Starscream Ascendant Ch. 9

Title: Starscream Ascendant
Series: 07 Bay Movieverse
Rating: M (for limited frank references to late-teenage sexuality, violence and an eventual mercy killing)
Summary: Barricade, Edith and the Baby are trapped, but are saved by Starscream... and by the reason Starsceam is interested in Alvin.
Authors Notes: This chapter marks the beginning of the serious Dune references. They'll only get more glaring.
Pairings: Miles/OFC and background Sam/Mikaela. None for the bots since, frankly, all reproduction is done by the Allspark being the source of life, all their closest companions are long dead and it took Bumblebee 3 years to learn that Humans had two distinct sexes.

1:47 AM Local Time, Saturday, June 21^st 2008

Amarillo, Texas

It had to happen, it just had to happen.

Barricade had not survived for this long by being prone to panic... but he was starting to worry. He'd only stopped for a bit in Tulsa so he could send up another of those stupid data-pulses that Soundwave was famous for mandating. Alright, so a regular progress report on the mission was necessary, but did one have to be sent every twelve hours to the minute? Did the vaunted Master of Espionage not realize how much that was slowing him down, having to stop every day and night precisely on time?

But it had to be him, didn't it? Soundwave wouldn't trust any signal coming directly from Starscream and Starscream didn't want to antagonize him any more than usual. Sometimes Barricade though that the two politicians would have scragged eachother years ago were it not for Blackout keeping the peace through brute intimidation and Shockwave's cool assertions that neither of them were expendable right at the moment.

And now he were being chased by what was probably every police vehicle in the Texas panhandle. Normally he would have been able to lose his pursuers easily, by ducking away and changing his appearance on the fly. This time, however, it hadn't worked; they'd still found him once he'd shed his white markings and his flashers. And now his sensors were detecting additional craft on both his flanks one or two streets away.

Not only was he being chased... now he was being corralled!

To be fair, there were tricks he could use to get out of this; stunts so reckless and high-speed that no human pursuers could ever catch him. Of course, they were also potentially fatal to any humans who happened to be in the cockpit at the time. Those were right out, as Starscream had made it quite clear that if the girl or especially if the child were damaged or killed, he would take great pleasure in prolonging the scout's slow and painful death.

That left two options: try to outdrive his pursuers with pure speed, or try to make a stand and contact Starscream to come in and blast them to slag.

His internal online map showed a railyard nearby.

Railyard... railroad cars... huge, semi-mobile containers made out of steel.

Taking his own designation as a cue, Barricade began to formulate a plan.

Inside the cockpit, Edith was, unlike Barricade, definitely entering a state of full-blown panic. Alvin had been fussing ever since this began: 12 hours since he'd had any decent sleep, crying for a quarter of that time, hardly a chance to adequately feed him and she was sure he'd soiled himself, possibly multiple times, in the interim. He didn't deserve any of this; a baby should be at home, sleeping in a crib in a proper bedroom, not crying in a robot car going 90 MPH in the middle of the night being chased by the police!

She was even beginning to doubt whether this had been the right thing to do. She knew she wanted Alvin back in her life, but...

Suddenly, this increasingly desperate line of thought was disrupted as Barricade began to jolt up and down. Looking out the window, Edith saw rows and rows of railroad tracks and the shadowed forms of the containers and boxcars going past.

Finally screeching to a halt behind a string of rust-red boxcars, Barricade used his computer screen to issue one simple command in extremely large font.

“OUT! NOW!”

Edith immediately got out of Barricade, getting the feeling that it would not be a good idea to dally. Still clutching her fussing son, as she had for the past half-day, she watched as Barricade transformed. That was one of the things that had practically transfixed her since encountering him: the very manner in which he changed his form from wheeled vehicle to two-legged mechanoid. It was almost graceful, with the shifting of mass and parts seeming altogether fluid and organic rather than clunky and mechanical like one would expect.

Finally standing, Barricade strode over to one of the boxcars and began examining the linkages between the cars. Finding them intact, the Decepticon formed his right hand into a cannon and blasted one to scrap, then moved to the other to do the same in a violent spectacle of blue plasma and white sparks of metal. With the car completely loose, Barricade moved to the next step: giving himself the Cybetronian version of a hernia.

