Post by Grand Moff Muffin on Mar 12, 2011 19:27:39 GMT
POWERS UNKNOWN
Somewhere in the British Isles a thread of traffic snaked its way along a winding road, headlights vainly attempting to pierce the heavy rain that had come with nightfall three hours earlier and showed no sign as yet of slackening off. Sandwiched between a blue Ford and a red Mini, a battered reddish four-wheel-drive vehicle towing a caravan patiently took its turn.
High above, invisible to the drivers far below in the darkness and the rain, the Insecticon Barrage fluttered his wings in his giant rhinoceros beetle mode, scanning each vehicle for one that matched the description of the metallurgist Swerve, leaked to him by an anonymous traitor in the Autobot army. Swerve had come to Earth in disguise to thwart a critical Decepticon mission, and had to be eliminated at all costs. At last Barrage spotted the four-by-four. Right on time, exactly as the informant had predicted. Barrage felt he could handle this one by himself, but orders were orders, so he sent the signal for reinforcements.
In response to his summons a giant black and yellow grasshopper Transformer landed like a meteorite, having leapt a mile and a half from his place of concealment. The force of his landing shattered the surface of the asphalt road, causing shock waves to ripple out from the point of impact, sending cars flipping over and rolling down the steep grassy embankment that ran alongside. Ransack swiftly located his airborne comrade and the caravan-towing off-road vehicle he was indicating as the Autobot target. He scuttled forward, kicking vehicles off the road whenever they got in his way. Suddenly he paused, his olfactory sensors detecting the scent of Transformer fuel. His optics fixed on its source. The vehicle Barrage was pointing out had a human driver. This one did not.
“You fool, Barrage! You’ve got the wrong vehicle. There’s the Autobot!”
The driverless four-wheel-drive screeched into gear and drove hard down the embankment, seeking refuge in a muddy wooded area. Barrage opened fire with a torrent of explosive charges from his insect eyes, churning up the mud while photon bursts from his antennae illuminated the darkness around his fleeing target. Ransack fired an electrical blast from his antennae, setting the woods ablaze, and leapt after his prey. A couple of bounds, and he had overtaken the fugitive. One kick flipped the Autobot over twice and sent him crashing into a large oak that splintered beneath his weight. Barrage landed beside his partner, and they both transformed to their upright modes, weapons in hand. Trapped between dense trees, a swiftly flowing river and the two Insecticons, the Autobot had nowhere left to go.
“Transform and face death like a warrior, Swerve.”
The four-by-four split apart and unfolded, forming arms and legs and also growing a linear blaster gun, laser rifle and shrapnel-missile launcher.
“What the blazes? That’s no metallurgist! It’s-”
___
Back at the road, Swerve’s facsimile construct driver watched the distant firefight with blank expression for a moment, then pulled out and overtook those few cars that still remained, accelerating ahead towards the twinkling lights of the small town. Once he was clear of all traffic, he activated the transformation sequence on his caravan module which split apart to release a pale blue autogyro whose blades extended and sped faster and faster until it had the required lift for take-off. Swerve uncoupled from the empty trailer once the ’copter was away, and it exploded as soon as he was clear, leaving nothing alien behind for the humans to puzzle over. He continued on his journey, while the gyrocopter flew off over the hills.
___
Hubcap had been clamped, towed away and impounded. He didn’t mind. In fact, he had been hoping it would happen. The fact that the police had turned up so quickly after he had taken up his unlawful position in a deserted car park on a near-deserted industrial estate only confirmed in his mind that he had located the correct target building. He was confident that with his sleek Porsche configuration, they would take good care of him. His part in the Autobot mission from now on only required him to act as a communications hub. His active roles – deliberately passing information to the Decepticons that would draw their warriors into an ambush, and identifying the facility that contained the sought-after technology – had been successfully played out. Naturally, no plan that he formulated would put him in the front line of battle.
___
Before Whirl was within a kilometre of the building, the humans’ radar had locked onto him, silent alarms sounded, and a pair of anti-aircraft missiles shot upwards from what had appeared on the surface to be extractor fans. Any pilot less skilled would have been blown out of the sky straight away, but the Autobots’ flying style was unique, and the homing missiles passed him twice without hitting him. The odds were that it would take four turns before one of them got him, but by sheer fluke his tail exploded on the missiles’ third attempt. Whirl struggled to maintain his course, as he was not quite above the target building. Then the second missile hit, and the gyrocopter became an expanding ball of flaming debris. But he had reached the intended spot, and came crashing down exactly as planned through the roof of what looked from the outside like a dilapidated warehouse, but was on the inside a pristine high-tech computer laboratory. Well, it had been pristine until the roof caved in.
