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Voices.
“You’re being paranoid, Kicker. It’s just a piece of digging equipment.”
“Oh really, Misha? you’ve seen orange, green and purple digging equipment before, then? With tank treads? Shaped like some sort of mechanical scorpion?”
The voices for which they’d searched – the reason he and Demolishor had sat for days, motionless, steeped in the filth and muck of this organic world. No more waiting – now was the time to transform, to attack, to wring the location of the Mini-cons from these puny creatures and…
… and his body would not respond. His systems failed him. Nothing would initialise, no coupling would twist. With a start, he realised he possessed no couplings. No systems. No circuitry to initiate, no chassis to contort.
He had nothing… was nothing… save for a Spark.
Floating, disembodied. Not on Earth – the world of his memories, the place to which they’d tracked the Mini-con escapees – but high above Cybertron. Though without optics, he could somehow take in the vista below. Had he a synthesiser, he would have gasped with surprise and delight. His planet, his world, was whole and, better yet, healthy. A golden sheen, unseen for so many vorns, coated the metallic world.
The sight did his Spark… and, therefore, all of him… good. Last he remembered, Cybertron was in the gravest of perils. Assaulted by a being from their racial nightmares, the Transformers had forged an uneasy alliance to repel it. He’d placed his faith in that alliance, based as it was on their religion. Sacred texts held only a Transformer race united as one could stand against the Chaos Bringer. To him had been entrusted the task of leading the Decepticons to glory alongside Optimus Prime’s Autobots.
Optimus. Despite their ideological differences, they’d become allies. Despite his cowardice and shame, they’d become friends. His “weakness” and “faults” – sparing the humans, hesitating when given the chance to end Red Alert’s life – had made him an unpopular Decepticon. And yet, when side-by-side with the red and blue Autobot, they’d earned him respect. “Weakness” and “fault” became “character trait” and “personal strength”. Perhaps he’d spent vorns on the wrong side of the conflict, after all.
Then, he’d ruined it by getting himself killed.
Watching his troops dying around him, his Terrorcon minions under threat, had driven him mad. Renouncing his cowardice, he had stormed onto the Chaos Bringer and assaulted it with his bare claws. He landed but three blows before the devil’s fiery breath melted his superstructure. Had he a face, he would have winced at the memory of his last words.
“Did I… do good?” he’d choked out to Optimus.
“Yes, friend,” his erstwhile enemy had replied, “You did good.” And with those words ringing in his audio sensors, Scorponok had died.
Until now.
His continued existence was puzzling. Long had Scorponok studied the legends of the Transformer race, hungrily devouring the data tracks found in every conquered city, every seized archive. When a Spark was extinguished, it returned to the Matrix of Leadership – the place from whence it had come – for all eternity. There was no bobbling about, in a semi-solid state of energy flux, in the outer atmosphere! No zipping around the sky observing events below! What madness is this?
Cybertron was different, as was the galaxy around it. Scorponok “saw” Unicron’s head, just behind him, rotating in a lazy orbit around the golden world. The beast’s face plate was frozen in a rictus of terror and insanity, its massive neck joints trailing messily behind. For a moment, he thought he “spied” small beings on its surface, hacking into the dense, ancient metal with tiny tools. It was as if he… the bodiless Spark… had emerged from somewhere within that enormous head. As if he’d been excavated. Exhumed.
Such thoughts were easily dismissed as insanity. Obviously, none of this could be happening. He was lost in a delusion, some trick of cross-wiring as his last conscious circuits melted to slag. It was all as much a dream as the dying energies swirling around him – tendrils of dark force reminding him of a closing black hole – and gently pulling him into a rapidly-closing wormhole.
All a delusion, he thought, as the blackness swallowed him.
-----
Starscream rolled his optics and ignored Obsidian. He had enough frelling problems right now without listening to the pseudo-mystical garbage of a deposed tin-pot tyrant.
“If you create a Transformer without a Spark, you’ve done nothing but build a sophisticated robot. A programmable shell that can alter its form… an automaton.”
