Chapter Text
“Prowl is missing.”
Jazz had suspected this for the past several hours, and yet the statement still made his cables tense. The command meeting went entirely silent. The only sound left was the irritating buzz of the comms disruptors shielding the room.
Prime gestured to Red Alert to explain, and their security director’s frantic voice painted a bleak picture.
After years of security and safety complaints received about Gorgon-3 without the resources to send someone out, the Ark had finally been near enough that Prowl could investigate himself. The whole group — Prowl, his posse of junior tacticians, and his security team — arrived there on their small ship only a half day before. Probably started looking around immediately, starting at the landing pad. Jazz could just hear Prowl’s disappointed tutting and see the base staff hand-wringing in stress. They’d probably gone to turn in for the night.
The Autobots, already chronically on the back pede, had then lost their single greatest advantage.
Red Alert seemed to waver in what he was saying, unsure. Information was still coming in from the Autobot rescue team on the ground, and they’d only just landed.
Jazz asked the standard first question: “Where’s the camera footage?” The response was that the entire security system had been knocked out. Not even by some zero-day exploit like the ones Soundwave was known for hoarding, but by a fragging botnetted DDOS over the open datanet. Literal scriptkiddie scrap. Having security servers open to the datanet was like having a database not sanitise its inputs, or having an admin passcode be ‘12345’ — inexcusable. Even if the Autobots had had the staff and ships to send someone out, Prowl had probably waited to visit the base himself, likely just so he could ream them all a new tailpipe.
The massive teleconference screen lit up at Red Alert’s command with a call from the rescue team.
Interviews from the few surviving base staff ended up leaving more questions than answers. Witnesses said that some dirty grey freighter full of Cybertronians had pulled up to the dock, went straight for Prowl, and then left. To get to him, they’d slaughtered the entire security team and all but one of the junior tacticians Prowl had brought with him. They’d had zero interest in anything else about the base, leaving the weapons cache untouched and infrastructure intact. Taking out the security systems had locked the doors, leaving many of the base staff trapped as they were invaded, and useless as witnesses.
Not that there were many bots there in the first place. Gorgon was a small base at the edge of Autobot territory, but despite its importance as a monitoring station, it was far from any of the battlefronts, and so had been conservatively staffed. The Autobot army was stretched far too thin to station extra soldiers where there wasn’t any fighting.
No one had reported seeing a single faction marking on any of them, which didn’t stop Red Alert from assuming it had to be some dastardly Con scheme. Jazz looked around the room to judge everyone’s reactions to the claims their security director was now making; no one in the meeting room seemed to have any doubts that the Cons were involved. Jazz wasn’t entirely sure.
He knew Soundwave better than any of them, and the cassette carrier would’ve never signed off on something so sloppy, even if it would work. Perhaps more notably, Megatron hadn’t made a call to gloat, not like when he’d captured Ratchet. That mech just couldn’t get enough of his own voice.
In fact, nothing at all was lining up. No ransoms had been issued. There wasn’t even anything on the bounty hunting forums Jazz frequented, despite the Decepticon’s obscene bounty for Prowl still being open. The only real balm to the whole situation was that the payout for him alive was thrice that for him dead. The Cons, and by extension any bounty hunters, wanted Prowl alive.
Jazz started drumming his digits on the meeting room table, ignoring the glare from Red Alert as the security director continued speaking.
“Given that Prowl’s visit to Gorgon base was strictly need-to-know, there’s an extremely high chance we have a spy. Jazz will have enough in his cube already, so I will be arranging a thorough investigation of the Ark myself. I also think we need some intelligence agents sent out as soon as possible. Given the unsure data, I put the risk of Prowl’s compromisation at 73.4%, rising 3.2% daily.”
“Thank you, Red Alert,” Optimus said. “Jazz, we’ll need some of your bots who’ll be immediately available. Given the most likely place is the Nemesis’ interrogation labs, that mission should be given the highest priority. What bots are available?"
"I am."
Ironhide guffawed. "Like the pits you will, you're too close to Prowl to make any half-decent threat assessments. You'll go in with half-clocked plans and get yourself killed."
"Ironhide is right. We cannot afford to lose you as well, especially with you serving as our acting second-in-command."
Jazz nearly snarled. He thought to himself: Of course we're close! We work together every damn day to run your slagging army!
"Fine," he spat. "I'll get some teams arranged. Where we probing besides the Nemesis?"
