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The Iacon 5000 is a pointless exercise, dangerous to participants and viewers both. A waste of time and financial and medical resources better spent elsewhere.
"Yeah, and I bet you'd have campaigned against gladiator matches if those were still going, too," Speedrun interrupts, wheels trembling in her effort to not flinch away from his airbrush.
Ratchet grins and pats Speedrun on the wheel well. "Yeah, they ended the fights six cycles before I was forged because they knew I was coming. Last one, you're doing well."
Speedrun is one of the hospital's couriers, small and quick and low to the ground in both root mode and alt. To hear her tell it, she was close to winning the whole thing before the coupe with the illegal spoiler came out of nowhere. The coupe came out of it with a mangled bumper; Speedrun came out of it with a pierced fuel tank and all four tires scraped so bald she's lucky they didn't pop with it. The fuel tank was the first priority. Now, unfortunately for them both, they're down to the tires.
She flinches back from the spray and asks again, "Can't you just replace them?"
"Hold still." Ratchet rotates the tire in her heel assembly slowly, letting the airbrush pass over it steadily. The worn black of her tires fades under the new application of rubber cement. "No, trust your doctor, that's a much more invasive procedure. Give it twenty shifts and you'll be back in racing form."
He shuts off the brush, juggling equipment to get it set down in the solvent tank before the isoprene solidifies.
"Twenty shifts?!"
Ratchet points straight at her. "No racing till your treads grow back to a depth of five centimetres, I mean it. Some movement is good for you, it'll encourage new growth, but nothing above fifty kilometres an hour."
"Fifty kilometres?!"
"Nothing wrong with a nice walk in root mode. Stop and smell the terpenes, and all."
"I'm gonna die, Doc-o-tron," Speedrun groans. "All my axles are gonna rust to nothing before I can get back on the road. I was forged to drive!"
Yeah, Ratchet likes Springsteel too. "Don't call me that. How is this worse than the fuel tank patch? Speeders, you were a single torn wire away from becoming an internal combustion machine. Here, take two of these and call me next shift for a checkup."
He fishes out a pack of carbon supplements to pass over. It's about time to put in a request for another pallet, the way Ratchet goes through them after every big race.
"Well, thanks," Speedrun says, and eats a coal drop morosely. "Hey, what about those miners though, you seen them yet? I bet they came out of the race with worse than bald tires."
"Triage says different. They keep getting kicked down my queue because of bots like you in worse shape. They're next if nobody else is about to explode in the waiting room..."
As if on cue, Triage pages him over the intercom. Ratchet transforms all his tools back into his wrists and sighs.
"That's me gone. Stick around till that coating is fully cured, you won't get the full benefit of traction coating till it's dry. And I don't want you tracking rubber through the hospital."
Speedrun waves as he leaves.
With one thing after another, Ratchet sees another four patients—two of them in the same appointment, after a nasty fender bender on their way home from the race physically locked them together—before the miners should be next in his queue.
Except they're gone from the list.
Ratchet pings Triage from his last appointment's wash station.
"Hey, did First Aid take those two cogless miners from the race? They're not on my list."
Triage is a big bot, great at her job even though she's always sleepy from staying up late to stargaze with her aftermarket telescope attachment. When she's on duty intake runs on rails. Probably because she wants to get back to her astronomy.
She sighs, crackling static into Ratchet's comm. "They left."
"Against medical advice?"
"They didn't sign out at all. One of Sentinel's assistants came through and picked them up, then left before I could stop them. Politics, I guess."
Ratchet transforms out his laser welder to get at some gunk in the seams. "Politics, schmolitics. Sentinel can't diagnose an impacted piston."
"Don't grumble at me, Doc-o-tron."
"Don't call me that. Hey, pass me their tech specs anyway, would you? Just in case they come back."
The files load into his processor as Ratchet shakes the solvent off his hands. D-16 and Orion Pax, smaller even than the minibot Ratchet knows who's got a data drive alt mode, but rated for heavy work.
