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Firestormers: Time Bomb


"Triiiiiixieeeee..." Upstart stepped into the dimly lit engine room of the starship under his command and looked around. This was Trixter's domain, but as much as he liked her it wasn't a place Upstart visited if he could help it. The room wasn't the most inviting of environments. It paralleled the three levels of the rest of the ship, was hundreds of meters deep, and the entirety of it was a maze of pipes and wires all connected to a massive black cylinder set against the back wall. A network of interconnected catwalks and balconies further cluttered the room, making it almost impossible for anyone other than a trained starship mechanic to tell what part of the infinitely complicated mechanism was what. The first several meters above the floor were clear enough to walk through, but like most natural-built fliers Upstart's thinking tended toward the non-planar, and it seemed like it would be far too easy to get lost and entangled in the mass of hoses and pipes. The blue and red robot hesitantly took a few steps further into the room. "Hey, Trix?"

Something fell to the floor beside him with a loud clang and he looked up to see the slender blue and grey Autobot peering over the side of a catwalk a few meters above his head. "Oh! Hi, Ups!" She tapped the side of her head with a thin silver finger. "Had my radio on. Could you hand that spanner back to me?"

Upstart picked up the large spanner, wincing at the thought of how much it would have hurt had the thing actually connected with his head. With a quick, fluid motion he flew up and over the railing, offering Trixter the implement with a bow. "You should really be more careful with your tools."

"Maybe I was trying to get you to stop calling me Trixie," she grinned mischeviously. "So to what do I owe the honor?"

"We've got a mission." He followed her over to the large box that was lying half-dismantled on the catwalk. "The ship needs to be spaceworthy again as soon as you can manage."

Trixter sighed and shook her head. "Well, you're gonna hafta give me an hour or so. A lot of the maintainence I had planned for today can wait, but we're not gonna make it very far if I don't get this particle filter changed. It's a couple billion light-years overdue as it is." She reached into an open side of the box and pulled out a stiff sheet of a tightly-woven material akin to steel wool. "See, look how dirty it is!"

Aside from a general brown color Upstart didn't see what was so wrong with it. "If you say so, Trix," he shrugged.

"So what's so urgent that we hafta get going ASAP?" she asked, sliding a fresh filter into place as she talked.

"Rescue mission. Team Gamma-12 was supposed to show up this afternoon with some supplies for the base, but around 2 AM local time they called in saying they were checking out an SOS on the general universal frequency. Right after that we lost radio contact with them."

"Actually, Jazz was in here earlier keeping me company and he mentioned that. So there's been word from them?"

"After a fashion. About a half-hour ago Metalhawk picked up an automated SOS from their shipboard computer. It's transmitting from somewhere out near Alpha Centauri. No word on whether there are any surviviors, but it doesn't look promising."

"Ugh. Have I mentioned lately how much I hate picking through corpses?"

Leaning against the railing, Upstart put a hand to his chin and feigned concentration. "I'm not sure about recently, but I do believe at some point you may have said something to that effect." Trixter looked up from her work just long enough to make a face at him. "Anyway, I've still to round up the rest of our teammates, so I must be off. Give me a buzz when the ship's ready to go."


* * *


Metalhawk pointed to the center of the screen. "This is where they'll appear. Long Haul and Quickmix here," the security chief moved his finger to indicate the two robots at opposite edges of the screen, frozen mid-task, "disappear the exact moment our visitors show up. Watch." He pushed a button beside the monitor- one of dozens on the large computer that controlled the Earthforce base's security network- and the figures began moving in a jerky, slow-motion semblance of life. The snow that had been falling when the recording was made moved almost imperceptably across the screen. Standing behind the seated security chief, Ultra Magnus watched as the air in the clearing at the center of the screen began to shimmer, then waver like a heat-haze. A similar energy formed around Long Haul and Quickmix like an aura, but even drastically slowed down it took only a handful of seconds for the energy to flare up bright enough to momentarily overload the security camera. The screen went white, and when the picture resolved again a few seconds later a different pair of robots stood, looking slightly dazed, in the middle of the clearing. The picture wasn't of the highest resolution, but Magnus could make out that the larger of the two was a mostly-black Earth-style stealth jet, the smaller a red and white Cybertronian orbital jet, quite possibly female. The two builders had disappeared, leaving behind only scorch marks on the ground where they had been standing.

Metalhawk pushed the button again and the scene froze. "Well?"

"I think they're telling the truth on that count, at least. That was definitely a time jump. So what's the rest of their story?"

"This one," he pointed to the smaller one, "says her name is Starlight. She's definitely the talker of the pair. Says she's a temporal physicist from the year 2053. The big guy is Tornado. He's her lab assistant or bodyguard or something. Hasn't said much. Interestingly, they're here concerning that mission we just assigned Upstart's team to." Magnus' optics widened. "They claim Gamma-12's ship was brought down by a temporal storm. Catch is, they're also saying it was caused by experiments going on at a heretofore unknown Cybertronian research base there specializing in temporal studies."

"They're trying to develop their own time-travel technology?"

