This probably isn't what you're expecting from a Transformers fic. There's no Optimus or Megatron. Not much of anyone you'll recognize, really. And while they'll certainly be fighting later, it won't be the centerpoint of the story.

This is Transformers told from the perspective of someone who does not seem to matter at first, on a larger narrative scale. That sorta figures into the title. I promise it'll make more sense later.

For now, I hope you'll read and post your thoughts below. I'll try to update this on a daily basis.

Chapter One,​

Crosswire snorted as they entered the hubdeck.

"Nice antennas."

Vesta took a long drag on her spiked enjex, optics tight around the edges, the array of antennas in question askew atop her teal helm. She took her time intaking, making unsavory gulping noises and swizzling. Letting the mediocre stimulant roll around on her glossa. When she was good and ready, she swallowed, the noise comically loud to her own audials.

"Mmmm, fuck off."

She replied conversationally into the cubule as she took another drink. Vesta was not a morning-bot and Crosswire knew it. She could see them feigning offense out of the corner of her optics. She didn't pay the taller grey transformer the courtesy of acknowledging their theatrics. The fragger already thought they should have been coded as a performing-arts unit. Encouragement was not something they needed.

The two robots made their way to the panoramic window at the front of the room, one tall and slight and jaunty, the other short and teal and shuffling. Vesta set her cube down roughly on her console, and Crosswire just stood there, looking insufferably cheerful.

"You,"

Crosswire began, sitting very, very slowly, optics on her the whole time. Here they went. The start. The event-horizon of not shutting up.

"Do not look well rested."

There was a beat of silence, and just as Vesta was considering the points for and against bludgeoning Crosswire with her drink, the bot actually activated their data-spread and started working. Perhaps she'd get some pe-

"A properly formatted stasis-cycle is the key to a productive day. You'd hate morning's less if you got the recommended four megacycles."

Vesta turned to Crosswire, who was busy tapping away cheerfully. A multitasking wunderkind, they were. They could map data transmat trends, log approval notices, and grind her gears all at the same time.

"I'd hate mornings less if you weren't in them."

There was a tenser pause, and for a moment, Vesta thought perhaps she'd gone too far. The haze of fatigue and irritation that had sat over her processor lifted, to be replaced with a cold sweat of embarrassment and regret. Her intake stuttered open and she nearly knocked her glass off the console before Crosswire finally broke the silence with a staticky snicker of amusement.

"Is that any way to talk to your best friend and superior officer?

They quite literally ribbed her with one skinny grey elbow. Vesta let both the elbow and the bad joke pass, considering. She supposed they were her best friend. Only friend, really. They were the only bot on the station who talked to her, anyway, when she made it abundantly clear that she did not want to talk. The superior officer bit was a joke. A play on the fact that the station acted as a homogenous unit with no actual chain of command aside from Supervisor Fercerr, who really didn't actually do all that much supervising except on review-days. Crosswire had simply been her longer, and jokingly regarded the self as some sort of mentor-figure for her accordingly. She put the thought aside, cycling her coolant, and got to work. Shift exchange kept work from really piling up, but the beginning of the day always came with a bit of a built-up transmission-feed.

It was her and Crosswire's sacred duty to monitor and organize records and approval of data-transfer from Cybertron to the colony-world they orbited, which looked to Vesta's untrained optic rather like a vast, muddy marble. Four megacycles a day. Every day of the lunar cycle. Until she died. Well... Not quite. If she didn't get reported for drinking on-site, she'd probably get transferred out and promoted within a few standard stellar cycles, if the boredom did't actually kill her first. She knew she ought to have a better attitude.

Her job wasn't actually a bad one. Scrap, a lot of bots wouldkill for a comfy desk job with good pay and no risks. She supposed she ought to be grateful.

And really, technically, she was-- it was just hard to be cheerful about being a console-drone when she could fly. She continued to type with one servo, but raised the other and pressed her palm to the window. It felt like static sounded against her metal hand. Seemed to buzz. That was because it was an energy-field, not actual material. Glass was far too valuable for a dinky little backwater station like this. Glass was for important places. Glass might have signified that her job mattered.

"Thinking about flying again?"

Crosswire's voice was gentle and very serious. Vesta pulled her palm away from the window.

"It's not fair. I have wings."