The files nag at Ratchet all through the end of his extended shift and all the way through his downtime. When it's time to detach himself from the recharge cables and drive back to the hospital, he comms Triage again.
"Hey. I'm gonna be in late. Taking a quarter-shift personal time, alright?"
"You finally learning how to relax?"
"No," says Ratchet. "Making a house call."
The deepest Ratchet's ever been is North Minus Eight, in the production district. He did a full cycle interning in the local drive-in clinic learning to treat all the problems unique to factory work. Molten silicate down the wrong pipe. Asbestosis of the audiovisual system. Chemical burns. Any one of a hundred flavours of crushed or mangled or bisected limbs from accidents on the shop floor. With all the practice he got in, these days Ratchet's the quickest hand at limb replacements in Iacon Central.
It had been good work, satisfying and tangible in a way lecturing racers about tire regrowth never was. The bots made things for Iacon, real and useful things that improved lives, and he helped them stay healthy along the way.
So it's with a sense of distant satisfaction that Ratchet drives down, down the roundabouts that take him from his one-room on shadowed South One into the negative levels, the warehouses and factories and trainyards. Iacon wakes every shift from the bottom up; Ratchet was generally the only one on the road when he was due to clock in at the hospital, but the lower levels are already bustling.
The roundabouts send him down past monorail stations, past any reach of natural light. Metal-halide lights beam down, cold, washing away any shadows.
Iacon is anchored to the shifting ground of Cybertron with a net of cables tying down plates of the city with massive stakes driven into the bedrock. The roundabouts take Ratchet in a spiral around one of them, graffitied all up and down its length with band names and political slogans he doesn't recognize.
The streets empty again as Ratchet passes the minus-teens on his approach to Minus Thirty where the mines begin. With a start that sends him swerving a foot to the left before he catches himself, Ratchet realizes: all the miners would have to take the monorail, if they can't drive themselves.
He fetches up at a huge blast door at last, guarded by a single bored pickup truck who looks like he's regretting staying up too late to celebrate the race.
Ratchet unfolds himself into root mode and flips up his identification. "Morning," he says. "I'm here to see a miner—?"
The pickup eyes him with interest. "Yeah? Must be some bust-up if they sent for a doctor. Down the freight elevator and keep to your right. You don't have the armor for a rockfall so stick to the covered walkways, okay, sir?"
"And how common are rockfalls?"
The pickup shrugs. "Eh. Through the security scanner this way, doc."
The elevator's slow descent gives him an overview of whatever landing area the miners need. Workers supervise energon ore up long belts to refinery tanks that bathe the whole area in a pale blue, the colour of life.
The elevator grate unfolds with a screech. Ratchet resists the urge to get out his can of oil.
A covered walkway leads left and right from the elevator; Ratchet takes a right, keeping an eye out for bots at hip height. The walkway trembles under him at unpredictable intervals, swaying as something shifts far down below. Veins opening and closing down below, maybe.
It's not an office that awaits at the end of the walkway, or even a room with any miners inside. It's a machine shop, badly lit and surrounded by broken nonsentient tools like hand drills and jacks and some other tools Ratchet can't name.
Ratchet raps on a worktable and flashes his brights. "Hey, anybody home?"
A light voice calls out, "Yoo-hoo! In the back!"
In the back is a cogless miner bot lying back on a worktable, a bright red lockout-tagout tab looped around the joint of a calf assembly with still-healing welds. He's tossing a crumpled aluminium ball up and down in one hand—probably all the entertainment he's got.
"Hello there," Ratchet starts, feeling himself unwieldy, out of place. "I'm looking for some miners."
"Well, you've found one at least!" The miner on the worktable flashes half his visor in a broad wink. "I didn't think my leg rated a real doctor, but I won't turn you down."
As an unintended distraction goes, this one's top-tier. Ratchet's radiographic lenses transform out and flip down over his eyes without his consciously meaning them to. "Who did your welds? And do you mind if I take a look?"
"Knock yourself out. Our mechanic did, she's pretty good, I've never had issues."