"That's the story. And in doing so it seems they've created this storm that's still raging half a century into the future. These two are saying they've come to put a cap on it now before it gets out of control."

Ultra Magnus shook his head in frustration. "I'm inclined to believe them. There's too much to be lost in time-jumping to do it without a very good reason, and if there is a time storm out there there's nothing we can do about it with our current technology. But whatever we do, it has to be done soon. Bring them up here." Metalhwak nodded, rising to leave. With a thought Magnus turned on his inter-Autobot radio. "Upstart?"

After a moment the Firestormer commander replied. "Yes, sir?"

"Is your team ready to leave yet?"

"Well, Trixter was in the middle of dismantling the ship, but as soon as she gets it all back together..."

"No, that's fine. I need to see you up here in the control room. There may be a problem."


* * *


Upstart stepped into the control room to find Metalhawk and Ultra Magnus talking to a pair of Autobots he had never seen before. The newcomers were seated in the middle of the room almost as if being interrogated, and the mood was decidedly tense. The conversation halted as all optics turned to him. "Erm, you wanted to see me?"

Magnus gestured him to his side. "We have some new information on Gamma-12. These two will be accompanying you. Starlight, Tornado," he gestured to them in turn," this is Upstart, commander of team Beta-5."

Upstart nodded in greeting. He half-listened to Magnus' explaination of their revised mission plans as he tried to place the unfamiliar Autobots. Starlight was very nicely female and decidedly Cybertronian in design. Her optics, staring fixedly up at Ultra Magnus, were just barely visible behind a red visor that accented the red and white of the rest of her body. When he had walked in he had noticed her looking at him like she recognized him, but he couldn't for the life of him remember having seen her before. As he watched her she turned to look at him. Their gazes met for the tiniest of moments before her optics darted nervously away.

He decided to turn his attention to her companion. Tornado was notably larger than Starlight and significantly more imposing, even sitting down. He was mostly black, with the wings of an Earthen stealth jet altmode jutting up from his back. His arms were crossed over his chest and Upstart noticed that one of them terminated in an odd sort of claw, though the other had a proper hand. But even more daunting than his coloring or his claw-hand was his face, which gazed stoically from behind a roughly T-shaped clear yellow shield. Upstart had only ever seen that sort of full face behind a clear mask before on a handful of Decepticons.

As he stood there it dawned on him what Magnus was saying. Time travellers. Unusual, but certainly not unheard of. And it could certainly explain why this cute little temporal physicist recognized him even though he had never seen either of them before. He'd have to bring that up later...


* * *


Slapdash and Lube were already on the ship's bridge when Air Raid stepped out of the lift, brushing snow off himself and grinning madly. "Remind me to never, ever get into another snowball fight with the Technobots," he laughed as he took his place at the copilot's position. He began flipping switches to power up the flight computer. "When's Trix gonna have the ship back together?"

"She's supposed to be done any minute now," Slapdash answered. Air Raid looked back at him, noticing a twinge of nervousness in his voice. "Erm, how much did Upstart tell you about this mission?"

The Aerialbot sobered up quickly. "Just that some Firestormer team crashed on their way here and we have to go check it out. Why?"

Slapdash hesitated, not wanting to be the bearer of bad news, so Lube stepped in. "It's team Gamma-12," the Nebulan said, sitting atop Slapdash's navigation console. "Waverider, Dogfight, High Beam, and..."

Air Raid's jaw dropped. "Gamma-12? That's Fireflight's team!"


* * *


An awkward silence fell as Upstart led the two time-jumpers to the starship hangar. "So," he began, trying to lighten the mood a little, "anything I should know about the future? Have I gotten the Matrix and been made Prime by 2053?" He flashed Starlight a grin. "Or would my knowing wreck the space-time continuum?"

"You're dead," Tornado said simply.

"Ah." Upstart winced. "Ouch."

"In our timeline," Starlight explained, "your team's ship was brought down by the storm just like Gamma-12's. By the time a better-prepared research scouter could make it to the asteroid, there were no survivors from either team." She looked up at him with the vaguest hint of a smile. "But our timeline splintered off from yours the moment we arrived. With us along to help it's not a fate you should have to worry about."

"That's at least a little reassuring," Upstart admitted. He heard a tone in his audio receptor that signaled someone trying to contact him. He turned on his inter-Autobot radio. "Yes?"

"Hey, it's Trix," came the familiar voice. "I'm all done with the ship, and everyone else is here, so we're ready to go as soon as you get here."

They reached the large double doors leading to the hangar and Upstart gestured with a flourish. "And here we are." He pushed a button on the wall and the doors slid open to reveal the cavernous room, filled mostly by the bulk of an Autobot battle cruiser. The wings spread almost to the walls, and the group had to walk under them, all but the relatively short Starlight having to duck, to reach the temporary stairway up to the bridge. "This hangar was designed for smaller shuttles," Upstart explained, "but Trixter threw an absolute fit at the idea of having to leave the ship out in the Arctic weather for weeks at a time." He noticed Starlight gazing up at the ship in barely-concealed wonder, but Tornado was as sternly impassive as ever. He was starting to wonder if there hadn't been something almost legendary about his team in their timeline, the way she seemed so interested in everything. Stranger things had happened.


