, she would give them to Discard or the medics. A little bribery could mean the difference between quick repairs and bleeding to death waiting someday.

In her case, it meant the difference between getting repairs and getting taken apart for scrap because she was such a terrible fighter.

That's all it is, she told herself, awkwardly carrying a dead Autobot that looked sort of like Clunker. But then, to her eyes, most of the Autobots looked like Clunker or Stopgap. Car-people. She found this one lying beside a crater. It's just taking apart broken machines. It's just parts.

Steelcast glanced up and snorted when Darkstar dropped the corpse on an empty table. "Today's 'rent', eh? Still can't hit anything?"

Darkstar had tried to be friendly to the medic, if only because she thought of Steelcast as a fellow female and figured they should stick together. "I don't see you out there."

"I earned the right to choose where I want to be. All you've proved is that you wouldn't even make a good empty. Empties scavenge better than you do."

She hit the table in frustration with the palm of her hand. "What do you want me to bring you, then?"

The medic's eyes flashed warmly and she tilted her head slightly - an expression that Darkstar had learned was a smile of surprise. Steelcast reached over and clapped her on the shoulder. "Ha! You know, if you asked anyone else, they'd yell at you, but they're dumb. Me, I like the idea of having a personal scrounge. Now then ..."

Steelcast thumped her toolbox down on the table. It fell open, and she took out something that looked like a cross between a crowbar and a machete. "Now, I'm just a poor little tech and these ones here you fight are even lower. Unless they got fancy sensor-panels, there's nothing in their heads worth keeping." With that, Steelcast lopped off the corpse's head. "You could take the optic crystals if you want. Some people collect them and sometimes you can sell them to artists. Me, I don't need them. Now ..."

Darkstar watched, too fascinated to be horrified, as Steelcast dissected the dead Autobot. Built-in weapons and tools had value. Always check the arms and hands for those. See if he's got a power chip rectifier - unlikely at this level, but a great find. Find this circuit and apply a mild current to empty his packet - he might be carrying something interesting in there. These kinds of wires were hard to come by in Porphuras, so take them. Take the fuel tank ...

Darkstar realised she must have said, "Yuck." Steelcast gave her a look of irritation. "What?"

"I've never been able to bring myself to drink someone else's fuel."

"It's life or death sometimes, Jet." Steelcast shrugged and returned her attention to the Autobot. "You don't want it, bring me the fuel tanks. We reprocess it."

"You ... what?"

"Ha. You've already been drinking recycled fuel, we just filter out the impurities before we put it in the main reservoir."

"That's ..." Darkstar frowned. "It can't be that much. The other warriors take most of it for their own stashes."

Steelcast chuckled and went back to pulling parts out of the dead Autobot.

She was finally getting used to her radio. Darkstar still couldn't use it herself, but she no longer jumped when she suddenly got somebody else's voice in her head - generally Windsweeper or Discard giving orders, once Clunker in trouble. Somehow she managed to run right to where Clunker was pinned, like following the sound of his voice.

Darkstar stopped counting the number of battles she had been in after the sixth one. It seemed like the Autobots made another try at claiming part of the city every few days. Time, she counted. She had been in the army for over two months.

Now she was using the tactic she had developed in her fourth battle - stick close to Smashup, shoot wildly, and claim to be cover fire.

Sometimes, back at the base, she wondered why it was her following him instead of Stopgap. They seemed to be partners, but they always split up on the battlefield - Smashup ran out to the front while Stopgap hung back and shot from cover. Darkstar sometimes thought that Stopgap had the right idea, but worried that if she tried, she was going to get labelled 'useless'. If she ran out with Smashup, she was at least showing willingness. It raised her chances of getting killed by Autobots, but lowered her chances of being killed by the technicians.

It was the little things like that that made being a Decepticon terrifying rather than exciting.

The air lit up again as it filled with laserfire. Smashup was hit, but he just grunted, transformed, and drove after the source. Darkstar made to follow him, and was hit by lights.

Darkstar screamed and collapsed. She knew that she wasn't really hurt all that badly, but being shot still terrified her. Any of the shots she'd taken would have incinerated her human body and she knew it. She also found it was a workable survival tactic - Autobots tended to ignore her if she was down and not moving. She had found her skill - Darkstar was good at playing dead.

So she held still, lying on her back, watching the sky, and waited for the noise around her to die down. And then an Autobot stepped into her field of vision.

This one was bright green and yellow, and looked like one of the car-people but without wheels. He had two long antennae on his helmet. Darkstar barely noticed. She was more focused on the still-smoking gun he was carrying. It wasn't pointed at her, but could be instantly. Darkstar tried to look dead, or at least too wounded to be any threat.

Sometimes they looked, but they always moved on. I'm dead. I'm not going to do anything. I'm just going to lie here. No need to waste any time on the broken jet-girl. Keep going.

The Autobot didn't keep going. He paused, frowning like he was confused. Then he stepped closer. When he was almost close enough to touch, Darkstar panicked. With a shriek, she brought up her arms, and twin streams of laserfire slammed into the Autobot.

She managed to roll to her feet as he collapsed, and brought her weapons in line again. A few seconds later, she realised she didn't need to. The Autobot's torso was one huge wound filled with cooling slag. As if to drive the point home, his paint faded to a dull gray. Darkstar stared at the body. I ... I did it.

And then, I just killed someone. Oh, dear God ...

Some time later, it was Smashup who found her, still standing over the body. "You got that one?"

"Y-yeah. It was an accident."

"Nice. Some accident."

"Hello?" Stopgap hailed as he picked his way across the debris of the battlefield. "I've been trying to radio you, but someone dropped a fuzz bomb. Did you find the secret entrance to the Magical Cavern of Hot Oil Baths, or what's over here that's so interesting that you two haven't started back yet?"

"The jet managed to kill something," said Smashup proudly, and the compliment from her teammate almost made Darkstar forget that she had committed murder.

Stopgap beamed. "Oh, good. Discard will be happy. Come on, let's take the shell back so we can gloat at the techs."

She had carried dead Autobots back to the base before, but she couldn't bring herself to touch this one. Touching him would make it real. "I ... I don't think I can ..."

The other two didn't comment, maybe seeing the burn marks on her and assuming she was too injured for heavy lifting. Stopgap gestured, and Smashup swung the shell over his left arm easily. "Clunker's probably still out wandering around, you know," he said.

"Well, Darkstar needs repairs anyway," said Stopgap. Then he turned to smile at her. "Lead on back, hero."

If there was sarcasm in the tone, Darkstar was in no mood to notice. She trusted her feet to bring her back to he base, letting her mind wander on its own paths.

He would have killed me if I didn't get him first, Darkstar told herself, trying to justify her actions. These Autobots we fight here are like us - they don't ask questions and they don't take prisoners. And it's not like he was a person. He was a robot. Just wires and things.

... Like me.

No, I'm different. I ... I have a soul? Right. Robots don't.

Then why do they have mystics? You don't believe that, anyway.

Look, it was him or me. It was self-defence, and he was a machine anyway. End of discussion.

She wasn't convinced, but she had run out of arguments. It wasn't so bad just coming across a dead Transformer, especially if he was still in vehicle-form. Those weren't a problem. Those were just broken machines. The green Autobot ...

Darkstar set her jaw. Somehow, she vowed, she would find out his name and who he was. They could make her kill, but they couldn't make her a cold-blooded murderer. She would have to ask Steelcast if there was any way to identify the bodies of the dead.

Somewhere behind her, Stopgap and Smashup were talking, too quietly to make out the words. Idly, she realised that if she concentrated, she could hear them better, but stopped herself. Whatever they were talking about, she probably wouldn't find it interesting. They weren't seeing any of this as traumatic. They were even proud of her.