And what’s wrong with that, really? Starscream wanted to yell. As I spend most of my time surrounded by incompetent, brainless idiots, I’ve decided the next incompetent, brainless idiot will be one that follows my every order to the letter!
He kept his mouth shut. Starscream, who had talked back to the “mighty” Megatron from day one, opted not to antagonise his uninvited audience. One did not disrespect Obsidian and Tankor if one wished to (a) continue to receive the benefit of their services, and (b) avoid being killed while offline tonight.
“Makin’ a grave mistake,” Tankor intoned. Starscream was surprised the lumbering giant deigned to speak – since hooking up with the survivors of the Iacon fiasco, the warlord of North Kalis had kept to himself, rarely activating his synthesiser outside of strategy meetings. The enormous yellow and green mech left the talking to his partner – the sleek and totally untrustworthy Obsidian, former warlord of South Kalis. Undetectable and radar invisible, the smaller mech also had the annoying habit of seemingly being everywhere when you wanted to avoid him.
“My partner is, as always, correct,” Obsidian said coolly. “All you will do here is create an abomination, a freak without the order and entropy needed to…”
“Thankyou for your input, Obsidian – it’s appreciated, as always,” Starscream said grandly. “Rest assured your… commentary… has been heard and filed for later reference, and your objections noted on the official record. Now, if you’ll please step… well, hover… out of the way, we can move to phase two.”
Obsidian’s red optics flashed, but both he and Tankor moved away. “No reason,” the giant said over his shoulder, “You couldn’t generate a Spark.”
“Actually, there’s every reason,” Starscream snapped back, his patience dangerously thin. “There’s only two ways of generating a Spark – possessing the Creation Matrix, or having enough Energon to bombard a pre-built frame and hoping a little blue ball of pulsing energy decides to form.
“Now, in case you’ve missed Demolishor and Snow Cat napping in the missile tubes, we’re kind of short on Energon right now. And seeing as I don’t have ‘Prime’ after my name, I guess we’re fresh out of sacred life forces too! So will you please get your slow-moving chassis the frell out of our way and let us work!”
Tankor’s massive body shifted and he growled, clicking his pincer-like hands. He made to turn back but was stopped by Obsidian. “Peace, old friend,” he whispered, laying a weapon-like hand on the giant’s thick forearm. “Ours is to serve the will of our leader.” Tankor grunted in reply and allowed himself to be led out of the med bay.
Starscream breathed a sigh of relief, wiped a sheen of lubricant from his forehead plate, and turned to business. “Is it ready?”
“Yes,” came the flat, nearly lifeless reply. “Everything has been prepared as you commanded, Lord Starscream.”
I have to admit, I could get used to this, Starscream mused happily. If I’d known losing a limb would turn Shockblast into the universe’s most co-operative Decepticon, I’d have arranged for one of his arms to be pulled off eons ago.
Shockblast was a changed mech. His encounter with Thundercracker, out on the Iacon cliffs, had robbed him of much more than his gun arm. The arrogant and conceited twit had lost his spine, his gumption and his self-respect. The broken weakling that had limped back to the orbital base, begging Starscream for help, was a far cry from the superior military operations commander who’d once led the Mayhem Attack Squad. In Starscream’s optics, that only made the one-eyed freak more useful.
“Then ramp it up and get it all moving,” he ordered shrilly. “And may I just remind you, once again, what a sick weirdo you were back in the day?”
Shockblast chuckled slightly – the first real sign of emotion he’d displayed in, well, centuries. “I only regret not getting into the amphitheatre sooner. Perhaps I could have saved others.”
“And that’s what I mean,” Starscream said. “You still refer to it as saving them when, in reality, you had Slugslinger nailing them in the head with data bullets to download their personality engrams! Even now, you claim to have saved this poor wretch, rather than acknowledging you blew his head off!”