Vesta sounded petulant and childish, even to herself.

"Why would they build me with wings if I'm never going to get to use them? Isn't that what functionism is? Practicality? I can fly and I'm stuck here behind a desk."

She wanted to thump the console dramatically, but settled for merely slapping her palms against it and quickly stopping her drink from sliding off the edge.

"Where's the practicality in making something you're never really going to use?"

Crosswire did not reply immediately, and Vesta let the silence hang, embarrassed by her own outburst. When they did reply, their tone was uncharacteristically somber and matter-of-fact.

"I don't think there's any practicality in Functionism, Vesty."

Vesta let the use of the nickname she hated pass, surprised at the taller bot's words.

"Nope,"

They continued, tone serious, their voice low so that it almost blended with the noise of their respective fingers tapping away and the ever-present hum of the station's power system.

"No practicality. Just laziness and a fear of anything that doesn't fit a narrow, pre-conceived mold."

Crosswire was silent after that. On her own spark, Vesta could not think of a single thing to say in return. The silence stretched into a valley. It wasn't like that was the first time she'd heard that sort of thing. Bots talked like that on the unsanctioned late-night radio half the population tuned into after-hours. They talked about tyranny and purpose in life and freedom in tinny voices stretched across the starways on weak broadband signals. And radical activists talked that way, in nervous voices, on prime time broadcasts.

But none of those people were really people. They were voices you tuned into for a few cycles a day. You nodded your head and agreed. Yes, functionalism blew gaskets. It sucked. Someone really ought to do something about. Someday. Indeed.

But a person, a real person, a 'bot you worked with? Saying those things? It was a bit surreal, that was all. The valley of silence widened and deepened, and Vesta let it sit for the rest of the day. At the end of the shift, both bots stood up and left. It was an evening of firsts-- Crosswire made no effort to pursue her or say goodbye, and Vesta almost wished he had.

 

Chapter 2,

Chapter 2,​

Vesta's alarm-program went off the next day, awakening her with a start, and she twisted sideways in her berth, slapping reflexively at the antenna from which the stubborn noise originated.

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

"No,"

She slid right off the side of her berth, dropping three meters to the deck with a thud. The alarm finally shut up, satisfied by the sudden rise in her vital-signs to levels that were considered analogous with "waking". Vesta sat for a moment, face screwed up, and just simmered in her own juices. Then she stood up and noticed that things looked a bit..... Off.

Her room was very dark, for a start. No external station light to send a harsh yellow glow through the window of her little apartment. And two of the three inside lights were out as well. The third guttered and flickered with an anemic blue glow, like an oversized bugzapper.

"Hum,"

Vesta looked about, straightening her mattress as she did so. Her radio still glowed with its familiar grey light, where it sat on standby on the shelf below her mattress. She ran her hands over it once, then moved to the door and ran right into it, falling back into her aft.

"Yeah, ok, "

She rubbed at her helm and straightened one bent antenna, which was oozing a bit of energon.

"Today's gonna be fun."

She dusted her skidplate off as she stood, then plunged one of her sharp little hands into the seam in the door and yanked on it vindictively. The door groaned and made a low clunking sound as its locking gears were forced in the wrong direction. Forcing any door, even a dinky little apartment door, was not what a 5-meter civilian frame like Vesta's was built for. But she had hate on her side, and the door was losing. It gave ground with tortured creaking noises and the sound of stripping gears as Vesta forced her other hand into the widening gap and leaned into the task.

"Open up, you stupid, glitch-ridden, scraplet-infested, miserable fragging excuse for a-"

The door opened smoothly and abruptly from the opposite side. Vesta stood face to face with Hyphen, the mech who took the shift before her and bunked next to her so far as she knew. She couldn't recall if they were to the right or left of her....

"For future reference, there is a button for low-power emergency situations."

Hyphen leaned into her apartment and pointed at a small black pad on the wall to the right of the door, thin green faceplate as disinterested as ever. He looked as if he was narrating a brochure.

"It might be easier and quieter than, um, breaking the door."