Mechanics aren't rated to work on sentient bots. May as well ask a civil engineer to replace a fuel pump.
Miner bots started coming out of the forges when Ratchet had been in med school. It'd made a stir around the student population—did treatment plans differ for bots with no t-cog? Did Primus not think an alt-mode was necessary for all bots?—but every time they'd asked the profs had said the teaching modules for cogless bots weren't ready yet. And then he'd graduated and gotten too busy to think about treatment plans for any bot who wasn't parked in his medibay.
Ratchet frowns and kneels by the miner's table. "Everything looks good on x-ray," he says at last, and remembers himself. "And I'm Ratchet, I'm from Iacon Central Medical, I should've said that before any medical procedure."
The miner bounces his aluminium ball against the ceiling. "Hey, all good, nice to get a second opinion. I'm Jazz. Did you come down here just to double-check Hook's work?"
Kneeling has him at roughly eye-level with Jazz. Ratchet sticks around on the floor instead of getting up to loom over Jazz again, and tries not to eye the gap in his chestplates where a transformation cog should sit.
"No," he says, though now he'd really like to do some more double-checking—say, of the welds on any other miner he can get his hands on. "I'm on the hunt for those two miners who ran the Iacon 5000 yesterday, if you know where I could ask about them? They skipped out before their checkup my last shift."
Jazz fumbles his toy ball and struggles up onto his elbows. "OP and D-16? You know where they went?"
"I don't, that's what I'm telling you. They left the hospital with some politician before their appointment."
There's tension in Jazz's face now, in the hitch of his mouth to the side. "Well, they haven't been back here."
Ratchet sighs and rubs the bridge of his nose. Then he belatedly folds away his lenses again. "Politics. They're sleeping off an overcharge in a hotel on Fifty, bet on it. Could you give me a ping when they turn up? I'll message you my code."
The light behind Jazz's visor dims for a moment. "I don't have an internal comm unit. Could you write it down?"
No internal comm unit—? Maybe they carry shortwave radios into the mines. Ratchet does his best to tamp down his dismay.
"Good thought," he says out loud, trying for diplomatic. He rustles through his kit for writing surface and materials... paint marker for noting the correct limbs for amputation, titanium supplement packet. Good, titanium's good for encouraging weld repair.
He writes out his comm code by hand, triple-checking it against the string practically hard-coded into his processor before passing it to Jazz.
"Hey, lollipop, nice," Jazz says, and pops the supplement out of its wrapper into his mouth.
"They're good for welds," says Ratchet inanely. "Hey, find a wall comm and let me know when your friends get back from whatever engex-and-handshake routine the Prime's got them doing, alright? Or call if you need any medical advice. Or anybot else you know."
Ratchet makes himself stop before he promises to set up a clinic on Minus Twenty-Eight. The mines have their own medical protocols. Ratchet doesn't know the protocols for military medicine either. It had been the only internship rotation he'd turned down. Doesn't mean Prime doesn't take care of his squadrons.
"Will do, Doc-o-tron." Jazz smiles wide around his titanium lollipop. "Soon as they get back I'll send the flare up. Believe me, everyone's real proud of 'em, they won't be able to take a step onto the mine floor without everyone noticing."
Ratchet takes his leave quietly, goes up the squeaking elevator quietly, nods to the pickup truck still standing at the security gate quietly. He's due back at the hospital, so he takes the monorail back up. It'll drop him at Central Minus Three, a quick turn along the highway back to Iacon Central Medical.
Iacon is a gorgeous city no matter which way you slice it. Its gold-electroplated buildings flash in the warm light of Cyberton's primary star. Bots walk and drive and fly along its corridors, each an individual circuit on the motherboard of society.
Ratchet had come out of the forge a rescue vehicle. His cohort had been given a brief orientation, a commemorative glass to dip into Iacon's flowing rivers for their first drink of energon, and an extensive multiple-choice quiz. Ratchet's results had come back saying medibot as loud as anything. He'd been shunted straight into school from there, ready to learn his function.
One of the questions that came back up again and again on late nights at the student bar was "What would you want to be, if not a doctor?"