"Any of the smaller Decepticon Armada ships that have been within range, and Cybertron, if at all possible. It’s likely that they’ll take him back there to Shockwave's lab for interrogation if a spacebridge is available. If you have any agents stationed near Gorgon-3, we’ll need someone to check for a deliberate breach and to confirm their systems are back up to standards."
"Got it."
Jazz needed to contribute more to the meeting than he felt able. He could strategise, sure, but that wasn’t what he was best at — that was Prowl’s job. That they couldn’t risk him out in the field really limited their options.
As he stood up to leave, he knew the others watched him with some sort of pity.
He wrote those pit-spawned missions, had them signed off on, had his bots sent out. Meanwhile, he was stuck back on the Ark with twice the work and none of the help.
Prowl's presence could peer-pressure Jazz into doing all his damn paperwork, even when all he wanted to do was have his rubber hit the road. Prowl's presence could take the edge off something he'd never known was sharp. He didn't even need to speak to lighten the load on Jazz's shoulders. Working without him felt like trying to run a motor off a dead battery.
Jazz — and the Autobots — couldn't afford to lose him. The situation was grim already. Without him, they might as well surrender.
His agents trickled back weeks, almost a month, later. Yet somehow none of the reports ended up back on his desk. He was never assigned to debrief any of them.
He ground his dentae hard enough that he felt metal shavings in his mouth.
They had to be going above him, which meant Optimus — clearly conspiring to keep him out of the whole affair, despite the fact that he needed Prowl back more than any of them! “Couldn’t give an unbiased opinion.” Bah! He wasn't cut out for running an army in the way Prowl did, his spark wasn't spun for it.
All they let him know was that the sole surviving member of Prowl’s team, a junior tactical officer, was currently in the medbay in critical, but stable, condition. When Jazz had tried to mosey his way in there to have a nice, casual chat with the bot, Ratchet had stated that someone had already been in to debrief them, and that the patient was too weak to talk. He had also none-too-subtly mentioned that he was monitoring the medbay sensors.
When another meeting was called, Jazz came in early, and sat there in his seat. An awful sensation crawled in his wires like he'd been spliced directly into an overpowered generator.
He hadn’t been authorised to go out on a mission no matter what plans he pinged to OP’s inbox. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust the agents he’d sent, it was that this was an issue that needed his optics directly on it. And they wouldn’t slagging let him.
As he watched the other command staff come in over the following minutes, Jazz thought resentfully about all the datawork they’d piled up on his desk. Half of the reason it was there was to keep him too occupied to sneak out, he was sure, but the other half was that they just didn’t have enough bots with the clearance to do it all. Prowl did the work of eight bots with twice the quality and gusto. Jazz was sure Red Alert was fuming at the way Jazz formatted his reports.
Ratchet looked across the table at him as he sat down, and there was some sinking pity in the medic’s look that made Jazz rage inside.
Optimus sat down, filling the last seat, and called the meeting to order. Red Alert confirmed he was taking the minutes, and began speaking.
They weren’t going to try to get Prowl back.
Oh, they assured the gathered brass that it was only a temporary halt until some hint of Prowl was found. The Ark couldn't stay sitting like digiducks in the region to do more recon, waiting for the Cons to come get a free hit. They also couldn't afford to aimlessly waste resources.
All of the reconnaissance and extraction missions to the Nemesis had come back with nothing. Nada. Not even Mirage — by far Jazz's best agent — had come back with any indication that the Cons had Prowl.
Logic would dictate that the third and fourth in command of the Decepticon army, the only two with the hacking ability and security clearance to handle Prowl, would be on the Nemesis, y'know, hacking Prowl had he been on board. Information like Prowl’s went stale quickly.
Shockwave hadn't even been onboard the flagship; a stolen report revealed he was back in his lab on Cybertron, fooling around with old Predacon fossils. Soundwave had been making energon sweets, for Unicron's sake. Those were activities neither of the two would be doing if they had a member of the Autobots’ top brass available for interrogation.
Jazz made a fist and clenched it so hard the metal creaked.
The other officers occasionally slipped their eyes over to him, watching for his reactions. They looked a bit frightened. Good, Jazz thought, they should be. If we don’t get him back, the Cons will overrun us within the century.