They withdrew from her room quickly before Vesta could explain, and she stood for a moment, mortified, then followed them out in time to see the sour little green bot disappear in their apartment, which was in fact to the left of hers. She supposed Hyphen wasn't actually sour. More, she thought as she made her way to the Hubdeck at a walk that was almost a jog, that they were simply sour around someone as unfriendly as herself.... Primus, she wished she had a drink for today. Her head was pounding and her fingers ached from "breaking the door", as Hyphen had put it. Wasn't Crosswire friends with Hyphen...? She supposed the grey mech was more or less friends with everyone on the station. She turned the corner and almost caught her foot on the base of the ramp that would bring her up a level to the hubdeck, cursing and hopping to maintain her footing. Dim lighting certainly made navigation more interesting... She supposed it was what she got for running with only the weak glow of the emergency-lights to guide her way....

As her head crested the top of the ramp, she caught site of a familiar tall pink frame. By the time she was all the way up, he was already turning.

"You're late,"

Fercerr regarded her from across the room, a mug of mandate-approved low grade energon clasped in the long fingers of one hand. Crosswire sat at their station, hunched over a rather fuzzy looking emergency-light blue screen. They turned, waved enthusiastically at her as if Fercerr wasn't about to fragging eat her, then went back to work.

"And that door's going to come out of your paycheck."

The pink mech continued, taking a sip from his mug. She was suddenly glad she didn't have her own much less legal drink.

"As you can see, the power's blown."

Fercerr gestured nebulously at the station in general, making a circular sweeping motion with his mug.

"As supervisor, I'm wired into all of the station's processors. Everything's working fine internally, but the system that routes the power the planet below beams at us is being disrupted. We're working on solar alone, here. Whatever's blocking things up is surprisingly...."

Fercerr made a disgusted face.

"Thorough. It is utterly beyond me why someone would waste so much time and effort on crippling a station like this one. I suppose it's some sort of virus. To fix it-"

Vesta interrupted rather enthusiastically as she realized where this was going.

"You'd need someone to access the computers in the power-receiver on the outside of the station manually!"

Fercerr pointed his mug at her like it was a gun, squinting.

"Don't interrupt me. But yes. Precisely. And I know how you feel about this job. And how much you love flying."

Vesta practically vibrated with enthusiasm at the much taller mech.

"Stop that or I'll get a grounder to do it and accept the lawsuit and demotion when he floats away due to a complete lack of appropriate safety-tethering on this station."

 

Chapter 3,​

Vesta was in love with space. She was going to make it her Conjunx Endura. Ok. Well. That was a bit hyperbolic. But the point that space was probably the most amazing thing she'd ever experienced stood.

She let herself drift, optics panning over the ocean of swirling gas and distant lights that stretched out around her forever in every direction. The fluid cold of the vacuum caressed her frame and snuck under her metal flesh.

"Vesta, get your aft in gear and fix my station, please."

Fercerr's voice crackled over her audials. Vesta startled, destabilizing her drift, and shifted to vehicle-mode, jetting around the curve of the station. She switched her output to internal comms as she flew.

"Right. Of course. I was just a bit distracted."

The station was shaped like a wheel, with a hub of spokes on the inside connecting said wheel to a conical cylinder at its center, which stretched above and below the wheel itself. She had emerged from an airlock on the outside of the wheel and needed to get the planet side tip of the cylinder. The station possessed a diameter of only 1,600 meters. The flight to her destination took less than fifteen seconds. But in the starry void, that tiny snippet of time might have been a megacycle.

To Fercerr, who must have been patiently watch her space out and drift around next to the airlock for the past ten cycles, it probably felt like a megacycle as well. She stifled the stuttering music of her own laughter as she flew, the frame of her vehicle-mode flexing with it. The power-receiver drew near, catching the light of the system's distant star and the muddier light reflected from the planet below. Vesta returned to robot mode and stretched her arms out, grasping it and using it to absorb her forward momentum.

"I'm at the receiver, sir."

She reported.

"Good. The secondary ring? Below the outer lip and the crystal? Grasp it. There should be two grips spaced opposite oneanother along its edges."

Vesta examined the structure and found what Fercerr was referring to after a moment, adjusting the position of her hand accordingly. This brought her face closer to the crystalline lense of the device, which reflected a comical, fish-eyed image of herself back at her.

"Alright, done."

She remarked, her distorted reflection nodding in unison with her.

"Now press on the grips as hard as you can and twist to the right hard."