It was so hard to hold a real conversation with the other Decep ... with the Decepticons, she corrected herself. She didn't want to consider herself one of them. In any case, they were hard to talk to. Their priorities weren't like hers. They weren't interested in the same things she was, she was only slowly picking up the slang, and they had no shared culture. What did she used to talk about with her friends? Movies - Darkstar didn't think they had any. Music - she had heard some Decepticon music, and it was awful. And none of them would have heard of any Earth bands anyway. Clothing - they didn't wear any. Boys - they were all boys, as far as she could tell, she just thought of some as girls because of their voices or build. Maybe they got together and gossiped about how hot helicopter-people were or something.

They didn't even have hobbies she could relate to. It seemed to Darkstar that every time she walked in on a Decepticon, he was doing something technical, like fixing his guns or doing research on a computer. Maybe they had video games. She'd have to ask about that.

Darkstar turned back to unnecessarily announce that they had arrived, but the words died with surprise. She had learned a lot about Decepticons in the last two months, but had never expected to see a pair of them walking like a human couple. Stopgap was tucked into the bend of Smashup's right arm, his own arm around the tank-person's waist. When Darkstar turned, he quickly stepped out of the half-embrace and flashed her a guilty smile. "I guess we're too close to the base anyway," Smashup mumbled.

So that was why they wanted her walking out in front. Maybe Decepticons weren't allowed to hug because it made them look soft or something. Except that she had seen plenty of other public-display-of-affection activity around the base, and nobody seemed embarrassed by it. Obviously these two were.

"I didn't see anything," Darkstar said quickly, then started off for the base again. Behind her, she heard Stopgap laugh softly, but the sound was one of relief, not mockery.

Once inside the base, they went straight to the repair bay. It was true that she needed repairs. And there was something else she might be able to find.

Steelcast glanced up from the computer screen she was reading. "You busy?" asked Darkstar. Somewhere behind her, Stopgap and Smashup were talking to another technician.

"Vaguely." The medic gave Darkstar a longer look. "You were damaged in the last battle. Why weren't you in here hours ago?"

"I, um ... it's not real bad, and I figured I'd just be in the way if I was hanging around down here?"

"Liar. All right, get over here."

Darkstar walked over and sat on the table so Steelcast could more easily reach the burns on her chest and wing. The medic prodded at the marks. "This doesn't look like much. I don't think it's gone deeper than your armour, but I guess I got nothing better to do."

Steelcast went to a cupboard and started fiddling with a jar and a thing that looked like a sprayer. Darkstar took a deep breath, or would have. "Steelcast ..."

"Yeah, Jet?"

Darkstar twisted her hands together, as well as she could. "Is there ... is there any way we can erase bits of our own memories?"

"Yeah, but it's a dumb thing to do."

"Well, if it wasn't for very long? Say, something that can make you just forget the last five minutes?"

"You don't want to start messing with your brain, okay?" Steelcast turned back with the thing that looked like an airbrush but bigger, and started spraying a fine mist on Darkstar's wing.

Whatever it was, it wasn't paint. The mist seemed to make her self-repair system work faster instead, causing the burns to fill in and turn her proper colours. Darkstar tried to bite her lip, but remembered she lacked teeth. "You're a non-combatant. Have you ... have you ever killed anybody, Steelcast?"

"Plenty," said Steelcast, in a tone that could have been discussing how many tools she owned. "I think only eight were counted officially, though. I haven't looked at my record in ages."

"And you don't mind?"

"Why should I? Serves those idiots right for poking around my projects." The medic's eyes glowed a bit brighter. "Is that what this is about? So that's why those two cross-wired pals of yours looked so smug when they brought that shell in. Jet, you're a warrior. You kill people, and it's about time, too."

"But I'd never done it before!" Darkstar protested.

"Then you oughta get used to it, shouldn't you?" Steelcast poked her in the stomach with her free hand. "We're in a war, dope. People die. Preferably more of them than of us."

Darkstar didn't say anything. "I remember my first kill," said Steelcast idly, taking her sprayer apart again. "I was on a project in the Tagon region, in a half-completed building. There was an Autobot poking around. I found out later he was a saboteur. If I hadn't killed him, he'd have killed a lot more people. Anyway, I was driving on a higher level, running a ditainium-4 shipment. Molten ditainium-4." Her eyes darkened in her masked equivalent of a smug smile. "I upended my crucible on him. Turned him into a very surprised and ugly statue. Ha, my supervisor at the time was an arty-type and bought him off me. That was neat."

It was meant to comfort. It didn't. "But why are we fighting the Autobots?" asked Darkstar.

Steelcast laid a hand on her shoulder. "Because," she intoned, and Darkstar waited for words of wisdom, "they're out-moded, overly optimistic dopes who think that sitting on their afts and fretting is a good way to run a planet. We're better than them. That's all."

Maybe if they didn't have video games, she could start up the video game industry on Cybertron and she'd never have to fight again.

Stopgap was at the target range, though up on the balcony that served as a gallery. It was easy enough to see what he was watching, even if she didn't suspect anything - Smashup was down on the range itself, taking out targets with his arm-cannon. Whenever he caused a particularly impressive explosion, he'd turn back and wave and yell to make sure Stopgap had seen it, and Stopgap would wave back to assure him that he had. Darkstar couldn't decide if it was cute or plain weird.

In between explosions, Darkstar asked, "Do you know if we have any video games on the computer?"

"It's tied into the Worldnet. You could call up any in the public archives," said Stopgap. "Discard will be upset if you get addicted, though."

So much for starting an entertainment revolution, then. At least she had something to look for next time she was on a computer.

Smashup missed a target. Stopgap quickly drew his gun, snapped off a shot and took it out, which caused Smashup to yell at him and Stopgap to laugh. Smashup returned to his target practice and Stopgap settled back against the wall, arms folded across his chest. "All strength and no skill," he murmured. "He'd never hit a thing if he didn't use such heavy ordnance. And he considers himself an artist!" There was another large explosion and a shout from the tank. "Well, a connoisseur."

"Of explosions?"

"No." Stopgap smiled. He did have a nice smile, sort of far-off and wistful. It helped that he had a more human face than most of the Transformers Darkstar had met. "I know it's stupid to change yourself just to try to attract someone, but it seemed like such a small price to pay."

He was looking at her, but it seemed almost more like he was talking to himself. But at least he actually wanted to talk. With the others, it always just felt like they were tolerating her questions. Well, maybe she'd learn something. Darkstar waited.

She didn't have to wait long. "I've been so lucky," said Stopgap. "Discard doesn't approve, no, but he doesn't get nasty about it. He even does my repairs. He even ... wait."

Stopgap sat down and fiddled with one of the rustier panels on his boots, then swung it open. "Here, look."

"I don't see ..." Then she did. There was a patch on the inside of his leg, behind where the rusted area was.

"So my armour is just as strong there as on the rest of my leg, even if it looks weakened from the outside," Stopgap agreed.

"That was nice of him."

The car-person laughed. "Nice? Discard just doesn't want me to die too easily. I'm the closest thing to a sharpshooter he's got in this crew, and when his subordinates die, it reflects badly on him. But not too badly - we're not expected to last all that long anyway. But think of it like your video games - as long as it doesn't interfere with us on the battlefield, we can do what we like."

"I don't understand why any of this is a bad thing," Darkstar admitted.

Stopgap smiled. "That's probably why I like you. You don't understand, so you're not disgusted. Mostly it's because I do it for him instead of for myself. Except that I am doing it for myself - it gets me Smashup. Do you see?"

"I ... I think so," said Darkstar, the part of her that was feminist warring with the part of her that was a teenage girl who would do anything to be accepted. "Like ... like if he would only date blue people, you'd change your paintjob. It doesn't hurt you, so you don't mind."

He nodded. "Exactly. It changes other people's perceptions of me, but it doesn't actually have any bearing on who I am. I would still be a low-level sharpshooter." Stopgap shook his head. "People just don't understand. They don't know Smashup like I do. He's more than just a ... a kink." He spat the final word out.

