CHAPTER 13
And then, everything was quiet.
It was like the downtime between missions. Once the stress and simplicity of combat was gone, there was just an interminable lull that could end at any given second. A numbing mix of boredom and anticipation, a slow wait for the next blow to come. It was almost enough to make Jack think it was over. But that wasn’t the case. Somewhere out there, Blackout and Soundwave were planning their next moves.
On the first day, Saturday, not much happened. Maggie’s friend came and got the trailer, and Arcee spent it somnolent in the garage. Jack asked Maggie what they had talked about, and she said it was all behind doctor-patient confidentiality.
On Sunday, Arcee was back to her usual acerbic self. With her, Jack headed back over to his family home. He didn’t stay long, given how desolate it felt without his mother or the birds, but he did grab his phone. That, and a change of clothes. Yes, Ravage could apparently detect his phone, but that didn’t matter now.
With the assistance of a second Autobot, they’d killed Frenzy and sent a message into space. Soundwave would be pointing every sensor, scanner, and optic he had at Los Angeles now. More to the point, they had to keep in contact with Sam and Bumblebee, and not having a phone was more of a hindrance than not. All they could do was assume that Soundwave was listening to every call they made.
“So, what, are we going to talk in code?” Sam asked, sitting on a bench in Maggie’s garage. Bumblebee took up most of the space, and he wasn’t even in his humanoid form.
“I don’t think we need to go that far,” Jack replied. “If these guys have access to the Internet, then they probably know a lot of our radio calls and brevity codes.”
“‘That’s a 10-4, pardner,’” Bumblebee quoted.
“See?” Jack continued. “We’d need to come up with something novel, and that’s more trouble than it’s worth.”
“And Soundwave is quite experienced at cracking codes,” Arcee put in.
“Which means we’ll just need to do most of our discussions in person.”
“Okay,” Sam said, and then frowned. “Can he listen in through our phones? Like, even when we’re not calling anyone? I think I saw that in a movie once.”
“I think I’d have to run that past Glen,” Jack said. And who knew what rabbit hole that’d lead them down. The fact that Glen’s knowledge of the weird side of history was seemingly increasingly relevant was still disturbing.
“I’m surprised he’s not here,” Maggie said.
“I was just thinking that.”
“Like, we’ll break his brain when we tell him that the journal was covered in alien writing.”
“Maybe it was already broken?” Arcee asked.
“Arcee!” Jack said, glancing at her.
“What? I’m not saying it isn’t useful.”
Bumblebee’s radio crackled. “‘The truth is out there, Scully.’”
Sam bent down and stared through Bumblebee’s driver-side window. “My God, Bee. Just how much TV do you watch?”
“‘I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.’”
Maggie shook her head. “How is this happening in my garage?”
Jack glanced at Arcee. He hoped that she shared his bemusement, but headlights weren’t anything like eyes.
“So, is there anything else, or can Bee and I go get our Sunday on?” Sam asked.
Jack blinked. “Your Sunday on?”
“Yeah. Bee and I were going to take a drive up to Mount Pinos. Y’know, show him the sights. Maybe go off-road.”
“That’s, like, two hours away.”
“More like an hour and a half.” Sam shrugged. “Wanna come with?”
“Are we sure that’s a good idea?”
“Dude, we stomped the Decepticons the last time they showed up.”
Arcee tilted her mirrors. It felt like the motorcycle equivalent of arching her eyebrows. “I’m sorry, ‘we’?”
Sam shrugged again. “We’re all Team Autobot here, right? All for one and one for all?”
Jack opened his mouth to say something, then closed it. “Okay,” he said, finally. “Might as well. Arcee?”
“Sure,” she replied. “It’s not like I’m doing anything else.”
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Twenty minutes later, they were on the road. Maggie hadn’t elected to come with them. Jack figured she wanted some peace and quiet. He’d make this all up to her. Somehow.