Jazz knew that leaving him safe and Prowl gone would just slow their crawl to ruin. Prowl had been the lynchpin keeping all the Autobot cogs from flying off straight into Decepticon smelter. The other side had Soundwave and Starscream and Strika, all individually capable of running the Con armada. Their side had some decent tacticions, sure, but no one that could run a whole army. Thunderclash was only good with smaller units, and Smokescreen was a diversionary tactician. Red Alert would have a catastrophic failure if he was put in control of the entire army. Optimus Prime himself had never been able to make the hard calls like Prowl did.
Jazz kept repeating to them: the only thing keeping the Autobots in the game at all, even if we’re on the back pede, is Prowl. We have no choice but to keep trying.
Prime disagreed.
And Jazz knew for certain now that the Cons themselves hadn't gotten a hold of him — at least not yet. Not that anyone believed him when he said that. There was no way in Unicron’s smelter Megatron would have Prowl alive for any longer than it took for Soundwave or Shockwave to scrape his drives — to them, no info would supersede the benefit of just having the Praxian dead after they’d gotten what they wanted. Megatron wouldn't have let any of his successes go. There would've been livestreams, gloating.
Soon, they were let out of the meeting. It had been tense as a funeral dirge, as they’d already written Prowl off. Desperately clinging to hope that someone could fill his place, as if another bot like him had ever existed, could exist.
The announcement of Prowl’s disappearance would be made to the army at large at some indefinite point in the future. They knew the rank-and-file would be devastated with yet another massive loss, and the rest of command wanted to put off the loss in morale for as long as possible.
Some there had seemed surprised at Jazz’s lack of outburst, others had been suspicious. Ratchet and Optimus, the former all suspicious pity and the latter a weary knowing, very aware he was not done fighting.
The only reason Jazz hadn’t lost it was because of that plan — the one that didn’t exist yet. He’d been too drowned in work to do anything about it. Just keeping the Autobots afloat took everything Jazz had in him. He’d racked up a defrag debt he’d expect of a longterm ops mission in the core of enemy territory.
He desperately, desperately needed that plan.
Jazz stalked all the way back to his office. It had never been a place he’d occupied often; he more often used it as a secure storage locker for medium-security datapads and weapons. The only personal thing in it was an office-warming gift from Prowl when he’d gotten the promotion to TiC, a little bundle of crystals.
Jazz booted up his dusty console and sat in the equally dusty chair. The only reason he wasn’t in his room was that it held too many flashes of late night debates with Prowl. There was a doorwing chair in the corner of the room where the tactician had arranged miracles, and it was getting dusty. The thought that he could lose those evenings would slagging well clog up Jazz’s processor.
There was some third party in play here.
Jazz checked the bounty hunter forums for the third time that day to the same results: the bounty posted by the Cons for Prowl was still out, and there was none of the gloating he’d expect if one of them had gotten their hands on Prowl. Just because it wasn't obvious, however, didn't mean there was nothing there. He took his [hourly] scraped archive of the sites, and directed every post made within days of Prowl's decision to go to Gorgon. In the [For Hire] section, there was a post.
The Minibots' Lair
Wanted>For Hire
[EXPERIENCED CREW 4 HIRE - FACTION WORK, ORGANICS OK]
[✪RustersNScappers ~Starred Member~(2.3k posts | 2,132pts) @ 13o--22:68:3.2]
we’re done our last job and r ready 4 hire.
27 bot crew, mostly size class 5 and above. got our own personal weapons, some reliable hastak laser automatics and close range stuff. we don't think anyone'll need *our* resume, but its attached for any business types.
ship is a τ-class toei industries modified freighter w/ aftermarket arms and cloaking, more specs available after contact.
rates start at 11,000 creds per orn, faction work at 17,000 creds per day (EDIT: payment w/ secuchit or monero ONLY). standard 50% before work starts, 50% after completion payment. payment plans negotiable for repeat customers only. energon procurement negotiable. extra payment needed if the job needs us to go outside neutral sector 32-4.
reply to the thread to be contacted. current location: near sector 3-17 of the second neutral zone. travel costs negotiable outside of that area.
(▾READMORE▾)
[Edited by ✪RustersNScappers @ 13o--22:68:4.2]
[✪MechDoorHandHook~Starred Member~(1.7k posts | 12.8kpts) @ 13o--22:68:3.9]
Been a while, but I got an interesting, well-paying job for ya. Do you still use secuchit for transfers?
