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Shadow Striker had always known that only the strong survive.
When she used her crimson dagger to slash her repulsive rule-following Autobot sister’s neck cabling and watched the lights of Roulette’s eyes flicker off, Roulette had asked, voice crackling: “How could you?” Her head had lolled to the side in the rapidly-spreading pool of her spilling oil.
“How could you not?” Shadow Striker had replied. Her sister might have already gone offline by that point, but Shadow Striker had continued, “After our sister was killed, didn’t you get that this is how things work?!”
Shadow Striker would always remember Megatron’s amused laugh as he clapped her on the shoulder in celebration of the kill. He had even raised a drink of high-grade energon in her honor of her unflinching nature. Her spherical eye had rolled in its socket at the gesture—as if it had been hard!
But all that was a long time ago. Even though technically she was still a part of the High Command, after she was blown up and reconstructed in Shockwave’s lab, she and Megatron drifted apart. And she could not blame her leader. She would not want to hang out with a mechanism whose joints were always seizing up either. One day, she would claw her way back to the top.
Unfortunately, she knew that meant medical appointments. But putting herself through the humiliation of being supervised after what had been done to her? Disgusting!
The next time Shockwave had tried to operate on her she had ripped his gun arm clean off. “I’ll order somebody to replace that with someone else’s body part against your will! See how you like it!” Unfortunately, his processor was just too backwards to comprehend the problem with that. And when Hook had bragged that if he had been the one to repair her, he would have done a far better job, he was really just asking for her to threaten that she would break him in half. After she systematically rejected each and every medical “professional” Megatron had slightly smirked at her brashness, but she felt coldness in his eyes. Even without words, the message was clear: she had to improve, no matter the cost.
That was when she met her. Nickel the medic was standing on her back wheels, the only way she could see over the examination table. Shadow Striker could not help but grin. “If you think I’m going to spare you just because you’re short, you’re in for a rude awakening.”
The needle in the gauge on Nickel’s head shifted positions as her eyes narrowed. “Do you want to be useful to our cause, or not.”
“I’m more useful than you’ll ever be even without your help,” Shadow Striker said. Unthinkingly she was already getting ready to draw a dagger.
“That’s not what I’ve heard,” Nickel said.
“What?!”
She skated around the table to stand in front of it. There was nothing shielding her from Shadow Striker’s wrath. “I studied your chart and know you’ve frozen up and even dropped your weapons in the middle of battle,” Nickel said.
Shadow Striker’s eyes blazed a brighter red. She drew her dagger and surged forward and put the blade against Nickel’s little neck. “You don’t know anything about me!” Shadow Striker snapped.
Nickel sighed. “Calm down. I’m not going to put you under against your will or anything, that would be pointless. The only way you’re going to improve is through regular physical therapy,” she said. “I just don’t understand why a decorated Decepticon like you would choose to be worse than you could be.”
“I didn’t choose any of this!” She intended to stab Nickel to punctuate those words, but to Shadow Striker’s horror, she realized her arm had locked up. “Mute yourself now or I’ll do that for you,” she added, trying to cover up her vulnerability.
“I can see little sparks jumping out of your arm, you know.” Nickel took a scalpel off one of the hooks on her body and used it to point to the affected joint. “We’ll start by flexing that one.” And she skated back toward the table just like that, as if the two of them were already in agreement.
Shadow Striker attended her physical therapy appointments without fail. Holding her elbows up, moving her fists and forearms back and forth in-time with the motions of Nickel’s bouncing needle, she felt ridiculous. “If Soundwave saw me dancing like this he’d laugh that monotone laugh in my face,” she muttered. “I hope he’s not watching this right now.”
Nickel snorted. “It’s a good thing you aren’t dancing, then.”
“If you knew Soundwave, you’d know that doesn’t matter.” It unnerved her, then, to realize that Nickel likely was not familiar with the rest of the High Command and did not treat them. It made Shadow Striker feel like the dregs at the bottom of a barrel. Putting that out of her mind, she explained, “I remember one time, we were disciplining Clobber for blowing our cover, and I threw a dagger under her feet and Soundwave gave her a big fat ‘zero’ for the ‘dance’ she did!” Shadow Striker chuckled. But the laughter sent a twinge of increased pain through her circuitry.