* * *


Finally the team took off, following the signal transmitted from Gamma-12's computer. It was almost two hours into the so-far unmomentous flight when Upstart, looking up from the very first sensor readouts as they approached the temporal storm, noticed Starlight was no longer on the bridge. "Go ahead and send these up to Trix and Air Raid," he told Lube. "Heads up, you two," he called to the pilots as the Nebulan keyed up the sensor array to send readouts to the flight computer. "We've got our first look at the bugger. Lube's sending it up." He turned back to Lube. "I'm gonna see where Starlight's gotten herself off to. She should get a look at this."

Tornado stood silently against the back wall, arms crossed and staring straight ahead into space. He turned as Upstart approached the lift door, the first motion he had made almost since they took off. "She went up," he said quietly.

The team commander turned, surprised at having been spoken to by the enigmatic Autobot. "Hmm? The observation deck?" Tornado nodded, once. He might as well have a proper facemask for all you can read from his face, Upstart thought. "Erm, thanks."

A handful of moments later Upstart stepped out of the lift, optics adjusting to the darkness of the observation deck. Starlight stood at the far end of the large, glass-walled room with her arms folded on the railing, careful not to bend the delicate fins on her forearms. She looked up at the sound of his footsteps. Even from a distance the little Autobot looked achingly sad, though she made a small effort to hide it as she saw him. "Hi, Upstart." She smiled weakly.

Upstart's first instinct was to leave the poor girl alone with whatever demons plagued her. She hadn't told anyone but Tornado where she was going, after all. Maybe she wanted to be left alone. But he had had an odd feeling about her from the first time he saw her. Instead he joined her at the window. "They do still have stars in the future, don't they?" he quipped, smiling gently.

Starlight smiled and stifled a laugh. "Yes, we do." She sighed, then, and looked down at where her slender arms rested on the rail. "I...we haven't been entirely honest with you, Upstart."

Definitely a bad start, he thought. "What do you mean?" He tried to keep his voice neutral. No point in scaring her.

She looked up again, still not meeting his gaze, and stared out the window as she spoke. "Tornado and I weren't sure if we wanted the team to know or not. It just seemed like it would make things so much simpler if we didn't tell you." She sighed again, and it seemed to Upstart the most heartbreaking sound in the universe. "But if nothing else I wanted you to know. When I told you, back at the base, that your entire team died on this mission in my timeline...that wasn't quite true. Some of us survived."

Upstart's jaw dropped. Suddenly her strange behavior made sense. "Trixie!?" She nodded, still not looking up at him. "And Tornado?"

"Air Raid. He's...been through a lot. Lube survived, too, but he wouldn't have anything to do with this mission. He thought we were insane for wanting to do it ourselves."

"So were...were Slapdash and I just killed when the ship went down?" He found himself a little curious about this death that had almost been his, that would surely have been his had she not come along.

"Slapdash was, when the side of the ship he was on hit a rock wall. It was really a miracle Lube wasn't killed then, too, though he was still comatose for months afterward from the shock of being connected to Slapdash when he died. When the ship finally stopped, the two of us were a little dented but otherwise fine. Air Raid was pinned under some ceiling girders but aside from a crushed leg was unhurt. But just as we were getting up and dusting ourselves off the reactor blew. The debris trapping Air Raid protected him a little, but the blast still tore away half his body and overloaded his optics. But somehow it left him conscious, and he spent the next day and a half blind and in terrible pain, with no sounds save the beepings of what was left of the ship's computer. He was damaged so badly the medics at the Earthbase just completely rebuilt him, the way he is now." She paused. "As I said, he's been through a lot."

"And us?" Upstart gently urged.

"You noticed the alarm going off a split-second before the explosion and...and you shielded me. I was still badly injured, badly enough to have to be rebuilt, but you saved my life. And, in doing so, you gave yours." Starlight began shaking with the pain of her memories and Upstart, feeling a need to do something comforting, put an arm around her shoulders. After a moment she regained a degree of composure. "It...it was that moment, when I realized what was going on, that I understood how much we meant to each other. A moment before it was too late..." She dissolved into sobbing and Upstart stood there awkwardly, head spinning from all she had told him, unsure of what to do with this strange, sad girl. But she wasn't strange at all, she was Trixter, she was Trixter who cared for him and needed him...

She was more than he ever could have hoped for.

He put his arms around her and she willingly leaned against him. "C'mon, now, I'm here," he said soothingly. "It'll be different this time, I promise." Slowly, she stopped shaking. "Atta girl, chin up," he said, patting her shoulder. "It'll be okay."