She did just that, and the depressions in the ring she grasped clicked in place. The entire thing vibrated as she locked her legs around the ring below the one she grasped for leverage and twisted it, and she felt the mechanisms of some sort of machinery activate with a stuttering rumble that shook her hands and jittered her servo motors. Her legs were dislodged as the entire assembly of the receiver telescoped outwards, exposing power-cells, pistons, and crystalline circuitry. Vesta released the grips, mouth opening in a "wow" that was stolen away by the airlessness of space. She examined the exposed guts of the receptor, spotting a curved screen, which was probably what she was looking for. Belatedly, she realized she hadn't yet relayed her progress to Fercerr.

"Err, done, right. It sorta telescoped out."

"Excellent, Vesta. There should be a fairly small screen on-"

Vesta interrupted.

"The side of the receptor! Yep. Way ahead of you. Ermmm. Way ahead of you, sir."

Fercerr's exasperated sigh crackled over the comms, laced with static. Vesta thought she detected a note of amusement.

"Oh Primus, I'm going to be fired for this. Alright, Vesta, activate the screen and input the administrative codes I provided you with."

Vesta nodded her head again, which, she realized, was entirely pointless, as Fercerr could not see her. She grasped the sides of the receptor delicately, drew herself close to the screen, and freed one hand. She tapped on the screen once, which felt as cold as the void around her. It bloomed to life and displayed a distorted purple smiley faceplate.

WE'LL BE WITH YOU SHORTLY.

Stylized block-text declared as it slowly scrolled into existence below the creepy little face. She blinked and simply looked at the screen for a few seconds. No more text appeared. This.... Didn't seem right in the slightest.

"Ermm, Fercerr...?"

Vesta's voice was laced with nervousness, even to her own audials.

"What? What is it?"

Vesta's reply never came, as a wave of cold, static-filled pain slammed into her from behind and hammered her against the receptor. Through blurry vision that swam with sparks and globs of darkness, she noted the screen fizzling out. Sparks jumped from the receptor's circuits. Vesta felt her own body jump and spasm in sync. Around her, every single emergency light on the station flickered out at once. Vesta blacked out as a massive, jagged shape blazing with purple light drew abreast with the station....

 

Chapter 4,​

Vesta did not come to all at once. There was a deep shudder, and she was vaguely aware that she had been jarred loose from the station and was drifting. The cold felt good.... She remained in a haze until her body struck the inside of the station's ring. The smooth hulls pressed uncomfortably against her wings. The teal bot's optics gradually focused, and she turned, pressing her hands to it and pushing off.

"Fercerr? Hello?"

She found nothing but dead air over the comms. Getting her bearings, she rubbed at her optics, which still twinged and swam with blots of dark, and looked around.... The station was entirely dark. And on the spaceside portion of the ring, a massive ship was docked.

"What in the name of Primus.....?"

The small fembot kicked away and shifted into vehicle mode, flying away from the vessel, which could only be bad news in the circumstances. She needed to find another airlock. Except.... After a moment of looking, Vesta realized it would be much easier than she had thought to enter. The windows of the station had no glass. They were nothing but energy-barriers. With the power completely knocked out.... Vesta approached a window and found her suspicions to be confirmed. She thrust an arm through the gap and found only the same cold void as outside. Surreal. That's what this was. It was surreal.

Vesta grimaced and crammed herself through the window, shimmying a bit at the shoulders and hips to make it through. Instead of dropping to the floor, she simply drifted, along with a great deal of very fine flotsam. The gravity was offline. This was bad. Vesta activated the magnets in her feet and dropped abruptly to the wall of the station. Whoops. That wasn't what she'd intended. Vesta shook her helm and tromped sideways onto the floor, then started walking. What was all this fine debris? Tiny flecks of something or other that caught the light from outside and glittered... Vesta's optics roamed over the stuff as she walked. And then she turned a corner and felt something splash against her chest. She looked down. Energon. Someone's energon. Her joints went rigid at the realization.

"Uhhhh..."

