I can't wait till you figure out wich way you will go. I really enjoy reading you stories.

 

Great way to bring Ravage into the story Wreckie. And his Binaltech look does mirror his BW form so the time travel is an intestesting angle. Take the time to work your story out, but don't take too long, 'kay. We want to read the next chapter asap.   You're continued shifts in viewpoint are always keeping the story fresh and does your sense of humor. The "it will still hurt like hell when I hit it" cracked me up. And the pov of the computer really built up the suspense for Ravage's intro.

 

Nice fanfic! Thanks for the read!

 

Wow... my fanfic lives!  

Guys, BIG apologies for not getting on and finishing this. The last six months have been tulmutuous to say the least. Now I've finally moved out of my parents' spare room (long and very dull story) into my new place and I've got my own things around me again, life is much less stressful again. I promise I'll be carrying on with this story very soon.

 

glad to hear it. it'll be good to hear how you decisde the story will develop

 

(Just a short bit today. More to come on the weekend, and hopefully more regular updates from now on.)

He was fast. I used to look at Bluestreak or Blurr racing across the Iaconian plains and think: “Wow, that’s fast.” He wasn’t like that. He wasn’t teleporting, he just moved effortlessly out of the way of every shot I fired. Wherever I aimed, he wasn’t.

And then he was on me.

“Wheeljack,” Ravage looked down at his prey and arranged his jaws into the semblance of a smile. “I’d say try anything and you’re dead, but just between you and me...” The smile grew wider, “You already are. So we have something in common, you and I.”

How did he do it?

Time travel has always been theoretically possible. Human scientists disagree on even that idea, with many claiming there is some unseen natural law that would prevent it, and any consequent paradoxes, from occurring. There are others who believe it is possible and come up with theories involving rotating singularities, string theory, baby universes and the Big Bang, to prove that it isn’t impossible after all, but merely so incredibly difficult and complex that it may as well be.

The stripped down, cut price version of the humans’ predominant theory is this: to travel through time safely, you need to create a wormhole, a literal shortcut in space-time between “here,” “there,” “now” and “then”. One end of that wormhole is then accelerated to near light speed before being looped back. The time dilation effect would mean that objects coming out of the end of the hole would emerge before they had even entered.

But the problem with this arrangement is that it’s impossible to travel back to a point before the wormhole was created. Not to mention the incredibly dangerous forces one would need to harness in order to create a wormhole big enough to pass through in the first place, and then keep it open and stable afterwards. So in practice the humans’ theory is about as useful as a marzipan gas tank.
Then again, what can you expect from a species that runs on carbohydrates?

They’re on the right track though. They just don’t understand that they don’t need to create the wormholes at all... because they already exist, underlying normal space. Millions of tunnels leading off to everywhere and everywhen, all joined in a vortex. We just need a way to access that vortex. By bombarding suitable areas of space with specially charged sub-atomic particles called chronons, a temporary gateway to the space-time vortex could open long enough to pass through. Then all you need to do is work out how to navigate and travel in a place where none of the normal laws of physics apply and – hey presto – you have your time travel. Before the war, we were gearing up for our first experiments... and that’s where we hit the big problem.

We couldn’t find any chronons. Not anywhere. We knew they existed because all the equations proved it. The problem was where they were and that puzzled us for a few centuries until, brilliant and incomprehensible as ever, Perceptor came up with the answer. I remember when he gathered us together at his lab and proudly announced that he’d solved the problem and knew where those precious chronons are.

Turns out they’re in the space-time vortex.

Slag.

The humans call it a Catch-22 situation: you can’t have time travel without chronons, and you can’t get any chronons without time travel.

Perceptor was so proud at the time, beaming at us all, totally unable to understand why we weren’t so enthused about his findings as he was. But that’s one of the differences between scientists and engineers. Scientists get excited over new discoveries, engineers only get excited about things we can actually use.

Wait an astrosecond....

Suppose in whatever era this Ravage guy is from, they’ve found a naturally occurring stable wormhole? It needn’t be very big, just a few atoms in diameter would be more than enough to bleed out a few chronons from the vortex. Then all they’d need to do is feed them into a suitable storage unit, like the transwarp cells I invented and – oh slag.