“What you say is illogical,” Shockblast replied, lifting a small cylinder. “The subject was saved, on this device, and has been saved for the centuries it’s taken for science to catch up to my vision. What is a Transformer, after all, but a complex set of sub-routines and algorithms?”
Starscream grimaced. “You might get argument from the gruesome twosome on that one.”
“Superstitious fools,” Shockblast sniffed. “That sort of attitude may have kept Kalis in line, but it has no place in the halls of science.” He walked across to the rusted steel bench, his ruined arm hanging limply at his side. A thimble-shaped cap had been fitted to the stump to stem the flow of fatal radiation from Shockblast’s internal reactors. “Where as this,” he continued, laying the tube down on the bench, “is the key to the future Decepticon empire.”
“My empire,” Starscream crooned, savouring the words. He ran a jet black hand over the subject’ angular, ice-blue metalwork. The repair job had been painstaking but successful – you’d never know the tall, lithe, almost ghostly chassis had been through one of the worst fights in Cybertronian history.
And, in a few breems, he thought gleefully, no one will ever never know Dreadwing has been dead for 8.1 million years.
-----
Scorponok’s delusion had continued. He’d been vomited from some sort of wormhole into orbit around a lush, organic world. As his Spark had descended, it had been swamped by a verdant glow. Save for the tree trunks and water, everything was green. He began to wonder if the soil was, too.
Another sight caught his attention. It was a mountain of charred, blackened animal carcasses, piled almost two kilometres high. The remains of every conceivable creature was there – bats, monkeys, wolves, big cats, lizards, birds and bears. Some were similar to species on earth, others were radically different – not just in colouring but also in form, in structure. Predators, prey, herbivores and carnivores, all just as burned as each another.
At the foot of the pile was something… out of place. Scorponok allowed his Spark to fall closer – may as well give into the delusion, he laughed mirthlessly – to get a better look. It was a large, flat green disc, edged with silver decorations. There was a symbol on its centre… some sort of claw, or perhaps a steaming anvil… and emerald lightning crackled from it. Where the electricity arced, the pile of corpses would buckle and bubble. Amazingly, new living creatures rose from the corporeal sludge – simple, tiny beings – and rolled into the grass.
He was watching carbon-based evolution in progress.
Scorponok rose and soared above the planet, once again, for a while. Without an internal chronometer, how was he to know how long he’d hovered? Eventually, he came upon a volcanic area surrounded by jungle. From out the rocky side of one volcano thrust giant golden engines – those of a star cruiser. A Vanguard class deep space interceptor. What was it doing here, on this uncharted backwater?
He floated into the orange hallways, noting the wreckage strewn everywhere. Animal bones lay side-by-side with chunks of Transformer chassis, but not in the patterns of battle debris. They were arranged, in piles, around a strange-looking machine. It looked something like a plant, with a mech-sized hole in the “trunk” and two pod-like chambers suspended from stalks.
Each pile of refuse resembled the left overs of some massive carnivore. A very wasteful, gluttonous carnivore – there were enough bones to build a full skeleton, and enough mech parts to construct a whole Transformer.
Construct…
An idea seized Scorponok’s mind – whatever his mind was constituted of, anyway. If this is a delusion, then why not give myself over to it, completely? He’d been, before the war, an engineer. His alt mode had been designed as a way of incorporating excavation, design and construction in a single, functional form. Megatron had recognised its potential for warfare and so made Scorponok exempt from the painful reformatting endured by the other Decepticons. Though that chassis was gone, the engineer’s intelligence remained… and, maybe, could be used to resurrect the body.
For what was a Transformer, after all, but pure energy surrounded by a metallic shell?
Sensing the Energon within the tree-like machine, Scorponok dove into it. The power of his own Spark kick-started the circuits, and the apparatus hummed to life. Without understanding how, the bodiless Decepticon used his own life force to reprogram the machine, causing it to magnetically draw all the spare parts into its central chamber… and reforge them.
