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Deep Space - Autobot Recon Ship
What Barricade thought was the last of the Lucky Thirteen looked surprised to die so fast. Understandable. Cybertronians live for eons and as Barricade put that last shot through Tundra's sparkchamber the femme looked so… startled that she actually forgot to counter attack. Shame. Cade split her open like a tin can, ripped her spark half out before it atomized and took the light out her optics. Like popping out a battery. Wildfire started screaming - funny, it was his fault she was dead.
Barricade spun, ducked his kill shot, and cut the Bot's vocalizer out of his throat, slammed his plasma blade through his belly. Wildfire went down, torn open, gasping and buzzing and whirring incoherently as Barricade stepped carefully over him, knelt down on top of the mech he'd hunted for near two centuries now. Blue optics flickered in the semi-dark.
"Sorry, Wildfire." Barricade grabbed the dying mech by the helm, punched the blade through Wildfire's chest and put his spark out instantly. Then it was dead quiet. "Meant to make that fast." Cade pulled his blade free. He liked that feeling – the metal-on-metal grind and the gush of heat, that ozone burn of the spent spark venting from the machine – it felt like being awake.
That's when the auto-doc systems came online, pinging the arrival of one more Bot. Barricade counted the dead. "Huh," he said, standing, dripping energon. "I thought I was short one."
One minute later the door opened… and Barricade attacked.
Anywhere else, and Shadow's reaction to the slaughter would have been faster. But this was a safe space, as close to home as any of them had, and shock cost her precious seconds while her processor tried to comprehend what she was seeing.
Movement at the corner of her optics saved her; a shot which should have crippled her primary system relays slammed into her left shoulder guard as she turned. She went down hard, fighting to turn the momentum into a roll with her left arm dead; her right hand transformed into her blaster to return fire. Her shots went wild, scattering across control panels, but still forced her attacker to take cover. She used the brief respite to struggle to her knees and assess the situation.
It was as bad as she'd thought; her attacker had the only cover, the huge, curved metal screen that divided communications from the rest of the control room. She had nothing but broken bodies, overturned seats, and the energon-slick floor…
And Barricade was a blur of jet black, space black, a pair of red optics burnt super-nova red in the dark and glowing just as brightly. He crouched behind cover, waiting for a break in fire to return a shot, watching the dark little femme realize that she'd just walked into a killing floor, that she was stepping on her dead friends, that they hadn't died easy or cleanly and there was no part of the room not covered in their still hot energon. Barricade took the time to carefully record her face as comprehension came.
She lurched toward the source of the movement which had saved her. Labyrinth, spark and core of the Thirteen, who had selected them, trained them, coordinated every mission. Still active through sheer, stubborn force of will, judging from the holes ripped through him.
He commed her on a tight, encrypted band, databurst hitting with enough force and speed to disorient her for a moment. ::Get that to the Prime,:: he ordered, words accompanied by a command imperative that had her up and moving before her dazed processor could muster any kind of protest.
Across the room, meanwhile, Barricade saw this, snarled and broke cover instantly. He snapped across the room, firing his right-arm laser, his left-arm blade unsheathed for the kill strike that never came. Shadowrunner – slippery little glitch of a femme, quick as they came, fast on her feet and quick on the trigger. But Cade was on her instantly, ignored the shots he took to get to her and slammed bodily into her, crashing her against the wall.
"Shadow," said Barricade, casual as he viciously pinned her, tried to force his blade through her chassis. She struggled. He'd never been this close to this one - she was always too quick for him. Cade leaned in, smirking, paintjob splattered in energon. "You're late to the party."
"How?" The impossibility of it was more overwhelming than the pain of Barricade's blade digging into her. You didn't find the Thirteen unless they wanted to be found, and for a single Con to get the drop on almost the entire unit...
Relay. Viper. Cam.
Even in the chaos, she knew the three bodies that hadn't been there, knew as surely that none of them would have betrayed the Thirteen.
"How?" she demanded again, optics locked on his. She twisted the arm he'd trapped between them; it wasn't quite angled so that she'd blow her own head off if she fired, but close enough.