Nickel fixed her with a stare, then. “How much does it hurt?” she asked, in a clipped tone.
“It always hurts. You know that already.”
“Not what I asked. Pain scale.” Nickel held up a tablet with the chart that marked each level from “no pain” to “debilitating pain.”
“Three.”
Nickel’s cold blue eyes turned a bit warmer. “It was four last time—you’re making great strides, Shadow Striker,” she said. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but you’re my best patient. All the others keep going and stupidly getting damaged, then complain the entire time!”
Shadow Striker smirked. “Glad to be one of the only people around here who isn’t stupid.” No, it was always the same stupid damage that kept her coming back here, she and Nickel did not say.
A loud buzzing came from one of Shadow Striker’s headlights. She dropped her arms and looked down, worried the physical therapy alone had been enough for her to damage something. Nickel leaned in to scrutinize the offending light. “There’s something dark inside,” she said. “Let me just—”
Nickel used a wedge to gently pry it open but then reeled back with a yell, dropping the wedge to the floor as the rest of her tools clattered together on their hooks.
“Now who drops things?” Shadow Striker said.
“An organic!” Nickel shouted. She pointed at what seemed to be nothing at first, but Shadow Striker looked to where a buzzing was emanating from and saw a tiny thing flying around. It was moving quickly for its size but by zooming in she could make out antennae that curled like horns, six thin legs, a pinched waist, and an abdomen that tapered into a point. How could it even survive when so many of its body parts were as thin as wires? Why was it flying by rapidly moving its wings in a blur instead of using thrusters?
Before she could think of any more questions, there was a bright flash and sharp noise. She zoomed out and saw Nickel was gripping a glowing blaster the same color as her chassis and that the organic thing had been disintegrated with the shot.
“Nice thick barrel on that gun you’ve got there,” Shadow Striker said, reaching out to caress it while it was still warm, “but that’s what we call overkill.”
“What was the alternative? I couldn’t taint my tools, or worse, smear it on my hands, my tires?” Nickel scowled, pretty wrinkles appearing on her normally smooth face. “I’m so sorry you had to feel that inside of you. How could you stand those dirty little feet scratching all over the glass?”
“It wasn’t tripping any sensors. It must’ve been in me since my last mission but I didn't even feel it. Do not think I needed you to rescue me, Nickel.” Shadow Striker looked down making sure her shadow fell over Nickel, trying to drive home that giving Nickel any power over her was a privilege that could be taken away at any time.
“Sure, let’s go with that.” Nickel slid the barrel of her blaster across Shadow Striker’s fingers. “I don’t want you to hide your pain from me—because it makes my job just that much harder, of course.”
“Of course.” Shadow Striker grinned.
“If I were promoted to Commander, the first thing I would do is work to eliminate all organic life,” Nickel said. Something on the floor caught her eye and she shuddered. “Look! Blasting them leaves organic debris!” She pointed to the floor but Shadow Striker could not even see anything there. Nickel pulled the gun away and moved to examine the supposed dirty spot, grumbling about how “even in death they ruin everything” and how she would “need a drone to clean this up” all the while.
In Shadow Striker’s experience, the other Decepticons simply did not acknowledge organic things at all unless they could be turned into fuel. Shadow Striker herself had never really found herself thinking about them until now. Why would they even be worth hating when they could not even put up a fight? They all just blended together into a mass that made up a backdrop to the raging War. But Nickel’s pointed disgust was amusing. “Well, if you hate these organic things so much, maybe I should hunt down some of the bigger ones and bring the corpses here for you for your creation day,” Shadow Striker said. “Would you like that?”
“Absolutely not! That’s disgusting. You soldiers make it hard enough to keep this place sterile as it is!” But Nickel’s infectious smile and the soft glow of the lights on her chest betrayed her.
Under cover of a moonless night, Shadow Striker knelt down, as hidden by foliage as she could be. Her mission was to make sure the Autobots were dead or preoccupied to give Insecticons time to multiply and consume the magnetite deposits throughout the woods. Of course, Megatron had figured out a way to quickly kill their clones with a process that would convert their energy into fuel the rest of the Decepticons could process.
