Would we survive in a horror movie?
I doubt it we're too slow moving
We trust everyone we meet.
- Noah Kahan, “Everywhere, Everything”
A long time ago, on a colony far, far away…
“So did it blow up yet?”
Signal distortion from the planet below made Aurora’s voice crackle and pop over the radio, but Trixter could still make out her words through the interference. The control console of the old shuttle was laid out terribly by modern standards, covered in mechanical buttons and knobs with only vague markings that assumed you knew what they meant. Piloting the thing had been easy enough to figure out, some things would always be intuitive, but the comms panel was a mess.
She turned down the volume on the music she’d been piping through the speakers — Twincast had some fresh Arcturian power ballads on his show today — and pressed a button with a symbol that seemed like it could conceivably represent the concept of “Send”, cursing herself for not taking the time to figure that part out before she was floating in space protected only by the hull and life-support systems of a long-decommissioned Cybertronian orbital shuttle.
“I regret to inform you that it is still intact, and if it can stay that way long enough to get me back on the ground in Nocenti, you’re coming on the next flight with me.”
She couldn’t help but grin. A ship of her own, even if it was a salvaged heap bought off a black-market trader and kludged back together with scrap and prayers, was something she’d only dreamed of. And now here she was, up in orbit by herself, everything working like it was supposed to. Not a single warning light was on — well, except for that one about the docking guidance, but she didn’t need that. All the important stuff was working.
“If you can land it safely, fine, I’ll go with you,” Aurora said. “Loggerhead says if it blows an engine up there, he’s charging you for retrieval.” She laughed. “I can’t believe you talked him into letting you take it on a salvage job.”
“I told him I’d cover the fuel. You know how he gets about the fuel costs. Anyway, I’m just scouting. The crew that towed the derelict into lunar orbit said it was an Autobot ship. I’m making sure it’s safe before we send the heavy equipment to pull it down.”
Aurora groaned. “Let me guess: Nobody else wants to touch it, so the shipyard got it cheap. It’s just a shame about, you know, the fucking war.”
The fucking war. Trixter stood up from the pilot’s chair and leaned over the controls, reaching up to brush her fingers against the thick glass of the forward shield of the cockpit. The stars up here were impossibly bright and clear, the darkness between them impossibly deep. So many other suns out there, so many other worlds… She’d never get sick of this view. There was a time back on Cybertron when she wouldn’t have been allowed it, not with her ground vehicle mode keeping her assigned to ground duties. She’d given up her home ages ago and immigrated to Twincast’s Free Cybertronian Settlement of Nocenti so she could have a view like this despite her altmode. That, and the fucking war.
“I wonder how cheap. Because this shuttle is fun and all, but can you imagine having a proper FTL ship? You and me and, I dunno, Granite, maybe Dart? Some of those new kids from Caminus we met at the bar last week seemed like they might appreciate an adventure, right? I could get a whole crew together.”
Aurora laughed. “I’ll ask Loggerhead how much he’d let you have it for. Have you even thought of a name for the shuttle yet? You’ve gotta name it.”
“I haven’t decided for sure yet, but I’ve been thinking maybe… the Phoenix.“
A warning light flashed on the console.
Trixter tried not to imagine the horrible ways she might be about to die if that warning light meant a rupture in the engine core or a hull breach. Her whole body tingled reflexively, ready to teleport away, knowing in her mind but not her spark that she was too far removed from anywhere safe for it to help her. Fix first, panic later.
But no, the new flashing light was a distress beacon. “Oh hey, it looks like the beacon’s still transmitting, it’s just really weak. I’m going to pull the recovery data and see if there’s anybody there who can respond to a hail. Call you back in a minute.”
Trixter clicked over to the other comms channel. The audio sounded like a computer voice, stilted and atonal and awkward: “-tomated distress beacon from the Autobot ship Paragon’s Fist. Please assist. This is an automated distress beacon from the Autobot ship Paragon’s Fist. Please assist-“
The holographic display in front of the pilot’s seat sprang to life, showing a wireframe rendering of the immediate planetary area with a flashing dot behind the second moon, a basic schematic of the ship — a small one, bigger than Trixter’s little shuttle but hardly a warship — and a list of what appeared to be names. Five of them, a small crew manifest.
And it looked like the finders had been right about it being an Autobot ship. It was all Cybertronian, right down to the names — Hyperlight, Proton, Zephyr, Spectrum, Shade, normal Cybertronian names — but Nocenti was very intentionally out of the line of fire of their war. It felt obscene to even have it in orbit nearby.