At the last possible second before shutdown, Whirl succeeded in making contact with the standalone mainframe and transferred his consciousness to the humans’ computer network. He was in.
___
The outcome of the forest battle was by no means inevitable. The Insecticons outgunned Roadbuster, but they were slower and had less thick armour plating. Barrage was also a weakling physically, but that didn’t matter when he could leave the hand-to-hand stuff to his comrade and blast away at the Autobot from a safe distance. All three combatants were fearless, and retreat was going to play no part in what followed.
Roadbuster nullified the threat from Barrage by grappling with Ransack so closely that the Insecticon gunner couldn’t shoot him without hitting his partner at the same time. Roadbuster kept them turning around as they fought to make himself a difficult target, while his shoulder-mounted cannon locked onto Barrage and rotated independently to point always in his direction, firing missile after missile at the wavering Insecticon.
While Barrage buzzed to and fro, trying to get a clear shot at the Autobot while meanwhile getting more and more pin-cushioned by the missiles from the Autobot’s persistent shoulder cannon, the deciding contest took place between Roadbuster and Ransack. The talons on the Insecticon warrior’s arms rotated at speed, slicing through the Autobot’s outer armour but failing to penetrate to his inner musculature. His concussion blaster staggered Roadbuster with its initial shot, and allowed Barrage to get in a couple of strikes from his more distant aerial vantage point, but the Autobot quickly bent its barrel out of shape, rendering it useless. He then wrested Ransack’s deflector shield off him and used it to ward off the spinning talons while he clubbed the Insecticon repeatedly in the head with the butt of his laser rifle.
Ransack’s talons snapped Roadbuster’s laser rifle in two. “You’ve made a mistake that will cost you, Autobot. We know your reputation, but we’re more than a match for your much-vaunted skills.”
Roadbuster discarded his shattered weapon and the deflector shield, and seized Ransack by his forearms. “Don’t make me laugh,” he sneered. “You’re just a couple of B-teamers, nothing more.”
“You’re behind the times,” called Barrage, finally managing to get off a shot that took out Roadbuster’s shoulder launcher. “We’re not on the Mayhem Reserve any more.”
With a grunt, Roadbuster wrenched off both Ransack’s arms, and used the Insecticon’s own talons to rip through his chest armour, exposing his sensitive electrical systems to the driving rain, causing them to spark and sizzle dangerously. “I wasn’t talking about the Mayhem Reserve,” retorted Roadbuster contemptuously, as he hurled Ransack into the river to short-circuit and be swept away. He leapt high into the air, tackling the shocked Barrage to the ground and pinning him by the neck, one massive fist raised to strike. “I was talking about the Decepticons.” The punch rendered the Insecticon gunner non-functional.
___
Swerve used the confusion caused by the flashing lights of the fire engines and the protesting government agents trying to deny the firemen entry, assuring them they had it all under control, to drive around the back with his lights off and engines set to silent. His sensors were searching, searching, searching for a trace of alien alloys. At last he found it, and found them, two tiny Insecticons – Chop Shop and Venom, tucked away behind a dustbin. Swerve extended a magnetic probe from his front grille, which acquired the two little robot bodies and brought them inside him for analysis. No sign of life whatsoever, which could only mean that their consciousness had been transferred to another system. Perhaps they had hitched a ride inside on a portable electronic device carried by one of the government agents. Swerve would probably never know. There was nothing more he could do without risking discovery, so he beat a hasty withdrawal, taking his prisoners with him.
___
In the real world, Whirl stood a chance against Chop Shop and Venom. In cyberspace, he did not. Try as he might to employ his crazy evasion tactics, their software was just too sneaky for him. Infiltration was their speciality, and they had got here before him and picked the high ground, so to speak. They knew all the passwords, controlled all the backdoors, and he was locked out of all the programs that might have given him an edge.
As Venom prepared to deliver the fatal data purge with his digital stinger, he couldn’t resist asking Whirl why he had been so foolish as to come alone.
“No! You idiot!” Chop Shop berated his leader. “You’re supposed to just kill him, not give him a feed line to which he can reply-”
“I didn’t,” smiled Whirl. Slipping through the gaps in the two Insecticons’ firewalls, the digital copy of an Autobot who matched the pair of Insecticons for sneakiness reallocated system resources, causing their programs to run slower and slower as the computer gave all its processing power to the Autobots. “Hold them,” Whirl instructed the Hubcap copy. “I’ll search for the PARD files.”