Starlight wrapped her arms around his waist and sighed. "I'm starting to think maybe Lube was right. I thought it'd be nice seeing you again, and it is, but it also reminds me how much I miss you. We should've let someone else do this..." Finally she looked up to meet his eyes. "I want you to promise me something. I want you to promise that you'll tell Trixter how you feel. I don't expect you to go down there and do it right this second, but I want you to tell her before it's too late. She loves you, Ups. She just doesn't think you're willing to get that close to anyone. You have to tell her otherwise, or you'll have nothing but a lifetime of wishing there could have been more between you."

He hugged her a little tighter. "Okay, then, I promise."

"Thank you, Ups." She looked up at him and smiled- that familiar smile, Trixter's mischevious little half-smirk of a smile. "So do you think maybe I could get a quick look around the engine room?"


* * *


Trixter shook her head. "This thing really isn't like anything I've encountered before. It's reading alomst like an electrical storm, but those are almost wholly an atmospheric phenomenon. It shouldn't be happening in the vacuum of space!"

"Starlight did say it was a temporal energy storm," Lube pointed out from his position on the other side of the bridge as he too studied the sensor readouts. "Electricity is just another form of energy. The ship's sensor array really has no reason to differentiate between them, especially given our current lack of knowledge of temporal physics."

"Well, it certainly helps to explain why Gamma-12's ship went down. If this thing is behaving anything like an electrical storm it probably fried their flight computer. We're gonna have to be extra careful with this one." The pilot turned to Slapdash at the navigation console. "How much longer 'till we get to the asteroid?"

The Powermaster consulted his own readouts. "Only about another hour."

Trixter looked over at Air Raid, who was trying to find Starlight on the ship cameras. The physicist had told them earlier that not all of Gamma-12 had died on impact, and that Fireflight was among those who might still be alive when they arrived, but there was still the chance that they would be too late to help him. Though he was trying not to let it show Trixter could tell her copilot was worried about his fellow Aerialbot. For now, though, he was putting all his effort into his work. As she watched his face became concerned. "Hrm." He tapped the screen in front of him. "Well, I found Starlight. And Upstart."

"What?" Trixter looked over at his monitor. She could tell from the darkness of the picture that it was the observation deck, but it took her a moment to make out the figures of the two Autobots. "They're very...close," she said, taken aback by the sight of Upstart and this...this stranger holding each other like that. She shook her head, trying to disperse this sudden odd sense of possessiveness that overtook her. What was this, jealousy? She shouldn't be jealous, she told herself, she had her Jazz, Ups was just her friend, she should be happy he had found someone. But no, she realized, she shouldn't, Starlight was leaving as soon as they got back to Earth, he was insane for getting involved with her like that, especially when the team needed him there...

"Look, they're leaving," Air Raid said, snapping Trixter out of her thoughts. The two figures on the screen had begun moving away from the window and towards the lift.

"Well, give them a minute," Trixter said. "They might be coming back down here now. And if not, well, I'll just have to have a talk with Upstart."


* * *


Starlight's face became rapturous as she looked around the cavernous yet cluttered engine room. "It's just how I remember it," she sighed blissfully. She looked up and, seeing the catwalk that ran above the doorway, impulsively flew up to it to get a better view.

As she vaulted herself smoothly over the railing it struck Upstart that she seemed much more graceful now that she was a proper flier and not just a car with retrofitted wings. It also struck him as he flew up next to her that she seemed to have missed the ship more than she missed him. "So what got you away from this and into temporal physics of all things?"

Starlight shrugged as she gazed out over the room. "I didn't really get away from it. That's just the direction FTL-drive development has been going. After I recovered from the crash I wanted to settle down a little- I've never been the Autobots' greatest warrior- so I started learning about starship engineering. Eventually they let me assist and eventually be part of the main Autobot starship development team. We've finally completed the first prototype of what we're calling a "trans-warp" engine that lets a ship travel between two points in a fraction of the time it takes with our current drives by opening a rift in the space-time fabric for the ship to travel through." She looked back over her shoulder at where he was leaning against the railing watching her. "I didn't lose you, did I?" she smiled.

"No, no," he assured her with a grin, "I'm just not interested in starship drives."

"Hmpf." She mocked sulking, then smiled. "You're just like I remember, too."

Upstart's doubtlessly witty retort was cut off before it began by the sound of his inter-Autobot radio pinging to life. "Yes?" he answered, feeling a sudden twinge of guilt at having pretty much ignored everything else happening on the ship.

"Upstart," Trixter began, making him wince with the impatience already painfully evident in her voice, "you were supposed to bring Starlight back to the bridge, not take her on a tour of the ship so you could...could flirt! Now could you please bring your new little friend up here so she can look at the sensor readouts? We're almost in visual range of this storm and she's got to help us through it."


* * *


Upstart and Starlight rushed onto the bridge to find the main screen filled with the image of the asteroid that was their destination. One side of it was completely enveloped in a seething cloud of royal blue light, shot through with constantly shifting streaks of brilliant reds and violets. The resolution at that magnification was too low to make out the wrecked Autobot battle cruiser on the scarred surface of the asteroid, but the research base itself, built against a massive rock wall and half-engulfed in the energy cloud, was clearly visible. "Wow..." Upstart said, at a loss for more eloquent words. Starlight, having already seen it and bigger in her own time, simply watched it with the awed respect due such a force of nature.