"So why did you have to alter yourself for him?"

Darkstar and Stopgap turned to find Clunker had snuck up on them, dropping down from the air. Stopgap glared. "Because it is part of him. It isn't all he is." Then, eyes bright, "And what do your mutilations bring you? You're just lucky that I like Discard, you ..."

Clunker made a rude noise at him, then transformed and drove away down the gallery.

It occurred to Darkstar that she still had no idea why Stopgap was supposed to be so horrible. Apparently it had to do with the rust, and the rust was ugly, but she didn't see why it made him a social outcast.

One day she found out where Clunker vanished to when he wasn't in the room. At least, where he was after battles.

Darkstar had hung behind after the last battle, scavenging from the fallen ahead of the clean-up team. She had eventually learned why the warriors from the base were referred to as 'garbage collectors' by the more elite Decepticons - Windsweeper, who ran the base, was tidy to the point of anal-retentive. Clean-up crews went out after every battle, taking away the corpses and clearing out damaged areas.

She recognised the orange figure, but found his movements strange. He wasn't scavenging or cleaning, just wandering around. Darkstar stuffed the parts she collected into her 'pocket' - Steelcast had rigged up a manual control for her when she realised Darkstar couldn't access it with her mind - and went over to ask what he was doing.

Clunker didn't look at her, instead watching his bleeding arm, but his voice was defiant. "I'm feeding the ghosts."

"Isn't that a waste of fuel?" she asked.

"Better I give it to them now than have them suck it out of my tank," said Clunker. "I have to feed them, otherwise they get angry and cause trouble for the living. If they're fed, they go off to the Allspark happy."

Darkstar watched him finish dripping on the ground and seal off his fuel line again. "Does it have to be you, specifically?"

"No, but it has to be a willing, living sacrifice," Clunker shrugged. "So I do it. Besides, when they come back, then they remember me a little more kindly."

They started the walk back to the barracks. "Oh, like reincarnation?"

"Yeah. Though since all the souls in the Allspark are one, they share their memories. That means they all know that I propitiate the ghosts." He punched her in the shoulder. "Come on, you should know this stuff if Mindwipe built you."

"He didn't tell me much about it. He wants me to learn everything on my own," Darkstar said. "The most mystical thing he showed me was throwing these coloured dice."

Clunker looked surprised. "Lithoastragalomancy?"

"Yeah, that sounds about right," said Darkstar. If the 'litho' meant gems and the 'astragalo' meant dice ... Finally, what trivia she picked up in her goth phase could be used for something. "They could have been made of gems. Maybe crystals or glass. I don't know. There were nine of them. Most had numbers and some had symbols."

"Oh, nine. That's all right."

"As different from what?"

"Well, four is really bad," he said. "Nine's good and solid, and more accurate than just three. Some fortune-teller cults use twelve. I hear the Devourists use thirteen, so that could get you in trouble."

They had numerology. They even had superstitions - and thirteen was an unlucky number, no less. Why they had them was another question. Darkstar was thrilled - she finally had a subject she could talk about to someone. "Mindwipe didn't tell me anything. What do the numbers mean?"

She started taking the memory-modules of the Autobots she killed, even though it made her queasy to open up their heads and dig the piece out. One day, maybe, she could find out their names and have a proper funeral for them, as an apology. It was also a way of remembering that she was human. The Decepticons didn't care about their victims - they just killed. Clunker might do his ghost-feeding, but even that was for himself.

Killing the Autobots got easier, a little, the more she did it. At least, she stopped panicking when she realised that she had just committed another murder.

Darkstar still slept for eight hours a day, out of habit, but she was glad that she couldn't dream.

Then, just when Darkstar thought she was getting used to all the death, Stopgap died.

Chapter Text

Darkstar regained consciousness, but didn't open her eyes yet. Activate them. Whatever. She'd been knocked out on the battlefield. As usual. One of the guys must have carried her back, because she could feel ...

Instinctively, Darkstar sat up and struck out with her arm. There was a metallic crash and whoever was trying to remove her arm-gun was knocked away. She was still outside, and someone was trying to steal bits of her. In fact, there were two thieves, and their size lent Darkstar bravery - neither would have come much higher than her knees if she was standing.

She stood, then grabbed the mostly black one with a fan on his back and shook him. "You little rats! You knew I wasn't dead -"

The tiny black robot twisted in her hands, kicked her in the chest, then became a helicopter and hovered at a safe distance. The other - who looked a bit like a miniature version of Smashup in green, though he had a face - kicked her in the ankle. It hurt more than it should have. "You were down, trinket. Makes you fair game."

He was still tiny and Darkstar was still angry. She kicked at him, but he stepped out of the way. "You couldn't use my parts for anything anyway, you runts."

"Lotta Seekers out there, trinket. Lotta dumb Seekers needing repairs."

"You've got some nerve calling me that. I could turn you into a bracelet charm." Bravado in the face of tiny thieves was still carrying her, but a quiet feeling of wrong started to creep in. Such as, Why doesn't he go tell me to pick on someone my own size? I could step on him! Does he really think he could take me on and win?

And, Oh crap, could he?

"Darkstar! Stop messing around and come on!"

Clunker. Darkstar could have kissed him for giving her an option to retreat. She ran over to him. "What's up?"

She should have realised. Even though Clunker didn't have much of a face, she'd been living with him long enough to see emotions in his body-language and knew it was bad news. "Stopgap's been killed," he said. "We're taking his shell back to the barracks."

"Oh."

They started walking. "You're lucky you're stupid enough to be entertaining," said Clunker. "Bombshock was waiting for the other two to show up, then they were going to tear you apart. He'd have just shot you otherwise."

It seemed like the wrong thing to talk about just after finding out one of their teammates was dead, but maybe it was normal for Decepticons. "But they're so small ..."

Clunker shook his head. "Just assume that anyone shorter than this," he said, holding his hand at about Darkstar's waist height, "is an angry little buzzsaw just looking for an excuse to tear your limbs off. Same goes for Autobots. Sometimes they're normal, but you can't take the chance."

Darkstar glanced back to where they left Bombshock and the helicopter. There were two others there. "Who are they?"

"Micromasters, one of the military patrols. The helicopter's Tracer, the other two are Dropshot and Growl. Tell me you didn't make any short jokes."

The Micromasters didn't seem interested in following them. Darkstar looked back to Clunker. "I, um, called Bombshock a runt. And threatened to make jewellery out of him."

Clunker sighed. "Next time, just paint yourself silver and yell that Megatron is a wimp, why don't you?"

"They won't try to get back at me, will they?"

"I doubt it. Bombshock's used to the abuse and probably figures you won't last long anyway. You're just lucky you didn't try that with Dropshot." Then, after a few minutes, unnecessarily, "Here's the others."

They carried the corpse back to the barracks and laid it on the table. He still had all his colours. Sometimes Transformers went gray when they died, sometimes they didn't. Darkstar couldn't figure out why and decided it didn't matter.

The others regarded their dead teammate silently. Darkstar fidgeted. "Um. Do we bury him now?"

"Waste of material, Darkstar," said Discard. He pulled his toolbox out from the cabinet in his berth, and handed it to Smashup.

Darkstar opened her mouth to protest that this was wrong, that Stopgap was one of them, that they should treat his body with more respect, but shut it. If they didn't dismantle him for parts, someone else would. It was better this way.

Smashup got to pick first, but all he did was use a small laser to remove a chunk of Stopgap's chest that had a large rust-patch on it. She also realised that she was the only one watching; Discard and Clunker had carefully averted their gazes. After that, Smashup left.

Discard went next, opening up the corpse and removing various cables and bits that, come to think of it, he would probably end up using to patch himself sometime. Recycling, thought Darkstar, and giggled nervously. Clunker took a few small parts, as well as the head-circuits Darkstar took from her victims and an odd cylinder from his chest.

