You stupid, slagging glitch-infested waste of processing, Whiplash thought, malfunctioning, gearslipped, underlubricated idiot!
At this point, he didn't know whether he was referring to himself or Rumble. Possibly both.
Of course the Decepticon had found him-- just because he couldn't scan didn't mean he couldn't be scanned. With Nic clinging to his back as he tore down the hard-packed dirt lane, he cranked his dampening field on full-blast. Let them try and track him now.
Only when his optics could no longer see Rumble's dust cloud behind them did he dare to slow down and veer off into the field next to the road, letting the tall grass-like vegetation swallow them up. As he came to a stop, he felt Nic let go and slide off to one side.
"A rock," he said, converting to bipedal mode and crouching over her. "You threw a rock at a Decepticon." He replayed the memory in his drive, half to confirm that it had actually happened, half because it was so blasted amusing.
"--had to--" Nic lay sprawled on her back, flattening the vegetation beneath, creating a human-shaped hollow. She was taking in and expelling air at an alarming rate, and he could detect tremors running through her entire body. Whiplash pushed his crippled scanners to their limit, but he still had no idea just what constituted lasting harm to a human.
"You are in distress. Are you damaged?"
"No, no," she gasped between breaths, shakily sitting up. "Just a-- little fazed."
"That was a very foolish thing to do. Rumble would have thought nothing of killing you." Whiplash privately marveled at the human's bravery-- or foolhardiness. No natural weapons, a frail and unprotected organic body, and tiny-- and she had stood up to Rumble.
"Just because I called him a hooptie." Nic drew her knees up and rested her forehead on them. "What a jerk. And he trashed my car!" She grabbed a handful of dry, stringy vegetation and tossed it, flopping back prone. "I still have payments left on that thing!"
Whatever that meant. "We need to find Optimus Prime as soon as possible. If Rumble is here, his allies will not be far behind."
"We need to go back into town, then," she said. "I can hunt down some info on the Internet, if there's any to be had. Is it safe? I mean, will Rumble attack us in a crowded place?"
Whiplash carefully considered this. It was highly likely that Rumble had been instructed to keep a low profile; otherwise, the Decepticon wouldn't have bothered with an Earth disguise. Perhaps a populated area would deter Rumble from starting another... well, rumble. "It should be safe, for now. But we must erudite our efforts."
"...I think you mean expedite."
Pit, not again!
"Where did we find this? YouTube?"
"Yes, Mr. Secretary. Some fourteen-year-old with a camera-phone. We've replaced the video on the site itself with something pixilated to hell, so that should keep things quiet for now."
Secretary of Defense John Keller watched the already grainy and shaky video with thinned lips. Twenty seconds long, it showed two distinct metallic forms in combat. Judging by the size of a small white car parked nearby, the larger purple one was roughly the size of NBE-2, the one which called itself Bumblebee. The other one, bright blue, was a little harder to make out, due both to the low quality of the video and the speed at which it moved. The two mechanoids kicked up a cloud of dun-colored dust as they wrestled, intermittent flashes of light punctuating the scene. Towards the end of the clip, there was an abrupt pause in the action. Just as the blue one resumed the fight, the clip ended.
"Shot on the outskirts of Topeka, Kansas."
"Do we know who these guys are?" Keller asked. This was how it had started last time. One little robot brawl.
"They don't match any of the other NBE descriptions."
"Have Miss Madsen meet me in my office, and contact Captain Lennox. We need to arrange a meeting with Optimus Prime."
"That... was suspiciously easy."
Sam tossed his duffel bag into Bumblebee's back seat. The yellow Camaro wondered what kind of story his charge had had to spin to get his parents to release him for this expedition. Bumblebee found some apt lyrics and flicked his sound system on.
"What did you say, what did you say, what did--"
"Camping trip with some friends." Sam scratched his head. "Had to swear a no-nookie oath and practically sign it in blood, but I guess sometimes the simple stuff works."
"Technically true," Bumblebee rasped with his own voice, his recalcitrant vocal capacitor sending out painful spikes of errant impulses. Ratchet had told him to give it a rest; although the AllSpark had kick-started his irreparable voice, restoring the intricate mechanism to full functionality had to be done in many stages, and using it in this state would set the schedule back.
Still, it felt good to stick it to Megatron, who had sworn Bumblebee would never utter another word. Every syllable another small victory. And besides, to hear him speak seemed to make Sam happy, and that was reason enough to risk the medic's wrath.