"It's about time..." Trixter muttered under her breath as she noticed the pair had arrived. The pilot stood up, gesturing them to the front. "Gamma-12's signal is transmitting from here," she informed them, pointing at a spot on the screen just a few scale miles from the base, away from the storm. "We were just about to try to raise them on the radio. We still aren't hearing the SOS from the base they were responding to, but it's possible that their transmitter is being affected by the storm."

Starlight nodded, taking a step forward. "The storm is steadily growing, as it has been since it was created. The part of the base housing the transmitter array has already been swallowed by it." She turned to Upstart. "We have to get in there soon or the equipment I need..."

"I got a signal!" Air Raid cried out suddenly.

In the silence that followed that exclaimation the static of the radio slowly filled the bridge, then was cut through by a weary voice, just barely discernable from the crackle of electrical interference that accompanied it. "I repeat, Beta-5, this is High Beam from Gamma-12, we're recieving your message, please respond!"

"High Beam! This is Air Raid of Beta-5," the Aerialbot answered, patching the visual part of the message through to the main screen. The energy storm was replaced by the face of a battered green and yellow Autobot. The picture was laced with static, but what they could see of the bridge was a chaos of rent walls and fallen ceiling panels. "We'll be sending down a rescue party as soon as we're in range. How many survivors are there and what condition are they in?"

Trixter looked over at Air Raid. It was a routine question for a rescue team, but despite his attempts to maintain his composure he looked as though all his heart and soul rested on High Beam's next words. She put a hand on his shoulder, trying to offer what comfort she could. Unnoticed by anyone else on the bridge, Starlight glanced back at Tornado to find him staring intently at the screen, unreadable as ever.

High Beam looked down, slowly shaking his head. "Just me and Fireflight, and I don't know how much longer he's gonna hold out. Me, I've just got a crushed arm, but he's in really bad shape. I've been tending to him as best I can, but...I couldn't do anything for Dogfight...and Waverider...he didn't even have a chance...I'm no medic..."

"It's okay, we'll be there soon," Air Raid said, trying to be at least a little reassuring despite his own concerns. "Hold on just a little longer." He turned to Trixter. "I'm gonna switch him to my monitor and try to calm him down a little. The poor guy's obviously been through a lot." She nodded and with the push of a few buttons on his part the main screen switched back to the asteroid and the raging time storm.

Trixter turned to Upstart, who was still standing just behind her. "It looks like we'll be splitting up," he said in answer to her unasked question. "Do you think it's safe to land?"

Trixter shook her head. "I don't trust that storm. I'd rather keep her up here a bit with the engines running, in case we need to get out of here quick."

"Fair enough. You can stay with the ship. We'd have probably needed to use the personal warp gates either way. I'll take Starlight and Tornado down to the base myself. Slapdash, Lube," he turned to where the Powermaster was standing attentively while his Nebulan companion pored over the constant flow of sensor readouts, facinated, "you'll be helping Air Raid with the rescue." Upstart turned back to the screen and shook his head at the sight of the churning storm. "Let's hope we can get this done before that thing gets much bigger."


* * *


In the rush of preparation the time it took for the ship to arrive within warp-gate range of the asteroid seemed to pass in a matter of moments. Starlight and Tornado, having feared they would have been assumed hostile had they appeared from their time jump fully armed, were given their choice of weapons from the ship's small armory. The smaller Starlight chose one of Trixter's lightweight sonic concussion guns, while Tornado, revealing that his claw-hand doubled as a missle launcher, took a handful of explosive-tipped missles in addition to a more practical laser rifle. Lube suited up and, with his usual air of resignation, joined with his Autobot partner. As Air Raid continued talking to High Beam, Trixter handed out the signal boxes that would allow the individual team members to open warp gates back to the ship, noting with irrational annoyance that Starlight had taken one of her guns. By the time Trixter eased the ship into place several miles above the irregular, pockmarked surface of the asteroid everyone was ready to go. One by one she instructed the computer to open warp gates for them, Air Raid and Slapdash first by following High Beam's radio transmission, then the time travellers based on Starlight's instructions.

Upstart was the last to leave. Trixter looked back over her shoulder at him as the bright pink swirl of light that was the warp gate opened in the center of the bridge. Their eyes locked. He hesitated for a moment, and she saw in his face a painful uncertainty. "Take care of yourself," he said softly, then, decisively, stepped through the gate.

"You too," Trixter answered a second too late. She watched the shimmer in the air left behind by the gate as it faded, confused by this unaccustomed seriousness. Then, with a shrug to herself, she turned back to the controls, opened a hip compartment, took out the oversized Game Boy she had fashioned for herself in her spare time, and started playing Pokemon. There'd be time to worry about Upstart later.