Shadow Striker had dimmed all her lights and zoomed in on her target. Arcee was turned to face a tree, and continually she was lit up with a flash of light from her handheld tablet as she took photos. The tree was marked by strange bulges that looked like swirls or knots and gashes oozing a thick, translucent liquid that glistened whenever it was illuminated. Some of the liquid looked stiff and crystallized.
“What is Arcee even doing?” Shadow Striker muttered to herself. “Why won’t she stop taking photos of that wounded tree?”
“I don’t know, maybe she wants to turn it into fuel or something?” the voice of Nova Storm rang out in her head.
Shadow Striker had forgotten she had been speaking into her comms. “Shut up. That was rhetorical,” she said.
To Nova Storm’s credit, she did shut up. If there was one benefit to getting stuck with these lower-rung soldiers it was that they knew their place. She would much rather work with Seekers who were just fodder than with the likes of Starscream.
Interruption over, Shadow Striker lined up her shot, looking for the perfect part to blast. At first, her crosshair lingered over Arcee’s hand, thinking she could make her drop her weapon. The hulking block of a bright pink gun that she held so casually was mismatched with her lightweight frame. How annoying that she had such good taste in firearms. But Arcee probably had plenty of other weapons stashed away in front of her vehicle-mode, so Shadow Striker repositioned the crosshair dead in the center of the back of Arcee’s head. If any Autobot was skilled enough to keep fighting with a busted brain-module it would probably be her, but she would still be crippled. Shadow Striker’s finger hooked the trigger.
Arcee’s face suddenly filled the entire view. Another flash, but it was not her camera this time. Shadow Striker’s gun felt molten and her hand burned before she tore it away—Arcee had hit it with a fully-charged shot.
“What?! How?!” Shadow Striker exclaimed. She pushed herself up and barely dodged shots that were close enough to singe her chest.
“Oh, Shadow Striker!” Arcee ran toward her. “Hi, I had no idea it was you!”
Shadow Striker took out a smaller, less-powerful blaster and returned fire. She longed for the days when she had been fast enough to block shots by slashing them with her dagger. To her annoyance, Arcee did cartwheels around the blasts before smoothly transforming. How could this slim-waisted little Autobot be this powerful? Shadow Striker transformed herself and accelerated, trying to ram her. If she could not rely on agility, she would have to resort to clunky bulk.
“How did you see me?!” The front of Shadow Striker’s vehicle mode nicked the side of Arcee’s, who drifted around the trees.
“I was just about to take a selfie when I saw this big shadow with a gun was behind me!” Arcee exclaimed. A sharp mechanical appendage jutted out of her gas cap, reaching out to burst Shadow Striker’s tires.
That forced Shadow Striker to swerve and put some distance between them. “Why did I even try to snipe your brain module? There’s clearly so much empty space in there, it’s probably just a big airbag!”
“That’s a good one! I’m totally stealing it.”
To anyone watching them fight in the darkness they would have been two comets, one blue and the other red, weaving between the trees and tearing up the undergrowth. These were the clashes Shadow Striker functioned for! Eventually they reached a rockier part of the woods with cliffs their vehicle-modes could not climb, and they transformed once again and Arcee jumped up a cliff face, preparing to blast from the high ground.
But she hesitated. “I really wish we didn’t have to fight right now. I love your color scheme! Asymmetry is underrated.”
The words hit Shadow Striker like the pronouncement of a death sentence. Pushing past the shock, she sank down like a predator ready to pounce, the searing humiliation in all her circuits drowning out the aching of all her stressed joints. She leaped forward, scaling the cliff, her every system focused on punishing the enemy. “Don’t mock me, Autobot trash!” she screamed.
Arcee flinched. “Haven’t you heard of compliments?!” She fired repeatedly and each shot struck true, turning bits of Shadow Striker’s plating into shrapnel.
But it did nothing to halt Shadow Striker’s ascent. She pulled her arm far back before uppercutting Arcee so hard the sound of the impact was louder than any of the gunfire. Arcee’s head snapped back, the punch having crumpled part of her pretty jaw inward, and she staggered backward and collided with another tree.
“Th-That was the truth,” Arcee muttered, voice glitching. One of her eyes blinked on and off rapidly. Her gaze fell upon something on the ground, and Shadow Striker glanced in the same direction.