"Okay, let's get this party started!" Sam hopped in, and Bumblebee cheerily zeroed in on an 80's station, much to the young human's dismay. Bumblebee couldn't imagine what Sam found so objectionable about this music; it wasn't that old, and the Autobot rather liked the genre called electronica, with its precise, if simplistic, synthetic formulae. Its younger offshoot techno was also somewhat appealing, but didn't have quite the same cleverness, and tended to be too repetitive for his tastes.
Instead of heading for the interstate, Bumblebee pulled up to a bus stop, where a lone human female lounged on a bench. It took Sam only a moment to recognize who it was, and there went the pheromone spike. When Bumblebee had first come to Earth almost five years ago, it didn't take the Autobot long to figure out that weird chemical reaction between the two halves of the human race, a suspicion that Ratchet only confirmed. Already a highly social species to begin with, humans seemed happier when paired off.
"Mikaela?"
Mikaela Banes pulled down her sunglasses and grinned as the passenger side door swung open. "So are we off to see the wizard or what?"
"How'd you know?" Despite the question, Bumblebee was pleased to note that Sam didn't object.
Mikaela held up her phone. "Bumblebee hacked Sprint and texted me. First text message I've ever gotten where everything's spelled correctly."
Sam leveled a look at the dashboard. "And yet you pull me out of bed with your neighborhood-rattling stereo."
Bumblebee meeped innocently. It's just more fun.
"You sure you want to come along?" Sam asked as Mikaela deposited her bag next to Sam's in the back seat. "I mean, this could take a couple days and I wasn't planning to shower the whole time."
"I expect you will now," she replied, pulling the door closed.
"Maaaaybe." Sam's pheromones betrayed his nonchalance as Bumblebee headed for the highway. "Just don't blame me if I forget and get all stinky and sweaty."
"Promises, promises." Mikaela rolled her eyes.
Bumblebee obligingly pumped out some Barry White.
A logo-festooned styrofoam cup of plain black coffee sat untouched on the counter nearby, steam still wafting from the hole in the lid. Nic didn't touch it. She felt she had enough adrenaline in her system at the moment to keep her going 'till Doomsday, and a single sip of caffiene would make her molecules vibrate apart. She had only bought it because Internet access was for paying customers only, and she didn't feel like fighting with the manic satellite connection at home. No, for this, she wanted a nice, fast, uninterrupted T1 line.
Not for the first time, she wondered if anybody at Google ever looked at the search terms used, out of curiosity. She was sure her current string was making her look like a loon.
Or someone with a serious robot fetish: alien robot "giant robots" sentient machine vehicles and a thesaurus's worth of synonyms thrown in for good measure.
It took her the better part of a quarter-hour to weed out all the shrine sites to obscure badly-animated 80's cartoons, sites about geek engineer tournaments to see whose remote-controlled droid could beat up whose, and sites offering cars for sale. (The video of a car commercial in which a silver coupe transformed and did a little breakdance first startled her, then nearly gave her a fit trying not to laugh. It was only some decent but telltale CGI at work, even if one could only wonder at where the inspiration had come from.)
The real meaty information was buried in message boards and blogs, some newly defunct and readable only by search engine cache. She made notes on napkins, noting even the oddest or unlikeliest-seeming mention. She could sort it later with Whiplash, who would know better what to look for. Though she was getting a good feeling about a recent rumor upswing of past months. Mention of 'military supermachines' came up with a marked regularity, sandwiched by government-is-reading-my-brainwaves conspiracy chatter. Talk of military or government experiments going haywire and destroying whole city blocks had become almost trendy in the blogosphere.
Nic glanced out the window to where Whiplash was parked outside, right next to a banged-up Suzuki GKW (an Uncle Terry-ism that meant God Knows What). The juxtaposition between the ratty, skeletal motorcycle and Whiplash's shining, sky-hued streamlined shape was more than a little funny. And, true to her earlier warning, her robot friend was attracting a bit of a crowd. She decided she had gathered enough notes, crammed the napkins into her bag and came out of the cyber-café just in time to catch a middle-aged man trying to sling a leg over Whiplash's seat.
"Hey. Off my bike, if you please." Tone appropriately sharp. Stance and gait crisp and businesslike. Bluster enough like this and nobody questioned you.
The man, who hadn't been limber enough to get his leg over the bike's girth anyway, stared dumbly at her. "This your bike?"
"I believe that's what I said. You go around messing with other people's property like that all the time?"
