Chapter Text
The research station was supposed to be safe. That was what they had all been told, it was what they had been lead to believe. It was a simple job – get in, pack down, and wait out the months when the planet was out of communications ranges before they could go back home again. They’d been given the required supplies, they’d been given the training and the materials they needed – shit, they’d even supplied them with stasis pods should things go tits-up with supplies and they needed to be able to reasonably ration them.
It was all supposed to be so easy, but it had all gone oh so very wrong, and by the time they’d noticed it was too late – all that was left for them was to shut the hatch and wait out the storm.
Day three.
It’s been a while since I saw the main star – it came out to welcome us on our first day here, but it had vanished when we woke up on our second day and it’s been hidden ever since. It’s a binary star, not unlike our own – it’s been fascinating watching the way the colour of the sky changes as they move through the sky. It’s so familiar but so alien. Our sky back home is pink and blue, but here it’s orange and green.
I’m glad I’m here. We’ve all just come off of a battlefield rotation – turns out there’s not much rescuing for a rescue team to do when the war is this intense. It’s more clean-up crew, which was starting to get extraordinarily depressing. Hot Spot says that he’s fine and he’s glad he could do what he could to help, but I can still tell he’s bothered by the smell of corpses. He’s not very good at hiding it. So, given we didn’t have much else to do and we’re already predisposed to not try to kill each other when locked up inside with each other, we were put forwards to go to a remote planet and begin to clear it out and salvage what data we can before wiping it off the map and pretending we were never here. Apparently there’s some data here that’s of interest to the scientists back home, but it’s so remote it’s hard to access for most of the year that we’ve been sent to go collect it and bring it home. It’s not worth maintaining the research station, apparently. Resources better used for the war efforts back on Cybertron. If you ask me, I’d much rather we used our precious resources to fund research and bring some semblance of peace rather than war, but it doesn’t seem many feel the same way.
Perceptor has been very useful. Anything we’re sending over to him, he’s directing us to do exactly what we need to do. He’s even trying to teach us what to look out for in determining if it’s of any good to them, anticipating when we go out of range in a weeks time – we’re all trying our very best to pay attention so that we can be as efficient as possible and get off of this planet as soon as it comes back up on the scanners back home again.
It’s such a weird planet. The outside world is inhospitable. Life lives underneath the thick ice, insulated from the brutal cold above and warm enough for small organisms to thrive. I haven’t seen them, but I’ve been told that they’re there. It’s too cold for me to go out and take a look – I’d freeze to death before I even reached the bore hole the original scientists used – but it’s still so fascinating to think about. Every time I walk I think of what could be underneath me.
We’re still finding new places in the base. The original blueprints were useful to a certain point, but none of us are architects and we don’t know how to properly read them. We can see voids and spaces that we think are rooms but don’t seem to have any doors, and there are rooms where we thought voids were, so we’re relying a lot on the emergency escape plans on the walls. There’s one on nearly every corner, in every hall – they must have been very prepared here. The environment is hostile. I’ve never been anywhere like it.
There’s a shield that activates to cover us. Groove’s managed to coax the weather station back to life, and it’s working away hard for us and telling us when the next storm is. Judging from its readings, the next storm is due around the same time as the planet goes out of communication range, so Hot Spot and Blades are working fast to try and make any repairs the communication unit needs before it hits, and repair the structure its housed in. We’re all taking shifts to move ice and snow to build it up against the structure for extra insulation against the cold – one group harvests the ice, one moves it closer, and one stacks it up and builds the wall. I’m busy looking at some kind of anti-freeze we can use to try and buy us some more time to send a message should the storm come before the final check-in does. The guys back planet side know that there’s every possibility we might not make it in time, that our final check in might be one of silence – they’re fine with it. They don’t expect anything to happen to us. This sector is a dead one. Nothing ever introduced itself to the researchers, the researchers never saw anything, and nobody ever goes this far our unless they’re truly desperate. We’ll be in a much better shape than any potential Decepticon threat will ever be. Blades is almost hoping that someone will come knocking, if only for something else to do. We can all tell he’s starting to get a little bored, but what else can we do?
Streetwise is already thinking of things we can all do once we’re in lockdown together. Games – he’d found lots of cards and half-complete board games – stories, odd jobs around the base. I know I’ll be seeing the most amount of downtime unless one of us gets sick – I don’t anticipate us coming to blows any time soon. The atmosphere is good. We are feeling very positive.
Day nine
There is something here with us. I don’t know what, but I know we are not alone and I just can’t shake the feeling that I’m being watched by something.
We go out of range tomorrow at 13.86 sharp. Whatever that thing is, we can’t let it go undetected any longer – we need to tell them we’re not alone here. Blades thinks it’s the isolation starting to get to me. Streetwise hasn’t found anything – he keeps looking, he believes me, but he can’t find anything. Hot Spot has said that we don’t mention it unless we can prove it – it’s a complete waste of resources if we tell them we’re not alone and then they come and find that it was just the sound of the near constant wind messing with my processor.
I get it. I agree with it, to a point. I understand. But it’s still upsetting and feels a bit dismissive.
So, instead of thinking about how I can feel optics boring into me, and my things keep going missing and moving around, and we’re lower on energon than we should be and the supplements are missing and my tools are going and
The anti-freeze has gone well! It buys us an extra five kliks. That may not sound like much, but it’s totally game-changing for us. Five more kliks means an extra board could be nailed in, it means time to pile up more snow and ice, its a few extra precious seconds if you become buried. This is especially precious considering the storm is here – we can hear it and visibly see it on the horizon – and it helps us a little should the central heating not be as powerful if energy gets diverted to the shield.