But… Hyperlight. Proton. Zephyr. Spectrum. Shade. Normal Cybertronian names. Autobots, but still fellow Cybertronians. Maybe they were all dead, but maybe some of them weren’t — Cybertronians were notoriously hard to kill, ask any organic — and maybe they needed help.
She tuned to the comms frequency attached to the message and hit that “Send” button. “Paragon’s Fist, this is Trixter of the Free Cybertronian Settlement of Nocenti, prepared to assist. Please respond if you can.”
Only a whine of static came back, almost drowned out by the hum of the shuttle’s engine. She repeated her message, waited again, still got nothing in response.
She turned the comms back to the shipyard’s frequency. “Hey, Aurora? I’m not getting a response, but it’s definitely an Autobot ship. This is probably going to be a corpse-counting job, but I’m gonna check for CR chambers and stasis pods just in case. Holding on to hope and all.”
“All right. Stay safe up there, Trix.”
— — —
The derelict was right where the beacon’s map said it would be, and its orbit around the moon brought it into the sunlight as Trixter approached. The schematic hadn’t prepared her for the reality of the thing. It was ten times the size of her little shuttle, only just barely big enough for FTL drives. But it was brutal in its design, all hard angles and bolted-on armor plating and jutting sensor arrays and more guns and missile ports than she could count. The only Cybertronian ships she’d seen other than pre-war antiques like her shuttle had been traders from Caminus, and their ships were designed with an aesthetic grace that was the antithesis to this battle cruiser. Its very silhouette threatened violence.
And it was… fine, as far as she could tell. No gaping holes in the hull, no crumpled superstructure, not even signs it had been in a battle. No lights, though — it was running completely dark.
The Phoenix handled like the tired old shuttle it was, but Trixter still managed to ease it alongside the Autobot ship to an airlock door. The schematic hadn’t shown a shuttle bay, so clamping to the side and attaching a boarding chute to the airlock was the best she was going to get.
The docking mechanism was something else Trixter hadn’t gotten a chance to test out beforehand, and she murmured a little prayer to whatever gods might be listening as she engaged the mag clamps. She felt a satisfying shudder as the shuttle attached itself to the larger ship. Once the shuttle’s inertia had synchronized with the Paragon’s Fist, she powered down the engine to save fuel and prepared to board.
The docking chute creaked and groaned as it extended to the other ship, but it sealed securely enough against the Fist’s hull to satisfy the safety system and illuminate the green light over her own ship’s door. The data encoded in the beacon had included enough information on the crew to assist with a proper recovery operation, names and visual references as well as basic medical data on each of them, and Trixter reviewed it as she checked her electro-daggers, double-checked the stunner she’d recently had added to the back of her right hand after a salvage deal went wrong, and mustered her courage. She tried not to think about how likely it was that they were all long dead. She’d been flippant about it on the comms with Aurora, but… these were fellow Cybertronians. She knew it shouldn’t matter, but it did. But maybe some of them had managed to get to CR chambers, or put themselves into a soft shutdown. Maybe she wasn’t about to walk into a ghost ship. Maybe she was about to be somebody’s hero.
— — —
The first Autobot she found on board was Zephyr — most of him, at least, strewn out across the hallway just inside the airlock, only identifiable by the blue and green of the parts of him that had once been his armor and the distinctive backswept wings that now jutted up at odd angles from the mess. She flashed her torch over it only long enough to confirm his identity. The dead bodies she found on salvaged ships were rarely this bad, and it was rarer still for their insides to look so much like her own.
The energon pooled on the floor around him was dried, though. An old corpse. She said a quick prayer out of habit, though whatever fate awaited poor Zephyr’s spark in the afterlife had been met long ago.
“So much for a heroic rescue,” she muttered to herself as she pulled up the schematics. As she double-checked the route to the bridge, she listened to the ship, and she heard… nothing. No scuttling of monsters waiting to jump out of the shadows, not even the barely-perceptible hum of the engines running idle. She wondered how long it had drifted like this before it had been found.
She kept her torch shining firmly ahead of her as she made her way through the profound silence of the corridor to the bridge, fighting the urge to keep looking over her shoulder. The tingle of her teleportation trying to kick in was as constant as an itch. She’d heard stores of the terrible things that could sneak onto a ship and do exactly the sort of thing that had been done to Zephyr. Void parasites, energon eaters, monsters with acid blood… The bridge computer should at least be able to tell her if there were any survivors to look for, whether they were in shutdown or in the CR chambers in the (tiny, judging by the schematics) medbay. It could hopefully tell her if there were any stowaways, too.
There was a song from Caminus about “making bad decisions”, and for some reason it was suddenly stuck in her head.