His classmates always had new answers ready. Machinist, courier, bartender, librarian—anything to get 'em out of triple shifts on call interning with old Doctor Gudgeon! Ratchet never had anything to say.
One night Flatline had jostled him by the shoulder and said, "Alright, easier question, what about a different alt mode?"
That hadn't been an easy question either. Ratchet wasn't the quickest around a corner, but his alt made good speed on the straightaways, especially when he had his siren going and everyone cleared his way. He could haul anything smaller than a shuttle back to the hospital for treatment and stabilize anything bigger on the spot. It felt good that every piece of Ratchet's body, every transformation built into his circuits, helped him heal people.
"Helicopter?" Flatline asked, and Ratchet shoved back at him.
"And leave my life in the hands of a single nut? Anyone who picks copter has something wrong with them. I'm telling you, it's Froidian. No way."
It took some more prodding and teasing before he'd said, grudgingly, "Skydart."
Across the table Pharma, a jet himself, had whooped and spilled his engex in triumph. But next to him Flatline nudged him again with that big shoulder assembly of his and said teasingly, "Yeah, I hear aerial rescue's always hiring."
"Yeah, well," Ratchet had grumbled, and emptied his drink. If that had been his logic, so what. They'd have to pull Ratchet out of medicine with a crane.
It's something he doesn't take the time to think about all that often. But if Ratchet were the praying sort he'd set a chunk of sodium smoking in thanks to Primus for the work of His forges that gave Ratchet a t-cog that could bear the load of all a medibot's tools.
Natural light from the surface reflects down across the mirrors of Iacon's buildings, flashing bright enough through the monorail's windows to blind for just a moment.
Of his class, Mixmaster had decided to drop out from the med side and retrain in pure chemistry. At the hospital, Triage liked her work because she liked organization and it gave her off-shifts free for stargazing. Hell, Pharma just liked solving problems first and best no matter what field he was competing in.
What choice did the miner bots have if they came out the forge with no default alt mode or way to scan another one?
And if bots didn't need a t-cog to live as they chose, why did Jazz have a great big gap in his chassis like someone had removed the cog and not bothered to replace the dust cover...?
Ratchet broods till he hits his stop, and broods more on his drive to the hospital.
He runs into Speedrun in the staff parking lot, both legs hooked over Triage's and one hand scratching at a shoulder wheel.
"Don't pick at your tires," Ratchet says on automatic as he approaches. Triage and Speedrun each give him a fistbump in greeting. "All good so far?"
Triage tips her head back till it bumps into her telescope attachment, looking up at Ratchet. "Five-car pileup," she says wearily. "Aid's on it. Nothing life-threatening. I'm on my fifteen, don't bother me."
"Not bothering anyone," Ratchet says, and turns for the hospital entrance. He calls behind him again, "Don't pick, Speeders!"
Inside, First Aid is on it. It makes Ratchet feel old before his time that he's somehow got an intern to take care of already, but First Aid has the makings of a good doctor. He just needs seasoning. Seasoning and confidence.
"You did good, you kept them alive this long," Ratchet says to him. "Good prioritization."
"Triage helped."
"Good, that's her job." Ratchet walks briskly through the ward. The loudest patient is the least injured, a goods transport with a handful of kinked wires keeping him from transforming fully out of alt. Ratchet tries not to laugh at him, poor bot half in truck form with a pair of legs coming out of his chassis—it's bad for patient morale.
There's a steady trickle of new patients in as he and First Aid work through the worst of the accident. It's just when one of them finally has the time spare to turn to the transport when all the hospital and city-block emergency sirens go off at once.
Ratchet's own sirens go off once in a startled whoop before he can throttle them down and listen to the information.
Buildings coming down in Central. A train derailed—Sentinel's tower—shots fired in the city core—? None of it makes sense, but it all spells casualties.
"I'm going, you're staying," he informs First Aid, packing more tools into his kit. "Prep two more wards, if the second starts filling up open a third, you know the drill for emergencies."
