I stepped out of the OB van and saw all the destruction. The reports were right. It was that fucking statue again. My cameraman had already shot his B roll and had it loaded up and ready to go.
“Okay, guys,” I said to my people, “do you think it’s good to set up over here?”
My producer and cameraman agreed and set up. I picked up the hand mirror and touched up my make-up. The deal with the network was that, during my short time remaining with my station, I was to do as many science-oriented pieces I could, so that the transition into the network’s science correspondent would be logical and seamless. And this one was one of those.
Our contacts in the military said this was connected to that Venus de Milo statue that we encountered before that started all of this. We thought that it had been killed, but apparently it wasn’t. Now it was tearing up this town.
“We’re ready, Susan,” my cameraman said.
I nodded and composed myself. I waited for him to finish his countdown and I started speaking.
“Thank you, Scott,” I said crisply, acknowledging the handoff from the network news anchorman. “This is Susan Blu, and I am at the scene of the destruction that had been visited upon this small Maryland town.
“As you can see, the damage is quite widespread, and we are told that it’s due to another of those robotic entities that we have come to know as the Decepticons. In recent years, the Autobots have been able to reduce these attacks to a minimum but there are still a few of them on occasion. It is too bad that this small community has to be the one to bear the brunt of this newest attack.”
The producer signaled, which meant that the B roll footage was running now. I continued with my spiel.
“You see the destruction in the town’s main square caused by one single Decepticon. As soon as the Autobots detected the attack they dispatched one of their own and, after a pitched battle, the Decepticon was put down; the attack is over.”
After the short, fifteen-second clip, the camera then switched back to me.
“We’ll look for some bystanders that were witness to the battle.”
My producer pointed to a bunch of kids near the decimated bus station, and I went there.
“Excuse me, guys,” I said, and some of them recognized me.
“Hey, it’s Susan Blu from the news!”
I smiled and nodded.
“I just wanted to ask if you witnessed what happened here.”
And they gave me a blow-by-blow of what happened. One of the kids was an Autobot fanatic and knew most of the Autobots and Decepticons by name, and he said that these were new ones.
“They are?” I said. “Can you describe these new Autobots and Decepticons?”
“Well, the Decepticon was a small one. About eight or nine feet high. About the size of Wheelie. But it didn’t look like any Decepticon. It actually looked like a statue - one of those Greek statues that you see in museums.”
“Other than that, what else can you say about it?”
“Well nothing much. It just went crazy and started trashing everything. Sort of like Megatron on steroids. It was just crazy-bad.”
I nodded. “Was there anyone hurt?”
“Oh, yeah. One of the things that the Decepticon trashed was this bus full of passengers. The police have rescued them by now, but I’m sure a lot of them got hurt.”
“Yeah, yeah,” his friend said. “And there were people who were out on the street that got hit by the stuff that bitch was throwing.”
“Throwing?”
“Oh, yeah. Like cars and motorcycles. It even tore down a street light and was waving it around like a baseball bat.”
“Were you guys hurt?”
“Oh, no. We were able to hide behind that building over there.” He pointed to a red brick building, which turned out to be the town’s fire station.
“So, how about the Autobot,” I asked. “Can you describe it? Was it any Autobot you knew?”
“Oh, this was a new one, too,” the first one, the Autobot fanatic, said. “This one was a girl Autobot.”
“Yeah!” his friend said, and they high-fived each other.
“So what did it look like?”
“This one wasn’t like any of the other Autobots. Even the current girl Autobots. You know? Like Chromia or Elita One? This one looked like a girl. I mean a human girl.”
“She looked like some hottie supermodel girl!” his friend interjected. “She’s super, super sexy, and wearing super-high heels and a pink swimsuit.”
“But she had on an ammo belt, with a rifle and a knife. She be a super-badass hottie!”
“Except she was, like, all shiny silver and everything.”
“Yeah!”
I now had an inkling of who this “new Autobot” was.
“So,” I asked, “did this Autobot come in with another one? A yellow Volkswagen Autobot?”
“A Volkswagen Autobot?” he asked. “There’s no Volkswagen Autobot! And, no, this girl Autobot flew in by herself using jets. It was great!”
Jet boots? That was definitely not RC.
“Anyway, they started whaling on each other, and the girl Autobot finished off the Decepticon with a built in rocket gun. That rocket gun sure packed a wallop! It sounded like bombs going off, and she decimated the Decepticon!”
Rocket gun, huh? Definitely not RC.