A tiny structure that looked like a basket made of wires had fallen from the tree. Inside the structure were fuzzy grey screaming, flapping organic things with disproportionately large beady eyes and little hooked beaks. The first thought that rose to the surface of Shadow Striker’s mind was that they were magnitudes more hideous than even herself. She was confused when Arcee gasped and picked them up to place them back in the tree on a higher branch, but Shadow Striker was not so confused that she did not take the opportunity to fully charge up her blaster while Arcee was distracted. Right when Arcee turned back to face her, Shadow Striker shot her in her chestplate’s heart. It left Arcee her clutching the wound that billowed smoke into the moist air.
Shadow Striker lunged at Arcee and slammed her to the ground. “Why would put your life on the line for something totally useless like those things?!” The two of them grappled. Shadow Striker struggled to keep Arcee, who kept twisting and turning, pinned with one arm while trying to pull out out dagger with her other arm.
But before she had the chance, Arcee let go of her smoldering wound and her hand shot out to grip Shadow Striker’s firmly. “They don’t need to be useful for me love them,” Arcee declared. Her wide eyes looked like twin sparks. Then she brought her knees up and jabbed their points into Shadow Striker’s abdomen, and with a sweep of her deceptively strong legs, threw Shadow Striker off of her. Reaching into the front of her vehicle-mode, Arcee drew a translucent blade aglow with the same color as her eyes. She held it aloft and brought it back.
Shadow Striker transformed, but could not move fast enough to avoid one of her front tires being slashed. She was torn between a desire to spin around and knock Arcee’s legs out from under her, and a desire to cut her losses and retreat. Deep down, Shadow Striker knew there was no winning this fight. No matter how hard she pushed herself, how many sensors she shut off to block out all the pain, Arcee could cut her down.
“Shadow Striker? Hey, Shadow Striker!” Nova Storm’s voice was a needle stabbing her audio receptors. “Didn’t you see all the Insecticons buzzing around? Our job’s done!”
Shadow Striker’s exhausts shot out burning shame as she sped away, desperate to leave the woods and never return. As she saw Arcee’s face in the rear view she knew she would be haunted by the Autobot’s little frown and sad eyes for a long time.
Shadow Striker’s body was all sleek curves and panels pressed flush to her symmetrical frame. She sped faster than a plasma shot down Iacon’s famed raised bridge that glittered gold in the vicious light of her high beams. Her sharp spoiler cut through the Cybertron night like Terrorcon wings.
Wait, there far in the distance, driving toward the glowing tunnel that beckoned like a warm embrace, could it be? Her sisters in their alt-modes? Shadow Striker reconfigured her optical sensors, but it was too late. The cars had slipped away, too small to be seen even through a scope. But then another car passed her on the right, a pink Cybertronian sportscar Shadow Striker would know anywhere—Arcee, the enemy! She let out a soft laugh, but Shadow Striker would punish her as harshly as a mocking one would warrant.
Arcee pulled forward, putting her directly in Shadow Striker’s sights. Shadow Striker popped her hood and transformed out a sniper rifle. She sent impulses to it, telling it to fire. But nothing happened. She tried again and again to shoot, but it backfired in a shower of plasma. It burned like a fuel fire.
Arcee became a pink blur and disappeared into the tunnel as Shadow Striker felt herself slow. The bridge stretched, growing longer and longer, her target growing more distant. Shadow Striker could hear all the Decepticons she had known throughout her career laughing at her over comms. But she would not crack. She would only growl, her engine roaring as fantasies of oil-slicked revenge filled her central processor.
But then the world shifted. A cycle had passed. She was in a Decepticon base, and she knew she was on Earth just from the taste of the air. There was Clobber in the hall, approaching her—hers was one of the voiced Shadow Striker had heard laughing just the other cycle! A pathetic Decepticon who might as well be an Autobot, she was such a sensitive spark, had laughed at her?! She had to pay. Shadow Striker drew her blades, one dagger in each hand, but then she froze. Her limbs were asymmetrical, and worse, her joints had locked up. She strained, trying to move, to stab Clobber, but Clobber just lumbered by. All Shadow Striker could do was shake like a cornered retro-rat.