"I could come with you," First Aid says, wobbling voice brave, and though he's halfway to the door already Ratchet turns back.
He claps Aid on the shoulder and says, with all the conviction he can put into his voice, "You could, but the patients need you here. I'll be sending you cases as soon as they're stabilized. They'll need your help. You're made for this, Aid. You'll do good."
First Aid nods.
On his way out, Ratchet nearly shoulder-checks Triage on her own way back in. "Ping me when you need medical transports!" she yells at Ratchet, and Ratchet yells back, "Send me one as soon as my location beacon stops moving for longer than a minute!"
It's still early in the shift, somehow. Ratchet has to fight the flow of traffic, thousands of scared bots, to get to the edge of the disaster zone. At least two buildings have come down, trapping who knows how many bots under rock and metal. Jets shriek through the air, firing at each other. And there's some huge rumble under Ratchet's feet, like they're about to get the big quake that's been threatened for the last twenty cycles.
There's a bot trapped half under a crumbled wall, only their legs sticking out. Ratchet goes to them, kneels, and gets to work.
The gunfire gets worse, and then stops. The rumbling gets much worse, and then stops. There must be a new cohort fresh from the forge, because eventually a bright green excavator who introduces herself as Bucket shows up to help dig patients out, and she's got the pure dizzy glee in her alt's functioning that only a brand-new bot retains for very long.
Nightmare, to think this must be Bucket's first day on Cybertron. But she's doing well.
Ratchet keeps his comm line open the whole time, listening for proximity pings from anyone buried under rubble, letting Triage inform him of when transports will show up to bring stabilized patients back to the hospital.
When he gets a distant ping from an unrecognized number, Ratchet gives the spiel he's already given a hundred times.
"Doctor Ratchet here. To report damage or to contact Iacon Central Medical, please contact medibot Triage. If your injuries are life-threatening stay on the line and we'll get you help in a jiffy. If you can move, follow my location beacon for medical assistance."
"Not life-threatening, but I've got someone I'd like you to look over." Ratchet can almost put a name to the voice, and then it continues, "This is Jazz, you looked at my welds this morning? I found OP."
"Jazz!" The beginning of this shift might as well be a hundred cycles ago by now. "If you're in the mines and they're stable, stay there. I'm in Central Iacon above ground, and things are dangerous up here. I'll come check in with your friend when I can. Might be a couple shifts."
"No," says Jazz, "we're, uh—we're up top. Look, I'll just come to your beacon, we're like a block away at this point."
Ratchet shakes his head hard and leans back to his current patient, a trike with a cracked spark casing. He wraps asbestos bandage around the casing and helps her up. "This'll keep your energy insulated till someone can weld you up. Tell the doctor when you get there that your coolant lines need flushing, okay? Asbestos is only good for you in the short term."
The trike nods so shakily that before leading her to the latest transport—Yoke, one of their best in the aerial rescue corps, he'll get their patients back safe—Ratchet pops out his paint marker for the second time that shift and writes !!ASBESTOS!! FLUSH LINES SOON! right on her chassis.
Ratchet's still braced from the wind of Yoke's takeoff when Jazz's voice says from behind him, "Doc-o-tron...?"
"Jazz!" Ratchet says, and turns. And then he says "Jazz?" again, because the bot standing there on the cracked unmoving sidewalk is definitely the same bot he saw at the beginning of his shift, but now he's nearly as tall as Ratchet. The gap in the front of his chestplates is sealed up. And he's got the doors and wheels and windows of a bot with a racing-car alt mode.
Lagging a step behind him is the biggest bot Ratchet's ever seen who isn't an orbital shuttle.
"What did you," Ratchet begins, and then "How did you," and then ends with "Is your knee weld holding up?"
Jazz lifts up a foot and wiggles it around, ending in a little ta-da! gesture with his hands. "Yeah, Ratchet. All good. Matrix of Leadership even got rid of my lockout-tagout tag for me, how about that?"
"Sorry, the what?" Ratchet asks faintly.