-----
By the time we finished our piece, the military had arrived. They started cordoning off everything and herding people away. A few of the soldiers came to us and asked us to move away. I showed them the white identification card that RC gave me. After studying it for a moment, they saluted me, and left us alone. Cool.
So we finished our piece and wrapped everything up. My producer had all our things packed up in ten minutes. When were ready to leave, I asked to be left. My producer reminded me that I had the six o'clock news to anchor but I promised I’d be back in plenty of time for that.
I looked around and marveled at the level of devastation around me. It reminded me of that abortive lunch date I'd had with Ronnie, what felt like a lifetime ago. Except this one was so much worse.
There were no bodies around, but I did see the telltale blood spatters and marks all over. I guess they had already taken all of the hurt and wounded to the hospitals. As to the dead – I wouldn’t know about that.
I noticed that there was a commotion. Many of the soldiers had congregated on the far side of the mall or park. I jogged over and noticed that all of them were looking over to a figure about fifty feet away. By the glint of shiny metal, I guess it was the Autobot that the kids were talking about, but what was it doing? No one was making a move to approach the Autobot but, since most people knew what Autobots and Decepticons were and what they could do, I could understand why.
A soldier tried to stop me but I showed him my ID again, and he let me through.
I peered forward and… it looked like RC.
I ran towards her and, yes, it was RC. She looked like her robot self - shiny, chrome skin, bright silver hair, and jointed plates covering her body. But she was practically naked – she was only wearing a semi-transparent pink swimsuit.
She was sitting on the ground cradling the broken, non-moving body of the Venus de Milo statue.
“RC!” I called, and she looked up. The sunlight glinted off her face, and off the tears that were on her cheeks. It broke my heart a bit to see her crying.
I kneeled down in the dirt and gave her a hug around the neck.
“What’s wrong, RC? Are you hurt.”
“No. No, I’m not… I’m not…” Oh, RC…
I looked at the figure she was cradling.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
I hugged her again. “It’s not your fault, RC. If you didn’t finish her off, she’d have hurt more people. It was your duty. It’s not your fault.”
“I know, Suzy. But…”
“No buts, RC. You did the only thing you could. You did good.”
She hugged me so tightly, I couldn’t breathe. But I didn’t complain. She needed this, and I’d give anything for my love.
After a while, she loosened her grip. I could breathe again, but tried to act normally.
She pulled back and looked at me. “Thank you, Suzy. I love you.” She leaned forward and gave me a small, chaste kiss. I would have thought her metal lips and face would have been cold, but they actually felt silky and warm.
I wiped the tears from her cheeks. “I love you, too.”
“Okay,” she sniffed. “I need to get back to Fort Lewis, now. You need to step back, honey.”
I didn’t understand why, but I complied. She gestured for me to move back some more, and I did.
She then stood up, with the Venus de Milo body in her arms.
I noticed that she was wearing wedge-heeled pumps. What looked to be five-inch wedges. It made her stand in a sexy way. And with her suit, I could understand why the kids we interviewed were so taken by her.
“See you later, Suzy,” she said.
In a moment, fire and smoke came out of the bottoms of RC’s wedge heels, and she started to climb up into the sky. When she was about two hundred feet up, she did something and, like a jet fighter going into afterburner, her jets exploded in a stronger exhaust and she flew across the sky, towards what I knew was towards Washington, and Fort Lewis.
“Wow,” an army officer beside me said.
I giggled. “Yeah. Wow.”
“You know her, Ma’am?” he asked.
“Sorry, Lieutenant,” I said. “That’s classified.”
He took that at face value and just nodded.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I have to get to work now.”
I walked away, past the areas cordoned off by the military, and punched for an Uber taxi on my cellphone.
Pretty soon, the car arrived and I was able to get back to my office, with more than enough time to take care of my news program.
-----
The main piece on the local and network news programs was, of course, the latest Decepticon attack, and I introduced my segment from earlier today, but now cut to include new footage that the network shot, or bought from other news outlets and even from Twitter users and bloggers.
What they didn’t have, though, was my interview with the kids, and the illustrations that our graphic people made based on the kids’ descriptions as well as input from me. They used anime images, and images from the official website of the Louvre Museum as the basis for mockups of the robotic Venus de Milo and RC.
They were extremely accurate, if I may say so – especially the statue. In my piece, I conjectured that the new Decepticon model was a kind of Decepticon Pretender (I then had to explain what a Pretender was). As to its purpose, no one knew.