Not long before, the Autobots and Decepticons on Earth had been temporarily stricken by a software assault that brought alternate personalities to the fore. While under the influence, Megatron and Shockwave had felt benevolence towards the human species, while Optimus Prime and Prowl treated those they normally protected with hatred and contempt. The signal had been traced to England, and Purnel’s Auto-Reverse Defence system or PARD for short. This human technology was designed to turn intercontinental ballistic missiles back on their senders, but it had the unintended side-effect of affecting Transformers’ minds half-way across the globe at the same time. The system was eventually destroyed during a pitched battle between Starscream and Jazz, and the two factions of Transformers returned to their respective bases in the United States of America, but in the months that followed, as Cybertronian scientists investigated the incident, two troubling facts came to light. Firstly, the software used by PARD continued to be developed by the British government, and secondly, they had been wrong in their original assumptions about its effects. PARD didn’t reverse or scramble Transformers’ minds – it merely unlocked alternative personality programs that were already dormant, placed there for reasons unknown when each Transformer first received life programming from the Creation Matrix. The implications were staggering. If all Transformers had two, three or perhaps a hundred equally viable alternative personas, all but one of them sleeping, it opened the door to a new form of subversive warfare, and also an ethical debate about how victors should dispose of the losing side. The Decepticons on Cybertron vastly outnumbered the Autobots. If PARD could be used to turn them all to good, the fortunes of war could be reversed at a stroke and peace achieved overnight. Entire worlds could be spared destruction. The Decepticons could not allow that to happen.
“I’ve found them,” proclaimed Whirl.
Venom felt Hubcap’s concentration relax slightly, and he made his move. Nearly all the computer’s processing power was currently with Whirl, and Whirl had attached himself to the PARD software. This made it easy for Venom to send a single ‘run’ command through Whirl to PARD. Before the Autobots knew it, the program had activated.
“Imbecile!” the Hubcap copy yelled at Whirl. “Can’t you do anything right? You were supposed to secure the thing, not use it.”
“Look who’s talking,” Whirl snarled. “Your job was to stop those two from interfering, and you blew it.”
“What’s happened?” a confused Chop Shop asked his leader.
“Our dominant personalities have changed,” said Venom calmly. “Now you see what the PARD program can do to a Transformer mind.”
“Our mission was to delete all copies of the software in the system,” said Chop Shop. “But if it can make all Decepticons feel as I feel now, perhaps we should keep it and use it on the rest of our army, ending this senseless war.”
“I agree.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” grimaced Hubcap, sending a painful jolt of data through his two prisoners. “Turn Cybertron into a world of dreamy-eyed pacifists! Not if I can help it, you won’t.”
“You’re not the one running this show!” yelled Whirl. “I allowed you to tag along with me, but you’re just a copy. The real Hubcap told me to delete you as soon as you’d outlived your usefulness. I’d say that time has long since passed.” With that, Whirl sent a prearranged command, and Hubcap was utterly deleted from the system.
“Now, Chop Shop!” said Venom. “Safeguard the PARD software!”
“Too late,” sneered Whirl, and he purged the system of every last fragment of the program that unlocked dormant Transformer personas.
___
Roadbuster drove straight through the wall at the time prearranged for Whirl’s extraction. Hubcap and Swerve were waiting on a nearby hillside. Beside them stood Whirl’s full-size Cobra helicopter body, awaiting reintegration with his conscious mind, the late gyrocopter having been merely an expendable vessel. Inside the building, the Autobot Ground Assault Commander found a computer terminal and plugged into it, ignoring the humans who were by now shooting bullets that ricocheted off his bodywork.
Roadbuster found not just Whirl, but as Swerve had predicted two Insecticons also in the computer system. The Insecticons had Whirl as their prisoner, but had treated him kindly, the effects of PARD having yet to wear off. There was no sign of the Hubcap copy. The Insecticons had apparently successfully completed their mission to prevent the Autobots from gaining possession of the PARD software, but at least they didn’t have it either. Roadbuster resigned himself to having nothing more to show from this mission than four Decepticon prisoners to trade for Autobot prisoners upon their return to Cybertron.
Was he sorry they had failed to obtain a technology that could bring instant peace to their homeworld? He thought back to his recent skirmish with Barrage and Ransack in the woods. Was he hell.