Pieces flew across the room and were swallowed by the tree, melting and bending into familiar shapes. Black and gold feet connected to blue joints, linked to treaded legs, fused to ebon hips, connected to gold-tipped arms and claws. Scorponok willed his Spark into the newborn mech’s chest as its head began to form – blood red optics in a black face plate, wrapped in a cobalt blue helm. He growled, savouring the tingle in his new synthesiser, as his long tail swished and struck at the metal behind him.
The growl rose in pitch and timbre, ending in a cavernous roar that shook the orange halls around him. Scorponok stepped from the chamber, revelling in his renewed strength and power. From the ashes of this strange world had he recreated himself – darker, more powerful than before and, most importantly…
“Alive!” he roared again, clicking his claws in celebration. Red Energon daggers sprung from the powerful pincers. “I am alive!”
Delusion had given way to beautiful, sweet reality. Scorponok was jubilant, he was complete and whole, he was… in pain! Severe, wrenching, agonizing pain. His very insides felt scalded, his bulk suddenly cavernous and impossible to support. He crashed to the floor, wailing in agony, doubling over and clutching at his midsection. No matter how he twisted, the torment continued.
“What,” he gasped, fighting a surge of suffering and nausea, “is happening?”
-----
Starscream skidded around the corner, cursing under his breath. The worst thing about the terrified shrieks echoing through the orbital base was that they meant Obsidian and Tankor were right.
It had started well enough. The data bullet had been welded into Dreadwing’s cranial casing, a portion of their limited Energon supply had been pumped into his rebuilt chassis to jump-start the essential circuits. Red optics had pulsed and the blue Decepticon had risen off the med bay table.
And risen… and risen… and kept on rising. Without firing a single retro-rocket, Dreadwing had floated into the air and out of the room. At first, Starscream and Shockblast had been too amazed to do much more than stand and gawk… it was more like conjuring a spirit that switching on a protoform. Then the screaming began.
Starscream hurdled a mess of crumpled forms blocking the corridor. Shockblast was less co-ordinated and tumbled over the obstacle which was… scratch that, had been… Blackout. The blue and purple helicopter – now coloured the unmistakable grey of death – was curled in a foetal position, his face plate a mask of pure fear. Duststorm, the crane, looked just as horrified. Well, his remains did. And his proto brother, Wideload, wasn’t about to up and dance a jig, either.
Typical, isn’t it? Starscream muttered internally. You go to all the effort of finding a new way of generating soldiers, and a group of fools get themselves slagged in the process. The universe really isn’t fair!
“Get offa him, you big eerie creep!”
The shrill voice was coming from the gap where the armoury used to be. Starscream pushed through his rubbernecking troops – making sure to note who was standing around being useless, for later reference – and forced his way to the front. Obsidian and Tankor were already there, but even they… the stuff of many an Autobot’s nightmare… were frozen with mute shock.
Dreadwing floated in the centre of the corridor, his feet and legs dangling languidly. His left arm fell relaxed at his side while his right held Frenzy, the mech from Gigalonia, in a vice-like grip. Dreadwing was looking at the tiny robot with a curious stare… a creepy mix of disinterest and callousness. At no point did he pay any attention to his victim’s best friend, Rumble, who was pounding at his lower limbs with pile-driver fists.
“Look closely,” Shockblast hissed, gesturing with his cycloptian head. Starscream followed the military commander’s inclination, realising he could see through Dreadwing’s chest. There was a cavernous gap, under his arms and behind his frontal armour, right where his Spark chamber should have been. Tiny bursts of energy crackled through the void.
He split his perceptions, multi-tasking his optical sensors. He watched as Frenzy’s greying body jiggled in Dreadwing’s grip. At the same time, the power storm within the wraith-like giant’s chest intensified, becoming a maelstrom that brightened the tattoo-like crest on his helmet. In mere astroseconds, Frenzy was a lifeless husk and Dreadwing was, for want of a better word, sated. Carelessly, he let the Gigalonian’s corpse fall to the floor and turned his gaze toward Starscream.
The aerial warrior felt his fluids chill.