* * *


Air Raid and Slapdash stepped through their warp gates onto the sterile grey surface of the asteroid. Lit by the harsh, cold light of distant Alpha Centauri, the ruins of the battle cruiser loomed over them like something unspeakably ancient. The entire lower level of the vessel had collapsed, bringing the door to the bridge only a few meters above ground level. Air Raid flew up to the sealed door and keyed in the access code that High Beam had given him. A light on the keypad blinked in acceptance and he pulled the door open, revealing the wreckage of the ship's bridge. In the minimal gravity much of the smaller debris drifted aimlessly between the larger pillars and beams that had obviously fallen while the ship's gravity was still functioning. The Aerialbot tried not to look too close at any of the wreckage, knowing that some of it might well have been alive just a few hours before. He turned on the magnets in his feet to help negate the effects of the low gravity and took a tentative step inside, checking the stability of the floor with his foot. "High Beam?"

A bright green bit of wreckage on the other side of the room seperated from the rest and stood up. Air Raid hadn't appreciated from his distorted radio transmission just how badly the little Gobot was injured. Although it didn't look like his life was in immediate danger, the entire right side of his body was a mess of crumpled and torn metal. His arm on that side hung limp and useless, crushed almost beyond recognition. One dark blue over-optic lens had been shattered, leaving shards sticking out in a ring around his smokey-grey eye. As he stood to approach his rescuer Air Raid noticed him moving with a pronounced limp.

As Slapdash used the low gravity to propel himself up into the ship, Air Raid rushed to High Beam's side. "It's okay, don't try to stand if your leg's hurt," he warned, putting an arm around him to hold him up.

The Gobot shrugged off Air Raid's help, shaking his head. "Take care of Fireflight," he said weakly, gesturing to where he had been kneeling. "He's in worse shape than I am."

In the dim light it was only his bright red chestplate that made Fireflight discernable from the rest of the wreckage in the corner where he sat. He moved his head slightly as he noticed the voices around him. "Air Raid?" His own voice was little more than a whisper, but his fellow Aerialbot recognized it immediately.

"Don't move," Air Raid chided as he reached for the torch in his hip compartment. Loath as he was to do so, he had to get a better look at what shape Fireflight was in. "You need to save your energy." He braced himself as the light came on, but he still had to stifle a gasp. There was hardly an inch on his body- what was left of it- that wasn't dented or otherwise mangled. It was obvious from the way he was positioned that he wasn't sitting so much as just being held up by the wall. To his horror Air Raid realized that he couldn't have stood if he had wanted to- one leg had been severed at the knee, leaving a twisted mess of an upper leg protruding from his hip, and the other was simply crushed. His left shoulder spilled wires out of the hole where his arm had been attached, and more wires hung loosely from a massive gash across his chest. The sight of his fellow Aerialbot, and more importantly his friend, in such bad shape was almost more than he could stand.

As Air Raid knelt down beside him Fireflight managed a smile through the ruins of his face. "High Beam...said you were...coming... It's...nice...to see you...again..."

"I'd rather be seeing you in one piece, kid," Air Raid replied grimly. He looked up at High Beam, who was standing nearby, unconsciously holding his injured shoulder. "There's nothing we're gonna be able to do for him here. We'll have to take him up to our ship. Slapdash?" On the other side of the bridge the blue and yellow Powermaster looked up from the pile of rubble he had been examining with his own torch. "Go ahead and take High Beam up to the ship, then come back down here. Trix can patch him up. It's going to take both of us to get Fireflight out of here."


* * *


"Trix?" Slapdash called out as he stepped out of his warp gate onto the bridge of his own team's ship. He saw her sitting the the pilot's seat and took a step toward her as High Beam emerged from his own gate. "We need you to..."

Not so much as turning around, Trixter stuck out her hand, index finger raised. "Wait...wait...Ha!" Her hand turned into a triumphant fist. "Oh yeah! I got your almost-vaguely-kitty-like ass now, Abra! Hell yeah!"

Slapdash's entire demeanor changed as if a switch had been flipped. "Trixter..." he said sternly.

"Just a sec, Lube, I gotta save...wait...okay, done." She turned around, setting the device she had been holding in her other hand down on her control board. "Now what do you need me to do?"

"First, you need to send us back down," he said, still under the Nebulan's control, "then you need to perform whatever first aid's appropriate on High Beam here. Incidentally...High Beam, this is Trixter. She's our pilot and the closest thing we have to a medic on this team."

Trixter gave a friendly smile and wave to the battered Gobot. "Nice to meet you." She frowned and turned back to Slapdash. "Oh. How's Fireflight?" she asked, finally snapping the rest of the way back to reality.

Slapdash- or rather, Lube- shook his head solemnly. "Personally, I don't think he's going to make it back to Earth," he said quietly.

"Ouch... Well, get him up here and I'll do what I can for him. And in the meantime, Lube, you should probably give Slapdash's body back to him. You're gonna give the poor guy a complex."