She made a panicked noise despite herself into her comms, the noise crackling over dead air. She stumbled backwards and away, bumped into a door, turned, and hammered the emergency release button. It opened sluggishly, and Vesta was immediately met with a gust of howling air that buffeted her backwards. With a grunt, she grasped the edges of the doorway, hauled herself through, and immediately closed the door behind her. Someone had evidently been careful to keep the inner chambers of the station airtight. As she cautiously made her way down the hall, she debated activating a flashlight so she could see a bit better. She had several compact lights built into various parts of her chassis. But... If she did activate a light, she'd run a much higher risk of being seen by whoever occupied the erstwhile ship. She somehow doubted said occupants would be friendly. Vesta absentmindedly opened one of the doors that segmented the station's ring-portion into quarters. Normally, the doors stayed completely open during daytime hours. Perhaps the loss of power had activated some sort of emergency protocal....?

As Vesta continued walking, she noted a crackling noise and flashes of light just ahead. Narrowing her optics, she pressed herself to the wall and made her way a bit further down the curved hallway until the source was visible. In the dimness, the flash of the 'bot's tool was like a strobe-light. They were not much taller than her, but their build was much heavier. Massive wheels bristled from their limbs, and a stylish spiked grill adorned their chest. They were painted a brilliant green, with blue highlights along their wheels and grill.

"Status report, Swindle."

The voice echoed in the hallway, flat and cold. Evidently, this was Swindle, and Swindle did not appear to care much for who heard their comm-traffic.

"Hey, hey,"

The bot's voice, low and rich and decidedly ingenuine, seemed to codify him as a mech, though one could never be certain with those sorts of things.

"I'm working as fast as I can, bossstuff. I make magic, not miracles. This station's a pile of scrap. We'll be lucky if we can turn much of a profit off of what we strip. Routing power to the central hub only with no access-codes and a mainframe that's half-fried after our ingenious decision to nuke it with the ship's EM field? That's not kiddie-fair."

The other voice replied.

"I did not ask for your assessment of the difficulty of the task. I asked you to get it done. Yesterday."

Swindle jerked upright, looking flustered.

"Bu-"

The comm-link closed and Swindle was left looking frustrated. He stood for a moment, then bent again, expression sour, pushing a heavy purple visor back up as it threatened to slip down his face.

"Not paid enough for this. Not by half."

Vesta edged backwards as "Swindle" continued to mutter to himself. The central hub! Her workstation! They obviously wanted something there. Access to the servers, perhaps? The voice on Swindle's comms would almost assuredly be there. That meant Vesta had to get there. As far as she knew, her coworkers were still on the ship. They might need help. At the very least, she had to make sure Crosswire and Fercerr were alright. And, if she was honest with herself, she'd have to admit that she wanted to know what all of this was about, even if it sort of terrified her. Vesta tip-toed back a bit more, then frowned.

Swindle evidently hadn't detected her entering. The sector-door would have done a lot to muffle the gusts of air escaping, and any remaining noise, including that of the sector-door itself, had likely been downed out by the power tools the bot was using. They were loud enough. But if she opened the door into one of the axial struts now, this close....? He'd sure as frag feel it. There were windows along the struts, afterall. That meant vacuum. Leaving would break the seal and alert Swindle, and likely by extension, everyone else, of her presence. It didn't take a memosurgeon to know that would be very bad.

As Vesta stood deliberating, the lights abruptly came back on, and there was a deep thrum in the bones of the station.

"Frag!"

Came Swindle's distant exclamation. It seemed he'd mistakenly returned power to all of the station. The ventilation systems unsealed with a hiss, cycled, and began to evenly distribute air throughout the re-sealed station... Vesta turned and came face-to-face, or, rather, face-to-chestplate, with Fercerr, as the much taller bot emerged through the very doors she'd planned to enter. The tall pink bot recoiled, looking startled, and then both shushed oneanother in unison.

"We need to get out of here,"

He whispered almost too quietly to hear.

"I think the central hub is overrun. The station isn't safe. There's a mainframe interface console right around here. With the power back online-"

Vesta interrupted.

"That console is currently occupied! By someone named "Swindle"! If we try anything, he'll know, and then he'll tell everyone else."

Fercerr shushed her again, then furrowed his optical ridge.

"And besides,"

Vesta continued more quietly.

"We have to try and help the others! Especially Crosswire! He's my friend!"

Fercerr scowled. It seemed like a typically Fercerrish thing to do, but Vesta was struck by the realization that her boss was more than likely as scared as she was.