“It would appear,” Shockblast said, his tone that of hushed excitement, “our new vessel is only half-full. Obsidian, galling as it is to admit, was right to some extent… by reanimating a Transformer without a Spark, we’ve created…”
“A weapon,” Starscream breathed, his confidence returning. He met Dreadwing’s gaze evenly, favouring him with a commanding nod. The ghostly killer returned the gesture. “A plague that we can unleash on the Autobots, one by one. A killer who feels no pain and stops for no injury.” His voice rose happily. “A Decepticon who desires not just his foe’s destruction, but the consumption of his very essence!”
Shockblast nodded. “A walking plague,” he agreed. “A contagion sculpted in metal.”
Starscream chuckled unpleasantly. “You do good work, Shockblast,” he said. “Now, find a way to keep our new friend fed so we still have some troops to send in after him.” The purple mech scurried away, already muttering to himself about energy conversion tables. Obsidian hurried the audience away, glaring, while Tankor dragged the grief-stricken Rumble by a crimson arm.
Starscream walked toward Dreadwing, letting arrogance fuel his every step. He refused to look up, waiting until the spectral assassin wafted down to his level.
“I can take you off-line like that,” Starscream said, snapping his fingers. “Without a Spark, you’re not really that complex a system. One shot of null ray,” he lifted his purple-barrelled pistol, “and it’s all over, as I’m sure you can imagine.”
Dreadwing nodded.
“Excellent.” He holstered the weapon. “Keep that in mind and I’m sure we’ll get along famously.”
“Give me more to kill,” Dreadwing hissed.
Starscream shuddered, then set his jaw and smirked. “Don’t you concern yourself with that,” he leered. “This is the Decepticon army… there’s always someone to kill, just around the next corner.”
Dreadwing nodded, his crimson optics flashing. “Good,” he intoned. “It’s been too long since I took a life.”
“More than eight million years, you mean?” Starscream inquired.
Dreadwing laughed, and the sound was so unpleasant that it horrified and disgusted Starscream. His composure broke – the chuckle was so deep, so chilling, it sounded like it came from the very core of a planet.
“No,” the wraith said. “Astroseconds.”
-----
Red light flickered across his field of vision, capturing his pain-addled attention. “Ener… gon,” he gasped.
The crimson daggers atop his claws were fluxing. One moment, they were scoring the hallway along with his own metalwork and, the next, they had faded out of sight like poor view screen reception. The engineer within him, though beaten and agonized, understood. His new body was craving Energon – indeed, it had no power save for the small amount contained within the tree-like machine!
Megacycles seemingly passed – in reality, mere breems – and he could feel his memory circuits both fusing and fragmenting. Scorponok made it out of the cavern and back onto the grassy plains… the jade-coloured soil… and the pain stopped.
Barely comprehending, he raised his head. Nothing, save his location, had changed. And yet here he was, feeling better, his daggers possessing both keen edge and sharp contrast. A sweep of his still-functioning sensors explained all… every inch of this world was soaking in Energon, the source of which was the volcano behind him. For some reason, the ship-like corridors provided a buffer from the ambient radiation – which was well into the lethal levels – while also channelling it up and out of the volcano’s mouth to rain down on the planet.
He pulled himself to his feet, snapping his claws nervously as green lightning arced across them. Once, a small alarm would have sounded in his processor, warning him of imminent stasis lock from overexposure. His reconstruction, miraculous though it was, lacked some creature comforts. Fortunately, he made up for it in smarts.
Scorponok hurried for the burnished corridors, shaking his head to clear it. Perhaps he could still salvage his processor, if it took no more damage from “malnourishment”. He’d gone barely one hundred metres when the pain stabbed him, deep in his core, once again. “No!” he moaned, dropping to his knees. “Not again, please! This makes no sense!”