Darkstar took Stopgap's gun. It was bigger than the small pistol she had been carrying, so she assumed it was more powerful. And he claimed to be a sharpshooter, so he probably took good care of it. It probably wasn't too great given that the others weren't interested in it, but she felt she should take something to remember him by.

They were done. Discard closed up the corpse and looked over at Clunker. "You want to take him down to the techs, or should I? You know what they're going to say ..."

"I'll do it," said Darkstar. They always teased her when she brought them stuff, anyway. And she knew that Discard took pride in his strange little team and didn't like to hear anything bad about them, useless as they were. Besides, Darkstar wanted to know what they would say. Nobody ever told her anything.

And it was a test. She managed to carry the body of her teammate down to the repair bay without feeling too horrified. That was bad - she was getting too used to being a Decepticon warrior. She was at the point where she could just let it happen, forget about ever having been anyone but Darkstar: No-Hoper. It wasn't like she could ever go back anyway ...

Darkstar shook her head. She had to get back to Earth while she was still human.

She reached the repair bay and managed to hit the button to open the door with the corner of her wing. A couple of the medics looked over and chuckled. Darkstar knew it was directed at her - by now, the repair staff all knew about her arrangement with Steelcast and seemed to find it funny that a warrior was 'working' for a medic. Especially since Steelcast seemed to be the only medic who never went out and fought Autobots. Darkstar ignored the other two and went to find Steelcast.

The medic was easy to find - sort of hidden back in a corner, but making a lot of noise. Darkstar watched as she took a dented sheet of metal out of a frame, put a new one in, and hit it with a sledgehammer. Then Steelcast glared at the dent she made. Darkstar coughed.

Steelcast looked up and managed to make a face despite having no mouth. "Ugh, put the 'crody on the table. I'm going to have to chop out these rust-spots before we can melt down his armour ..."

So the techs were going to complain about his rust. Darkstar couldn't understand why this was nearly as horrible as everyone made it out to be. Rust was a hygiene thing. Stopgap was just a guy who didn't bathe often.

No, that wasn't right, Darkstar thought, remembering how much time he spent polishing himself and how disgusted everyone was by him. Stopgap was more like a guy who cuts himself and shows off the scars.

"Hey, Jet?"

Darkstar looked up. Steelcast tossed a can at her, which she managed to catch. "Looks like ordinary oxidation on him," said the medic, nodding to the corpse, "but you and whoever else handled him might want to give yourselves a good scrubbing anyway, just in case."

"Um. Thank you."

"One more thing, Jet - I'm leaving in a few days," said Steelcast. "Just so you know you don't have to keep bringing stuff down to me."

"Where are you headed?"

Steelcast shrugged. "East. Krystagon. Some friends of mine got some time off and want to show me around the site of the old capital."

"Oh." So much for the hope that Steelcast was heading west towards Jekka. Darkstar retreated. Out in the hall, she looked at the can. There was a chemical formula written on it above the words, 'To Kill Rust Spores'. Which didn't help. Rust spores? I may have gotten a 'D' in Chemistry, but rust isn't caused by spores. She kept the can anyway, tucking it into her 'pocket'.

On impulse, Darkstar decided to go back out to the last battlefield instead of directly back to the room. She wasn't surprised to find the familiar orange figure out there, arm-panel open, purposefully dripping on the ground. "Are we going to do anything special for Stopgap?" she asked.

"Not really," said Clunker. "If there were catacombs under the city, we could put him there, but the nearest ones are in the capital."

"You've never had to do this before?" asked Darkstar, surprised.

"Not in Porphuras and not for this unit. I joined up here not long before you did." Clunker closed up his arm-panel and looked around. "Maybe we could just pry up one of the ground panels and stuff his remains underneath."

They tried. The ground panels wouldn't budge. "Could we melt the pieces?" she asked.

"Easily. Seems a bit dull, though."

"If we dripped energon on it first ..." Darkstar suggested.

Clunker laughed. "We'd get an explosion. But it should damage the pieces beyond recognition and sounds fun. We'll do that."

Because Darkstar thought it felt right and because Clunker liked rituals, they went back to the spot where Stopgap died. Clunker put the various pieces he had taken on the ground, and Darkstar opened one of her fuel lines over them. Bleeding on purpose made her nervous, but she felt she should contribute, and she didn't know how drained Clunker was already. Then they stepped back to a safe distance.

"Should we say something about him?" Darkstar asked.

"Probably," said Clunker. Then, "Stopgap was a pretty good shot, but he should have remembered that some Autobots can fly." With that, he snapped off a shot at the energon-covered pieces.

After Clunker's stories of the ghost-like Monitors who waited for unwary Internet surfers and then shredded their brains from the inside, it was a while before Darkstar could bring herself to use the computer again. Even if they weren't evil supernatural forces, they still might find the things Darkstar asked suspect. She decided to take the risk - one of them picking her out of the whole Cybertronian Internet was a one in a billion chance. Besides, there were things she needed and people always looked over her shoulder when she used the public computers.

She plugged in. Why can't I fly even though I've got the programming for it? Answer on-screen.

The screen typed: Insufficient data to answer query.

I've got the programming. I want to fly. I've tried. I've thrown myself off buildings and jumped and thought about it and not thought about it and I know this body can fly, so why can't I fly?

The screen typed: Insufficient data to answer query.

What other data do you need? she demanded. Oh well, she would think about that later. Now she would indulge idle curiousity. Computer, are there any female Decepticons?

The screen typed: No.

Why are they all male?

The screen typed: There are no male Decepticons.

Explain.

The screen typed: Transformers have no gender.

Darkstar frowned. She knew that ... well, sort of. She knew they didn't have reproductive organs anyway, and that they built new people, but it felt too strange. They were people, not machines. She tried: But I've used the word 'female' and Discard understood what I meant.

The screen typed: 'Male' and 'female' are terms used exclusively for organic species.

Suddenly, Darkstar understood Discard much better. She had called herself a girl when they first met, and the word could only mean 'a female organic being'. She had told Discard that she was something that she obviously wasn't - she was obviously a robot. It would be like walking up to someone and trying to convince him she was a penguin. No wonder Discard thought she was crazy.

Well, that made things clearer. Back to business. Tell me about Jekka.

The screen filled with information - the vital statistics of the city. It seemed to be friendly to aliens, but that made sense if there was a spaceport. Darkstar memorised it, then, Tell me about the spaceport. Do ships go to Earth from there?

The screen typed: There are no flights to Earth from the Jekka spaceport.

Darkstar bit her lip. Could I buy a ship there?

The screen typed: There are no spaceships currently listed for sale in Jekka.

Computer, you are a magic eight-ball.

The screen typed: Invalid query.

Well, at least she knew the way to Jekka now and had an idea of what to expect there. Maybe she could find a short-term solution to holding on to her humanity. Is there anyone in Porphuras who studies Earth culture or collects samples from it? she asked.

Oddly, Mindwipe wasn't listed. But then, he wasn't interested in culture, just biology. There was only one name on the screen: Euphony ( Registered Neutral ) - Sound Collector, followed by an address in the Artists' Quarter.

She had two more questions. In answer, a sound collector was someone who bought and sold sounds - random noises, music, speeches, anything. The 'neutral' note after his name meant he was a Cybertronian who wasn't an Autobot or a Decepticon. Someone who refused to participate in the war, tolerated by the Decepticons only if he was useful. Well, of course there would be civilians or pacifists. They couldn't all be in the army.

She memorised the name and address. Even if she couldn't go back to Earth, she might be able to get a small piece of it. Now to find Discard and ask permission to go.