As for RC’s mockup, she was extremely sexy. My graphic guy explained that they used the main character from a Japanese cartoon movie called “Ghost in the Shell” as her basis. I didn’t bother to correct him but at the very least, if someone saw RC in either her Autobot or her normal form, she would never have connected her with the girl in the graphic.
As I explained to the guys, the Autobot girl was dressed in a swimsuit. They used a monokini as its basis, with large cutouts on the sides and back, and made it slightly translucent. They also put her in high-heeled wedges as I specified, and gave her an ammo belt and an M16 rifle. The graphic that they ended up was an extremely sexy, badass hottie.
In my piece, I said that the robot girl was a new Autobot. No one knew her name, or what her Autobot vehicle form was (which many Autobot fans were very interested in), but I said I was sure we’d see her again, if ever there were new Decepticon attacks.
My bosses were pleased with my news show in general, and with my piece in particular. My new network bosses were pleased as well, and asked me to have regular science or tech pieces every night, from then on.
I said that the piece I just did was hardly a tech piece, but they argued that it was about Autobots, so it qualified.
I shrugged at that.
-----
Later that night, when I was done for the day and back in my hotel, I tried to call up RC. I was relieved to find that she was okay. I took this with a grain of salt, but she sounded so much better, my worries were mostly washed away.
RC laughed at my news show, especially about the Autobot anime girl. I giggled with her, and asked her what she thought of her picture. She thought that she looked real good, but I countered that I preferred the real thing.
Anyway, I was so full of questions that RC had to laugh. She didn’t mind me asking, so I did.
The first thing I asked about was her robotic look, and she explained that she had now fully transitioned into her full Cybertronian self. Her robot look was actually her second form, just like the second vehicle form of the Autobots. She hastily explained that she could transform back to her normal human form at will, which, she explained, was her regular form.
That was great news.
Anyway, I then asked my second question, which had to do with her new ability to fly. RC explained that it was due to her new footwear. They weren’t just fancy high heels – they were Perceptor’s latest inventions, and it allowed RC to fire jets from their bottoms, which then allowed her to fly.
My next question was her swimsuit. Not that I was complaining, but I had to ask why. She explained the problem with the shredding. Perceptor therefore had to make a special outfit for her, but since he didn’t have enough for a full outfit, RC had to make do with a tiny little suit. I had to giggle at that.
RC mentioned that she had some problems with her hair – it seemed that the long hair was really distracting, and caused a lot of drag. I was vehemently opposed to her cutting her hair.
RC sighed. “How about we shelve the topic of my hair for now?” she said.
I said that I was excited to see her, and she said that the weekend was coming up..
“Okay,” I sighed. “I’ll see you then.”
-----
As soon as the ramp opened, I jumped out. I saw RC and Betty by the side of the runway. I ran over and jumped into RC’s arms.
When Betty tapped me on my shoulder, that was the first time I realized we had been standing there for a while and that people were staring.
I reluctantly let go and we went home.
That night, we got reacquainted again. I was sure we were pretty noisy, but Betty was pretty understanding. I didn’t get a lot of sleep that night. Not that I minded. Heehee.
I woke up a little late in the morning, but I found that RC was up already.
“Good morning, my love,” I said. “You’re up early.”
“Hey, Suzy baby,” she said. “Sorry about that. I have an appointment with Rodimus this morning.” She gave me a kiss. “Go back to bed. If you get hungry, I have breakfast on the dining table.”
“What’s going on?”
“One of the Autobot jets, Scattershot – he’s come down from the new moon base and he’s going to help us do some testing.”
“Testing? On what?”
“On me.”
“On you? What do you mean?”
“We’re gonna test me while in my augmented mode, especially my flight capabilities.”
“Well, in that case, I’m going, too.”
“No need, Suzy. You can stay and rest up…”
“Not on your life! I’m not gonna miss this! Just give me ten minutes for a quick shower and a cup of coffee.”
“Okay…”
I rushed into the bathroom, took a quick shower and got dressed right away. Nothing special – just denim shorts, sneakers and a long-sleeved plaid shirt that I tied around by the tails.
And we were off. Betty’s ride was as smooth and fast as ever, and we were soon at the main hangar by the airstrip.
There were a lot of people there, as well as several Autobots. There was one Autobot that I didn’t recognize; he was a big one – bigger than Rodimus, and mostly blue-colored with several red markings.
RC brought me over and introduced me to him.
“Scattershot, I’d like to introduce to you Susan Blu, my fiancée. Suzy, this is Scattershot, one of Sky Lynx’s high flyers.”
“Hello, Ma’am. Please to finally meet you.”