"Fine,"

He hissed, looking like someone who was very scared and trying very hard to look like he was very exasperated instead.

"Let's do the right thing."

Vesta nodded, grinning, and both turned and ran as lightly as possible down the axial strut, towards the heart of the station.

 

Chapter 5,​

Vesta grimaced as the two ran along the length of the cold, scarcely lit axial corridor. The power was back on, but the EM blast had apparantly damaged some of the lighting fixtures.

The result was an eerie, strobing effect. Parts of the hall were entirely dark.

And to Vesta, both Fercerr's footsteps and her own sounded far too loud. She was sure someone would hear. Midway through, things got worse. Fercerr made a sheepish face as they ran.

"What?"

Vesta whispered up at him.

"There's a bit of.... Unpleasantness ahead,"

Fercerr replied.

"I had to get through it once when I came through here the first time. I feel you should have fair warning."

Vesta had opened her intake to reply when the first bead squished against her foot. Energon. Half frozen in the vacuum-temperature of the recently repowered station. A ghastly site loomed suddenly out of the gloom ahead. A bot Vesta knew to have been janitorial staff lay ripped apart on the deckplating, surrounded by a halo of her own spilt energon. Vesta's optics dialated, and she raised a hand to her intake as she ran, slowing to sidle around the mess. Fercerr did not cover his mouth, presumably desensitized by having seen the corpse before, but he did make a face, pinching his lips flat and tipping his head back as if he thought he might catch some sort of pathogen from the body.

"You should have seen it in zero-g. Poor dear. The glitches who did this...."

Fercerr whispered harshly, trailing off and shaking his helm as they made it around the messy site of the body. He didn't have to finish the sentence. Vesta felt the same way, underneath a few layers of terror. The fraggers who had done this needed to pay. It went unspoken between the two that many of the station's hundred or so occupants had ended up the same way. Vesta remembered the cloud of energon she'd come across before she ran into Fercerr. It hadn't occured to her then, but it most likely belonged to a bot who'd floated out into the void, most likely never to be recovered or properly recycled or interred. She wondered how many others had floated out into the void after having their sparks snuffed, processors slowly winding down, last thoughts of cold and pain....

It made Vesta furious.

As they reached the door to the hub of the station, that fury cooled into loathing, spun with flecks of dread.

"Hold on,"

Fercerr touched her shoulder, peering up.

"Look,"

He whispered, nodding at the ceiling. Vesta took a quiet step forwards, and stared up at the gloom of the curved ceiling above.

"Uhh..."

She looked back at Fercerr, expression questioning. The taller pink bot stared back for a moment, looking expectant, then rolled his optics and cycled his cooling systems in exasperation.

"The vents, Vesta. They're sound-insulated to keep noise from other parts of the station, and they're big enough for you and I to move through unseen. I'll have to do a bit of scrunching, but...."

His trailed off for a moment.

"The point is, they're out best bet on making it through the operations-hub unnoticed. Use your engines to hover up there and open them quietly. I can't fly like you, and if I jump and botch it, we might be heard."

Vesta nodded wordlessly, crouched, and then leapt upwards, igniting the thrusters in her feet that served as her propulsion in vehicle mode. For a moment, she swayed back in forth in the air, giddy despite the situation. She'd never used her boosters in robot-mode before. It wasn't really the sort of thing that was smiled upon. Fercerr stepped back a bit, looking alarmed, as the grinning fembot almost smacked into him. After a few seconds, her flight stabilized, and she gradually ascended to the level of the vents, removing the screws that kept them shut with a few deft turns of her fingers and handing the section of grating and filter down to Fercerr below, who stood on tiptoe to take it from her.

"Right,"

He stared up at her, optics bright in the dimness.

"Now, Vesta, I'm going to jump up and into the vents, if you'll kindly move aside."

"What?"

She whispered back.

"Why can't I go first? I was the one who got the grate off."

Fercerr's optics narrowed.

"Because I'm your boss, Vesta, and because I know the layout of every part of the station, vents included, like the back of my servos, AND because without me to have told you of the vent's location, you would not have known to have removed that grate."

Vesta hovered silently out of the way.

"Right,"

She whispered sheepishly. Fercerr leapt up into the vent, sleek frame making him look like a large, very cross pink turbofox. Vesta followed after.