She tried her radio first, trying to dial the mental cell phone, but couldn't get it to work. It was worth a try, anyway. Sometimes she could broadcast, but never when she wanted to. She'd have to go find him, then. She'd try the target range first, he was sometimes there ...

Halfway out the door, Darkstar stopped, stepped back, and touched the intercom panel next to the door. "Computer, where is Discard?"

"Unit Discard is in the primary common room."

Hooray for technology. Darkstar set off.

Once in the largest of the three common rooms, Discard was easy to find. He was sitting at a table off to the side, tinkering with a small box. Across from him, standing on his chair, was the short blue and yellow warrior that had heckled her when she was trying to learn to fly. Darkstar debated whether to wait for him to leave, then squared her shoulders and walked over. Discard already knew about her attempts at flying. Besides, if they were too busy laughing that she couldn't fly, they weren't demanding to know why she couldn't transform.

"Discard?"

He waved her off with a vague motion of his screwdriver. "Just a second - there." A panel clicked into place. The work didn't seem to be done, he just didn't need to concentrate now. "What do you want?"

Momentarily distracted, she said, "I didn't know you did repair work outside the team."

Discard tapped the box. "The techs don't want to be bothered with fixing things like Scowl's toys."

"A skirlvox keypad is not a toy," Scowl snapped.

"Convince the techs of that, then," Discard countered, then returned his attention to Darkstar. "You didn't come up here because you miss me. What're you after?"

Darkstar worried that one day Discard was going to get fed up with her questions, but he continued to tolerate them. She was afraid to ask why, in case it broke the spell. He might have just been patient by nature, it might have been because she obeyed him without backtalk, it might have been because he thought she was insane and felt sorry for her. It might have just been because he thought jets were nice to look at. "Um. Do we ever get a day off?" asked Darkstar.

Discard shook his head. "We're Decepticons, Darkstar," he said, like that explained everything.

"We don't do anything but fight?"

Scowl snorted. Discard shook his head. "No, but we don't get days off. You want a vacation, you sneak out while the boss isn't watching and pray he doesn't notice you're gone."

"Do you think we'll be needed today? I just want to go see the city."

"Not much to see in Porphuras," said Discard.

"Shows what you know," said Scowl. "Plenty of painters and dye-artists in this city. And the Autobots suddenly seem to want it, so it must have something going for it."

"It's a small city with lousy defences. They're hoping it'll be easy to knock over so they'll get a foothold in Tyrest," Discard argued.

"So I can just leave for the day?" Darkstar asked.

Discard waved her away. "Yeah, go ahead. Windsweeper won't notice unless you litter."

She had expected the Artists' Quarter to look different. She expected it to be cleaner and more, well, artistic. This part of the city looked like every other part of the city. In fact, if there was a difference, it was that it was dirtier than the area around the base.

There was public transit and it was free, thank God. Darkstar still couldn't fly, no matter how hard she tried. Continuing experiments in jumping off short buildings only left her frustrated and dented.

She really wished that the streets had names and that the buildings had numbers. Darkstar had the map in her head and could picture it easily, but had no idea how to connect that to where she was. If she could fly, she could recognise the aerial view. Darkstar settled for just walking without thinking about it. She tended to have better luck with things when she didn't think.

She didn't know how, but it worked. Within half an hour, Darkstar found herself in front of a small building. She couldn't tell if she was looking at a house or a store. It was ground-level, and while it didn't have a big window like she would expect on a store, a house wasn't likely to have a poster on the front. At least she knew it was the right place - the poster read: Euphony ~ Sound Collector ~ General Contact. The lettering shimmered when she looked at it, and Darkstar was certain it wasn't just fancy paint. She wasn't sure what else it would be, though.

Curious, she reached out and touched the poster. When she touched a letter, it chimed and gave off a little puff of fine, glittering dust that vanished before it touched the ground. Each letter made a different tone. Darkstar played with the sign for several minutes, trying to play a tune, when she remembered where she was and what she was doing. She hoped the poster didn't double as a doorbell. Whoever he was, Euphony couldn't possibly appreciate someone trying to pick out 'Jingle Bells' on his door.

When Darkstar touched the call-button, the door slid open. She stepped into a room that looked like a cross between a music store and a messy studio. There were devices all over, probably all musical instruments, but only a few that Darkstar could recognise as such. There was a cluttered desk with a clearing on it, and a little thing in the middle of it that made Darkstar think of those perpetual-motion desk-toys with the marbles hanging from strings. In this case, there were six balls.

Playing with the desk-toy instrument was a blue and orangey-red Transformer. He let one marble go, and when it hit another there was a sound like tiny bells far off. When the last echoes died away, he looked up.

He was rather thin and far more delicate than any Transformer Darkstar had met, as well as the first one she had seen with purple eyes. He also wasn't wearing any faction markings. So this was what a neutral looked like. His upper arms looked like stereo speakers. That seemed promising. Darkstar approached him. "Are you the sound collector?"

He nodded. "A sound collector, but, yes. I'm Euphony. Are you looking to buy or to sell?"

"I'm Darkstar. I'm hoping to buy. Do you have alien music? From Earth?"

"Oh, quite a bit," Euphony said, and put his hand to his side. There seemed to be a keyboard there, and he played it silently. "At the moment, it's the easiest xenoworld to get pieces from. I can put together a sampler disc, unless you're looking for something specific."

It was as easy as that, then. Finally, Darkstar was having good luck for a change. "Got any Linkin Park?" She struggled to pronounce the band name correctly with her robot mouth.

"Ah? Is that a style?"

"It's the name of a band."

"Oh, the performer," said Euphony. "I haven't got them arranged that way, I'm afraid. But if you would describe the music for me, I can check."

Not so easy, then. Darkstar wasn't sure of the genre - all she knew was that she liked the sound of it. "It's ... I think the term is 'nu metal', but they've got some other things mixed in, like a bit of hip-hop and ... no?"

The sound collector was shaking his head. "No. I need the formulas. Describe it mathematically."

"Um ..."

Euphony sighed. "Perhaps you could just sing a few bars and I can compare it to my database."

The English words gave her problems, but Darkstar managed the first verse of 'Numb'. Euphony took a wire from his chest and plugged himself into his computer. He hummed the bit that Darkstar sang, this time playing one of the keyboards on his arm. After a moment, the actual song came from his speakers. Darkstar clapped her hands and laughed. "That's it! You actually have it!"

"I have ..." pause, search, "three of that particular performer, judging by the singer's voice, and another twenty-six of pieces that sound musically similar overall."

"Oh, I'll take all of it!"

Euphony smiled. "You're unusual. Most people can't stand music with lyrics, not even in the context of alien cultures in a language they don't understand." He picked a disc out of a box and slipped it into a drive just below his chest.

Darkstar stopped him. "Have you got any nature sounds? Like chirping crickets or wind in trees or birds singing?"

"Oh, certainly."

"Could I get a sampler of that?" she asked. "But only of peaceful sounds."

It took a bit more explaining to decide what she meant exactly by 'peaceful'. Soon, Euphony ejected the disc and handed it to her. "There. A fairly simple order, so I won't ask for much in return. It's not your fault I'm used to dealing with artists who know the formulae."

This was where it was going to get tricky. Darkstar had shoplifted before, but there was a world of difference between shoplifting and walking out while the owner watched. "Um. No. I don't have to. I'm a Decepticon, and you're just a neutral."

A gun appeared in Euphony's hand and he leaned forward, causing the long barrel to click against Darkstar's nose. "'Neutral' just means that I'll shoot anybody," he said. "Find a way to pay me or I will take my fee in the sound of your wings being torn off and the price I get when I sell them."

"Um." Darkstar decided to go for honesty. "I don't think I have any credit. Or anything I can trade. Unless you want bits of dead Autobots. Or a laser pistol. I can give you that."

"I can find my own weapons," said Euphony. "Too bad your voice isn't interesting enough to make a sample of."

"I can speak English fluently," she tried.