THE END
Somewhere in the British Isles a thread of traffic snaked its way along a winding road, headlights vainly attempting to pierce the heavy rain that had come with nightfall three hours earlier and showed no sign as yet of slackening off. Sandwiched between a blue Ford and a red Mini, a battered reddish four-wheel-drive vehicle towing a caravan patiently took its turn.
High above, invisible to the drivers far below in the darkness and the rain, the Insecticon Barrage fluttered his wings in his giant rhinoceros beetle mode, scanning each vehicle for one that matched the description of the metallurgist Swerve, leaked to him by an anonymous traitor in the Autobot army. Swerve had come to Earth in disguise to thwart a critical Decepticon mission, and had to be eliminated at all costs. At last Barrage spotted the four-by-four. Right on time, exactly as the informant had predicted. Barrage felt he could handle this one by himself, but orders were orders, so he sent the signal for reinforcements.
In response to his summons a giant black and yellow grasshopper Transformer landed like a meteorite, having leapt a mile and a half from his place of concealment. The force of his landing shattered the surface of the asphalt road, causing shock waves to ripple out from the point of impact, sending cars flipping over and rolling down the steep grassy embankment that ran alongside. Ransack swiftly located his airborne comrade and the caravan-towing off-road vehicle he was indicating as the Autobot target. He scuttled forward, kicking vehicles off the road whenever they got in his way. Suddenly he paused, his olfactory sensors detecting the scent of Transformer fuel. His optics fixed on its source. The vehicle Barrage was pointing out had a human driver. This one did not.
“You fool, Barrage! You’ve got the wrong vehicle. There’s the Autobot!”
The driverless four-wheel-drive screeched into gear and drove hard down the embankment, seeking refuge in a muddy wooded area. Barrage opened fire with a torrent of explosive charges from his insect eyes, churning up the mud while photon bursts from his antennae illuminated the darkness around his fleeing target. Ransack fired an electrical blast from his antennae, setting the woods ablaze, and leapt after his prey. A couple of bounds, and he had overtaken the fugitive. One kick flipped the Autobot over twice and sent him crashing into a large oak that splintered beneath his weight. Barrage landed beside his partner, and they both transformed to their upright modes, weapons in hand. Trapped between dense trees, a swiftly flowing river and the two Insecticons, the Autobot had nowhere left to go.
“Transform and face death like a warrior, Swerve.”
The four-by-four split apart and unfolded, forming arms and legs and also growing a linear blaster gun, laser rifle and shrapnel-missile launcher.
“What the blazes? That’s no metallurgist! It’s-”
___
Back at the road, Swerve’s facsimile construct driver watched the distant firefight with blank expression for a moment, then pulled out and overtook those few cars that still remained, accelerating ahead towards the twinkling lights of the small town. Once he was clear of all traffic, he activated the transformation sequence on his caravan module which split apart to release a pale blue autogyro whose blades extended and sped faster and faster until it had the required lift for take-off. Swerve uncoupled from the empty trailer once the ’copter was away, and it exploded as soon as he was clear, leaving nothing alien behind for the humans to puzzle over. He continued on his journey, while the gyrocopter flew off over the hills.
___
Hubcap had been clamped, towed away and impounded. He didn’t mind. In fact, he had been hoping it would happen. The fact that the police had turned up so quickly after he had taken up his unlawful position in a deserted car park on a near-deserted industrial estate only confirmed in his mind that he had located the correct target building. He was confident that with his sleek Porsche configuration, they would take good care of him. His part in the Autobot mission from now on only required him to act as a communications hub. His active roles – deliberately passing information to the Decepticons that would draw their warriors into an ambush, and identifying the facility that contained the sought-after technology – had been successfully played out. Naturally, no plan that he formulated would put him in the front line of battle.
___
Before Whirl was within a kilometre of the building, the humans’ radar had locked onto him, silent alarms sounded, and a pair of anti-aircraft missiles shot upwards from what had appeared on the surface to be extractor fans. Any pilot less skilled would have been blown out of the sky straight away, but the Autobots’ flying style was unique, and the homing missiles passed him twice without hitting him. The odds were that it would take four turns before one of them got him, but by sheer fluke his tail exploded on the missiles’ third attempt. Whirl struggled to maintain his course, as he was not quite above the target building. Then the second missile hit, and the gyrocopter became an expanding ball of flaming debris. But he had reached the intended spot, and came crashing down exactly as planned through the roof of what looked from the outside like a dilapidated warehouse, but was on the inside a pristine high-tech computer laboratory. Well, it had been pristine until the roof caved in.