* * *


"This way!" Starlight shouted over the din of laser fire, consulting a handheld mapping device as Upstart and Tornado fought off a small group of the ubiquitous green and white Cybertronians they had literally run into at a T-junction in the corridor. She took off back the way they had come and the two other Autobots followed, firing behind them as they ran. Upstart had the satisfaction of seeing one of his shots hit home and drop one of the Cybertronian soldiers to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut before turning another corner that they had passed up before. It seemed to him that it was getting harder to think the further into the base they went. The electrical cloud surrounding the time storm had been causing a buzzing in his head since they had come out of the warp gates, and it only seemed to be getting worse. He thanked Primus that the research scouter from Starlight and Tornado's timeline had had the foresight to download what files they could from the Cybertronian base's main computer before it was completely engulfed in the storm, giving them amongst other resources a detailed map of the base. They would have been lost otherwise. Every corridor looked just like the last one: four walls of featureless, sterile, gleaming metal. One hundred percent research base, and one hundred percent dull to Upstart. "Are we at least getting close?" he called as they turned another corner into another corridor that looked exactly like all the ones before.

"Not much further now," the red and white time traveller called back over her shoulder. "It'd help if we didn't have to keep taking these detours." As if to drive her point home they turned yet another corner into another corridor blocked by another pocket of the remainder of the base's staff. They pulled back and once again used the corner for cover, sniping at the four Cybertronians as Starlight checked her map. "No good," she cried. "There's no other route. We either go this way or go back."

As if on cue Tornado took one of the missles out of its storage slot on his wing. "Stand back," he told Upstart, loading the missle into his claw. The big black robot stepped out from around the corner and fired into the cluster of Cybertronians. As the missle left his claw a laser blast tore through his upper arm. He clutched at it, optics narrowing at the pain, then realized his mistake a split-second too late as the missle's detonation threw him back against the wall.

"Tornado!" Starlight cried out, rushing to his side. Upstart stayed back as Tornado got shakily to his feet. The cockpit on his chest had been shattered by the explosion but otherwise he was unhurt. "Come on," Starlight urged, gingerly stepping over the remains of the Cybertronian soldiers as she proceeded down the hall. "Just a little further..."

Upstart shook his head as they ran, trying to shake the buzzing sensation that had suddenly gotten even more intense. "Starlight?" he called, starting to stumble as it began interfering with his coordination.

"C'mon, it's just down this hall," she called back to him encouragingly, though she herself had begun to slow down. She came to the T-junction she had been referring to and stopped, suddenly bathed in blue light. Her jaw dropped. "Oh slag..."

It only took Upstart a matter of seconds to catch up with her. "What is...bloody hell..." He trailed off as he looked down the hallway that was blocked about hundred meters down its length by a wall of blue, cloudy light- the time storm. "It's...it's too late, isn't it?"


* * *


The warp gate onto the bridge of Beta-5's ship was just closing behind Air Raid, Slapdash, and the injured Fireflight when Starlight's message came through. "Trixter! If you're listening, please respond!"

Trixter ran back to her controls from where she had been kneeling beside Fireflight at the back of the bridge, trying to figure out if there was anything at all that could be done for him. As High Beam, his wrecked arm in a sling, watched from Air Raid's usual position Trixter keyed the visual up to the main screen. "I'm here, Starlight. What's happening?"

The bridge fell silent as all attention turned to the temporal physicist. The picture was staticky with distortion from the time storm, but still they could see her shake her head sadly. "We're too late."

"Waitaminute, what do you mean?" Trixter asked, starting to get decidedly concerned.

"The machine that's causing this, that was supposed to control it...the part of the building it's in has been swallowed by the storm. We can't get to it!"

"Is there anything we can do from up here?"

"Did you bring any orbit-to-ground missiles? Anything that could blow up the base itself?"

Trixter shook her head, suddenly seriously regretting not having loaded up the ship better for this trip. She hadn't thought the fate of the universe was going to depend on it! "I didn't think we'd need any! All we're armed with right now is the usual space-battle fare. No big missiles. Can't you set the computers there to self-destruct?"

"We could, but there are still a few Cybertronians running around down here. They'd just shut it off. We'd have to leave someone down here to guard the main control room, and there's a chance there'd be too much distortion from the storm to open a warp gate anywhere near it in the time it'd take us to get clear."

A harsh, quiet voice piped up from behind her. "I'll do it."

Trixter and High Beam turned in unison to find Fireflight attempting to sit up against the back wall. On either side of him Slapdash and Air Raid were trying to get him to lie back down, but he shook them off. "You...you can't!" Air Raid cried.

Trixter turned back to the radio for a moment. "Hang on, we might have a volunteer," she said grimly.

Fireflight looked up at his fellow Aerialbot sadly, summoning all his remaining strength to plead his case. "I'm dying...'Raid. We both know...I'm not going to make it...back to Earth. You just don't...want to admit it. If there's too much...distortion for a...warp gate, it's no...big loss." He managed to shift most of his weight off his remaining hand and used it to take Air Raid's. "This way...I can do some good...before I go. You've always looked out for me...you and the...other Aerialbots. It's time I returned the favor."


* * *


It only took a matter of minutes for Air Raid and Slapdash, with the mood of a funeral procession, to carry Fireflight through another warp gate into the main control room of the Cybertronian base. While Upstart and Tornado returned to the ship, the latter in an even quieter mood then usual, Starlight used the information taken from the base's computer in her own timeline to set the reactors to overload approximately ten minutes from when the command was given.