"So can I. Whenever I find my lexicon disc, anyway," he admitted. The sound collector brightened slightly. "Do you speak German? I know people would pay well for a German language program."

"I can't. Sorry." The gun was still resting against the angle between her helmet and her nose, but at least Euphony didn't seem eager to pull the trigger. "I could sing something you don't have? I know Earth culture fairly well."

Euphony laughed shortly. "Forgive me, but I've heard you sing. No one would pay for that." He thought for a moment. "But you claim to know the culture. Recite a poem for me and I'll accept it as payment."

"I thought you hated my voice."

"Your voice is merely unremarkable," he said. "But it will be sufficient to convey rhythm and meter."

"All right."

The gun was removed to rest on Euphony's shoulder, and two thin panels extended from his back. Microphones, Darkstar guessed. Euphony nodded. "Whenever you're ready."

Darkstar's mind went blank. She had never been interested in poetry. She thought it was the most boring part of her English classes. None of the ones she had studied had stuck. Shakespeare, maybe? She could remember bits and pieces, but knew that, "'To be or not to be ...' um, that's all I've got," wouldn't be accepted. It didn't help that the first thing that came to mind was, 'There once was a man from Nantucket,' and was now stuck there. Darkstar might have chanced it if Euphony hadn't said he could speak English. Maybe she could recite a song ... except Euphony might recognise it.

After what felt like an eternity, she remembered something she had read during her goth phase. It was eighteen stanzas long and she could only remember the first two, but it might just be enough. Darkstar squared her shoulders and began: "'Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak -'"

Euphony cut her off with a wave of his free hand. "I have that one. Terribly typical example. The species seems enamoured of that one-two-one-two rhythm ..."

Memory supplied a bit of classroom trivia. "It's called iambic pentameter. Humans like it because it mimics the human heartbeat."

To her surprise, the gun vanished, the thin panels retracted, and Euphony smiled. "Actually, your raven poem is in trochaic octameter generally. But the disc is yours."

"But ... I was wrong ..."

"About the rhythm and meter of your selected poem, yes. But while I know the words and the, hm, academic meanings, I didn't know the organic reasoning behind them," said Euphony cheerfully. "It's not worth much to me except as a curiousity, but knowledge is power, power has its price, and I know where to find the buyers. Now shoo."

Darkstar wasn't sure what just happened, but she retreated gratefully, the disc clutched to her chest. She ran all the way back to the subway.

Discard laughed when Darkstar told him what happened. "It didn't occur to you that a neutral living in a Decepticon city would be more dangerous than a Decepticon because he was always fighting people who thought he'd be an easy target because he's neutral?"

It hadn't. Were she still human, Darkstar knew she would be blushing. "Nobody warned me! I thought that 'neutral' meant he wouldn't be a fighter. And anyway, he was just a music dealer!"

Discard laughed even harder. When it was apparent he wasn't going to explain the punch line, Darkstar curled up on her bunk and ignored him.

Chapter Text

Darkstar sulked until she heard Discard leave, then finally uncurled. Clunker had arrived in the meantime, and was sitting on his bunk, taking apart his gun. Well, at least she knew he wouldn't want to use the computer. Darkstar went to the desk, then slid the disc into the drive. The screen typed: Play media?

She didn't need to plug in to play a disc. Well, that was unexpected. Yes, she typed.

There must have been a speaker somewhere. The opening music of 'Numb' started up. Twenty seconds in, Clunker, who until now had just been looking curious, groaned. "Ugh, lyrics? Turn that dirge off before you summon something."

She typed, Stop playing, and it did. "It's not a ... what do you mean 'summon something'?"

"Look, if you play an opera, you're going to attract opera fans," said Clunker. "You play a dirge, you're going to attract ghosts. Stands to reason."

"It does not. And it's not a dirge anyway. It's an alien song about a person who was being controlled by someone who was trying to make him act like someone he wasn't and he's saying he's not going to let that keep happening," said Darkstar, trying to explain in terms a Decepticon could understand. Personally, the song always made her think of her mother. However, amongst other things, 'mother' wasn't in the vocabulary.

"Feh. It'll attract Stopgap's ghost, then," Clunker grumbled. "Plug in or play it in yourself, then. Risk yourself if you have to, but I don't want to be a part of it."

She blinked. "I can play it in myself?"

"Just stick it in your drive and play it through your internal radio. Idiot."

Darkstar ejected the disc from the computer and sat down on her bunk with it. Right. She was a robot, she had a disc drive on her someplace. She had never noticed one, so it was probably hidden under a panel someplace. Euphony's had been visible, just under his chest. Turning away from Clunker out of modesty, Darkstar checked underneath her lower chest panels. There were vents and things that looked like USB ports, but no disc drives. On a whim, she opened her canopy.

Luckily, her disc drive was down in her nosecone. She didn't have to ask Clunker where it would be and look stupid again. It was a bit unnerving, but she inserted the disc.

Right. Now she had to figure out how to play it. Maybe it was like the maps - now that it was in her head, she could call it up like a memory. She knew 'Numb' was on the disc. Darkstar thought of the song, playing it in her mind ...

... And it worked.

"Argh!" Clunker threw his pliers at her, which bounced off her wing. "You're broadcasting!"

"Sorry!" Darkstar closed off the other connections. Of course, her radio would work then, when she didn't want it to.

Music played in her mind. It wasn't as worrying as when people called her on her internal radio, because she was the one in control of it. It was like having a song in her head, only so clearly that it might have been playing on an ordinary radio. She wasn't sure how to change tracks, but found that if she just relaxed and let it play, it would switch by itself.

Darkstar listened to her twenty-nine songs, recognising only half of them, but loving them all because they were human voices speaking of human experiences in her native language. She listened to the full playlist twice, then moved on to the nature sounds.

Euphony had made excellent choices. Whalesong, the murmur of a crowd, the sound of waves ... Darkstar knew she should stop before she got too sentimental, but she couldn't. The sounds were her only link with home.

The track changed, and while Euphony must have considered it a soothing sound, Darkstar didn't - a cow mooed in her head. Clunker yelled at her again as Darkstar cracked up, and she decided that if she ever found a way, she would thank Euphony for making her laugh.

Scrape. Scrape.

When Darkstar noticed the sound, her first thought that it was Discard making it. He was at the table, working on some largish device she couldn't recognise. After a moment, she traced its true source - Smashup, sitting on his bunk, vacantly drawing his fingers across a small sheet of rusted metal. There was a gleam of white along one edge, and with a sick feeling, she realised it was the piece of Stopgap's armour he had taken.

Scrape.

Discard suddenly banged a wrench on the table. "Smashup! Take it outside." The tank-person growled, but left.

"That was the piece he took from Stopgap," said Darkstar. "I mean, I know the noise was annoying, but I think he just misses him."

Discard gave her a long, disbelieving look. "You never got it. Smashup's a rodophiliac."

"A what?"

"Rust-fetishist. I don't think Stopgap was really an autocorroder - not compulsively - but he did it for Smashup. I have no idea what he saw in him."

"Neither do I. He never told me." Memory waved a flag. Autocorroder. 'Crody? Suddenly one of Steelcast's slang terms made sense. "Stopgap said he was always covered in rust because Smashup liked it," Darkstar said. "I thought it was a bit weird, but ..."

"Uh-huh. It didn't affect their battle performance and they kept it private for the most part, so I figured they could have their kinks." Discard sighed and poked the wrench at the innards of the device. "And now Stopgap's gone."

Darkstar nodded. "And Smashup misses him."

Her team leader snorted. "Misses his rust-patches, anyway. Stopgap kept him under control."

"He what? I thought that Smashup was ..."