I already invented it. I’m the reason he got here.

It’s my fault. This is all my fault.

Is it me, or is it getting hot...?

 

(So much for "next week" hey? The creative bug finally bit me again this week.)

Power corrupts. As he sat alone in his throne room, Megatron reflected on the applicability of that old human adage to his current situation. For a Decepticon corruption was as natural and healthy as breathing was to a fleshling, although the idea was so fundamental to the Decepticon way of thinking that the word was relatively new to him. The term “corruption” was a very Autobot concept, one which in Megatron’s view (and let’s face it, when you’re Emperor of a planet, what other view really matters?) demonstrated the fundamental flaw in their philosophy. Autobots could be corrupted, turned. They abandoned their lofty moral code when faced with their own destruction or after several weeks of torture. They were weak not because they cracked, but because they denied their own fundamental nature and hid behind words they didn’t understand: honour, dignity, principle.

Real honour came with victory. Real dignity was achieved by conquest. The only principles which really mattered were those which enabled one to win. Power didn’t corrupt, Megatron decided. Those who had been “corrupted” might achieve power, but only because they had accepted their true natures. And once that power had been achieved, what else could one do but achieve more power? Despite some unexpected setbacks, the Decepticon armies were mere months away from conquering the whole of Cybertron. Once that had been achieved, Earth would follow, its wealth of energon deposits used to fuel an armada that would carve out a galactic empire, and then.... Megatron smiled to himself. There were other galaxies too.

His thoughts turned towards the future more and more these days because, if he was even honest with himself, he found the present so dull. Conquering a city-state was all very well, but then he had to do something with it. The buildings needed repairing, the infrastructure maintaining, the population subduing. Local provincial governors he himself had appointed began demanding more energon rations, saying that even slave labour needed fuel. Naturally he’d had the provincial governors shot, but their replacements also made the same arguments, albeit in a more respectful manner. Power was wonderful, Megatron reflected. Government on the other hand was just annoying.

“Megatron.”

The sound of his own name spoken aloud shook him from his reverie. He looked up as Soundwave entered the chamber, so grateful for the distraction he almost smiled. Thankfully he remembered himself in time to scowl in apparent irritation. “What is it, Soundwave?” he snapped. You are the busy ruler, he told himself, appear approachable and they’ll never stop approaching you.

“An Autobot shuttle is on an approach vector, Commander.”

There was no need to feign irritation this time. “Well, shoot it down, then! Are our warriors so incompetent they can’t activate the automated defence systems?”

“No, Commander.”

“Then why bother me?” He tone conveyed annoyance, but he was genuinely interested. Soundwave wouldn’t bother him with such a matter unless it deserved his attention. Among all his ‘loyal’ servants Soundwave was the only one that engendered a feeling almost akin to trust in him. So instead of berating him for wasting his leader’s time, he allowed the communications officer to give the report in silence.

Soundwave described how the shuttle had appeared on their early warning systems, which was in itself unusual. The Autobots had long since learned that if they chose their vector carefully, they could use the gravitational fields of Cybertron’s two moons to hide their approach. The pilot of this shuttle was evidently either woefully incompetent or genuinely didn’t care that he was about to commit suicide.

As the craft entered the upper atmosphere above Polyhex, the computer in charge of the defence grid calculated its trajectory and trained several hundred primary long-range weapons batteries on its most likely position. Then it worked out a few dozen possible alternate trajectories, trained its secondary batteries on those positions, ranked them in order of descending probability and prioritised the firepower accordingly.

Just to show how brilliantly Shockwave had designed it, it then accessed its databanks to discover what evasive manoeuvres the shuttle was physically capable of making and coordinated its tertiary batteries accordingly. It still had a second or two to kill before the fireworks started, so it began calculating the odds of the shuttle’s survival.

Which was when it all started going wrong.

The computer was halfway through a long line of zeroes when an innocent-looking data packet appeared out of nowhere. The packet then unfolded itself, walked straight through every firewall and countermeasure the grid could throw up, slapped the core intelligence around a bit and then told it to go to sleep. It was offline for a three whole seconds.

