“Hey, do not besmirch the power of friendship!” Salvage chides Nova, as if the human had just uttered some terrible blaspheme that would invite divine wrath upon our heroes. “The powers of love and friendship are time-tested essentials in every galactic calamity. We take them very seriously here in the Imperium. Or at least on Junkion, anyway.”
“Well, I’m sure any sane person would consider fighting quintessons more important than a training exercise,” Downburst suggests. “Just say where you’d like her to go, and I’ll pull the strings to get her there.”
After a few more hours in transwarp, a low tone sounds over the ship’s comm system.
“We’re coming up on Eukaris now,” Quickdraw advises his passengers. “You two come on up to the cockpit, let me know where you want to land.”
The technicolor void outside the window splits open like rending cloth, and the tattered rainbow strips fade away to reveal the familiar star-speckled blackness of space. Eukaris’s rocky, bone-white moon drifts by; the planet itself can be viewed from the bridge.
“Would there happen to be anywhere with some power tools?” Razor asks. “I’ve got some equipment I’d like to tinker with.”
Meanwhile, Defender enters the bridge. He looks around for the captain, intending to ask about weapon storage. His tank cannon is a little oversized for indoor use.
Oreo has been listening to the various conversations with interest. He is particularly interested in Nova’s cynical responses to Salvage. I haven’t heard such speech in centuries, he thinks.
“Do you have any suggestions for us?” he asks her.
Seraphicon begins mentally going over a list of everyone who was coming on this mission to figure out if they were missing anyone.
The Firestorms shrug, “honestly, I think that the power of friendship, as you guys call it, does have merit.” They say, “nobody can bear all things on their own; time and time again Cybertronians and humans and many sentient races find themselves having to work together to overcome hardship.”
The Pack Mule has an extensive toolkit for its passengers’ convenience, and Seraphicon had additional equipment loaded onto the ship while he was preparing it for launch. None of it was made to tinker with quintesson tech, but it’d be better than nothing.
The pulling sensation in Kitai’s mind feels almost physical, like a gentle tug on his brainstem. Whatever it is, it seems to be emanating from Razor, bizarrely enough. The voice continues to mutter in Kitai’s ears, still as of yet unintelligible.
The only bot on the bridge, apart from Defender himself, is Seraphicon.
It is unlikely that Overgrowth will return from Primogenitum in time to rejoin the group before they go to Astrum; excluding her, the only person the party is waiting on now is Axis.
“Exactly,” Salvage agrees, nodding his head. “No species is an island.”
“…We did kill Unicron by ourselves, though,” he remarks after a short pause. “Twice, actually. But that’s an exception. And having some help probably would’ve made the job easier.”
“Alright, alright! Sheesh…”
Nova hastily replied. She raised the hands of her mech in a defensive expression.
“I wouldn’t have expected a robot to be so superstitious.”
She said, mostly towards Salvage.
“Have the ship taken to iacon’s primary space port. No doubt that’s where the others are waiting.”
Axis replied to Downburst.
“Oh, hold on a moment-”
The Prime says as she answerers her comlink.
“Seraphicon, hello. No not at all. I was just about to meet with you all. Is something the matter?”
“Take us to the Steel Shard Mountains. We’ll be fine from there.”
Maximus replied.
“What? The mountains? That’s so far away from the hive though.”
Honeycomb lamented.
“Sorry kid. As excited as I am to get back, this is still a political trip first and foremost. I get all my info from a guy named Carrion, who I usually meet up with by the mountains. Though now that I think about it, I probably should have contacted him ahead of time… Eh, I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
The Eukarian ambassador replied. While his concern was legitimate, he reasoned that since almost all of his visits to Carrion were surprise ones, the bot must have been used to it by now.
“Well what if you got your intel from Queen Pterygota directly? Get all the news from the Below right from the source?”
The young insecticon suggested.
“Huh. Well I suppose that isn’t a terrible idea. And I can’t really remember the last time I tried paying any of the other tribe leaders a visit… Alright kid, you’ve changed my mind. We’ll go to the Below so I can visit the queen and you can see your friends. Then we go to the mountains so I can talk with Carrion and get the rest of the world’s news.”
“Awesome! Thank you so much!”
Honeycomb happily replied.
“Not quite superstitious, but observant of trends.” Firestorm says, “plus, mechanical as our bodies are, we are not too unlike humans. We’re both very adaptive species in our own way.”
“We’re mainly waiting for you, ship’s ready to launch.” Seraphicon says to Axis, “I helped install some extra stuff to the ship to be on the safe side; and, yes, I know it sounds paranoid but better to have shields than not.”
“Why, yes,” she replied. She wondered at the question. It was common for people to buy stuff at the spaceport…
“Let me see…”
She began summoning items from their storage in subspace, surrounding her with a pale glow as equipment and parts materialized at her feet. As she finally arrived at the wolf’s-head device, she stopped. Red lights shone on all of the Quintesson devices, some flickering in complex patterns, others glowing with a faint pulsating light.
“What’s this? I don’t recall these being active when I bought them,” she remarked in surprise.
“It’s some Quintesson tech that I bought off a guy at the spaceport,” Razor said. “He told me it didn’t work, so I was going to see if I could fix it, or at least figure out what it does…”
She stared at the glowing items, their lights suddenly seeming like a multitude of eyes peering from darkness. The wolf-head seemed especially malevolent, the lights in its decorative face pulsing as though it was looking around…
Downburst steps away, putting away her datapad to tap a finger to her temple.