[✪RustersNScappers ~Starred Member~(2.3k posts | 2,132pts) @ 13o--22:68:4.2]
⮩[Reply to: ✪MechDoorHandHook @ 13o--22:68:3.9]
👀 and yea for sure! dming u now. welcome back
3-17 was the correct sector…
Jazz scanned the ship IDs that had pinged as anywhere near Gorgon-3 up to the time of Prowl's capture. Autobot sentry beacons unconnected to the shoddy system at Gorgon had captured traders, traders, Autobot ships, neutrals, more traders, and unaffiliated aliens.
Sure, some pirates had ships without IDs, but the tradeoff was that the combination of a radar saying there was a ship and the automatic sentry saying the ID didn’t match was a standard trigger for any turret to start shooting. Not that any legitimate dock would let an ID-less ship land if they got down there. It was a tactic of the truly desperate only.
Of all the ID pings, there was one that had been there twice, and only in that small window between when Prowl had decided to go to Gorgon and when he’d actually left. When he entered the number on the Galactic Council’s transportation portal, he got a hit. It had been registered as a smaller class than it obviously was (probably to avoid extra fees)... but the forum description and the ID registration matched from the information he had on hand. It was a common ship type, and was something of a nothing as far as clues went.
Jazz leaned back in his chair.
He didn’t really have anything more substantial. It was time to go digging.
Prowl had all kinds of buried histories and skeletal frames in his past under Sentinel — may he rust in the Pits. The tactician had worked hard to keep them buried, even from Jazz. That didn’t mean he’d been entirely successful.
All it had taken was baiting Prowl at the end of a brutal triple shift early in the war, back when their early animosity still curdled energon.
"There are things about me which will never be unburied," the tactician had hissed. At the time Jazz had assumed he'd been talking about the experiment reports on his battle processor — those had been lost when Praxus had fallen — not his damned exes.
But one didn't simply keep something that potentially juicy and important from the saboteur forever. Saying those words had been akin to baiting a turbofox with raw sentio metallico.
Jazz reached behind his workstation, and pried open the back of the case.
All the files he didn’t want Prime or Prowl to find for various reasons were technically in the computer — as in, the datadrive was in his workstation with the rest, it just wasn’t hooked up to power. It just took a little fiddling to find the cable in the dusty dark of the case, and it popped up on his screen.
Jazz’s file on Prowl was spottier than the spymaster would like, but was far more in-depth than the Praxian would like — or even think possible.
Prowl hadn’t been close to many bots before the war, and many of those he’d known had been lost in the fall of Praxus. The list of bots who would have the motive to go after him was mercifully short.
From a breached police personnel database, a mnemnosurgery partner. The bot — a nutjob in Jazz’s humble opinion — was now an Autobot and conjunx to one of Blaster’s cassettes. The note of recommendation on said bot’s police file from the head of the Institute didn’t exactly make the mech look good. He and Prowl had been separated as partners after ‘intimate personal differences’, AKA relationship got messy.
Checking the Autobot roster put his current posting halfway across the galaxy in a large frigate. That left two others.
From a separate database breach, a case file on an independent weapons contractor and scientist who had worked for the local police force. This one was truly something else. He’d also been assigned to Prowl, but had gone rogue and gotten charged with crimes against Cybertron. How the bot had managed to get that kind of a charge in peacetime was unfortunately not expanded upon, but what was was his obsession with Prowl.
The mech would’ve been a prime suspect candidate, was it not for him now being in Garrus-7. Leaving only…
Jazz scrolled down to the last one. Prowl really had a knack for getting with the strangest bots imaginable, as Jazz had put together his relationship with a now-notorious debatably-Decepticon bounty hunter. He was now famous in the fringes of the for-hire Cybertronian circle for stealing upgrades right out of others frames. Before he’d made a name for himself, he’d been implicated in the murder of a dojo master and the theft of some relics stored at the historic facility. Prowl, a police rookie at the time, had studied there with Lockdown, and had been a key suspect given his ‘intimate relations’ with the mech. He’d later be exonerated.
The accused murderer, one Lockdown, had gotten off-planet and had never been caught. Hm.
Jazz had one Primus-sent truth in every investigation: criminals were really, really, really slagging bad at opsec.
Lockdown’s old personal comms address had been listed on the police file, probably provided by Prowl. Through both many years of hoarded data breaches and public profile information, Jazz found a little trail. The address had been used to sign up to both a Clankr account, and more importantly, a defunct illicit weapons trading forum. Through usernames, shared passcodes, and many old bounty hunting forums long closed from drama, Jazz led that thread right to MechDoorHandHook.