Except that it did, in a mad way. His damaged processor raced, illogical thoughts filling every corner of his corrupted pathways. What if he’d been not just destroyed by Unicron, but consumed? What if the Chaos Bringer had swallowed his Spark upon destroying his body – if the beast had devoured the life essences of every Transformer he’d destroyed that horrible day? Unicron’s goal was to consume and absorb everything that was Primus, after all… why would it not suck up the power instilled within its enemy’s children?
He laughed madly. Now Unicron was gone, a lifeless husk, and Scorponok had been cast free from purgatory by the excavation work of those tiny robots – Mini-cons, perhaps? – and thrown into space. Not unmolested by his experiences… no, instead changed greatly. What if this craving, this inability to be sated, this constant need for Energon was akin to Unicron’s hunger for the life essences of entire worlds?
Horrified, Scorponok tumbled outside. The sudden easing of his anguish… his hunger… only served to increase his suffering. Though he was not delusional, he was no longer truly alive, either. He’d not resurrected himself, merely reanimated his Spark and frame in a hideous parody of Transformer life. Scorponok was the walking dead – a zombie – cursed with the need to consume energy by any means necessary.
He cursed the emerald energy crawling over his ebony metalwork and transformed, meaning to drive at full speed back into the corridor. Amazingly, the Energon overload stopped without him moving an inch. His hunger, meanwhile, gnawed at him but did not consume him. He wheeled on tank-like treads and jabbed at the ground with his claws, frustrated. “Am I to be some kind of beast, then?” he roared to the heavens. “A crazed creature, doomed to one of three torments – animalistic uselessness, hunger-driven insanity or pain-wracked starvation? Is this all there is, at the end of life?”
Scorponok laughed with grief – a high, howling sound – and raised his tail, furious at his circumstances. A green glow emanated from a spot behind the powerful weapon and, a second later, an emerald disc slammed into the curved implement. Two crimson cannons unfurled and snapped into place, giving rise to his anger in the form of an unrelenting barrage of laser fire. The forest before him collapsed in a tangle of incinerated trunks and burning leaves, wiped out in an instant.
The hunger bit savagely and he transformed, letting his armour soak up every erg of available energy, feeling his processor pop and sizzle under the radiation bombardment. His faceplate contorted with rage, and his breathing became laboured. He was slavering at the world around him. His optics were wide and his claws snapped almost non-stop, tail coiled and ready to destroy.
Something grabbed him by the shoulder and heaved him of the ground. Scorponok snarled, attacking with tail and claws. A thick, powerful hand – a perfect match for the one that had dug into his shoulder – caught his tail and held it fast, as if it had no power at all. The zombie Decepticon gasped as he was spun around and brought, optic to optic, with another mechanoid. Two more robots hovered just behind him, peering over its shoulders. Their optics stabbed murderously at Scorponok.
“You are not a crazed creature,” the first mechanoid said forcefully, “nor a ‘mere’ animal. In our experience, there’s nothing mere about animals. Indeed, we find them to be the key to a lot of things… like power, and vengeance.”
The attacker slammed Scorponok into the ground and pinned him to the grass. Then he leaned in to whisper into the ebony giant’s audio sensor. “We will ease your three torments, stranger,” the other robot hissed soothingly, “In return, you will serve us…take us from this world… and, perhaps, gain vengeance on those who left you in this state.”
Abruptly, Scorponok ceased struggling. Faces flashed through his memory. Megatron, who gave him command and sent him to die at Unicron’s hands. Optimus, who had claimed to be his friend and ally, yet had done nothing to spare him the wrath of the Chaos Bringer. The Terrorcons, for whom he’d sacrificed so much, and yet who had abandoned him in his hour of need.
“Yes… yes, all of them will pay for what they have done to me,” he babbled and growled. “For what they have reduced me to! Energon is my need and vengeance my reason… I’ll rip Energon from their twitching corpses and feast on their very fuel!”
Incoherent, rambling thoughts claimed his processor – but not before he caught a glimpse of the smug grin spreading over his attacker’s features. It was a grin that promised much carnage… a grin Scorponok, by surrendering his lucidity, found himself able to share.