Discard shook his head. "Oh, no. Stopgap was firmly in charge of their weird little partnership. If Smashup didn't do what Stopgap said, Stopgap could just go have his rust-patches treated, and Smashup wasn't sure what Stopgap would do if he tried to force the issue. Someone obsessed enough about you to contract a disfiguring disease for you ... well, he must be pretty crazy."

"But Stopgap seemed so nice."

"You can afford to be nice to people when you've got a twenty-tonne tank at your beck and call who can beat the gears out of anyone who isn't nice back," said Discard. "Anyway, now Smashup will be looking for a new playmate. If he finds one before we get a replacement, things'll probably go back to the way they were. If we get a replacement first, Smashup might leave to find someone else who'll be rusty for him. If we're lucky."

"If we're not?"

"If we're not, then he's going to start looking at us, and he's not scared of us." Discard leaned back and tapped his wrench against the back of Darkstar's arm. "You're the one he's most likely to go after."

Darkstar glared. "He thinks I'd be easy?"

"You're rust-coloured in places."

"That's just paint! My hygiene is fine, thank you very much."

"Yeah, but the idea's there." Discard sat back. "If he gets pushy with you, kill him."

She blinked. "What?"

"You heard me."

Right. One more reason to abandon the now-familiar Porphuras and get to Jekka.

Darkstar told Discard she was going into the city for a while. Discard told Darkstar that he didn't care.

She went back up to Euphony's music store. Something had occurred to her from when she first spoke to him.

The door opened when she tapped the control, and Darkstar was extremely surprised to find Euphony sitting on the floor, talking to Scowl. He was holding the little box that Discard had been fixing. Euphony touched a key ...

... Darkstar had never liked bagpipe music. The noises that came from the box sounded like the highest notes of a bagpipe, if the bagpipe was a woman being murdered. Euphony played for a few minutes - just doing scales, as near as Darkstar could tell - then handed it back to Scowl with a look of satisfaction. "There. It's tuned."

"When I finish my composition, you'll get the first copy," Scowl promised.

Euphony laughed. "For just a tuning? Put me in your debt! No, here ..."

The sound collector got to his feet, opened a drawer on the wall, and pulled out two discs. Scowl took them. "What's this?"

"Thundercrush stopped by a few days ago to drop off his latest work."

Scowl vanished the discs. "Two copies?"

"One's for Slog. Deliver it and we're even. Thundercrush is still trying to convert him to opera, and you'll probably see him before I do."

"Maybe, maybe not."

Scowl left, with barely an 'oh, it's you' glance at Darkstar. Euphony smiled at her. "Ah, the only other person on this planet who appreciates xeno music. The disc was to your liking?"

"Yes, very much so," said Darkstar. "I want to thank you again. I was so surprised to find someone else who's interested in Earth."

"Oh, I'm not interested in the place specifically," said Euphony. "I merely like voices and how they're used."

It was a bit of a blow to be told that the sum of one's entire planetary music culture was just a point of interest to somebody. But, it reminded her that she had business. "You said you have contacts on Earth. Can you get a message there?"

"I could, but remember my neutrality," said Euphony. "I will not work for either Autobots or Decepticons."

"No, it's a personal message to a couple of humans," Darkstar explained.

The sound collector shook his head. "Humans sometimes work for Autobots. And sometimes for Decepticons. If I render aid to either faction, the other will take that as permission to kill me."

"This has nothing to do with the war! It's just to two people I know and they have nothing to do with Transformers at all. Listen -" She said, in English: "'Caitlin is alive and well. She can't come home now, maybe never, but she'll try. She loves you and misses you and is sorry she was such a jerk before she left ... She's all right. Don't worry. Please.'"

Euphony frowned. "It's not in any code I recognise, but I don't know them all."

"It's not a code. It's just a letter."

"And I have only a Decepticon's word on that." He held up his hand before she could protest. "Darkstar, no. Earth's currently a contested territory. While that makes it easy for me to get samples, it means I can do little else without fear of retribution."

Samples, again. Anything from music recordings to human beings. Without even a glance back, Darkstar ran out the door, heading back to the subway.

Darkstar had promised herself that she would only ask Mindwipe for help if it was a life-or-death situation and there were no other options.

She had been kidnapped. If she had been killed by an ordinary murderer, at least her body would be found and her parents would know what happened to her. This way, she just vanished and they would be left wondering forever. They might be blaming themselves, the way she blamed herself. They might be blaming her, thinking she had run away on purpose.

It was life-or-death, she decided - the guilt and worry were killing her. Darkstar went to find Mindwipe.

She found his place again easily enough. She couldn't find a doorbell, but the door opened when she approached. Darkstar thought that she should have been worried by that, but wasn't. She knew Mindwipe had some way of keeping track of her. Besides, he still reminded her of Dracula, and the automatically-opening door was a staple of horror movies.

Or maybe Mindwipe just left his door unlocked out of habit. Whichever.

As it was when she left, only one path was lit. At least Mindwipe didn't seem to mind her coming back ... unless she was being led into a trap. She followed the lights anyway.

He wasn't in his lab this time. The lights led her to a large, dark room with a floor done in blue and purple mosaic tiles. Mindwipe sat on a low couch in the centre of the room, seemingly meditating. His visor was dark, but lit up red when she stepped into the room. "Keatrai. Why do you return to me?"

"I ... I need your help."

"You have survived for four months as you count time in the Decepticon army without my assistance, and now you want help?"

"You did help me once," Darkstar reminded him. "Back when they first signed me up for the army. You got me my identification."

Mindwipe got to his feet. "Well, otherwise things would have ended right there, and I had invested too much time in you for that. What do you want of me?"

"I want to get a message to Earth, but Euphony - he's a sound collector - won't send it for me in case it's a Decepticon trick," Darkstar explained. "And then I thought that if he wouldn't do it, and that you must have contacts ..." She ran across the room to him. "Can you get a message to Earth?" she asked, clinging to his shoulders. "You've got contacts - you must, someone brought me to you ..."

Mindwipe delicately removed her hands from him. "My contacts do not work that way. I may only file requests and receive."

"Request that someone delivers my message, then!"

He did it almost casually. The heel of his hand connected with her chin in something between a slap and a punch. "You may not order me. Remember that."

The blow hadn't hurt much, but it shocked her. Mindwipe had never raised a hand to her before. Though she had never really talked back to him before ... "Please," she whispered. "Please help me."

He let her cringe for another ten seconds before he nodded. "I will. Lead the way to this sound collector of yours."

Darkstar walked ahead of him, out up to the street. "You aren't going to hurt him, are you?"

"Oh, no." Out of the tunnels, Mindwipe walked beside her. "I will merely ask him to help you."

"He said that the Autobots would kill him if he helped a Decepticon."

Mindwipe smiled. "Ah, but you are not truly a Decepticon, are you? And I know that your message is entirely innocent, so Euphony will not actually be engaged in any wrongdoing, even by his own rules."

The sound collector was toying with one of the instruments on the wall when they came in. Mindwipe fixed him with a steady gaze. "Euphony."

He turned, seemed to freeze for an instant, then relaxed. "Can I help you?"

"Yes," said Mindwipe. "Darkstar wishes to send a message to a pair of humans on Earth. You will send it."

"Oh, of course."

"Prepare to record. Darkstar, tell him your message."

Darkstar repeated her message, though this time included her parents' names and address. When she finished, Euphony nodded. "That's all?"

"And you will make certain that the Earth-contact who receives the message to deliver is Soundwave," said Mindwipe.

"Sure," said Euphony. Darkstar couldn't figure out why Euphony was suddenly being so agreeable when she remembered what Flywheels had said months ago. He wasn't just joking when he had said Mindwipe could hypnotise people.

"Get it to your first contact immediately, then erase your memory of this transaction."

"Sure."

"Why Soundwave?" asked Darkstar as they walked back to Mindwipe's apartment.