Not only did he have that, Lockdown seemed like he was in the perfect position with all the motivation to do so. Cybertronians held grudges and obsessions for longer than many organic races existed. He had a messily-ended relationship, he was a Con, and even besides that bounty, Prowl’s unique Tacnet would probably be a very desirable addition to Lockdown’s mod collection.
For Jazz, that was enough. For Optimus, however, the spymaster’s unorganised ramblings would not be.
Lockdown had everything Jazz had been looking for: the past link, the motive, the skills, and the means; he’d contracted mercenaries in the right quadrant at the right time… but that team had no direct connection to Gorgon-3, and neither did Lockdown. This sector was a common stomping ground for random mercs. The rattled witness descriptions looked like half the Cybertronian mercenaries out there. One team could’ve just gotten lucky.
The spymaster scowled.
Optimus would look at that last link, grey freighter in a well-trodden sector, and make those ‘suggested’ appointments with Rung mandatory.
Jazz stood up, slamming the chair back, and began to pace.
He was absolutely not approved to re-question the injured tactical officer still in the medbay. All he needed was a few moments, surely nothing that would do the bot any harm.
Jazz could be pretty sure he wouldn't be caught screwing with the security cameras along the way to the medbay, especially at this time in the graveyard shift. Red Alert was just too swamped. With anonymous access to Teletran, the camera loops went easy with some footage of guards walking their rounds. He wouldn't take long enough for their Security Director to notice a pattern anyhow.
Given that Jazz himself had helped with the patrols, he knew there were no gaps in that corridor — medics were one of the few precious advantages the Autobots had left, and Jazz wasn't risking them.
It felt wrong to be walking so nonchalantly to a destination he wasn't supposed to be going to on his own ship. The guards didn't care about him walking around, they didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to be there. Any mention of him being out on his off shift wouldn't reach command until he’d already gotten what he needed.
The junior tactician was laid out on a slab in the secure back part of the medbay. Curtains were drawn around them, and the smell of singed wiring still wafted around despite many weeks of the medics' close attention. The chart on the end of the berth read:
Corporal Strongarm of the Macross Incursion
She/her
That was a very good start. Jazz knew of this bot, and had gotten hints of hero worship from her towards Prowl.
It was pretty clear as Jazz fiddled with the sedation drip that she'd only survived by looking too much like a scrapped corpse to be worth the effort of shooting. Frankly, Ratchet hadn't been lying when he'd said she was in no shape to talk to anyone.
As this was Prowl's little protégé, Jazz'd go as easy as he could on her. If he did her any harm, if when he brought Prowl back, the Praxian would make him pay Unicron.
Gently, gently he pinched the sedation line, and quickly, so as not to set off an alarm for occlusion, pulled it from the cannula and set it over a floor drain. He turned off the cannula tap and waited, daubing the few beads of energon with a strip of gauze.
He looked around while he waited. The medical equipment was beginning to be more Wheeljack repairs than original hardware, and a lot of storage was empty. They didn’t have the scratch to buy more, and too little energon to make more. The medbay, like special operations, was running on dredges and scraps.
Her optics onlined into a fuzzy blue, probably unable to focus on anything in the dim light of the off-shift medbay. She clearly knew he was there, though. Her EM field flickered nervously. Jazz slipped a digit in to press on her voxcoder to keep her silent, and he pinged her his ident over shortrange.
[General Jazz, sir!]
She struggled to sit at attention in the medical berth, but Jazz removed his digit from her throat and eased her back horizontal.
[Corporal Strongarm, at ease. I don’t want you stressed. No need to be formal with me, I’m not Prowl.}
A pained chord ran through her EM field. Jazz returned it with an honest pang in his own.
[I’m just here to ask you a few questions — off the record.]
She never commented on the fact that he was there in the dead of night. Instead, she replied readily.
[Of course, sir, whatever you need. My condolences about General Prowl, I know you were both close.]
Jazz opted to simply accept the platitude. Whatever rumour had made the rounds was a problem for future Jazz.
[Strongarm, please speak freely.]
[Sir…]
Jazz could feel her EM field waver. She continued.
[Is it true that they’re ending the recovery efforts?]
[I’m sorry, I can’t say.]