They left the suburbs of Los Angeles behind, burning north-west on the I-5. Jack on Arcee, Sam with Bumblebee. Coupe leading, motorcycle following. Just too humans and their alien robot buddies, out for a Sunday drive. They were about twenty minutes past Santa Clarita when Arcee spoke up.
“Bee says that Sam wants to make a wager. Twenty dollars. She says, and I quote, that her Autobot can beat your Autobot to Pyramid Lake.”
Jack frowned. “She wants to race?”
“It appears so, yes.”
“Right here?”
“Very perceptive, soldier boy.”
“Right now? But there’s other cars... There could be highway patrol guys around the next bend.”
He thought Arcee would have his back. Instead, she said: “Maybe, and they’d never catch us.”
Jack tightened his grip on Arcee’s handlebars, and closed his eyes. Disconcerting, given the speeds they were already traveling at. It was such a bad idea. Completely irresponsible, and yet...
“Let’s do it, Arcee. Tell Bumblebee, it’s on.”
“Oh, he’ll get the message,” Arcee replied, and he heard the roar of her engine pitch upward. “Watch this.”
Arcee veered left, into the next lane, and accelerated—drew up alongside Bumblebee. Jack turned his head, and there was Sam, in the driver’s seat, hands behind her head and eying him with a smug smile. She said something which Jack couldn’t possibly hope to hear. Had to be: look, no hands!
Bumblebee edged ahead. The green hills whipped by, faster and faster. Road signs went from far to readable and past him before he had time to comprehend them. Jack didn’t dare look down at Arcee’s speedometer. That could remain a known unknown. Fast was enough he felt he needed to know. But was this smart, he thought, to let Arcee push herself like this?
He had to trust her. She had to know her limits better than he did.
“I think we’re done playing around,” Arcee said. “Nice try, 127. Hold on!”
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And she floored it. She caught up to Bumblebee in seconds, and then outpaced him—and the gap widened further still, the pitch of her engine rising steadily. Jack didn’t dare look back, because the animal part of his brain was insisting that if he did anything beyond cling to the handlebars and keep his eyes ahead, then he’d experience a brief moment of flying before eating the highway asphalt.
Arcee held her lead for miles. When he dared look back, he couldn’t see Bumblebee.
“Arcee!” Jack called. “I think we’ve proven the point!”
“You’d think so!” And she was laughing—laughing! “But it’s one thing to prove the point, and another to make them cry!”
He might’ve been laughing, too.
When they reached Pyramid Lake, Arcee pulled onto the shoulder and waited. It didn’t take as long as Jack thought for Bumblebee to come down the highway. Arcee slipped back into the rear position, the message clear: she was letting him lead the way.
It was really something. Jack had never thought a motorcycle could be smug before.
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Mount Pinos was true to its name. There was no shortage of pine trees as the four of them took the long, winding rod that led up to the peak of the mountain. Eventually, the road terminated in a parking lot. If they wanted to go any further, then it’d be by foot. A sign read: PARKED VEHICLES MUST HAVE A VALID RECREATION PASS.
“Think that’ll be a problem?” Sam asked, leaning out Bumblebee’s window.
“I don’t know,” Jack replied. “A really technical interpretation would insist we’re fine... providing we never leave our vehicles parked.”
“‘I’m here taking a stroll, stretching my legs,’” Bumblebee said.
“I mean, the trees are pretty thick,” Sam said, thoughtful. “I don’t see many other cars around. And if anyone saw you, they’d just think you’re a big yellow sasquatch.”
“Sasquatch?” Arcee asked.
“I’ll explain later,” Jack said. “Sam, I don’t think this is the best—”
She’d already hopped out, and Bumblebee double-timed everything, the pair taking off into the woods.
“—idea,” he finished, lamely. He glanced down at Arcee. “Well, now what?”
“I’m not going to wait here. Let’s go off-road for a bit.”
“Well,” Jack said. “You’re the boss.”