Police and patrolmen poured out of their vehicles in front of the line of boxcars, and all of them scattered back in surprise and fear when one of the huge steel constructs began to groan ominously and tip forward. With a resounding crash, the car landed on its side, flinging dust everywhere and sending men and vehicles retreating to a “safe distance”.

Barricade chuckled darkly as he peeked over his make-shift barricade, watching the humans scatter like quail in the wind. Despite his arms now feeling like re-fried rubber bands, the fact that this was working so well cheered the Decepticon in a way that he had not felt in... well, eons. But better he let Starscream know where he was than just sit around and wait for the humans to regroup... no matter how badly he wanted to squeeze off a few warning shots so they didn't get any ideas.

“Barricade to Starscream, Barricade to Starscream: am pinned down in Amarillo Railyard. Requesting fire support. Coordinates...” He rattled off a string of jargon that, while they were rather standard Sentinel-Era four-dimensional coordinates, were probably far too complex to properly translate into English or human mathematics. Right now he wasn't thinking about what it would look like to his charges, to see him kneeling behind his shelter, digit to the side of his head, spouting strange noises into seemingly thin air. He only cared about getting out of this with the humans alive and himself in one piece... because if they didn't stay alive, he wouldn't be in one piece for much longer anyway.

Beyond the barricade...

The humans were... confused, even frightened. They, as police and State troopers, had trained for all sorts of incidents, and in cases such as these it was expected that the culprits would try to fight back or flee. What they had not been expecting was what had just happened. Even Silas Burke, ranking officer and hastily elected leader of the group, was utterly stumped on what to do. Every one of these men and women were trained to fulfill their duties... but when a boxcar tipped over on you, was seemingly pushed by something unseen, it could seriously shake people.

However, the situation was quickly taken out of their hands.

Black vehicles streamed into the railyard. Sedans and SUV's, they lacked any distinguishing marks or even, to the astonishment of several officers, proper license plates, instead having numbers: S7-01, S7-02, etcetera. Out of these vehicles came black suited men and black-clad paramilitary types, armed with MP5's, assault rifles and what appeared to be grenade launchers. “What's going on? Who are you guys?” Silas shouted as he approached a group of black-suited men clustered in discussion.

One of them, a tall man with a blonde crew-cut, detached himself from the huddle. “Agent Matthew Black, I'm with Section Seven. I suggest you and your people vacate the area, it may get dangerous.”

Silas was getting the distinct, uncomfortable feelings that he was not only going to get screwed out of any real answers but that he was talking to a man who probably had the authority to kill him if necessary. Nevertheless, he wanted to say one more thing. “I've never heard of this 'Section Seven'!”

“Exactly.” Agent Black answered the man, before turning to see that the “equipment” had arrived.

Back behind the barricade...

Edith, sitting against the upturned boxcar and cradling her son, was the first to notice the ground rumbling beneath her. She looked up to see that Barricade was still sending out the same message as he had for the past five minutes. “Can you feel that?” She asked him.

And then, in a most figurative sense... the world exploded.

BOOM

The boxcar shuddered violently, a fountain of fire and sparks erupting between the young woman and the kneeling robot, forcing them back. Edith instinctively attempted to shelter Alvin with her upper body, but Barricade was far more concerned with what was reaching his environment sensors. The bitter, sour stink of burning magnesium was everywhere, but there was also something else; a hint of the sweet, almost syrupy-sick odour that signaled rotting uranium.

Inspecting the place there the flame had come from, he found a hole that went clear through the roof and the floor of the car. Again looking over the steel structure, he saw what had made the hole.

'Oh... Frag.'

A Bradley... the humans had a freaking Bradley, a vehicle one step down from a tank! And they'd only fired one shot... or burst. But in any case, if the autocannon on that thing caught up with him, it'd chew him up bad, especially if the heat readings coming off that exit point were right. Right now he wished that Devastator had survived: he himself hadn't been built for this sort of prolonged standoff and that had been precisely the brawler's function. What he needed to do was get them out of here now... but the lack of response from Starscream was making him both nervous and irritable.