“Hello, Scattershot. I haven’t seen you before.”
“I apologize. Sky Lynx brought most of us who are hypersonic to the new moon project. He needed flyers because of the need to travel to the moon and back.”
“How is the project going?”
“It should be finished in a couple of months. Soon, NEST will have a base to help monitor the planet and identify any Decepticon-related activities.”
I nodded. “So what are you all doing here?”
“Good morning, Ms. Blu,” one of the officers approached me. I knew him to be one of RC’s people.
“Hey, Dave. Good morning.”
“We’re here to test RC’s flight capabilities and other abilities while in her augmented form.”
“So RC told me. How will you do that?”
“We’re going to attach some sensors to her, and track her while she does her thing.”
While we were chatting, RC went inside the hangar, and came out a minute later wearing nothing but her pink monokini and her high-heeled “jet boot” wedges.
All conversation stopped as they watched her come out. She was blushing all over.
“Hey, sexy,” I said, and giggled.
“Stop saying that,” she said.
“Sorry,” I said contritely. “So, you’re all set?”
“Yes.”
Dave, the officer beside her, attached some electrodes on her upper chest and put what looked like a bracelet around her right wrist. “Thanks, Dave.”
“Okay, people,” Dave called. “Move back. Give the Captain room.”
I reached up and gave her a kiss. “Good luck, RC.”
She nodded nervously and moved away.
“Okay, Captain,” Dave called. “Here we go. Get ready to transform in: five, four, three, two, one. Transform!”
RC closed her eyes and we heard the Autobot transformation sound coming from her. In moments, she was in her “augmented” robotic form.” The ruby part of her wedges started to glow.
Everyone clapped and cheered, and RC gave us a little wave.
“Okay, Captain. Scattershot – stand by. Captain, ready for flight in: five, four, three, two, one. Blast off!”
Smoke and fire started to come out of her jet boots and RC took to the air.
Everyone cheered as we saw her streaking across the sky.
“Go, RC!” someone yelled.
Moments later, Scattershot transformed into some kind of jet plane and took off to chase after RC.
We saw the two of them flying in formation side-by-side and their speed noticeably became faster. After a minute, we saw them coming back.
“Telemetry’s good. Velocity reads as three hundred miles per hour… four hundred… five hundred… six hundred… Mach one!”
A loud thunderclap rolled over us and saw the two racing away. “Wow!” someone exclaimed.
“Mach one point two,” Dave called the numbers as they changed on his panel. “One point four, point six, point eight… there she goes! Mach two!”
“RC, Scattershot,” Rodimus said, obviously communicating with them, “climb to forty thousand feet, and continue acceleration.
We heard them respond, and Dave confirmed.
“They are breaking angels twenty. Twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, and forty! Velocity now at Mach three point two.”
“We are reading you at forty thousand feet, and Mach three-plus,” Rodimus called. “Continue with the test flight at your discretion and report when able.”
“Mach four at angels ninety now, one hundred. Now Mach five at one hundred-fifty, two hundred, two hundred-fifty. Mach six, by God! Altitude now three hundred.
“Now past the Karman line at three-fifty. They are now two hundred miles away. There goes our telemetry data. Switching to satellite tracking.”
Dave pressed a few buttons, and his screen changed. “Satellite signal acquired. Targets now crossing the state boundary. Velocity now at six thousand miles per hour, six-five, seven, eight… Sub-orbital altitude now four hundred thousand feet. Seventy-six miles, Eighty! Altitude now eighty miles. Velocity at seven thousand, nine, twelve, sixteen… Velocity now at twenty thousand miles per hour!”
Everyone had now crowded around Dave. On it we could see a global map and a curving tracer line that was going up and down the face of that map. That was RC and Scattershot.
“Signal now holding steady at twenty thousand miles per hour, altitude at three hundred miles.”
“Base to RC and Scattershot,” Rodimus called. “We are reading you at three hundred miles and speed stable at twenty thousand. Are you under acceleration?”
We heard RC respond and said that they weren’t
“Copy that, RC. You and Scattershot are cleared to return to base at your convenience. Acknowledge.”
They acknowledged and, after a while, they were back.
Scattershot was the first to land, followed by RC. I raced to her, but RC held out a hand.
“Stop, Suzy! My skin is still too hot from the friction.”
I stopped. “So when?”
Dave had a device pointed at RC. After a minute, Dave nodded, and I went over and gave her a hug.
She was a bit warm but not bad.
“So, how’d I do?” she asked.