Cycle after cycle passed. Sometimes she halted in the middle of typing, and had to endure hearing Slipstream asking if she needed assistance as Starscream cackled. Sometimes she could not move her limbs out of the way of Chromia’s axe and experienced the searing pain of the shorts that came from having them severed. Sometimes she was on the operating table as Shockwave replaced her parts with ones her entire being rejected, but no matter how much she longed to shatter his evil eye, she was paralyzed. And sometimes, worst of all, Shadow Striker was pinned like a specimen by Megatron’s disappointed gaze.
Shadow Striker came online already in a sitting position, in the cold light of the medical room that was too harsh to be from any star. She dreaded when she would lock up and humiliate herself this cycle. And yet when she checked her chronometer, it showed not even one full cycle had passed. She was covered with bits of organic matter from her fight with Arcee. But the dreams had felt real, and her entire frame felt like it was made of lead. Yet it was not Megatron’s eyes, but Nickel’s eyes that reflected that color of the cramped room, boring into her.
Nickel cleaned off the exhaust pipes that jutted from behind Shadow Striker’s shoulders like vestigial wings. Shadow Striker had shut her eyes off and reveled in the methodical way Nickel changed her ruptured tire and soldered then buffed out her many wounds. Shadow Striker daydreamed about sharing an oil bath and just sinking into it, her pain giving way to overpowering relaxation.
It felt luxurious having splintered twigs and leaves being carefully plucked from her wheel wells and grille. “This is disgusting,” Nickel said. “I can’t believe these vermin got all over you. I swear, they seize upon and swarm any mechanism unfortunate enough to touch the Earth.”
Despite the pleasurable physical sensations, the incessant commentary was making Shadow Striker wish it was Arcee tending to her instead. Shadow Striker was too exhausted to fight those feelings or be ashamed anymore. After her pain level had sunken to a three but then plateaued. It only ever spiked higher. Even in her restless recharge or after spending cycles’ worth of time holed up in physical therapy, it never fell beyond that. Shadow Striker turned her visual feed back on. “What is it about organic life, anyway?” she asked. “I’ve seen plenty of it now, Nickel. It’s all so much weaker than we are. What’s the point of hating it?”
Nickel paused in cleaning Shadow Striker out. “Yes, we’re superior in every way.” Nickel stared at Shadow Striker’s grille like it was a prized museum display. “It’s like rust taking over everything!”
Shadow Striker could have pointed out that surely it could not both be lesser and weaker in every way yet also somehow an all-powerful rust. But in the stark light of the medical room, with Arcee heavy on her mind, Shadow Striker instead pointed out, “Look, we both know I’m… disabled. Doesn’t that make me weak? Am I inferior?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Nickel smiled. “I’m making you better every day.”
As those words sank in, Shadow Striker’s tanks roiled. Visions of the damaged trees bleeding out the liquid to plug their wounds danced across his vision. Oil and lubricant threatened to bubble up and spew out of her mouth to paint the walls of the medical room.
Struggling to keep it all inside, Shadow Striker made in optics zoom in and focused on the Decepticon insignia on Nickel’s body. She imagined the line of Decepticon leaders she stupidly thought she could be part of once—they were not akin to links in a long chain, no, because whenever one showed signs of weakness another would tear them apart in order to ascend. To be one of them was an impossible dream, but at least for now, Shadow Striker was a valued scout. For now, she was useful.
Nickel went on about a new regimen for her, but to Shadow Striker, it sounded like she was hearing her voice from a distance while her spark lay outside her own body. Eventually, she watched as Nickel finished cleaning her out. Nickel only ever used scrapers, files, aspirators, and other tools, never touching what she called the organic “contamination” with her hands. After the procedure was completed, Shadow Striker staggered out of the room. She was shiny and spotless and all her surface-level injuries were gone. In all her time functioning, she had never felt so dirty.
She broke into a run, shoving other mechanisms out of the way without a word, desperate to get back to her own quarters. She stomped inside. The instant the door slid shut she screamed out. She overturned what little furniture she had and kicked it across the room. It was nowhere close to enough.
Shadow Striker slammed the wall with her fist but instead of punching a hole in it like she craved, the sound that rang out pierced her audio sensors and pain shot through her arm like lightning. She crumpled over and wailed, crying out her departed sisters’ names over and over like a chant.
But Shadow Striker had always known that only the strong survive.