 

Chapter 6
​

The scramble through the vents was long and dark and tense. She had only Fercerr's skinny aft to guide her, and the vents felt tight and claustrophobic even to her small frame. She had no idea how Fercerr managed the crawl with his much longer limbs. Finally, the pink mech halted, whispering back to her.

"Stop. This is the closest vent to the escape-pods. Primus. What a ridiculous sentence. I feel like we're in one of those old cinemas about the War of Wrath."

Fercerr huffed to himself and began to fiddle with what was presumably the vent that would let them out. After a moment, the noise ceased, light filled the ventilation shaft, and Fercerr crawled forwards carefully, gradually sliding out into the open air and dropping from the vent.

"C'mon,"

He waved her down as she started forwards, triggering her boosters to allow her an easy glide to the floor.

"Follow me,"

Fercerr gestured over his shoulder, loping down the corridor they were in. Vesta had only been in this part of the station once or twice. It was near the docking-bay, which she'd entered through. But instead of hanging the left that would have taken them to the huge, open room, they continued forwards, towards a shut industrial door with a horizontal seam. Vesta looked around, nervous. It was too quiet. Too deserted. She would have almost felt better if they'd had a close encounter with being caught along the way. She stood and shuffled her feet a little ways away while Fercerr made his way over to the door.

"I don't like this. I know there are other bots in the station.... I heard Swindle talking to someone."

She whispered, optics scanning nervously.

"Relax. It'll just take me a second to input the access codes...."

Fercerr leaned close to the little screen next to the doorway. But instead of priming for the code when he tapped at it, it blinked green and the door hissed. Fercerr turned to Vesta, horrified. Vesta knew, right then, in a vague, anxious way that something was horribly wrong. Her cooling-systems tensed up. Her spark felt cold.

"Vesta someone's tampered with the door."

It was beginning to open.

"Hide!"

Vesta looked back and forth, panicked, and sprinted back to the doorway of the docking bay, huddling there, peeking on optic around the corner. Fercerr faced the open doorway, seemingly rooted to the spot by fear or stubborn determination or some combination of the two, dwarfed by a massive purple bot with no face and a single, glaring eye. One hand held the shattered fuse-box in its grip. The other arm terminated in a blunt cylinder with three huge claws. Corpses littered the floor around the mech's feet. They apparently had not been the first to try to escape this way. There was a tense, eerie moment of silence where Fercerr, who had seemed so very tall to Vesta before, was scrutinized by the purple giant. It seemed to Vesta that it was looking at him like a scientist looked at a bug in a jar.

"W-we need to leave! Please."

The cyclops stared down at Fercerr, so big it nearly filled the doorway, then, in the cold voice Vesta had heard over Swindle's comm, replied.

"That is not my problem."

Fercerr pointed the crushed machinary in the huge creature's grip, seemingly ignoring the corpses, perhaps in the hope that pretending he didn't see them would somehow spare him from joining them.

"You're wrecking the escape-pods! They're our only way off! We're no threat to you. We just want to go peacefully."

The bot pulled back his other arm.

"Then..."

The limb pistoned forwards, and the claws impaled Fercerr, the massive mech lifting him high into the air.

"Go."

The tip of the cylinder glowed, and then roared with fire and sound. Fercerr came apart like a cheap toy. All of it slowed down in Vesta's mind's eye. She watched the pink bot's boiling energon splatter the corridor. She watched one arm explode off of his frame, bounce again the wall, and drop. She watched his head come off, the lower half of his face burning, his optics wide with shock and agony, as it spun through the air and skidded across the floor, rolling to a stop only a yard or so from where she hid. She watched the flaming remains of his body soar backwards, crash against the deck. A foot twitch once. She watched his optics flicker out, staring in blank, frozen horror. Straight ahead.

The purple mech stood, arm still pointed, the claw that was a cannon steaming.

"To all crew members aboard the station, this is Shockwave. I have extracted the necessary data from station supervisor Fercerr and neutralized him in the process. Return to the ship once your respective stripping and salvaging duties are completed."

The huge robot took one step and then another, covering the hallway in long, easy strides. Vesta slid around the doorway all the way so she wouldn't be seen, frame trembling, optics so wide they looked like saucers.

"A sincere thank-you, once again, to Crosswire, for making this all possible."