Note: In its original printing in my fanzine Roll Out, this story was part of a crossover with another series running in the zine at the time (which will be continued as soon as I get that dang heating element for my Xerox machine :P). The other series, "Autobase Controllers" by Shaun McMichael, is about a group of Autobots and Decepticons who crashed on Earth several thousand years ago while searching for the Ark. The characters Dial, DeRolle, and Xevander were all created by him and originally appeared in that series.
Firestormers #8: Cybertron Under Seige, pt. 1
By Trixter
The hospital's main room was strewn with the bodies of injured and dying Autobot soldiers. Some were on makeshift cots but most were simply sprawled on the floor, laid there when the cots had run out. Medics rushed around the room, only able to attend to the most serious cases before more were brought in from the batte outside. It was to this scene that Trixter slowly awoke, groggy and sore.
At first she was disoriented. The last thing she remembered was helping to fight off a small team of Decepticons on Procyon Five. She had been shot down and then... well, she wasn't too sure what had happened after that. Apparently she had lost consciousness and been taken to this battlefield hospital. But was this the same planet, had the battle gotten this out of control? She sat up slowly and looked around, but she didn't see any of her teammates. She found that both relieving and disappointing. It meant that it was likely none them had been injured as bad as she had, but it made her feel even more lost and alone. Then she spotted a familiar face coming toward her from across the room, stepping over the injured Autobots on the floor as he made his way to her.
"Furie?" she said, smiling weakly as he approached.
"Feeling better, Trixter?" he asked cheerfully.
"To be honest, Furie, I feel like slag," she said. "How about you?"
"I'm...a bit better now. I still can't remember anything that happened before you rescued me, except bits and pieces. The doctors here have been keeping a close optic on me, but nothing's happened since I got here. They've been treating me the whole time, but no one can figure out what made me..." He trailed off, looking down at the floor. "I'm so sorry, Trix..."
"It's okay, maybe whatever it was is gone now." Trixter thought for a moment, but her mind was still muddled from being unconscious. Something Furie had said... "Hey, this is Cybertron, isn't it?"
"Oh, that's right, you were out cold! I didn't realize you didn't know where you were. Yeah, we're on Cybertron. Your friends brought you here after you got injured on Procyon. It's a good thing they got you here when they did, too. No one would've had time to fix you up if you hadn't made it here before the battle started."
"This is Cybertron?" she asked, surprised. "Are we under attack or something? Megatron wouldn't..."
"It's not Megatron, it's some guy named Jhiaxus. They say they're Decepticons, but they're like no Decepticons anyone's ever seen before. They're all the same green and white..."
"Jhiaxus? Jhiaxus is attacking Cybertron!? Aw, slag, this is probably all my fault for getting Rook killed..."
"What?" Furie asked, confused.
"I'll explain it on the way to the Starcruiser. I've got to find the guys. C'mon."
With Furie in tow, Trixter made her way through the now battle-torn city of Iacon to the Cybertron Spaceport, where she used her built-in homing device to find which hangar her teammates had parked her ship, the Starcruiser, in. The spaceport was under heavy fire from the Decepticon forces, but that hangar, at least, was still mostly intact. As they ducked inside the cavernous building, she was relieved to see that her ship was no worse for the wear. She opened the door to the bridge and stuck her head inside, gesturing for Furie to stay back for a moment. Upstart, Dharma, and Skids were all on the bridge, seated in a circle on the floor around Dial, who was in the middle of a story. All four looked up as they heard the door slide open.
"Trix!" Upstart exclaimed. "You're okay!"
"Worried, Upstart?" Trix smiled.
"Maybe a little," Upstart answered, slightly embarassed by his enthusiasm.
"Where are the other guys?" Trixter asked. "I need to tell you all something."
"They went out to fight with the other Autobots, but..." He froze in mid-sentence as he noticed Furie standing behind her. "Uh, what's he doing here, Trix?" he whispered. "I mean, I know he was our friend and all, but he did kinda try to kill us."
"He was at the hospital when I woke up. He...he's better now, okay? They've been treating him and all..."
"Don't worry about it, Trixter," Furie said bitterly. "I'm used to it."
"What's wrong with him?" Dharma asked curiously, still seated on the floor.
"Oh, yeah, your power!" Upstart said. "Maybe you could do something..."
"We're not sure exactly what's wrong with him," Trixter explained. "He's an old friend of me an' Upstart. A few weeks ago we rescued him from a derelict ship, but before we could get him back here he just sorta lost control and started shooting at us. No one's figured out why, and he can't remember what happened to him before we got to him. He hasn't relapsed, so maybe it was just a one-time thing..."
"Yes, it sounds like something I may be able to fix," Dharma said thoughtfully. "Come over here, Furie."
Furie came uncertainly onto the bridge of the ship. "What are you going to do, exactly?" he asked her. "Not that I have much to lose at this point..."