At the last possible second before shutdown, Whirl succeeded in making contact with the standalone mainframe and transferred his consciousness to the humans’ computer network. He was in.
___
The outcome of the forest battle was by no means inevitable. The Insecticons outgunned Roadbuster, but they were slower and had less thick armour plating. Barrage was also a weakling physically, but that didn’t matter when he could leave the hand-to-hand stuff to his comrade and blast away at the Autobot from a safe distance. All three combatants were fearless, and retreat was going to play no part in what followed.
Roadbuster nullified the threat from Barrage by grappling with Ransack so closely that the Insecticon gunner couldn’t shoot him without hitting his partner at the same time. Roadbuster kept them turning around as they fought to make himself a difficult target, while his shoulder-mounted cannon locked onto Barrage and rotated independently to point always in his direction, firing missile after missile at the wavering Insecticon.
While Barrage buzzed to and fro, trying to get a clear shot at the Autobot while meanwhile getting more and more pin-cushioned by the missiles from the Autobot’s persistent shoulder cannon, the deciding contest took place between Roadbuster and Ransack. The talons on the Insecticon warrior’s arms rotated at speed, slicing through the Autobot’s outer armour but failing to penetrate to his inner musculature. His concussion blaster staggered Roadbuster with its initial shot, and allowed Barrage to get in a couple of strikes from his more distant aerial vantage point, but the Autobot quickly bent its barrel out of shape, rendering it useless. He then wrested Ransack’s deflector shield off him and used it to ward off the spinning talons while he clubbed the Insecticon repeatedly in the head with the butt of his laser rifle.
Ransack’s talons snapped Roadbuster’s laser rifle in two. “You’ve made a mistake that will cost you, Autobot. We know your reputation, but we’re more than a match for your much-vaunted skills.”
Roadbuster discarded his shattered weapon and the deflector shield, and seized Ransack by his forearms. “Don’t make me laugh,” he sneered. “You’re just a couple of B-teamers, nothing more.”
“You’re behind the times,” called Barrage, finally managing to get off a shot that took out Roadbuster’s shoulder launcher. “We’re not on the Mayhem Reserve any more.”
With a grunt, Roadbuster wrenched off both Ransack’s arms, and used the Insecticon’s own talons to rip through his chest armour, exposing his sensitive electrical systems to the driving rain, causing them to spark and sizzle dangerously. “I wasn’t talking about the Mayhem Reserve,” retorted Roadbuster contemptuously, as he hurled Ransack into the river to short-circuit and be swept away. He leapt high into the air, tackling the shocked Barrage to the ground and pinning him by the neck, one massive fist raised to strike. “I was talking about the Decepticons.” The punch rendered the Insecticon gunner non-functional.
___
Swerve used the confusion caused by the flashing lights of the fire engines and the protesting government agents trying to deny the firemen entry, assuring them they had it all under control, to drive around the back with his lights off and engines set to silent. His sensors were searching, searching, searching for a trace of alien alloys. At last he found it, and found them, two tiny Insecticons – Chop Shop and Venom, tucked away behind a dustbin. Swerve extended a magnetic probe from his front grille, which acquired the two little robot bodies and brought them inside him for analysis. No sign of life whatsoever, which could only mean that their consciousness had been transferred to another system. Perhaps they had hitched a ride inside on a portable electronic device carried by one of the government agents. Swerve would probably never know. There was nothing more he could do without risking discovery, so he beat a hasty withdrawal, taking his prisoners with him.
___
In the real world, Whirl stood a chance against Chop Shop and Venom. In cyberspace, he did not. Try as he might to employ his crazy evasion tactics, their software was just too sneaky for him. Infiltration was their speciality, and they had got here before him and picked the high ground, so to speak. They knew all the passwords, controlled all the backdoors, and he was locked out of all the programs that might have given him an edge.
As Venom prepared to deliver the fatal data purge with his digital stinger, he couldn’t resist asking Whirl why he had been so foolish as to come alone.
“No! You idiot!” Chop Shop berated his leader. “You’re supposed to just kill him, not give him a feed line to which he can reply-”
“I didn’t,” smiled Whirl. Slipping through the gaps in the two Insecticons’ firewalls, the digital copy of an Autobot who matched the pair of Insecticons for sneakiness reallocated system resources, causing their programs to run slower and slower as the computer gave all its processing power to the Autobots. “Hold them,” Whirl instructed the Hubcap copy. “I’ll search for the PARD files.”