"I just wanted to see how it felt. I've never seen anything like it. Where'd you get it?"
"Custom, one-off. Built from scratch." She delivered her most disapproving moue, hopping astride said unique motorcycle. "Brand new, too, so I'd appreciate it if you asked before manhandling it."
"I'll give you five thousand dollars for it."
Nic stared at him, the original Tomahawk's better than half-a-mil price tag flashing through her mind. "Sir, I'm insulted." ...on Whiplash's behalf!
Just then the Suzuki's owner appeared and came to a dead halt when he saw Whiplash. Nic could see the young man's eyes dart from his bike to the alien Tomahawk and then come to rest on her. She decided she'd better get moving before he proposed marriage.
She squeezed the clutch and fumbled with her foot, long-neglected habit coming to the surface. Her composure nearly crumbled when she realized he didn't have a shifter. Come to think, he didn't even have an ignition switch... or fuel cutoff...
Fortunately he started his engine on his own, likely realizing what she was trying to do. The sudden chainsaw-from-hell noise made the handful of spectators jump back, and she slipped out of the parking lot and into the light early-afternoon traffic. Whiplash was a preternaturally smooth ride-- each wheel's independent suspension made every bump and dip in the pavement disappear. She strongly suspected even the original Tomahawk wasn't this easy a ride.
Of course, it helped when the bike had a literal mind of his own.
With a start, she realized she was steering him. He has to be letting me steer. I mean, he could take control if he wanted, right? Still, I'm... manipulating him. This is so bizarre. I'm going to wake up any minute now.
She headed for the Eyesore.
It had been intended to be a fancy new office building near some of the more affluent apartment complexes of Topeka. For some reason or other, construction had stopped nearly half a year ago, and it sat there, a big empty half-finished shell, a monstrous pimple in a perfectly coiffed neighborhood. Stuck in zoning purgatory, the way she'd heard it, and couldn't be completed or demolished until some committee or other decided what to do. Kids would use the Eyesore for skateboarding or raves until police kicked them out, occasionally a homeless person would squat for the night before being run off by the rich residents.
Right now, Nic was counting on the privacy. She directed Whiplash around the construction fence at the perimeter of the property, ducking through a gap when she was sure nobody was looking. She rode right into the bare building's lobby, through the gaping doorless entryway.
Dismounting, she looked around in the dusty dimness. The only eyes watching them belonged to the lopsided happy-face spray-painted on the nearby cinderblock wall, next to the cheerful sentiment 'JAYHAWKS SUK!' Whiplash's engine cut off. "Okay," she said. "You can come out now."
Nic had a feeling she'd never get tired of seeing this-- the impossibly complex, impossibly graceful conversion from motorcycle to robot. Even before the last armor panel slid into place, he was looking around, with what looked like a frown.
"Surely this derelict is not your residence."
"No, but we can talk here." Nic unslung her bag and dug out the sheaf of scribbled-on napkins. "Whiplash, you don't mind-- I mean, you're not, I dunno, offended that I was steering you?"
He looked at her, the frown disappearing. She was beginning to get the hang of reading his rather subtle expressions. "Why would I be? You know this place; I do not. You knew to come here."
"Can't argue with your logic," she replied, gratified by his trust. She held up the napkins. "So let's find your friends."
She found a clear space among the piles of abandoned construction materials and trash. The soft blue glow of his eyes played over the napkins as she laid them out on the dusty floor. "Not much data," he murmured, crouching.
"More than I expected to get, frankly. But still, I'm willing to bet that this is at least three-quarters crazy. We get a lot of that on this planet." She made a stab at sorting them by geographic location. "Okay, Roswell-- robots going around eating cows and other livestock."
Whiplash made a derisive zrrrrrng noise. "My kind does not ingest organic material."
"Bunk, then," she said, tossing the napkin aside. She made a mental note to ask just what he did eat, if at all-- and if she needed to plug him in at night or something... "Hoover Dam, a jet grew legs and started shooting up the place."
"That," he said darkly, "sounds like a Decepticon."
"This was a couple months ago..." Nic poked at the napkin, chewing on her lip. He had said that others were already here. "Maybe in a fight with one of your friends?"
"Possibly." He didn't sound pleased with the idea. "Or attacking humans. Rumble is not alone in his opinion of non-Cybertronian life."
Xenophobic space robots. Lovely. "And what is your opinion of non-Cybertronian life?"