“Surrender Now! We have you surrounded! You will be treated fairly by the courts but you must come...” This loudspeaker broadcast by one of the new detachment of armed personnel was cut short when an unaimed plasma round from the Decepticon hit a sedan and engulfed it in flames, sending the unarmed agents scrambling for better cover. Barricade immediately regretted his rash action as fire from the armoured men began hitting the line of boxcars.

He had an idea... and with impacts from sabot rounds slamming into the other boxcars, it was the only one he could think of.

“Edith Roberta McPherson?” Barricade barked at the shaken young woman, trying to gauge if she was all right. When she nodded and with Alvin giving off a healthy-sounding wail, he was slightly reassured. “Good. Follow me and when I say run, you run. Do not stop, do not look back, do not hide, run. Understood?” Edith gave another terrified nod and Barricade pressed his shoulder against the boxcar, using something he'd never thought he had: brute strength.

The boxcar began groaning again, and the armed men were not sure of what was happening... until the car began jolting up and down. The jolting was caused by the car hitting rails and being pushed over them... being pushed with increasing speed.

Being pushed... towards them.

Armed agents retreated as fast as their legs could propel them, vaulting over vehicle hoods and out of the railyard itself, shouting for everyone to fall back before the mobile boxcar slammed home. And slam it did, with the seemingly Unstoppable Force crushing automobiles before it and under it, only stopping as the Bradley proved the Immovable Object. When one end of the boxcar caught on the metal fighting-machine, the massive metal container swerved and came to a halt, heaved to one side by Barricade to conveniently provide some cover for Edith, Alvin and himself.

“RUN!!!” Barricade suddenly broke to the left, performed a spin, managed to fire a few shots at the human vehicles and then continued running, closely following his charges.

Edith, following the instructions given to her, ran. She didn't dare stop, trying to hide would have been pointless, and she was too afraid to even risk looking back. Her mind was nearly blank aside from the sensation of Alvin against her chest and the urge to simply run propelling her. She became so focused on running that she wasn't keeping track of where her feet were landing.

She certainly didn't notice the dislodged railway tie in front of her.

Her left foot hit the tie in mid-stride. She stumbled, she fell, the shoe dislodged itself from her foot... but she never hit the ground. Instead, she fell into the hand of her robotic companion, who scooped her up and held her, cradled on his left arm, while he continued running. Eventually the sounds of the agents and vehicles were no longer audible and by the time Barricade stopped and let her down, they were in the courtyard formed by a few low buildings, seemingly safe from any pursuing ground vehicles.

Helicopters, however, were another story.

Two of the aerial platforms raced towards the courtyard, their searchlights already bathing the area in a stark contrast of harsh blue-white light and deep shadow, their rotors kicking up wind and dust. Barricade's first move was to put himself between the two craft and his charges, though that meant that Edith had to shelter between the robots' legs when the helicopters began circling around them. Trying to track both vehicles at once, Barricade made his left hand into a smaller-caliber, multi-shot cannon, hoping to pick out a good shot.

One of the helicopters seemed to slow for an instant, swinging it's exposed flank toward him. A whoosh of compressed air issued from the barrel as a projectile, attached to a trailing cable, flew forward to make contact with the Decepticon's left arm. The harpoons primary function was not to puncture in the traditional manner, but to entrap with weighted tendrils, as happened when the six bolas-cables wrapped themselves around Barricade's elbow by force of inertia.

The master-cable snapped taut and, for the first time in a long, long time, Barricade felt panic. In the frenzied struggle to resist the pull of the tether and to stay upright, he was lucky that a second harpoon, fired by the second craft, missed his other arm. Old fears began rising in his spark, the memories of a thousand screams haunting him: cries for help and for absent mercy; not from his many Autobot victims, but from friends and comrades he had lost a lifetime ago, in a war that had planted the original seeds of Cybertrons destruction.

“Don't let the fleshies take me!”

After watching , helpless to intervene, as Prowl had been dragged off to nameless oblivion, Barricade had always vowed that he would never allow himself to suffer the same fate.

