When his forward momentum finally brought him face to face with his foe, Blitzwing resolved to correct his previous error. “Nice try, Goldthug.” Blitzwing smashed his forehead into the Autobot’s cranium, knocking him to the ground. Satisfied with this victory over his now unconscious foe and his use of language, he turned to the spanner, which now rippled and surged with life.

“Oh… that’s not good,” he muttered to himself. “Heatwave, can you hear me?”

“Blitzwing! Got out of the bonds, but I can’t talk the spanner into shutting off! You’ve gotta turn it off from there!”

“Hang in there!” Blitzwing pulled an access cable from his forehead crest and plugged it into the spanner’s controls. A second later his consciousness reached out to the system, forcing the material world away in favor of a stream of unfiltered data. Despite his relative inexperience he began plucking command codes from the data flow.

‘Schematics… we might need those… and… aha… the Autobot communications encryption key…’ Blitzwing smiled to himself as he seized every bit of information available. While minutes had passed within the virtual environment, outside only seconds had passed. As the rift above the spanner grew ever wider, Blitzwing began pushing the codes he had stolen through to signal a cancellation. A few more seconds and the system would shut down entirely.

Seconds were all that the only-seemingly incapacitated Wheeljack needed.

Blitzwing couldn’t see the electro-shell hit the control panel but he felt it. Lightning surged out of the data stream and enveloped his virtual self. He screamed as his unprotected circuits were overwhelmed by the power surge. A motor-spasm ripped him free from the system just as he felt something pop deep within his form. As he tumbled backward he saw the rift open high above the stellar spanner, and witnessed a red and blue shape tumble upward into the void.

Wheeljack rose to his feet as the rend in the sky sealed itself. If he had a mouth he would have been grinning. “Pathetic fool! You thought I was defeated, but it is you who have suffered defeat!” The lights on the side of his head flashed as he laughed maniacally at Blitzwing’s fallen form.

As he laughed, Wheeljack swore he heard a click, as though a distant system were coming online. His laughter stopped as a strange cacophony of rhythmic sounds accompanied by the wet, meaty voice of some unknown human warbled at him from every direction.

“-ither, heavy metal machine, restore the con-sti-tu-tion, that is our dream!”

“What… who’s there?” Wheeljack looked in all directions. “Where’s that coming from? Goldbug!”

“What…. what is that noise?” Goldbug muttered as he came back online. “Vile, reprehensible, obnoxious!”

“It is some sort of Decepticon attack!” The two Autobots, futilely covering their external auditory sensors with their hands, turned to see Side Burn running toward them. “This is what the humans laughably consider music, the Decepticons must have weaponized it somehow.”



- Blitzwing Bop