He drew back, as if insulted she had even asked. "If it is sentient, it deserves to live. I value life no matter its origin. Autobots do not inscribe to the Decepticon philosophy."
"Subscribe?" The corners of Nic's mouth twitched. Whiplash's head turned aside and he emitted another mechanical noise, possibly a word in his own native electronic language. "Why do you keep doing that?"
"The language data I acquired is corrupt somehow." He reached out and tapped the Hoover Dam napkin with a metal finger. "Please, continue. Your manual glyph system seems to deviate from the accepted common format and I can't decipher it."
It was probably the nicest way anyone had ever told her that her handwriting was messy. She moved the Hoover Dam tip to one side. "Okay... a year ago in Fresno, a yellow beater driving around with nobody behind the wheel. Cars don't drive themselves."
"Agreed." That napkin joined the other.
UFOs abducting the elderly and replacing them with robotic duplicates in Chicago: Definite no.
A 'haunted' big-rig truck sighted in Nevada: Strong possibility.
'Demolition' of a city block as coverup for a military war-game involving 'walking tanks and helicopters': another mutter about Decepticons from Whiplash.
Fifteen napkins in, a pattern was emerging. Southern Nevada, someplace called Mission City, and scattered spots trailing northwest into California. "Why does all the insanity migrate out west?" Nic asked out loud, ripping up the false-lead napkins. "So what do you need now?"
Whiplash stood, gazing off into the dusty gloom of the Eyesore's lobby. "A guide."
"You want me to come with you?"
He was silent for a moment, save for some soft mechanical rattles and clicks and whirrs from deep within his body. "Optimus Prime said in his message that this planet is our new home. That we were not alone. I have been alone for so long... and even now, I am so close to others of my kind I should be able to hear their voices, but damaged as I am, I might as well be on the other side of the galaxy." His blue lenses focused on her. "I know nothing about this world. I do not have the luxury of wandering on my own, finding my own way. The message I must deliver is too vital to take the risk that the Decepticons will find me. I realize I may be asking a great deal of you--"
Nic's cell phone tweedled brightly. She jumped, the sound of it sharp and startling next to Whiplash's soft, sad voice.
"Oh for... Uncle Terry, your timing is atrocious..." Her finger poised on the green button, she looked up at Whiplash. "Sorry, just give me a sec, Whip." At least the phone call would give her time to think about going cross-country on an alien motorcycle.
"NICOLE!"
She winced, pulling the earpiece slightly away. "Uncle T--"
"Nicole, where are you?! Are you all right? What happened to your car, why didn't you call us?!"
Nic groaned. She'd forgotten about her poor lobotomized Civic, just sitting there for the world to see. "I'm-- I'm okay, Uncle Terry, I'm in town with a friend."
"Your car is out by the Kingstons' field with a hole through the engine big as my head!" Terry continued. "Your aunt's calling the hospitals. What happened? Were you in an accident? Why didn't you call--"
"I'm fine, I'm not hurt," she assured him. So much for swanning back to the house as if nothing had happened. "I can-- I can explain it." Whether it would be the truth or another quick lie, she had no idea.
"Where are you? Are you sure you're all right?" Terry demanded, some of his hysterics dying down.
"Yes, I'm fine-- I was at a café with a friend," she repeated. Terry said something in response, but his words were masked by a burst of high-pitched static. She plugged her free ear and frowned into the phone. "Uncle Terry? He-hello? Reception's really bad. Can you hear me?"
More squealing static, becoming so shrill she had to cut the call. Reception was usually pretty good within Topeka proper, likely the trouble was with wherever Terry was.
"Your unit commander?" Whiplash inquired.
"My uncle, same thing. He found my car where Rumble left it. I'd better call my aunt before she turns out the National Guard." Nic thumbed through her phone's call list and dialed Aunt Marie, only to wince as more of the static shrieked into her ear. With a sigh, she shut the phone and turned to Whiplash to ask for a ride home.
The words were never spoken.
The cinderblock wall directly behind her exploded. Whiplash darted in and swept her off the floor and out of the way just as the debris pounded across where she had been standing. Sucking in a lungful of dust, Nic grabbed Whiplash's fingers for support and coughed.
"What the--"
Another blast filled the lobby with billows of dust and flying debris. Part of the ceiling crumbled and rubble fell, blocking the daylight that had streamed in through the open doorway. The newly-created hole in the wall was now the only exit, and standing abreast of it, iridescent purple gleaming like some monstrous demonic scarab, was--
"I always seem to find you in the classiest places."
Rumble.