Grabbing the cable with his right hand and planting his footpads solidly in the dirt, Barricade heaved. The helicopter jerked, it's rotary motor straining as Barricade worked to pull the craft in like a fish on a line. Finally gaining enough slack on his left arm, Barricade aimed and fired once, twice, three times at the offending vehicle. The cockpit shattered, the rotor assembly spun off on its own, and the harpoon gun detached and clattered to he ground. Barricade immediately began working to try to tear the tangled cables off of his elbow joint.

The girl, on the other hand, was staring at the flaming wreck. Even though she had recently seen him rip out a wall and upend a boxcar, Edith hadn't truly appreciated what sort of carnage her apparent guardian would or could commit. But now, looking at the flaming wreck of the first helicopter and warily watching the second, she was beginning to come to the conclusion that this had much more to it than simply her getting her baby back. She was beginning to wonder what Barricade (and others like him, if they existed) really wanted with her and Alvin.

Of course, on some level she already knew the answer.

The crew aboard the second helicopter had also reached a conclusion: namely, that stronger ordinance was needed. While NBE-6 tore the cables from it's arm, the gunner inserted a new type of harpoon into the launcher. Realizing that ensnaring the arms would be useless without another craft, the gunner aimed for the right leg. And whereas the first harpoon was only able to penetrate earth-standard armour, the new design had been specially developed for its' intended targets.

Just when Barricade had freed himself from the first harpoon, the third was fired. Instead of wrapping around his leg, the white hot tip pierced his right thigh in a burst of sparks, melting armour and gut-wrenching, femur-cracking pain. His damage sensors squealing, he collapsed on the leg, falling onto his back as the cable pulled taut and barbs on the harpoon hooked in. Forgetting the presence of his charges, he swung his left arm upward and began firing wildly at the helicopter.

The first shot hit the tail rotor while the third, fourth and seventh found their mark in the fuselage. Another fireball lit up the dark sky as the flaming wreck plunged to earth... and Barricade tried crawling to his feet, his single-shod charge holding her son as she looked on nervously.

With a mighty pull and a bout of intense pain, Barricade extracted the harpoon from his leg and flung it aside before flipping onto his chest. Although reduced to a dull throbbing (his damage sensors warning him that vital structures had been compromised), Barricade didn't trust his leg to support him... especially after his attempt to kneel on it ended in painful failure. The only option now was to try to transform and get out before the humans caught up with them.

When the sound of screeching tires and the floodlights hit him, Barricade realized that there was, now, nowhere to go.

“Stay behind me!” This was a warning for the girl to... well, to do what he said. Edith would have probably done this anyway but Barricade was in no mood to be nice to or to trust fleshlings right now, even if he was supposed to be protecting two of them. As for the approaching agents, with their weapons and their mist-sprayers (that registered as black on his infrared scanners), he only had two approaches: shoot and yell.

Barricade shot wildly at the approaching humans, throwing up dirt in explosions and cleanly vaporizing one mans head. While doing that, he screamed a number of “commands” at the humans, including STOP and DESIST. After the survivors of the initial wave retreated towards the vehicles, Barricade thought that he might just get out of this.

Unfortunately, the humans had one last trick up their collective sleeves.

Those armed agents left alive began arming themselves with strange and unfamiliar weapons. Resembling grenade launchers but with outsized, boxy magazines, these weapons were now being aimed squarely at the downed Decepticon.

“FIRE!!”

At the command of Agent Black, the weapons began launching strange projectiles at Barricade. Silver discs, measuring some 4 centimeters across flew by force of compressed gases until they latched onto the injured robot.

What they brought was pain: burning, itching, electrifying, 'thousand-fiery-needles-under-the-skin' pain. Barricade roared in agony as more and more of the devices clung to him, his damage sensors screaming in alarm or becoming a haze of burning static. His systems were registering truly massive amounts of physical damage... but from what he could comprehend through his optics, not even his gloss finish had been chipped. Through his screams and the gnawing, gnat-bite agony of the devices, he realized that they were trying to force him into stasis lock through psychosomatic pain... or make him blow out his own central processor, whichever came first.