"Because I am certain that he will deliver the message to your parents," he said. "Without the request, Euphony is equally likely to pass the message on to an Autobot for delivery. But if the Autobots on Earth trace the message back and learn it was originally posted by a Decepticon, they will not deliver it."

"You hypnotised him."

"Of course."

She glanced at him sideways. "Did you ever hypnotise me?"

Mindwipe snorted. "You were under thrall most of the time you were with me at the beginning. It kept you quiet."

So that was why she hadn't panicked. That was good, she supposed, but it worried her that she never noticed that it happened. Mindwipe's victims thought their ideas were still their own. Even Euphony had seemed to act naturally, though Mindwipe made him do something he said he would never do.

After a few blocks, something occurred to her. "Mindwipe?"

"Yes?"

"I've been trying to learn how to fly. I know this body can fly and it has all the programming for it," said Darkstar. "But I can't do it, no matter how hard I try."

"Then you are probably trying too hard," said Mindwipe. "Keatrai, you are a Decepticon. Flight should be natural for you, but your mind keeps getting in the way."

"But I'm not a Decepticon."

"That's your whole problem right there."

A few days later, they got a new teammate. Discard jerked a thumb over his shoulder at what had been Stopgap's bunk. "Your berth is over there. You might want to give it a scrubbing before you use it. The one before you had rust problems."

The newcomer nodded, "Yes, sir," and Darkstar felt an irrational surge of joy. They had another female on the team. Again, she didn't look female at all - she sort of reminded Darkstar of Discard in grungy orange because she had a patchy look to her - but the voice was enough. It was terribly rasping, but in a feminine pitch.

"I can show, um, him around, if you want," said Darkstar.

"Roadkill," said the newcomer.

Discard waved them away without looking up. "Fine. Go."

Darkstar led Roadkill out. "I'm Darkstar. There isn't really that much to see, I guess, but I know that I could have really used a tour when I first showed up."

Roadkill looked amused. "Trying to get your hooks in me before your boss does?"

"What? No." Darkstar thought that over. "A little," she admitted. "Discard doesn't need to put an effort into it because he's useful. I have to work to make friends and it never turns out right."

Despite her unpleasant name, Darkstar found Roadkill fairly easy to talk to. Though that might not have been anything more than that she had more confidence than she used to, or that Roadkill seemed female and Darkstar hadn't immediately said anything stupid to her like she did with Steelcast.

The tour went well for the first fifteen minutes. Then Darkstar said, "This is the secondary common room," waved Roadkill on ahead of her, and was about to go through the door when someone grabbed her by her wings and yanked her back into the hallway.

She pulled away and turned - too quickly because she banged a wing on the wall. Darkstar frowned. "Hi, Smashup."

"You used to talk to Stopgap," rumbled the tank-person. "You know I'm looking for a new partner."

"I'm not interested."

"Stopgap liked you," Smashup continued as if she hadn't spoken. "Said you were open-minded. So I'll make the same deal with you as he made with me - you rust up, you get me."

"I wouldn't know what to do with you," Darkstar huffed primly.

Smashup laughed. "You think I never noticed how you fight? You follow me. You use me like a shield, a firedraw, and as a way to soften up the enemy. I could do that full-time."

"I've been doing perfectly well on my own."

"Because you've been hiding behind me and because you have no pride," Smashup said. "Hook up with me. Next time someone gets on your case about not being able to fly, you could tell him, 'I may not be able to fly, but at least I still have my head.'"

If he wasn't serious, she would have laughed. "I don't need your help."

"See how far not having my help gets you in the next battle," he snapped.

"I will, then." She turned to leave, but he caught her hand. "Let go."

"Instead of rust-coloured paint, it could be real rust," he said. "It would be like art."

There was the clonk of a gun barrel tapping metal plate. "Things that are 'like art' tend to get demolished by people who make things that are art," said Roadkill from behind Smashup. "And I don't want that kind of attention anywhere near me."

"Hnh." But he let Darkstar go, pushed past Roadkill, and disappeared down the hall.

Roadkill vanished her gun. "I noticed I had lost my tour guide. Who was that?"

"Smashup. One of the team, unfortunately," said Darkstar. "His ... partner, I guess, died a few days ago, and he's looking for a new one."

"What, no period of mourning?"

"I think he did it already, and I'm not sure how close they really were." Darkstar shook her head. "He's pushy. Discard's worried about what he might do. Now I am, too. Thanks for the save - I don't know what he'd have done if you hadn't stopped him." If Smashup had been human, Darkstar could guess what he would have tried if they were alone. Since he was a robot pervert instead of the ordinary kind, maybe he would have poured corrosives on her and stroked the resulting rust patches. Darkstar shuddered.

"I was the handler for the Stunticons for a while," said Roadkill. "One tank isn't real scary after that."

Darkstar recognised the words as assurance even though she had no idea what a 'Stunticon' was. "Maybe not for you. Smashup was telling the truth - I rely on him in fights. Without him, I'm dead, and he knows it." She sighed. "I've been meaning to go to Jekka for a while now anyway, but I just never had the chance to go. Now I've got another reason to get out of here."

Roadkill nodded. "What's in Jekka?"

"It's the closest spaceport to Porphuras."

"You're not trying to get off-planet just because of Smashup, are you?"

"No, other reasons. I want to go to Earth," said Darkstar, and waited for Roadkill to give her a funny look.

Roadkill gave her a funny look. "Why? It's weird there. The xenos are walking bags of chemicals and they get stuck in your wheels." She thought about that. "Well, my wheels, anyway. But I bet one would gum you up pretty good if it was caught in your gears."

Darkstar knew she sounded too eager, but couldn't control it. "You were there? How did you get there?"

"Space-bridge up in Polyhex, but they don't let you use it without a really good reason. It's all the elite up there because it's the front line. You and me, we don't make the cut."

"Then I still need to get to Jekka," she said, but filed away the information in case she needed it. Darkstar frowned. "Do I have to put in a request for a transfer, or do I have to just hope they send me there?"

Roadkill chuckled. "You just sneak out when nobody's looking and tell the base where you end up to put you to work. I mean, that's pretty much what I did. They got tired of me on Earth, so they sent me back up to Cybertron. But I've never liked Polyhex, so I just made my way south."

When Darkstar didn't say anything for a minute, Roadkill shook her head. "I can just tell Discard you left if you don't want to deal with him."

"I guess it was obvious what I was thinking," Darkstar admitted. "But I need to go back and pick up my stuff. And I should tell him myself anyway."

Discard was disappointed when Darkstar told him she was leaving, but he didn't try to stop her. He seemed convinced that she was leaving because of Smashup. That was part of it, certainly, and better Discard think that. Trying to explain that she ultimately wanted to get to Earth would have required more explanation.

She was cannon-fodder. She would go be cannon-fodder in Jekka, then. It wasn't as if anyone really cared.

One person might. Darkstar went back to tell Mindwipe.

He didn't seem interested. He didn't even look up from the computer he was working on in his lab. "Go, then. I gave you your freedom months ago. Use it."

"I thought I should get your permission first."

"You have no need of it. I do not own you."

"I'm going to Jekka."

Mindwipe sighed. "I will have one of my associates look you up when you arrive, then."

It was strange, but it made her feel better. Darkstar had spent her teenage years rolling her eyes at parents who wanted to know where she was going and what she was doing, and now she found she wanted that. Having Mindwipe nearby was ... comforting, in a way. She hated him for what he did to her, but he was still the most protection she had on this planet. Mindwipe kept tabs on her. If she got in really serious trouble, there was the chance that he would bail her out.

But he couldn't do it from across the state.

Darkstar had decided as soon as Mindwipe had first let her go that she wasn't just going to accept her fate. Porphuras was familiar to her now, but it had nothing for her.

The subway barely took her to the city limits before it had to stop due to tunnel damage. Darkstar went back to the surface, found the road headed west, and started the long walk to Jekka.

The End.