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I looked out the window to the palm trees and the pale pink of dawn over the ocean beyond. As a soldier, I'd expected to relocate my family every four years. Someone who's irreplaceable is also a liability in the military, and so the powers that be mixed things up on a regular basis with transfers. No one was above reproach, no one was irreplaceable, and everyone was expendable. That's what it meant to be in the Army – I was part of something much bigger and more valuable than myself.
NEST was the exception. That was largely Optimus' doing, and the Prime had pitched it to the brass as accommodating the Cybertronians' long lives. They were used to building relationships that spanned millennia; four years was not long enough for them to learn to trust any individual human. (This was total BS, but I kept my grunt mouth shut. The 'bots had learned to trust me and my team in the time it took to make the 22-mile drive from Hoover Dam to Mission City. We were NEST – a safe place to land – months before some PR spin-master in the Pentagon came up with a fancy acronym for us.) If they wanted NEST to be successful, Optimus said, once a human was read in, they were in for the rest of their professional life, or for as long as they wanted to be. Drooling over those Cybertronian weapons, all of NEST's human governments had agreed. So Sarah and I had gotten comfortable on Diego Garcia over the years.
Until now.
Frag Charlotte Mearing. Frag her every step of the way to the Pit.
I hadn't told Annabelle yet. Telling her would make it real. Telling her would make her face light up and turn the whole thing into a silver lining because we'd all be together again. Except we wouldn't. Not when Optimus and Ironhide and a passel of twins and fighting femmes were all still here. It wasn't Diego Garcia that had become home – it was NEST. I couldn't leave these people behind like this. I couldn't abandon them in the power of the scum of humanity: politicians.
"Oh hey!" I heard Sarah say upstairs.
I hadn't heard her cell phone ring, but maybe she'd still had it on silent from when she was sleeping?
"Sure," she said and I heard her footsteps in the bedroom above me. A few seconds later, she came down the stairs still in her bathrobe and talking to someone on a video-chat. Sarah glanced up at me and said, "Your dad's right here. Go ahead, sweetheart."
I stepped closer so we were both in view of the camera, and sure enough, there was Annabelle, wiping tears from her eyes and sniffling.
"What's wrong?" I instantly demanded.
"So…Samuel told me something tonight, and I didn't know if you and Mom…" she paused, rubbing her eyes a bit more, "if it was true or not or if you even knew…"
Slaggit! Was she upset that I was getting reassigned to the Pentagon?!
"Annabelle," I gently said, but she cut me off.
"And if you did know, I can't believe you'd keep another secret this big from me…"
"We weren't deliberately keeping it a secret," I tried to explain, "I just wasn't sure if it was really true or not and…"
She sniffled twice more and asked, "So you're not the Decepticon boogeyman?"
I froze, blinking in disbelief as I tried to wrap my brain around what she'd just said.
Her teary expression became a huge grin, and laughing, she blew her nose one more time. "Stupid onions."
"What are you talking about?" Sarah asked, sounding as flabbergasted as I felt.
"Those two Decepticon Seekers," Annabelle answered, still all smiles.
"What about them?" I cautiously asked, beginning to wonder if this wasn't a deep-fake intel phishing attempt or something.
"Samuel just told me and Mikaela that the Seekers cracked and spilled their guts. And one of the things they said is that Colonel William Lennox is living proof that Earth is cursed ground for any and all Decepticons. That you're the boogeyman as far as Decepticons are concerned."
Sarah started laughing while I still floundered. The interrogation had been in Cybertonian, so watching it was pretty pointless. I'd read the summary Prowl gave us humans but I didn't bother with the full transcript since I trusted him to prioritize the relevant parts. "They were interrogated yesterday and they did give us some decent intel – nothing immediately actionable but some big-picture stuff that Prowl thinks could eventually be useful." I narrowed my eyes at the little screen. "Samuel told you this?"
My own daughter cackled as she nodded. "Yep! My dad – the monster to the monsters!"
Sarah was grinning now too as she looked up at me. "I'd say that about puts you on equal footing with 'Hide or Prime."
"No way," Annabelle gleefully contradicted. "It makes him the most terrifying human alive!"
"That sounds like a catch phrase," Sarah said with a chuckle.
"I'm going to put that on some business cards for you!" Annabelle giggled.
"Don't you dare!" I blurted out. Even if it was true, I did not want this getting out, especially among the Autobots. They'd give me all kinds of slag about it. That's probably why Prowl hadn't mentioned it in the summary.
"I wonder if there's a National Boogeyman Day," Sarah said, playing along. "I bet you'd get free cake or something."
"Oooh! Or a t-shirt!" Annabelle squealed.
"If not, I'll have to make you a cake," Sarah said.
"And a t-shirt!"
"Primus help me," I muttered.
Both my ladies broke out in laughter over that one.
"What's so funny?" Aaron Hyde demanded as he strode into the kitchen. Right on time, he was here to pick me up for work.
Sarah turned the phone's screen so that Annabelle could see Hyde's reaction, and I would have snatched it from her hand if I thought I had any chance of actually stopping her with him here.
Her voice dripping with delight, Annabelle told him, "The Seekers say Dad's the Boogeyman, that he's proof Earth's cursed for any and all Decepticons!"
Hyde got a confused expression, and then his eyes got distant for a second. When he focused on the screen again, he said, "Yeah, that's in the interrogation transcript, more or less."
"Ha!" Annabelle triumphantly crowed, while Sarah looked at me sidelong. "Definitely getting a t-shirt."
"And a hat!" Annabelle chimed in.
Hyde crossed his arms, looking at my ladies like they'd lost their minds. "Femmes, femmes. Settle down. You know that wouldn't be at all appropriate."
"Thank you!" I exclaimed.
Then Hyde smirked at me, though he was still talking to them. "You know something like that needs to be on a patch or a medal if it's going to be regulation for his uniform."
Recognizing I'd lost this battle, I grabbed my wallet and cell phone and retreated to Ironhide's cab, all three of them laughing behind me. Primus help me!