Probably a cleaner death than Barricade would offer, but not one she could take. She still had a mission to finish.
"Wildfire," said Barricade, the deep red of his optics flickering, a subtle, nasty flash of brutality. He shoved forward, blade digging with a screech of metal into her shoulder. She was squirming a bit too much to let him make a clean through and through job of her. One wrong move and she'd get her gun on him. Cade kept his tone low, conversational, watching Shadow's optics - the movement of neon yellow in the emergency lights. "He was sooo careful. But after I dug Relay's frequency codes out of his cranial case… he never knew I was there, tracking him back to your precious Lieutenant Labyrinth."
Cade smirked. "Ages of ghosting him and centuries of waiting to get you glitches off guard." He lunged forward again, pinning Shadow against the wall and grabbing her by the neck. He jerked close to hiss, "I gave Fire a fast slag for that." His levity vanished. "But now you give me that data pack, Shadowrunner. Do that for me and you won't feel me put your spark out."
Shadow sagged back against the wall, not bothering to hide her shock. There was no point; Barricade knew the effect his words would have, was clearly relishing it.
"Everyone?" she asked, vocalizer glitching and breaking on the word.
"Everyone always said the Lucky Thirteen were like ghosts," said Barricade quietly. He shrugged a shoulder. "I just made it true. Now, the data pack, Shadow, or I'll pull your optics out of your head and jam them down your intake." Cade's stare and his grip on the femme's slender neck didn't engender delusions that he might be bluffing. "I've wasted enough time hunting you and your unit."
And I've wasted enough time listening to you gloat, Shadow thought viciously, and fired.
Pain seared across her torso, but she had the satisfaction of seeing the utter shock in Barricade's optics as he was knocked back by the blast. He must have thought he was safe as long as she didn't have a clean shot.
She had only that brief glimpse, though, because as soon as his grip was gone she was moving, through the door and into the docking ring. She'd been last in; her ship was on the far side of the ring, she was losing energon fast, and she didn't harbor any delusions about that shot doing Barricade as much damage as it had done to herself.
She turned and blasted the control mechanism on the door. It wouldn't slow Barricade for long, but she needed every second she could get.
Crazy fragging femme! Barricade overrode the flash of error diagnostics flagging up from his right leg, high strike on the armor plating that had punched through the metal to the hydraulics beneath, sent of wash of pain through every sensor relay. He slashed at her as she darted away, firing at the fast-moving recon Bot before taking off after her. That shot slowed the speed demon down and he slammed a fist into the door as it closed seconds before he reached it. He ripped open the control on his side of the blocked entry and jammed his arm inside, finding the direct uplink into the system and pulling its wiring out, jacking in manually.
"Shadowrunner!" Cade logged into the system. Frag. He was lousy at hacking; this would have taken his former partner, Dataspike (Viper had made short work of her) less than two seconds. He struggled to parse the code, force an override. "I'll find you! Run and I'll just hunt you down! Just like Relay! Just like Viper, Cam, Tundra, Fire, Labyrinth, every single one of you!" Finally. The door gave and Barricade raced into the docking ring, sweeping the room with blaster armed.
The green light of an unsecured dock caught Shadow's attention before she was halfway to her own ship. Tundra, she thought, the surge of fond exasperation shattering to pain almost immediately. She turned, staggering with damage from a shot she hadn't even felt, and keyed open the lock.
For the second time that day, she stepped into a nightmare.
Dried energon caked the floor, smeared across the controls. What was left of Relay's body had been carelessly tossed into a corner.
Of course he followed Fire in using one of our own ships, she thought. A strange ship in the area would have set off alerts across the board.
Energon flaked off the pilot's seat as she settled into it, clinging to the still-wet energon smeared across her, still flowing from her wounds. The ship was in standby; it powered up instantly at her touch on the controls.
The ship was in standby. She should have noticed coming in. She should have known.