When it rebooted and woke up, its middle and short-range sensors kept trying to tell it there was an enemy craft in the atmosphere... which was obviously a load of nonsense. Telling the sensors not to be so silly, it recalibrated them to adjust for the blatant error of a shuttle’s energy signature and vapour trail within weapons range. It took some doing, but eventually all the grid’s sensors were reporting clear skies again.

Wasting ammunition was inefficient, so rather than fire at something which clearly wasn’t there, it took all the weapons batteries offline. With the digital equivalent of satisfaction at a job well done running through its processors, the computer went back to the important task scanning the skies for enemies. It refused to be distracted from its work by the rather large number of clearly erroneous visual confirmations of an Autobot shuttle descending on the capital. It was also nonplussed by the network administrator’s increasingly frustrated questions as to what the hell it was doing.

The grid’s creator had considered the possibility that, in the event of an all-out enemy assault, the defence systems could be overwhelmed by panicked messages from the field. To prevent a system crash at such a critical time, Shockwave had installed a failsafe: when responding to incoming messages took up more than a certain amount of processing power, the grid just ignored them for a while. So upon receiving yet another message begging it to do something about an enemy craft that was now coming in to land, the grid shut out the whole loud, panicking mob. It then serenely dedicated all its processing power to the main objective: watching out for those cursed Autobots.


“Why are we not attacking it ourselves?” Megatron snapped. “Or are my soldiers utterly reliant on Shockwave’s unthinking machines to tell them when to fight?”

“Commander, the defence grid was built so we could redirect all our airborne troops to the front lines.”

“Oh. Yes.” It had, he reflected, seemed like a good idea at the time. Shockwave’s proposal had been... well... logical. The system was foolproof, after all. “And our ground units? We have manual anti-aircraft weapons, do we not?”

“Yes Commander. But their power supply is controlled by the defence grid. As the grid refuses to recognise the shuttle, it does not perceive a clear and present danger. Powering up the manual weapons without a clear and present danger is unnecessary and wasteful. Therefore it won’t do it.”

“How very... logical of it,” said Megatron calmly.

Unnaturally calm, thought Soundwave. Deathly calm. He’d know his leader a very long time, long enough to know that although he often feigned anger to intimidate his inferiors, Megatron was always in control of himself. But when he stopped pacing, shouting and threatening, when he forgot to maintain that warrior-king façade... that was Megatron truly enraged. This is it, he thought. Someone’s going to die for this, and I know who.

Megatron and Shockwave had been engaged in an uneasy non-struggle for a while now. While being deeply suspicious of the one-eyed freak, Megatron never had a good enough reason to act against him. Shockwave undermined his leader in subtle ways, exceeding his authority, but always able to give a rational explanation for his actions afterwards. Nothing he did had ever been punishable. Until now. The defence grid was designed, built, maintained and monitored by Shockwave. He’d made it in his own image, logical, intelligent, powerful... and deeply flawed.

Seeming to pluck the thoughts from his mind, Megatron said: “I’ll kill him for this. But first thing’s first, we have an enemy craft to destroy. What is its current location, Soundwave? And how many casualties?”

The communications officer tuned in to the babble of voices shouting at each other at defence command HQ. “Apparently, the shuttle has not fired a shot, Commander. And its current location is...” he paused as he once again intercepted a few likely-looking radio transmissions. “It is apparently coming in to land at your personal hanger. It transmitted the correct entry codes and is preparing to dock.”

Megatron picked up his fusion cannon, clicked it into place and headed for the door. “Then let’s greet our guest!” he said, rubbing his hands together. He was alive again, there was the prospect of a puzzle to be solved here. And afterwards he might get to kill Shockwave, or at least seriously wound him. He smiled to himself as he headed for the hangar. Things were looking up.

 

Coool.

I mean it Alternator fic which both is kool.... although no alts in that epidode - where are they?????

Anyways -- very nice portayal of the senior Decepticon commanders.....

 

it must be ravage. it'll be interesting to see what happens next. it was described as a passing comment in the bt story but it'll ge interesting to find out what happened

 

Heh, I like that.

 

I'm still enjoying this fic Wreckie. I loved Wheeljack's realization. It's because of him Ravage can time travel. Too funny. And good characterization of Megatron. I wonder who could be at the door? I'm guessing Ravage too.