Not long before, the Autobots and Decepticons on Earth had been temporarily stricken by a software assault that brought alternate personalities to the fore. While under the influence, Megatron and Shockwave had felt benevolence towards the human species, while Optimus Prime and Prowl treated those they normally protected with hatred and contempt. The signal had been traced to England, and Purnel’s Auto-Reverse Defence system or PARD for short. This human technology was designed to turn intercontinental ballistic missiles back on their senders, but it had the unintended side-effect of affecting Transformers’ minds half-way across the globe at the same time. The system was eventually destroyed during a pitched battle between Starscream and Jazz, and the two factions of Transformers returned to their respective bases in the United States of America, but in the months that followed, as Cybertronian scientists investigated the incident, two troubling facts came to light. Firstly, the software used by PARD continued to be developed by the British government, and secondly, they had been wrong in their original assumptions about its effects. PARD didn’t reverse or scramble Transformers’ minds – it merely unlocked alternative personality programs that were already dormant, placed there for reasons unknown when each Transformer first received life programming from the Creation Matrix. The implications were staggering. If all Transformers had two, three or perhaps a hundred equally viable alternative personas, all but one of them sleeping, it opened the door to a new form of subversive warfare, and also an ethical debate about how victors should dispose of the losing side. The Decepticons on Cybertron vastly outnumbered the Autobots. If PARD could be used to turn them all to good, the fortunes of war could be reversed at a stroke and peace achieved overnight. Entire worlds could be spared destruction. The Decepticons could not allow that to happen.
“I’ve found them,” proclaimed Whirl.
Venom felt Hubcap’s concentration relax slightly, and he made his move. Nearly all the computer’s processing power was currently with Whirl, and Whirl had attached himself to the PARD software. This made it easy for Venom to send a single ‘run’ command through Whirl to PARD. Before the Autobots knew it, the program had activated.
“Imbecile!” the Hubcap copy yelled at Whirl. “Can’t you do anything right? You were supposed to secure the thing, not use it.”
“Look who’s talking,” Whirl snarled. “Your job was to stop those two from interfering, and you blew it.”
“What’s happened?” a confused Chop Shop asked his leader.
“Our dominant personalities have changed,” said Venom calmly. “Now you see what the PARD program can do to a Transformer mind.”
“Our mission was to delete all copies of the software in the system,” said Chop Shop. “But if it can make all Decepticons feel as I feel now, perhaps we should keep it and use it on the rest of our army, ending this senseless war.”
“I agree.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” grimaced Hubcap, sending a painful jolt of data through his two prisoners. “Turn Cybertron into a world of dreamy-eyed pacifists! Not if I can help it, you won’t.”
“You’re not the one running this show!” yelled Whirl. “I allowed you to tag along with me, but you’re just a copy. The real Hubcap told me to delete you as soon as you’d outlived your usefulness. I’d say that time has long since passed.” With that, Whirl sent a prearranged command, and Hubcap was utterly deleted from the system.
“Now, Chop Shop!” said Venom. “Safeguard the PARD software!”
“Too late,” sneered Whirl, and he purged the system of every last fragment of the program that unlocked dormant Transformer personas.
___
Roadbuster drove straight through the wall at the time prearranged for Whirl’s extraction. Hubcap and Swerve were waiting on a nearby hillside. Beside them stood Whirl’s full-size Cobra helicopter body, awaiting reintegration with his conscious mind, the late gyrocopter having been merely an expendable vessel. Inside the building, the Autobot Ground Assault Commander found a computer terminal and plugged into it, ignoring the humans who were by now shooting bullets that ricocheted off his bodywork.
Roadbuster found not just Whirl, but as Swerve had predicted two Insecticons also in the computer system. The Insecticons had Whirl as their prisoner, but had treated him kindly, the effects of PARD having yet to wear off. There was no sign of the Hubcap copy. The Insecticons had apparently successfully completed their mission to prevent the Autobots from gaining possession of the PARD software, but at least they didn’t have it either. Roadbuster resigned himself to having nothing more to show from this mission than four Decepticon prisoners to trade for Autobot prisoners upon their return to Cybertron.
Was he sorry they had failed to obtain a technology that could bring instant peace to their homeworld? He thought back to his recent skirmish with Barrage and Ransack in the woods. Was he hell.
THE END