Slaggit! She was taking Relay's ship. Cade didn't waste time trying to stop the cruiser itself, he just ran to the nearest vessel (Wildfire's) and manually undocked the ship, racing up into the cockpit and powering it up. He'd followed this unit long enough, killed enough of them, to know their basic security codes, to know them and well enough to know that Shadowrunner had just become quite dangerous. She was flying a ship with the remains of her squadmate inside, just run out of the new crypt of the Lucky Thirteen, and shot herself to act on the final command of her dying superior.
Cade killed Bots to make their friends weak, but Shadowrunner wasn't the kind of break even in the face of atrocity. Cade launched Wildfire's ship and opened a comm between the Bot's ship and Relays. Her vessel was pulling away from the docking ring as Cade launched Wildfire's battle cruiser into the void of space. Barricade didn't say anything for a moment, his ship swinging around to close in Relay's flying tomb.
"Relay died loud," said Barricade, trying to get a lock on the femme. "He was all over that ship when I finished with him."
Barricade's taunt was the final shove, pushing Shadow past feeling anything but raw hatred. "I noticed," she growled, bringing up her ship's weapon system. Almost conversationally, she added, "You know, you probably should have picked a different ship. Wildfire was never as maintenance happy as some of us. Always thought a good pilot could make up for weak shielding."
She waited just long enough for her words to register, then fired without worrying about a target lock. She didn't need to blast him out of space, as much as she wanted to, she just needed to keep him off her long enough to reach Prime and deliver her data.
"I know," said Barricade, slightly tensely, flipping the Bot ship through a series of evasive maneuvers. The flashing zip of each blaster shot narrowly missing made every system lock and release with combat high and relief. The whole ship jolted, hard, however, when three of her blast slammed into the shielding across the hull. Behind him circuitry on the wall blew with a serious of claxons going off. "Slag," he muttered, heat pulsing through his spark. This ship was going to come apart if he took another hit.
Regardless, the infiltrator brought the ship screaming around, dipping low before coming up behind the fleeing femme like a predator on a kill trajectory. Cade's smile was in his voice as the weapon system came online, drawing a bead on Shadowrunner's cockpit. "But he's the only one with a rapid-fire energy cannon."
Shadow almost managed to roll the ship out of the way. In her own, more maneuverable, vessel she might have succeeded, but as soon as Relay's ship was clipped the first time, it was all over. The ship shuddered, shields barely holding under the relentless barrage of Wildfire's weaponry, lights dimming as all available power was thrown into maintaining those shields.
Something deep inside the console blew, and the entire control board went black.
Almost.
The weapons display glowed like a beacon in the darkness.
Primus bless Relay's obsession with being able to shoot back to the end.
Shadow brought her weapons around. Her ship was dead in space, and she was as good as dead with it...but she was slagging well going to take Barricade with her.
Barricade had been in Relay's ship for years, using it to ghost the other recon Bots for ages and he was very, very fragging familiar with the dead Bot's backward firing weapon systems… he'd just hoped Wildfire's cannon would have knocked it out when he fired on her. Cade ripped his cruiser to the right, trying to swerve away from the crippled Bot ship as his on board defense systems sounded off warnings for target lock. Slaggit! He was fragged.
Wildfire's shield gave instantly. The underside of the ship half caved in, shrapnel exploding through the interior of the ship and the last thing Cade heard before static was the scream of the cockpit decompressing. Then nothing. Cade woke on, face down on the control console seconds later, head ringing, onboard emergency systems flashing silently at him in the airless cockpit. Error codes raced across the display screens, error codes in his own head. Barricade laid stunned, helm ringing, head aching, trying to make sense of what he was feeling and it was after a few kliks that he realized he was hemorrhaging energon. It was floating in perfect blue beads in the weightless vacuum. He pushed himself off the console and looked down. Slaggit… a rather significant shard of shrapnel was punched through his midriff.
He looked up. Shadowrunner's dead ship was listing, limping through space, far out of range now. She was probably slagged. Probably. Cade couldn't get himself to move, system lock trying to settle into his systems. Slag. There was static on her comm frequency. The ship was dead. She was dead. Cade told himself that… but he knew the Lucky Thirteen too well to believe it would be that easy… but he could hope. Hope, at least, wasn't exclusive to Autobots.