[They are, aren’t they?! General Prowl has been getting me up to speed on just how bad our faction’s situation is, and there’s no chance without him, there really isn’t — not to say that you’re incompetent, sir, no offence is intended — but we can’t survive more than a few dozen vorns without him —]
Jazz cut her off as her sparkrate on the monitor rose, afraid the alarm would sound and attract a spitting-mad Ratchet.
[I agree, that’s why I’m here. Either I convince Optimus, or I do it myself.]
Her anger deflated, leaving her again a broken frame on a medbay berth. Prowl, to her, was the mentor most MTOs never got to have. Her next message was tentative and quiet.
[Ratchet didn’t allow the other bot who did the debrief to do direct rip of my memory banks as my storage drives were still to unstable at the time… they’re still not up to one hundred percent, but General Prowl said you were very skilled at memory work…]
Memory work was a dirty job that Jazz loathed doing, but knowing Prowl had praised him to someone else made him feel a little something.
[That memory would be a great help.]
[One thing first, sir. Do you really think you can get General Prowl back?]
[I have to, don’t I?]
She paused.
[He did say you could pull miracles out of a scrap heap.]
Jazz smiled, knowing she couldn’t see it.
She held out her arm, half again as large as his own, and Jazz had to help the stuck medical port retract so he could plug in his own cable. The handshake crackled with stress and guilt.
[I’m gonna give you a shot of dielectric fluid through the port Ratchet left in just to keep your sparkrate down. That okay?]
He prepped the syringe as she nodded, pulling out the vial he kept in his subspace in case he had a flashback. He injected the milky solution, waiting until the line on the monitor evened out until he shifted in her code again.
She directed him to the memory where it was sitting in her archives, flagged with so many foul emotional tags that it almost overflowed the metadata allowance. This ragged feel in her code was a common situation to be in when he was debriefing his ops bots after a retrieval. If he hadn’t had the experience from there, the memory wouldn’t have budged.
Jazz retreated from her systems and unplugged his cable, and with a sparkfelt thank you he left her to recharge after restarting the drip.
He waited until he was back in his office to end the camera loops. Once everything was back to normal on that front, he sat down and replayed the memory file as fast as his processors could manage.
Their team arrived at Gorgon and was immediately beset with problems.
Jazz’s spark panged as Prowl, his frustration palpable even in secondary replay, strutted about the projection, directing Strongarm’s attention to the various shortcomings of the base on their datapads. Her spark flittered with pride as she correctly identified a section of substandard rivets as pursuant to some Autobot code. It really did take a special kind of bot to keep the faction running, he thought.
It was their first night there that the base began to rumble in the artificial twilight. From a window, Strongarm had seen the flickering of the grey freighter decloaking while the base’s turrets remained limp and refused to fire. Jazz took an internal image capture of the ship, clear and crisp matching the forum’s description.
Prowl began barking orders behind her, and from then on the memory was a flurry of movement as the mercenaries, sans faction badges and painted grey, overcame their security team and stormed the room. Most of those present fell within a minute, and Strongarm had taken heavy shrapnel and ablative damage, laying agonised on the floor.
Jazz paused the playback as a figure filled the doorway. Through the glitching memory he saw green-on-black detailing and heard a heavy step. From the Colonel’s position on the floor, he got a view of a distinctive faceplate and a conspicuous black square centered on the bot’s chest. Jazz didn’t even need to see the hook swinging up into the frame to know it was Lockdown.
The tip dug into Prowl’s chin, hauling him up into view from his bleeding slump at the back of the room.
“Nice to see you again, sweetspark. Been too long.”
Prowl spat at him, his injured frame struggling to rise to keep the hook from going any deeper.
“Couldn’t trust your own faction to let you do what you pleased, so you’re here with mercenaries. How droll.”
“Sharp, as always. They’d’ve killed you after they got what they wanted, while I’ve got a much more tasteful proposition. And some that’re less so. Gotta have some options. What happens after is all dependent on you…”
The memory fritzed and faded as Strongarm fell into stasis, low energon warnings crowding her HUD as Lockdown pulled Prowl up until they were chest-to-chest.
Jazz fell out of the memory. He had what he needed.
He double, triple, quadruple checked what he knew enough that Prowl would be proud, and downloaded it to a secure datapad. Enough time had passed that the early shift was soon starting. Before anything came up, he needed Optimus. And on the way…
While he still didn’t know where Prowl had been taken to, he had justification. His processor just didn’t have the sheer capacity needed to be able run the application he was setting up, not that he’d even had any images to use with it before.