— — —
Spectrum was in the corridor just before the bridge, sprawled in a way that would have been described as “face down” if he’d still had a face. The distinctive multi-colored armor she’d seen in the roster data was dulled in death, but the shape of him still matched, apart from missing most of his head. He was much more intact than Zephyr, but in a way that was just as horrifying. No chitinous acid-blooded monster has done this. This was high-powered energy weapon damage, two shots from behind, leaving a smear of a blast mark on the opposite wall. One through the head, one through the back, where his spark would have been. He had been executed while running away.
She stopped to listen again, but there was still nothing. But anything intelligent enough to do this was intelligent enough to stay silent.
Hyperlight. Proton. Shade.
Trixter shone her torch farther down the hallway. The bridge door was open, spilling a faint silvery light through this part of the corridor. She tried to convince herself that whoever did this was long gone. They must have killed Zephyr on their way out through the airlock. It was probably Decepticons, right? So they’d have some important planetary genocide to be doing once they wrapped things up here. They definitely wouldn’t still be hiding on the bridge, lying in wait for a salvager to come poking around.
It was convincing enough to get her moving toward the bridge.
— — —
The ship was angled just right to catch the reflected sunlight from the moon’s surface through the bridge’s forward canopy, casting everything into sharp silver and deep shadow. The two Autobots she found there — Proton, based on the shape of his shoulders, and Shade, based on the treads on his legs — had been executed as cleanly as Spectrum. Proton lay sprawled in the middle of the floor. Shade lay slumped on the floor next to the chair in front of the computer console. Both had been shot twice, once through the head, once through the spark, and the energon splattered on the controls and pooled around their bodies was long dried.
She tried to piece together what had happened. Someone started firing on the bridge, taking Proton and Shade down first. Were Spectrum and Zephyr in the corridors when it started, or were they in here on the bridge and then ran, only to be killed trying to escape? Is Hyperlight somewhere else on the ship, or did the Decepticons take him hostage? He was the ranking officer here, right? Maybe he was important enough for that.
She stepped gingerly over Shade, trying not to look too close at all the parts of his head that weren’t meant to be exposed like that. Who had these Autobots been, before their stories had come to an end here? Did anyone back on Cybertron miss them? Had they chosen this, or were they some of those poor souls she’d heard about who had been built to feed the war machine? She should at least make sure they got a proper smelting, once the ship was towed back to Nocenti for salvage. They deserved that much.
The main console was as dark as the rest of the ship. She tapped a few buttons and was not at all surprised when there was no response. But even a ship computer with no power would have data storage that could be accessed. She examined the console, running her light over the sides of it until she found a small access port. She pulled out the matching connector cable she’d had installed in the back of her wrist for ship diagnostics and plugged in.
She checked first for saved security camera footage, but there was none. Then she checked for logged life signs — there’d be gaps with the system this low on power, but it was better than nothing. But there hadn’t been any since the crew was killed, not even organic ones, no unusual heat or cold or movement detected in the system’s increasingly intermittent scans. It wasn’t a confident all-clear, but it was enough to soothe that persistent anxious urge to blink away from the danger.
Then she queried the ship for Hyperlight’s last detected location and found that he’d been pinged in the medbay, alive but in shutdown in a CR chamber.
She felt a surge of hope. Someone here might still make it out of this nightmare alive.
“All right, Hyperlight,” she whispered, grinning, into the ship’s silence, “let’s get you out of here.”
— — —
According to the schematics, the ship’s crew section was a single level, with a corridor looping along the hull on the sides and behind the bridge in the front. The airlock was on the starboard side, so Trixter followed the port side from the bridge past the bunker-style shared hab suite to the medbay near the rear, just before the engine section. She’d have to see poor Zephyr one more time on her way out anyway, so there was no point in making herself walk by or over or through him more than necessary. She really wanted to take a tour of the engines and see what FTL technology the Autobots had been using since she’d left, but that could wait until Hyperlight was either safe or confirmed dead.
The medbay door was locked. The keypad on the wall next to it was as dark as the bridge console, but Trixter found a service port there too, and she jacked in just as easily. The log showed it had been locked from the inside. She imagined him locking himself in here to escape the Decepticon raiders, maybe injured trying to defend his crew, knowing it was too late to help them now. Sometimes the best you could do was survive.
She convinced it to unlock and then pulled it open — powered doors were a luxury this close to full shutdown. The inside of the medbay was faintly lit by the glow from the CR chambers standing up against the back wall, the last recipient of the ship’s dwindling power. A pair of empty circuit slabs flanked the room, leaving a walkway between them. A handgun had been left on one of them. There were no dead bodies in here, not even signs of a fight other than a dribble of energon leading from the door to one of the CR chambers.