As she turned away from the computer a countdown began over the PA system, the numbers being announced by a deep, slightly intimidating voice. "Are you ready?" she asked Fireflight quietly.

The Aerialbot hefted the gun Upstart had left with him in his good hand. "I just have to keep...any of those green buggers...from getting in here and shutting that...down, right?"

Starlight nodded. She looked at him solemnly. "You'll be missed."

He grinned humorlessly. "I'll be missed...either way."

"I know. I'm not trying to talk you out of it. I just...thought you should know. It was one of the things that upset Tornado the most..."

"Tornado?"

Without answering him, she hugged him, gently, then took out her signal box. She gave him one last silent glance over her shoulder before stepping through the gate.


* * *


Out of some tiny last traces of hope they decided to keep the ship within warp gate range of the asteroid until the countdown, duplicated on a chronometer embedded in Starlight's wrist, had finished. The storm had grown visably as they watched, covering more and more of the base. At two minutes before detonation the ship's computer picked up a weak radio signal from the base. Trixter routed it to the main monitor. It was more distorted than even Starlight's previous one had been, but they could still make out Fireflight's scarred face, looking almost serene. Air Raid stood up at the sight, eyes wide and mouth open slightly. "This is Fireflight...making one last call-out...to team Beta-5...and everyone else. My signal box doesn't seem to be...working...this close to the storm, so I guess...I'm stuck here. I've managed to take out...a few Cybertronians who were trying...to break in here, so I guess...I'm doing my job. High Beam...I just wanted to thank you...for taking care of me after...the crash. I hope you can find another team...as good as ours was." He paused for a moment, trying to gather just a little more strength. "Air Raid...tell Skydive and Silverbolt...I'm sorry I didn't check in on them more. Maybe someday...we'll all see each other...again." He smiled weakly. "But at least...I'll have Slingshot...to keep me company..." He coughed, shuddering, then put his hand to the screen. Air Raid reached up to the monitor and put his own hand against Fireflight's. "Until then...goodbye, brother."

"Goodbye, brother," Air Raid whispered in reply as the signal went dead. He remained frozen, staring at the screen, as the monitor automatically switched back to the asteroid just as the chain reaction began tearing the base apart. As Upstart and Slapdash watched the explosions on the screen in solemn silence, Trixter reached over and put her arms comfortingly around Air Raid, who began sobbing silently against her shoulder. She glanced around the bridge, noticing that High Beam had curled up on the floor, knees to his battered chest, and was staring emptily at the back of her chair. And then she saw, oddly enough, that Starlight was comforting Tornado, who, standing against the back wall as usual, had his optics closed and his head down in what was the biggest display of emotion she had seen from him.

And then, most importantly, came Lube's announcement from the scanner station: "It worked! The temporal energy is dissipating!"


* * *


Trixter lifted the trapdoor to the roof and looked around. A thin layer of the ever-present snow surrounded the door, betraying the last traces of a trail of footprints that as she watched were even further obscured by the fluffy white flakes falling en masse from the dark, starless night sky. She pulled herself up onto the roof and, with the aid of the bright lights glaring from the parts of the base still under construction, followed the trail to where Air Raid sat near the edge. "'Raid?" she said softly, putting a hand on his shoulder. "I...I know it'd be stupid to ask if you're okay... Would you like to talk? Or should I just leave you alone for a bit?"

The Aerialbot spoke without looking up. "Does it ever get any easier?"

Trixter laughed, a short, sharp, humorless sound. "I'm not that much older than you, but if it does it takes a lot longer than the few extra years I've been doing it." She shook her head as she sat down next to him. "I don't think you ever get used to losing your friends. Not your close ones. And I don't think it ever really stops hurting completely," she added solemnly. "There'll always be a little place inside you that starts hurting again whenever you think of all the fun stuff you used to do together. I know it still hurts me when I think about some of the good friends I've lost, even from way back when I was on Cybertron."

Air Raid sighed. "Actually, I think I like it better that way. Better to hurt than let your friends be forgotten."

"I agree completely." Together they looked out over the snow-covered landscape. "So have you told Skydive and Silverbolt?"

"I told Skydive. He...took it as well as could be expected, really. He's upset, but he didn't go insane or anything. I haven't gotten ahold of Silverbolt yet. His team's out somewhere." He paused, brushing off some of the snow that had accumulated on his shoulders. "Why did you come up here instead of going to see the time travellers off?"

"Honestly, I thought maybe you needed some company. And I didn't wanna have to deal with stupid Upstart getting all mushy over Starlight," she grinned. "I know you Aerialbots were really close-knit, but you're part of our team, too. And we do have to look out for each other. I know it's upsetting to watch your old team fall apart, but you still have us. You'll always have someone watching your back."

"Well, thanks. I do appreciate it."

"It's no problem," she smiled. "That's what teammates are for."


THE END

5:06AM 2/14/00


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