It was a useful little program he’d coded long ago to track Con ships with image recognition from security camera footage, and now that he had a clear picture of the ship and Lockdown, it was a matter of checking that the vulnerabilities he needed hadn’t been patched…
TLTRN-1: [wheretheyat.dll] CRN-4660, CRN-26070, and 4 more vulnerabilities confirmed, appearance configs saved as: rusters.3d, lockdown.3d. run wheretheyat.dll in sector 13-7 (neutral zone)? Y/N
Y
Scan started...
Red Alert soon noticed the spike in Teletran’s CPU usage, but the search was already half completed by the time he’d begun to poke around. Jazz ignored some messages on his HUD; he was already most of the way to Optimus’ office. His room in the Special Operations section was half the ship away from Prime’s office near the bridge.
TLTRN-1: wheretheyat.dll scan complete. Uploading files…
He trusted his own code, and when the program spit out some lovely security footage clips, he plugged into his datapad and watched them then and there as he embedded them into his research.
The planet listed, Moth, rang a little bell. There had been Con activity there many years before. Interesting…
Commandeering old Con resources without permission, Lockdown?, Jazz thought. Naughty, naughty.
The Prime seemed to be waiting for him, probably having been commed by Red Alert, and he signalled for the door to open as soon as the spymaster pinged for entry.
"Jazz, there is nothing we can do to help Prowl. Whatever the Decepticons are doing with him is too deep for even Mirage, and there's not enough time for you to set up a deep cover mission for you— "
Jazz slammed his datapad on Optimus' desk, ignoring the sad cast to his commander's optics and his preplanned spiel.
"He's not in 'Con hands," he hissed. "Lockdown's got him."
Optimus' optics widened as he scanned Jazz's hurried scrawls, seeming familiar with the dubiously Decepticon bounty hunter. Had he met Lockdown before?
"We didn't hand the earlier missions to you, as you’re too emotionally connected to make a valid decision."
"I'm not gonna stop, and you can't make me. Seems like it's just as well to let me do it." Optimus looked at him, clearly still unsure.
"Listen, I can handle whatever scrap Lockdown's got jury-rigged up. This ain't Shockwave, or even Soundwave."
"Lockdown is someone who should be taken seriously. I can't afford to lose another officer."
"We can't afford to lose Prowl. Period."
Optimus grimaced at the truth, putting down the datapad, folding his hands and looking down at the cam footage of Lockdown rolling the Cybertronian-sized crate towards his base.
"How much time do we have?"
"Not much. I expect Lockdown will realise he can't get anything out of Prowl himself soon, and once he's done having fun with him, he'll bargain him off to the 'Cons."
"Megatron is far more likely to kill Prowl than to try and negotiate a trade, unless we offer them the key to Vector Sigma." Offering up that key was essentially a full surrender.
"And before they'd send him back, they'd fully compromise him anyway."
"Soundwave and Shockwave together would certainly have the capabilities and the facilities available. Jazz, what do you suggest?"
"We need to get him before Lockdown starts bartering with the 'Cons. We have so little time, and no Prowl here to help me organise a team. I'm going it alone."
"Jazz."
"Prime, we haven't got no other options. It's solo, or risk tangling with 'Con command on the Nemesis."
Optimus clearly wasn't pleased with it, but waved his hand in assent.
"I'll authorise it if you can reduce the risk, is that clear?"
"Crystal." Jazz saluted sharply and moved to return to his office. He needed this plan done yesterday.
Stalking back to his office, he changed course without thinking to Prowl's. He hacked the lock with some difficulty, and sat in that weirdly-shaped chair Prowl had to support his wings. The office smelled of the tactician’s overly strong energon and tar.
Jazz had that plan churned out two shifts later, drinking from Prowl's in-office energon dispenser left on the tactician's brutal settings. He got the threat level barely within an acceptable level, and pinged Bee to come to the office.
When the scout arrived, he was very clearly concealing his pity at the state Jazz was in — dull polish, optics flickering from exhaustion — well aware that his boss didn't want any of it. Jazz slid the pad to him and directed him to bring it over to Prime. The document was too high clearance to send digitally, and Bee's cheerful presence was always calming to Optimus. It was the little things. All their leader had to do was say yes once, and Jazz could be off the Ark before he could reconsider.
