Chapter Text
“What now, biker boy?”
Thrust followed the length of the wall with his arms raised. He hesitated as he rolled to a stop and stared into the dark. Then, the safety in his servo turrets snapped off with resounding twin clicks.
“Well?”
“Take the long way around,” Thrust answered. His voice reverberated against the concrete— the sound of metal raking over smouldering coals. “I’ll drive them straight to you.”
Their most recent attempt at a Mange Menagerie roundup took them deep into the lower districts of Cybertropolis. Laid out beneath the towering skyscrapers and a stretch of the mega-freeway that fed the Citadel. This was a seedier section of the city that interlaced with weaving alleyways and pushed into a maze of backstreets. It had the smell to match, too. An abysmal runoff of grime and gunge choked the already thin air with its fumes, fermented by sewer water bubbling to the surface streets. The recent acid rains had made the resulting haze even worse. Cold, plunging the metal valley of decayed apartments into a dense fog. Visibility was next to zero after more than three feet in the corrosive mist. Relocation signage bolted to the wall next to him told a pressing story… Maximal officials had been trying to evict the Predacon tenants for months. Something about levelling the place to build up luxury apartments. Which was a shame, because he was sure it still would have smelled like slag after the fact.
Their Maximals had vanished at the throat of the labyrinth with nothing more for the Vehicon generals to go on. No drones were coming to their aid, either. Radio communications were impossible with half the relays across the city choked into submission from the storm. Their drone-control synapses were also offline, by extension. The narrow lanes were at least awash in neon from the fluorescent signage above. They were the prettiest of the city’s lights that refracted on the wet asphalt, turning the dark haze into a clash of rainbow hues.
Jetstorm loved it second only to the skies— if only from a distance. You wouldn’t catch him dead wandering a filthy gutter like some rat. One Maximal fitting the description was enough too many. “The long way around where?”
Thrust mulled over his thoughts before giving the answer. “The river. Any one of those maintenance entrances to the sewers will have a direct line to the Catacombs. I’ll flush ‘em out, you take ‘em out.”
“Aerial poaching? Sounds like a blood sport.” Jetstorm rose to an elevated hover, brandishing his talons outward. His weapons array whined as it came to life. “I love blood sports, biker boy.”
Thrust took the low road, disappearing into the brume that swallowed his energy signature whole. Straight down a gullet of a multicolored water painting, until even his headlamp light vanished. Jetstorm went high and took the long way around as agreed on. Cutting straight ahead over the dilapidated buildings, bowing far enough to the side to avoid drawing attention to himself. The winding web of pathways between the buildings fed straight to the river swollen by the rain. The floodgates had already opened to divert water accordingly. A powerful current lashed the concrete barricades.
Jetstorm hung at the entrance of the most direct path with his antigravs hissing. He waited. And waited.
He never would have noticed the Maximals sneaking by thirty cycles later if Nightscream hadn’t slipped and shouted. The resounding slap of wet fur on asphalt was also hard to miss. The bat wasn’t exactly made for walking in his beast-mode… Jetstorm turned, and found himself practically face-to-snout with all five Maximals trying to skirt past. A brief exchange of weapons fire left Jetstorm scrambling to avoid Primal’s energy pulses. Two on five hardly sounded fair, but Jetstorm and Thrust — together — would have been able to hold their own. One on five after being effectively snuck up on had dealt the aerial Vehicon an unwinnable situation. The blue mech was forced to back off. Adding insult to injury, he watched with seething anger as the Maximals made their escape across one of the maintenance bridges. Not a single one of them fell in and drowned. Typical.
To say he was upset was a sheer goddamn understatement.
“Son of a glitch!” Jetstorm turned his head into the alley and shouted down its mouth. The force of it caused his vocalizer to bubble with static. “Roller boy! What the frag was that about!? I almost got slagged out here!”
There was no answer. The haze churned down the darkened corridor, black and red that blended on green at its fringe. His voice echoed down and was met with ominous silence. The sound of it was warped by the time it finally bounced back to him.
Jetstorm tried his radio. “Thrust?”
Nothing.
Jetstorm scoured the alleys from above as best he could. The chemical vapor was still too thick to see through and had actually managed to get worse in the time he spent waiting by the river. Visibility was down to twelve inches— maybe less. Too many of his instruments were being skewed to do proper measurements. Any reliance on radar was shot without a baseline to differentiate between the structures and a single lost mech. Short-wave pings were useless, too. He almost struck the side of one of the taller buildings as he went around in circles and lost his sense of direction. Jetstorm tried shouting again. He was remiss to realize that fog was muting him too much for the sound to carry.
“Thrust!”
There were no alternatives left. He finally descended into the labyrinth and felt worse than a rat. Rats were at least hard-pressed to instinctually know their way around in the dark, but Jetstorm felt… something. Not helpless (certainly not, not at all) but the word lingered in his processing cortex with a twinge of menace. Twice, he had to exit back up into the sky to retrace “steps” as he got lost. Struggling to hone in on where Thrust could have wedged himself was drawing on increasingly worse thoughts on what might have happened. Maybe he was never going to find him. Maybe he needed to brace himself to find a body.
Eventually, Jetstorm looped back to where he first agreed to take the long way around. He brandished his claws and furiously gouged the wall to mark his place after three feet. Then another three feet. When his talons started to wear down, he dragged his armor along the wall to leave paint transfer. When it started to wear down to his surface-level sensors and hurt, he tore one of the relocation plaques off the wall and used that to scrape path markers. Sparks flew.
There were finally tire treads underfoot as the grime accumulated into a heavy layer on the ground. Deep enough for a robot to leave a noticeable trail. Jetstorm could have recognized Thrust’s tread-pattern anywhere and started following it, continuing to leave marks in the walls to keep tracking his progress. He went straight down the gradual decline heading northbound, all the way to another narrow backstreet that fed into an even slimmer lane. There were signs of a struggle as the mire slicked amongst animal pawprints. Energon was sloshed on the wall.
He found Thrust leaning against a metal wall behind a dumpster, using both to keep his himself propped upright. Cheetor’s machetes had slashed his tire flat to the rim. He had also gored him deep through the chassis. Light from his borrowed spark radiated from the shattered chamber. The asphalt shimmered those deflected neon glares as energon pooled under his wheel. The maroon mech was holding his arms against his body to keep his battered fuel processor and shredded tubing from spilling out.
“Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea,” Thrust said when he spotted him. His vocalizer warbled, agonized, but still restrained as he attempted to rein in whatever semblance of control he had left. His optic sensors couldn’t quite keep Jetstorm in their focus as the visor's backlight flickered. Poor power allocation must have left him fading in and out of consciousness. The hot coals in his voice were doused. “How about we take the short way out?”
There was no carrying Thrust up and out in that condition. Jetstorm settled for the next best thing and lowered himself down to the other mech’s height. Bending his tail at the “knee” and slinging one of Thrust’s arms over his shoulder. The larger Vehicon wrapped an arm around the other mech’s back and used a massive servo to keep the bike’s dislodged internals in place.
For emphasis, he squeezed three times. Weakly, Thrust nudged him three times back.
“I’m good for that,” Jetstorm said, looking up to try and glare over the tops of the buildings he could no longer reach. He also made note to draw out whatever level of hurt he could against Cheetor when he next saw him on the other side. “Definitely.”