The huge bot behind Jazz puts a hand on his chestplates. "I am Optimus Prime," he says, with the kind of resonance to his voice Ratchet thought you only got in maybe the better cartoon voice actors, or maybe God. "Until recently, I was known as Orion Pax."
"It's a long story," says Jazz. "Cogless miner, lost the Iacon 5000, journey through the wilderness, gifted a t-cog, more wilderness, killed by his best bro, fell into the centre of the planet, got a Matrix, came back different? OP tells it better. But I figure if we've got a genuine doctor on tap someone should take a look, double-check Primus's welds."
Ratchet rubs at his face. His hands come away gritty with dust and gravel. "I missed a lot today, huh?"
He sends out a query ping. No critical cases at the moment. They're in the post-crisis stage of the long dig-out and repair, now.
"Well," he says. "Looks like you made it to the top of the queue in the end, kid. Let me see your fuel levels?"
He takes OP—Optimus Prime—through a full checkup right there in the rubble while Jazz watches. A new Prime for Iacon and a new bodyguard for that Prime, maybe.
Optimus talks through the last couple cycles of his life. Ratchet tries not to interrupt too often. The powerful t-cog—not to mention the Matrix itself—inside his chassis speaks to the truth of Optimus's story.
All he says about the other miner in the race, a sweet-faced kid named D-16, is that "he's gone." Ratchet tries not to add to his grief by asking too many questions.
Midway through the story, he can't help but say, "And I thought I was having a weird shift," though.
Optimus gives a sad little chuckle. Jazz laughs louder, and turns to cyberwolf-whistle at a distant Bucket, still clearing rubble from the walkways. "Hey bot! Nice alt! Always knew you were meant for it!"
Bucket waves back with her scoop, raining gravel around her. Ratchet looks over at her with a new eye before bending back to Optimus's joints. Each one needs a reflex test and Optimus isn't sure yet he knows everything that he can turn into or generate, so it's a tricky one. Ratchet needs keen reflexes of his own to not get whacked in half when a glowing axe pops out of Optimus's wrist.
"But the Quints," he says, finally. "They have the rest of the planet?"
Optimus nods.
"How do we stop 'em? Is there some kind of, I don't know, deal we can make with them now that the river's running again? Peace and flowing energon for all?"
Jazz and Optimus share a look Ratchet can't read. "A bad deal is what got us here in the first place," Optimus says, and sighs deeper than anyone that young ought to. "To maintain our freedom—to maintain the freedom all sentient beings deserve—I fear it will be war."
War.
It had been Ratchet's second cycle in med school when the rivers dried up and the war stopped, a cycle later when the forge started spitting out cogless miner bots. Not cogless out of the forges, he knows now, but operated on before they ever booted up for the first time to pick an alt.
The older doctors in school and at the hospital have been through war. Ratchet hasn't. He's been a doctor during peacetime. The only bullet holes he's ever patched have come from the drag racers taking potshots at each other down on East Minus Six.
Iacon, the shining city, the motherboard of a million circuits—Ratchet loves it and its people, the complex clockwork of all their lives fitting together. He'd been so proud to keep his patients in good repair so that they could function as they wanted, could add to the complex core-rope memory weave of a living city.
"War," Ratchet says out loud this time. He sighs. "Well, clean bill of health for you, Optimus—your whole chassis reads like you're fresh off the assembly line."
Ratchet stands up. He looks off to the massive dust clouds still filling the air—new filters definitely recommended for everyone on the ground today, he's gotta remember to check storage for them—and shakes his head.
"I never wanted to be a military doctor," he says. "But we can't always be what we want, I guess. Alright, Prime. I'm in. Let's try to keep our people whole."
Ratchet does his very best to ignore Jazz's whoop of "All right! Yeah, Doc-o-tron!"
Optimus puts out a massive, brand-new hand. They shake.
"Welcome to the Autobots, Doctor," Optimus Prime says in that God-given rumble of his: kind, and sympathetic, and already tired.
And behind Optimus's shoulder, the rubble of Iacon shines gold in the setting sun.