Jazz slipped back to his room to prepare. He could sleep on the shuttle.
A few hours later he was stalking back and forth in his berthroom, considering his kit where it was set out on his berthtop.
His metallic blades were sharpened, and his energon blades and blasters were fully charged, all set out on his berth for his final perusal. The medkit was prepped for two knowing Prowl would be in bad shape, and the tiny compressed energon cubes every agent hated were sitting in a foul little pile on his desk. They glowed an unappetising grey-green. He'd eaten worse, but not by much.
There were some tools and gear Prime wouldn't approve of in a nondescript grey case. Wheeljack had provided some nasty new explosives, nicely wrapped in an unassuming canister. Both shanix and galactic credit chits for potential bribes. Local currency, also for bribes. It felt a little hopeful, but he had one of Prowl’s own backup acid-pellet rifles there alongside his
Though the mission was strictly need-to-know only, Ratchet had been included in that group in case either Prowl or Jazz came back slagged. His pre-mission checkup with Ratchet had been full of sad glances tossed Jazz’s way. The medic had clearly thought that this was some pity mission Prime was letting him go on to get him over the situation, and had probably voiced his opposition to it, at length, to their leader..
While Jazz had been getting thoroughly examined by their CMO, Wheeljack had been working in a private side bay of the main hangar. He’d kitted out the shuttle, an appropriately dicey-looking little two-seater. It was sized for two average grounders, the legally required emergency kit, and scrap-all else. Jazz was perfectly sure it was reliable on the inside, despite the unassuming paint jobs. Moth wasn’t a rich planet, after all, and he didn’t need the extra attention.
The blueprints he'd been handed said it contained one of Perceptor's condensed warp drives, which was really more than he could’ve hoped for. It was really only good for a single jump before it needed to recharge for days, but one clean jump to a more Autobot-leaning area was all he’d need.
A message from Kup confirmed his transport on the currently-docked Xantium to an asteroid nearer to Moth.
The Xantium’s erratic travel routes made it the perfect transport ship (even if the company wasn’t really Jazz’s cube of energon). Given all the nonsense the Wreckers got dragged off to as itinerant ‘problem-solvers’, there’d be very little suspicion as long as they were headed away from the planet Moth.
Lockdown laughed in his hollow rumble, his hook braced in the opposite hand as he scanned Prowl's chained form. Scarlet optics slid over the Autobot's monochrome frame, leaving a greasy sensation wherever they roamed.
"You know I don't just have you for personal reasons, Prowl. You don't mean that much to me. So, laying my cards out on the table: I ain’t got the scratch to keep this team around much longer, so that means I’ll be calling old Soundwave later this afternoon. They;ll be here by the morning.
He took another look, moving towards Prowl and passing under the flickering cell light.
His hook shot out, catching Prowl under his chin, yanking him forward against the chains. They dug into his exposed joints, and energon beaded up around the sharpened point of the hook, trailing down the taut cables of his neck.
The bounty's hunter's exhalations were sticky and humid in the subterranean base. He leaned in until the derma of his lips was almost grazing Prowl's faceplate.
"Imma pitch this to you one final time: between the two of us, we could make enough creds to never have to hear of this damn war again. Your team ain’t winning, and Optimus doesn’t have enough of a spine to win a war without you. The Cons are so desperate to have your mind off the playing field, even if they just get to keep you from the Autobots.
"If the Cons won’t pay me the full bounty, I'm sure that processor of yours’ll sell for good money on the black market. You know I always got Swindle on speed dial. I've got so many options."
Lockdown twisted his arm, tilting Prowl's head so far it ached. The darkened rubsign in front of him was cast in that red-orange glow, and in that light Prowl could see the suggestion of the Decepticon symbol underneath the reflective layer. It was a decal instead of the forged spark casing and steel of the proper Decepticon forces.
"I'll let you think on it."
He dragged the hook tip, still embedded in Prowl's chin, back to himself, cutting a furrow into his plating. Prowl's head fell to his chest as if his cables had been cut. A hot line of energon dripped into the myriad cables of his neck, wet and sticky.
He heard the cell door lock, and the loud crackling buzz of the energy bars relighting. The sound fizzled along the fried sensors in Prowl’s doorwings, the feedback scritching across the traces of his motherboard.
Jazz, Prowl thought bitterly, would have already escaped by now.