And inside that tube was her last hope of finding a survivor.
Hyperlight was handsome. The crew data from the beacon hadn’t done him justice. He stood a bit taller than Trixter, with a lean build accentuated by oversized, downswept shoulder pauldrons from his jet mode. The stark blue light of the chamber wasn’t kind to his yellow and orange paint job, but she could tell it would look striking under proper sunlight. His yellow optics were dark, and in shutdown his face looked calm and untroubled. Alive, though. The chamber’s control panel showed that he was still alive.
She put a hand against the chamber’s window and smiled up at him. “Hey there. I’m here to rescue you.”
She set the chamber to wake him up and stepped back. It beeped a few times, then hummed, then hissed as the door slid aside.
As his eyes lit up and he started to move, she noticed the dried energon on his hands, splattered all the way up to his elbows.
She popped out her fist stunner. “Hyperlight?” she said hesitantly. “I’m here to help.”
He looked at her, locked eyes with her, and for a split second there was something scared and desperate there. Then it was replaced by something soulless and ugly and violent. He smoothly grabbed the gun from the circuit slab and before she saw what he was going to do with it she let that instinct she’d been pushing down have its way and blinked back through the door into the corridor.
He tore Zephyr apart. He shot the others and then he tore Zephyr apart with his bare hands and -
He chased her out into the corridor with savage speed, letting out a wordless roar that hit Trixter like a punch in the ship’s uncanny silence. She blinked again, back down the corridor toward the bridge, but she couldn’t keep herself from looking back. There was something wrong with him. He looked angry, and confused, and also like she was going to end up like Zephyr if she couldn’t get away from him.
How was she going to get away from him? She couldn’t keep teleporting, she’d burn herself out. There was nowhere to hide here that wouldn’t just trap her, and she couldn’t stop for long enough to open the airlock door. She’d have to get in close enough for the stunner.
But everything in her just wanted to run.
She ducked around the corner toward the bridge, hoping she could get a shot in before he noticed she’d stopped running. And he followed, making no effort at stealth, his footsteps filling the void where the sound of an active ship should be. His footsteps, and the sound of her own body on full alert, pumps pounding, instincts screaming at her to get away.
He came into view and she lunged, punching at him with her charged fist. He smoothly grabbed her wrist and yanked upward, and the joints in her shoulder screamed with pain and tortured metal as he used her arm to pin her back against the wall. He kept her wrist trapped above her head, crushing it in his fist. She cried out as he lifted her off her feet, forcing her injured arm to take all her weight.
She looked at him, into his eyes, hoping for any sign of the scared, desperate survivor she’d seen in the medbay. Anything she could get through to. “Hyperlight,” she said evenly, grimacing through the pain, “I know this isn’t you. I don’t even know you, but I know this isn’t you.”
And there it was, just for a moment, that spark of whoever he used to be. The rage left his face, and fear took its place.
He lifted the gun to his own head and pulled the trigger.
There was a click, and a fizzle, and nothing else.
She teleported out of his grip, landed behind him, and pushed through all the pain and damage in her arm to land a solid blow to the back of his neck. He convulsed from the shock of the stunner, then collapsed to the floor.
And she fell to her knees beside him, exhausted.
— — —
Trixter found some booster packs and a sling for her arm in the medbay, and, conveniently, a maglift gurney. She used one of the boosters on herself and stashed the rest on the gurney — the Phoenix could use free supplies.
She thought about leaving Hyperlight behind — thought about it several times, to be honest, as she struggled to drag him onto the gurney with one wrecked arm and then tie his wrists and ankles with cable she found on the ship, grimacing at the dried energon that flaked off his hands. She thought about taking his empty gun back to her shuttle, giving it a quick charge, and doing what he’d failed to do to himself, too, but that felt even worse than leaving him to be someone else’s problem. She’d gone… well, a while without killing anyone, and she wasn’t going to break that streak now.
And that wasn’t him. That scared person she’d seen there, the one who tried to turn the gun on himself, that had to be the real him, right? Something had been pushing him so hard to kill that he’d torn Zephyr apart with his bare hands once his gun was out of power. And he’d fought against that for her. He was still in there, and he deserved her help.
So after a lot of effort and awkward maneuvering, she got him onto the Phoenix and lowered the gurney to the floor at the back of the cockpit. He still hadn’t stirred. The stunner wasn’t supposed to be that strong, but he was probably running on a trickle of power himself.