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Once they were well within the trees, and far enough from any hiking trails that Jack had noticed, Arcee emerged from her motorcycle mode with a quick somersault. She rolled her neck left and right then turned a circle, like she was taking it all in. They walked for a time. No direction, no plan.
“Hey,” Jack said. “What’s it like? The transformation thing.”
“It’s like using every part of your body at once. I’m not sure it is possible for you to comprehend. Your form is rather immutable.”
“Huh,” Jack said, and thought for a moment. “It sounds a little like stretching, really. But, like, all the muscles and ligaments at the same time. Kicks up the metabolism, gets your body ready to move. Something like that?”
“Apt, I suppose.”
They walked for a little longer and emerged from the woods onto a steep, craggy slope. Not quite a cliff, but not far from it. Jack perched himself on a rocky outcropping. Arcee took a seat on the ground next to him, the afternoon sun glimmering on her plating. Part of him, even now, expected her to vanish when he looked away from her.
“Hey, Arcee,” he began. “I’ve been wondering. What’re you doing on Earth?”
“Defending your planet from the Decepticons,” she replied. “I thought it was obvious.”
“No, I get that. I mean, how’d you end up here? Why Earth, of all the planets in the galaxy?”
Arcee looked left, and then right. The components and mechanics in her neck shifted quietly. Her expression, as much as he could read it, had gone distant and thoughtful.
“Your planet is beautiful,” she said. “A very different form of beauty than Cybertron, but beautiful all the same. The way it functions as a whole system, drawing energy from your star, distributing it across such an interconnected web of life... Would it shock you, Sergeant, to learn that I was a scientist? Before the war.”
It would. It did. Jack glanced at her, and felt himself chuckled. Her electric-blue optics remained far away from him.
“It would,” she said. “I thought it might.”
“I’m sorry,” Jack said. But the thought of it...
“I just... I just can’t imagine you shaking vials and wearing a white lab coat or whatever, Arcee.”
“Then that should tell you just how much this war has taken from us.”
Jack just nodded. A scientist. Was it really that much of a shock? Frenzy and Rumble had been construction workers. Ravage had been some kind of robotic animal. But it was startling, to imagine these giant robots with a vast society of their own.
He asked, “What kind of science did you do?”
“Archaeology,” Arcee replied. “It’s why I can read High Cybertronian. I was part of Sentinel Prime’s team. We excavated the Temple of Simfur, just after the Thetacon truce. Not that any of it means anything to you.”
“It means a little bit, Arcee. Thanks for telling me.” Jack looked up, watched the clouds roll overhead. “So, is that why you’re here? You find our little dirt ball interesting?”
“It isn’t a dirt ball,” she countered, almost a reprimand. “It’s a blue planet, with vast seas. But it isn’t why I arrived. It’s why I stayed.”
Jack glanced at her. “What?”
“Ever since the war and the loss of the AllSpark, my entire race has been looking to recover it. To use its incredible power to restore life to our world. Megatron would use its power to dominate the universe. He would do anything to take control of it.”
“So, he must’ve been looking for it, too...” Jack said, nodding to himself. “What can this AllSpark do?”
“Anything,” Arcee replied. “It’s a miracle.”
Which, Jack felt, meant something coming from a machine who struck him as pretty miraculous herself.
They sat for a time, not saying anything. The wind whistled through the trees. The sun crept down toward the horizon.
“I’ve always worked best on my own,” Arcee said. “Archaeology was perfect for me, really. There was so much of Cybertron to see. So much ancient history. Then, the war. I didn’t wish to fight and, so, became a scout. When the AllSpark was lost, I was one of the best suited to finding it.”
She sat forwards, metal sliding against metal, and rested her arms on her knees. “We knew it was unlikely to ever find it again. But I trusted that Primus would guide us. The AllSpark was his gift to us. He would ensure we found it again. And then, as I was traveling through your local interstellar cloud, I detected a signal from your star system. From this planet. I thought it had to be the AllSpark. So far from Cybertron, what else could it have been? But now...”