But that was no reason why he couldn't still fight...

Barricade again began firing wildly, giving no thought to aim nor strategy, only wishing to hold off the end though sheer chaos. The humans had been planning for this, and several well-aimed sabot rounds from normal grenade launchers ripped though his cannon and lower arm, leaving nothing but a ragged, glowing stump.

Now that was real pain. He held the stump to his chest, trying to ignore the pain by grinding his dental plates together, trying to think of something else to do. That exercise ended when a disc attached to the side of his head, elicitng a harsh scream from him.

Edith McPherson, to put it mildly, had been though much in the last twelve hours, to say nothing of the last twelve days or even the last twelve months. The stress of trying to soothe her son though a police chase that had lasted half the day, the struggle to properly attend to him in that time, the noise, the sirens, the lights, the explosions, and her own fright had all taken their toll on her emotional state. Now, looking at her guide, her companion during this whole experience, writhing in agony and with her helpless to intervene, her own empathy as a sentient being was also now added to that tally.

There is a limit to how much stress each person can withstand before they snap... and Edith had just exceeded hers.

“STOP!!” Running from the shadows behind Barricade into the harsh blue glare of the vehicle headlights, still clutching Alvin in her arms, screaming her lungs out in what sounded like emotional agony, the girl must have seemed quite the spectacle to the agents. “STOP!!!” Edith screamed, practically in tears, unable to withstand the stress or hold back her emotions any longer.

The shower of discs stopped and all weapons fell silent. Barricade, supporting himself on his elbows, still barely conscious from the regular pulses of pain the discs emitted, turned his head toward Edith. 'What did the little meatbag think she was doing?! She's disobeyed a direct order and now the operation's all shot to slag!'

And thus men started coming towards them again. Armed with mist nozzles and automatic weapons, the sight of them began to register in Edith's tired brain as a very bad thing which she had, in some way, brought about. She knew that they would take Alvin away from her, she suspected they would take Barricade apart to back-engineer spaceships or something and as for herself... right now she didn't know and she didn't care. All she knew was that she could not let them catch her or Alvin.

She began retreating into the space underneath Barricades body, and, for decades to come, Barricade would wonder exactly how it had happened. Maybe Edith had turned a little too quickly near an armour plate or perhaps he himself moved in some way, but what was confirmable is that some part of Alvins exposed skin (most likely his head or face) came in contact with Barricade.

At that instant, Alvin's still-blue eyes turned... bluer. There would simply be no other way to describe it.

The silver discs detached from Barricade, clattering to the ground.

Barricade, sure that death (or worse) was near at hand, suddenly felt the most remarkable sensation: the pain disappeared, replaced by a soothing, cooling wave of energy as his sensors returned to normal: normal readings, normal structural integrity... and looking at his arm, that was only the bonus for Barricade.

The armed men were almost upon them when the unexpected happened: the robot stood up... and pointed his gun at them.

Another wave of men fell or retreated as Barricade blasted at them with his light cannon, his right arm transforming onto a heavy cannon to fire at the arrayed vehicles. The men at the back lines barely ready when they heard the second sign of their imminent demise.

A sonic boom heralded the arrival of an F-22 coming in curiously low. Barricade took his as a sign to retreat and did so, scooping up his charges and retreating while the agents were in the midst of panic... and death, as four air-to-ground missiles slammed into the parked convoy.

With the fire of the impacts in the background, Barricade let Edith and Alvin down in an alley a little ways from the courtyard. Quickly he transformed and beckoned for the humans to enter, which they did. Inside, the supplies were jumbled and in some cases crushed, but at least Alvin had stopped crying and was falling asleep. Edith, however, could not help but stare at his eyes as they began closing, as they began returning to their normal colour.

She knew that there was only one reason that human eyes could look like that... and she knew Arrakis was fictional.

Back at the site of the bombings, a moth had been drawn by the light of the flames. As it fluttered hear the ground, it became especially attracted to a shiny, round object lying on the ground. It landed on the disc... and, in a flurry of movement, was promptly eaten by it.

The Water of Life need not always be wet, afterall.