"I have the ability to interface with the minds and in particular the memories of other Transformers. If this is truly a result of some kind of mental damage, I may be able to fix it. I may also be able to recover your lost memories."
"Well, like I said, I don't have much to lose," Furie said quietly. "Please, do whatever you can..." She gestured for him to kneel down in front of her. As the others looked on, she got up on her knees and placed a hand on each side of his head...
...and Furie's thoughts and memories flooded into Dharma's mind like a tidal wave. It was easy to get overwhelmed and lost at this stage, but Dharma knew what she was looking for and concentrated on navigating his neural pathways accordingly. Shorted-out circuits, blocked-off memories, anything out of the ordinary would lead her to the cause of his psychotic episode. Almost all of his memories were recent, from after he was rescued by the Firestormer team and returned to Cybertron. Before long she found a few broken synapses and a place where a block had been placed across his normal stream of memories, keeping the recollection of what had happened before he had been rescued from the ship unaccessable to his conscious mind. At first she assumed that he himself had repressed those memories, but Dharma soon realized that something about the block felt unnatural. Normal memory blocks caused by repression had a vague feeling of pain or shame about them, but this seemed to have not only been blocked but cleanly cut out, with no emotion to it and no way to regain his lost memories. It was almost like her own handi-work, or that of another with the same talent, though she didn't recall any other Transformers with her skills. She decided to save the mystery for later and went to work fixing Furie's delicate neuro-circuitry.
To those watching, very little seemed to be happing to either Dharma or Furie. Both had apparently gone into a trance and they were simply frozen in place. Feeling a bit akward, no one else moved or spoke, and the only sound was the subdued roar of the battle outside. Then, with a slight moan, Dharma stirred. Skids moved to her side, looking concerned. "Are you okay?" he whispered to her worriedly as she winced and held a hand to her forehead.
Then, where he had been kneeling, Furie sat down with his legs under him. "I... I think it worked," he said slowly. "My mind seems a lot clearer now. But I still can't remember..."
"I'm sorry, Furie, there was nothing I could do about your memories," Dharma explained quietly. "I don't know who, but someone cut them out completely."
Trixter turned to Upstart. "We need to call the other guys back to the ship. I found out that Jhiaxus is in charge of this attack."
"I could've told you that," he said. "We had to maneuver through a whole fleet of their warships to land here and the Twilight was apparently the flagship."
"Just get the team together. I have a plan."
It didn't take long for Air Raid, Afterburner, and Strafe to get back to the Starcruiser, and once everyone had arrived Trixter had an audience.
"I don't know if it occured to any of you," she started, addressing the other members of Firestormer team Beta-5, "but I think Jhiaxus is attacking Cybertron to flush us out because of what we did before. I think we're who he's after. So it looks like we have three choices: we can stay here and let him destroy Cybertron, we can do what he wants and give ourselves up, or we can go up there fighting."
"What do you mean, go up there fighting!?" Afterburner asked incredulously. "They'll kill us if we get within a mile of the Twilight!"
"If I know anything about Decepticon leaders, they never simply kill someone like that when looking for revenge. They prefer a more theatrical killing, which is often their greatest weakness. I was thinking we could take the 'Cruiser in close enough to board the Twilight. Since it's so small it's likely that they won't detect it. Then we can go in and destroy it from the inside out. It's the sort of quick-strike maneuver we've been trained for as Firestormers, doing a lot of damage with only a few Autobots. And we're going to be fighting anyway, whether it's here on the ground or up there on their ship. And we, aside from Dharma, Skids, Furie, and Dial, have been aboard that ship. We can to more good than anyone else on this planet against it just because we're familiar with the layout. With their flagship out of commission, they'll have to call off the attack."
"Well, team, what's it gonna be?" Upstart asked.
"She does have a point, it is the sort of thing we were trained for," Air Raid said. "And I get the feeling that this is our fault, too. I say we go for it." The other two members nodded their agreement.
"So it's settled," Trixter said. She turned to Dharma, Skids, Dial, and Furie, none of whom were officially part of the team. "You can come too, but don't feel like you have to. It's going to be very dangerous, I know, and you had nothing to do with our encounter with the Twilight. But we could use your help."
"I'll go with you," Furie offered calmly.
Dharma and Skids looked at each other for a minute. Finally Skids turned to Trixter. "We'll go," he said.
Trixter turned to the dimuitive Micromaster seated in the middle of the floor. "I'm sorry, Dial, I know we're the only Autobots you know in this time, but we need to do this. You're free to stay behind until we return, even though I'm not sure where you'd go if you did. If you want you can go with us and guard the ship while we board the Twilight."
Dial thought it over for a minute. He wanted to help his new friends, even though it sounded like what they were planning was very dangerous. And Trixter did have a point, he didn't know anyone else in this time that he could stay with until they got back. He was very literally lost without them. "Okay, Trixter," he finally said, "I'll watch your ship."
"Okay, then, lets get this 'Cruiser ready to go."
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