Jack nodded. “You think it was Megatron.”
“Perhaps,” Arcee said, in a tone that meant yes. “Either way, I have not detected it again. I spent some time on your planet, hiding in plain sight, hoping to sense it again. I knew, eventually, that I had to leave. To move on. To continue the search, continue the war. But...”
“You stayed.”
“I stayed,” Arcee replied, nodding. “And, in so doing, betrayed my comrades and my cause and my faith.”
She hadn’t moved. Jack looked her over—the tribal glyphs, the scratches and scars on her armored form. How long had she been fighting? Long enough to survive. To turn her scientific mind to the precise application of violence.
To become very good at it.
“Arcee. Hey. Don’t beat yourself up over this. Take it from me.”
“Cliffjumper died for me. And I repaid his sacrifice by hiding on the first planet I could. What is that except the most selfish kind of cowardice?”
He had no idea what else to say. But he understood the sense of responsibility, and the terrible twisted knot it became when mixed with grief. It’d always been the watchword of the Darby household—responsibility. Responsibility to his family and then his mother. To his schoolwork, to his first job at that burger joint...
It’d metastasized into responsibility toward his country. But he’d joined the military of his own free will. He looked down at the scars it’d left him with, the one across his hand. He couldn’t imagine having no other choice, going from science to war, from loving uncovering the past of your world to seeing the loss of its future.
And then, in the end, it was all for nothing. Her planet in ruins, the AllSpark gone, her comrades dead, and the war spreading out across the galaxy like the seeds of a malignant dandelion...
“Arcee,” he began, “when I went through Ranger School—which was funny, because we did some of it down at Camp Darby, and no one ever let me hear the end of it—I had to learn this creed. I won’t bore you with the whole thing, but in the middle it says: ‘Never shall I fail my comrades.’ But I did, Arcee. I did fail them. All of them.”
She turned to look at him. He heard it more than he saw it. His attention was on the horizon as the world fell away, and Blackout was there, with his tectonic footsteps and his unimaginable firepower.
“I failed every single one of them, Arcee. Lennox, Epps, Fig... So many people. I can’t even remember what happened. I just remember Epps running past, shouting that we were under attack. And it was like... under attack by what? Who’d be stupid enough to pick a fight with us on our own turf? Then I just... remember waking up under one of the Abrams’, passing in and out of consciousness, pinned under the barrel, unable to do anything but lie there and scream...
“They found me three days after the attack. All I remember is the sunburn. I told them the truth about what I saw, and they looked at me like I was broken. Delirious from the dehydration and the grief. They told me it couldn’t be a ‘giant walking helicopter.’ And it wasn’t even a lie, because no one believed anything like you even existed.
“I tell myself that there was nothing I could’ve possibly done. I mean, you tell me the same thing. But maybe there was, Arcee. Maybe I could’ve saved at least one person. A single person. Just one.”
He reached up and pressed his fingers against his closed eyes. God, he wasn’t about to cry in front of Arcee. She remained silent. Probably pretending she didn’t see it.
“My counselor, he said that grief isn’t just about what happened, but what now won’t happen. I don’t know Cliffjumper. But I feel like he wouldn’t want you to have lived for him just to die for someone else. If he knew who you were, he’d want you to do what made you happy. Even if that’s, I don’t know...”
He looked around, trying to find something. A bright orange butterfly alighted on Arcee’s shoulder guard. “Making a long list of Earth’s butterflies or whatever.” It fluttered away as she looked at it, and then back to him.
“That isn’t what archaeologists do, Jack,” she replied, with what might’ve been a smile. “And...” She chuckled. “You would’ve hated Cliffjumper. He was loud. And annoyingly zealous.”
“You’re slipping.” He grinned back at her, and pressed a playful punch to her forearm. “You just called me Jack.”
Her browplates rose, like she hadn’t realized it. “Huh. So I did. Well, soldier boy, don’t go getting any ideas.”
But, just for a second, he might’ve been.