She also hooked his gun to a recharger, in case she needed it. She hoped for the best, hoped that shock had given him a good hard reset, but she knew better than to leave anything to chance.
Once she was satisfied she wasn’t going to be murdered before she made it back to Nocenti, she settled into the pilot’s seat. Music was playing softly through the speakers, not with the clarity of Twincast’s subspace transmission but on the shipyard’s staticky local frequency. Aurora’s way of letting Trixter know she was waiting on standby for an update.
Trixter hit the Send button, trying to get her nerves to settle. One more blink at this point might be enough to put her into shutdown herself. “Hey, I’m back on the shuttle.”
“There you are! I was starting to think maybe something on that ship had eaten you.”
“No, I’m… I’m fine. Found one survivor close to shutdown and, uh, wrecked my arm pretty bad trying to move some stuff. So if you could get one of the medics to meet me when I land, that’d be great.”
“So how’s it look?”
“The ship itself is in perfect shape. Might be worth more whole than it’d be in parts. I’m, uh, retracting my interest in it, though. It’s a bit more than I want to deal with.”
Aurora laughed. “I’ll retract my resignation, then.”
“Oh, and tell the boss there are a few dead Cybertronians on board who’ll need to be given a proper send-off.”
“I’ll let him know. Safe landing, hope that shuttle doesn’t burn up on reentry!”
She closed the comms channel and turned her attention to the shuttle controls. The boarding chute and the mag clamps retracted with only minor complaints. Once she was untethered from the larger ship, she fired the engines.
Tried to fire the engines.
“Oh, come on!” she cried, holding the big red button that was supposed to trigger the ignition with a nice throaty rumble, but now was only making a click sound. “Start up start up start up start up start up…” On the tenth or eleventh frustrated button-jab, the engines finally caught with a healthy roar that made the whole shuttle shudder, and she collapsed back into the pilot’s seat in relief.
She had just finished getting up to speed and pointed back toward Nocenti when she heard Hyperlight stir. She grabbed the gun from the recharger and slowly stood, keeping it hidden behind her back.
He sat up with a long groan like he had the worst hangover of his life. When he looked up at her, there was no trace of… anything she’d seen before. He half-smiled at her, then nodded to his bound hands. “So this is awkward.”
“Well, you-” -did try to kill me, she stopped herself from saying. She watched him closely and tried to look like she didn’t have her finger on a trigger behind her back. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
He looked around the cramped little cockpit and out the canopy window, at the green and gray and blue of the planet ahead of them. She could almost hear the gears grinding in his brain. “That’s kind of a big question. Nothing that would have gotten me tied up, I don’t think. Not…” He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
She tried something she knew the answer to: “What’s your name?"
He blinked at her, frowning just a little. “It’s Upstart, right?”
She stared at him. He heard me talking to the shuttle and his poor brain is so fried that he forgot his own name so he thought…
Just before she left Cybertron, there’d been rumors of something called “shadowplay”, some dark science that could alter minds and completely change personalities. She’d always thought it was a wild conspiracy theory. But not an hour ago he’d been ready to kill her with his bare hands, and now he was… this.
They broke him. Whoever did this to him, they just completely broke him.
But she remembered what Aurora had said when she first showed her the junky little shuttle she’d bought: “You do love broken things.”
She nodded and forced a smile for his sake — and carefully set the gun down in the pilot’s seat. “Yeah. Good. I’m Trixter. With a… well, you don’t need to spell it. You were nearly dead when I found you on that derelict. Wasn’t sure how you’d react when you woke up, but… Here, let’s get you untied. Looks like you’ve got some pretty bad memory loss, but you were in a CR chamber, so I think the rest of you should be all right.”
She sat down on the floor next to him and freed his hands, watching his face as he looked up in awe at the view ahead of them, the cyberformed settlement spilling like mercury around a massive parabolic antenna in the middle of a continent of raw stone. There really was no sign of the monster he’d been on that ship except for the last traces of energon on his hands. Maybe whatever had triggered it had been left behind there.
Maybe here, in the hard-won peace of their little settlement, he could heal from what the war had done to him. Like she had.
And when he turned away from the view to look at her, she couldn’t help but return his smile, in earnest this time. She could tell him later that he was the only survivor. Maybe tell him never why that was, if he didn’t remember on his own. For now, he was Upstart, and she was happy to leave it at that.
She gestured grandly to her home. “Upstart, welcome to the Free Cybertronian Settlement of Nocenti, sketchy trade hub and pirate broadcast capital of the Cybertronian diaspora. You’re welcome to stay as long as you want.”