We hope that’s not the case, though. Blades doesn’t like the cold very much and nor do I. We’re allowed to have one of us be grumpy. We’re not allowed two.
I haven’t mentioned this to my team yet, but I don’t think it’s just the wind I can hear. I can hear something else howling out there – it’s not a mournful sound, or the whistle of air through the mountains or other geological structures we’re surrounded by. It sounds more… organic. Forceful. Like it’s coming out of something rather from something. Hot Spot is already treating me like I’m made from glass and is glancing at the stasis pod as if weighing up whether or not it’s worth putting me in it to keep me asleep for the duration of our isolation which I don’t like very much at all. He’d definitely encourage me to use it if I said anything.
So I kept my mouth shut, even as the sound of it got louder.
We were looking through datapads by what used to be the geology lab, the hidden optics burning into the back of my neck, when Streetwise and Blades came back from their turn scouting for new areas reporting a new area. A basement.
Nobody had mentioned a basement. We’d checked the blueprints, each clearly marked with a floor – no basement. No subterranean area, no underground – there wasn’t anything suggesting a basement.
But here we were, staring at the hatch. I felt the back of my neck prickling, whatever was watching us was watching more intently than ever. I swallowed hard as I stared down into the darkness underneath the hatch. It didn’t feel like it wanted us to go down there.
I said as much. In different words. Words that made it sound like I’d come to that conclusion myself. We should focus on the research, on getting together one last message to base and getting our final instructions before we did any kind of exploration. The responding argument was that there could be something down there that they needed to know of, so we should go down and check it out.
So we did. And I hated it. The air felt thick and heavy and murderous. Something awful had happened down there – I could smell it. Old energon. I know the smell well. I’d been surrounded by it on the likes of Delphi training with Pharma, on battlefields, in the field hospitals I’d trained and taught at, when going with Streetwise to investigate illegal and abandoned Decepticon research institutes and sites of suspected war crimes.
Streetwise could smell it too. We shared a horrified look.
Neither of us will recharge well. It’s our turn now, but we’re wasting precious time by filling in our own respective journals and avoiding letting our optics grow too heavy.
I don’t want to dream.
Day ten
I WAS RIGHT.
WE ARE NOT ALONE.
Hot Spot and Streetwise came back inside like they’d seen a ghost. Hot Spot wordlessly pointed to where they’d cleared the cabling running between the communications hut and the main station, and there was a section where the snow was more churned up than anywhere else.
There was an axe cutting through the cabling. It had been damaged by something well thrown.
It started an argument. A lot of I told you so’s that I’m not proud of left me, but I felt vindicated. Vindicated and smug. If they’d listened, maybe we wouldn’t have been unable to send the communication. We’d have been more alert, more aware.
We were not alone, and we had no way to tell anyone.
I knew how to fix the cable. Fortunately, our biology was quite similar, and fixing broken cables was not a taxing task for me. I could do it in my sleep. The difficulty came in keeping me out there long enough to fix it and with making sure whatever it was that threw the axe couldn’t do it again while I was out there with my head over it.
Hot Spot went with me. He brandished it like a weapon as his optics scanned the skyline and scoured the roof, any hidden spots someone might be hiding in. I felt my extremities slowly freeze over, the white hot welder in my hands not enough to keep them warm.
Repairs were at 10%. I wouldn’t make the repair in time to re-establish communications.
I couldn’t feel the optics on me again, but I could feel my team staring at me as if waiting for me to come up with an answer, with reassurance that I could be faster. The reality of the situation was that the metal was cooling faster than I could melt it, than I could get it to reconnect to where it needed to be. I wasn’t fast enough, the wind was too strong, and the temperature was too low. Everything was working against me, and 10% was the best I could manage.
The check-in came and went.
We had a half ration of energon, and thought hard about what we wanted to do next.
I wanted to continue packaging up what research we’d already found into the crates and pile them up ready for when pick-up came. If we all stayed together, then whoever it was would find it so much harder to pick us off one-by-one. There was a reason they hadn’t done it yet. We out numbered them, we out muscled them. Hot spot studied the blueprints, identifying where all the mysterious voids were. We were to avoid rooms that were surrounded by them, to limit our operational spaces to the places where there was nowhere for anyone to hide. They had an upper-hand. We weren’t going to give them a chance.
I’m writing this from the room we have all piled into, the door partially barricaded with crates of research. Soft furniture has been dragged in along with all the blankets and weapons we can find, anything we can use to defend ourselves when their guns run out of charge. Hot Spot had pressed the axe into my hands and told me that even if I didn’t want to use it, it was still good for me to appear to be a threat. Pharma had said the same thing to me. Delphi saw a wide range of patients – Autobots, Decepticons, Autobots who should have been Decepticons, and unaligned mechs, some of whom didn’t even know there was a war. I’d decided when I’d taken my oath as a medic that I would never harm anyone. This would be perceived as weakness to those seeking an opportunity to hurt someone, so I’d need to look like I wouldn’t be worth the trouble, that’d I’d give back as good as I got. He’d made me carry a taser at all times, and a gun when we had particularly troublesome patients.
It had felt like lead in my hands, a blight hanging at my hip.
The axe didn’t feel much different. I’d twirled it around to get the weight of it, to try and get my mind to not think it was so heavy, when I noticed something on it.
Paint transfers.
Dark grey paint transfers.
None of my team have dark grey hands. For some of them, they’d have to rub it on certain parts harder than is reasonable to transfer the paint, and I just don’t understand why any of them would have done this, which only leaves one thing.
I was right. We are not alone. And whoever it is has dark grey hands.