“Gravastar, hey,” she says quietly, raising Excalibur II’s captain. “Yes, I know this is a priority channel and I’m skipping a few links in the ol’ chain of command to reach you directly. Don’t bother asking; you’re gonna want to sit down for this…”
“Oh, I am a little superstitious,” Salvage confesses. “I’ve got a lucky petro-rabbit’s foot hanging off my rearview mirror and I avoid walking under ladders as much as I can. Why take chances, right?”
As Kitai approaches Razor and her trinkets, tiny, fleshy cilia sprout from the nooks and crannies of the quintesson devices. Every tendril reaches out to Kitai, and the hybrid can now discern some of what the voice in his head is saying. It is in fact several alien voices, whispering over each other and repeating the same three words incessantly:
Regenerate… repair… regroup…
Quickdraw adjusts his course accordingly, and the ship barrels through the atmosphere over the primary point of contact between Eukaris’s subterranean tribe and the planet. It is not a gentle re-entry, unfortunately, and the ship violently bucks at one point as some part of her sheers off from atmospheric friction.
“Nothing to worry about, you two,” Quickdraw says to Maximus and Honeycomb. “That wasn’t nothin’ important.”
However, he leans into his console and presses on the intercom afterward, whispering a much more concerned “Hey, Avalanche, what was that?” into the microphone.
“…The primary buffer panel? I thought you fixed that! Hey, that little gunfight wasn’t my fault- she shot me first…”
The Maw, as the entrance to the Below is called, is a massive pit boring through the center of a delta jutting into Eukaris’s equatorial sea. Water cascades over its lip and into the dark abyss in great frothing curtains, but between the waterfalls, elevators carry Eukarian transformers to and from the surface. Many insecticons, though, simply crawl up and down the pit’s walls. Quickdraw sets the ship down on a landing platform nearby- rather roughly so- and he lets out a sigh of relief as the engines wind down and the vessel settles onto its landing gear.
“What the heck is that?!”
Razor looks at the tendrils in alarm, and reaches for her blaster, only to remember that she’d stored it in subspace a few minutes previous.
Oreo, hearing the cry, walks over, looking surprised at the collection of tentacled parts reaching upwards toward Kitai.
“I still think you’re all nuts.”
Nova replied.
“Then again, I guess I don’t have too much room to judge. I’ve heard about places on earth that still refuse to pave over million year old fairy circles and runestones. Hell even I have my lucky pendant. Though its more of a religious thing than a superstitious one.”
“Oh, about that. I’m having the Excalibur II relocated to the main space port. I’m not sure what ship you selected, but this is the one I’ve decided we’ll be taking.”
Maximus grabbed on to the pilot’s seat once the turbulence hits. His fingers dug into the back of the seat, leaving very visible dents.
When the violent buck hit Honeycomb flew off of the floor. Using his free hand Maximus quickly grabbed her by the arm so she wouldn’t crash into anything else. And he made sure not to let go until the ship came to a full stop.
“Well, I’ve definitely had worse landings.”
Maximus noted. He let go of the pilot’s seat, which took a surprising amount of effort.
“Oh. Sorry about that.”
Honeycomb meanwhile tried to find solid footing. Her legs were shaking and she was having a hard time keeping upright.
“Ughh. I think I’m gonna be sick…”
Salvage comes running over, hearing our heroes’ concerned cries.
“Whoa, what is it?” he says. “What’s happen-”
The Junkion comes to an abrupt stop as he lays eyes upon the quintesson artifacts. By his feet, Leslie taps her visor and begins recording as Kitai interfaces with the revived technology, her idle talk with Beta Maxx now abandoned.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea!” Beta warns Kitai- but the warning comes too late.
The cilia wrap around Kitai’s fingers as he picks up the skull-like device, clinging tightly to the hybrid’s hand. The chorus of voices drowns out the concerned words of Razor and the Firestorms, and a tide of strange sensations and fragmented visions assault Kitai’s senses:
-A hot wind blows tendrils of sand around an enormous cube made of black metal. The structure rumbles as red lights bloom within its hull, like blood seeping from a torn scap-
-Amidst a thicket of jetsam from a forgotten battle floating around a dimming star, the carcass of a biomechanical ship lifts itself up from the scrapheap. Thousands of eyes peek out from its lumpy hull of chitin and steel, their cold gaze sweeping across the void-
-Blood flows once more through long-dead flesh, and ancient circuits dormant for eons now surge with power. Minds long-descended into madness heed the rousing call of a new master, giving them new purpose-
-Robotic tendrils slither through faraway galaxies, pulling fragile, screaming creatures into their embrace. The hour of Judgement draws near. Regenerate, repair, regroup-
-A sword and lantern in a wreath of flowers. Searching- the Master searches for… a contract? A treaty? a pact? Witwicky. Avalon. Liege Maximo. Beta Maxx. The Master needs their knowledge-
Kitai sees the faces of our heroes and hears their names, and his own, whispered among the alien chorus. They threaten the Master’s work. They are priority targets. Judgement will not be denied.
“Well, don’t be sick in here, if you can help it,” Quickdraw requests. He looks over his shoulder at the handprint Maximus has pressed into the back of his seat, and with a sheepish chuckle he adds, “Hey, any landing you can walk away from, right?”