Durability

As soon as Cyclonus pierced the outer casing of the Quintesson shield generator with the nosecone Wheeljack had forged him, all the defenders turned their weapons on him at once, and he could not take evasive action. The barrage thundered against his exposed sides, agony flaming through him, but he held grimly on until the upload of Hook’s nanovirus was complete. The shield wall collapsed into flickers of static as all the microgenerators ringed around Cybertron began exploding into small firebursts. Cyclonus began to withdraw, hoping to join the incoming wave of attack and do a little more before he was destroyed, but it was too late. Though he saw Defensor’s mighty fist coming, he had already sustained too much damage; he could not evade in time.

The smashing blow crushed his last two functioning thrusters and sent him tumbling far out into space and past the outer limits of the battle even as it was fully joined. He was unable even to right himself. The others could not turn away to aid him; he had completed his critical task, but they all still had their own to perform. He approved the cold determination that kept them in their positions: it was he who had commanded it, looking intently at his few Autobot warriors to be sure they too would accept the necessity of it. “There is no rescue possible in this battle,” he had said quietly. “None who go shall return. Let no one come who does not understand that and is prepared to endure that fate—for both themselves and their comrades.”

Now it was he who had to endure, a pain far worse than his physical wounds to hear them all fighting, dying, incinerated and smashed, while he could do nothing more.

[...]

It was so strange a realization that it took him four more of his dwindling minutes for his logic processor to raise to his attention the chance that he could survive: he couldn’t aim himself, but he could calculate a trajectory for Earth’s solar system and then engage his warp drive when he was aligned in the right direction. He would almost certainly lose consciousness from the strain on his battered frame, but his engines would deliver him to the target once engaged. He needed only set a simple distress beacon broadcasting on the general channel, and the others would find him.

He slowly began the calculations, trying to decide if he truly meant to survive this day. He could think of no better resting place than here—with his lord, and also with Scourge, with Ironhide, with the Combaticons and the Predacons, with Grimlock; the last handful of all their greatest warriors, those who had fought to the end against the Quintesson yoke. But to die only through inaction—not in battle, but in surrender—no. That was not a warrior’s death, and if he died it, he would not deserve to mingle his ashes with theirs. They had not died for no purpose.

The leading edge of the blast wave was nearly upon him: it would be a near-run thing, and his warp drive might interact badly with the disruption of space-time. That did not matter. He would try. “Rest in honor, my comrades,” he said softly, as his visual sensors swept one last time across the expanding field of debris, most of it still glowing: all the remnants of his world and the rushing expanding surface of the shockwave sphere so near he could already feel the molten heat of it upon his frame. Then he was turning away from it, towards Earth, and as the glow rose up around him, he engaged the beacon, and flung himself into warp.

 #

He rose gradually through layers of consciousness, his sensors gathering data about his surroundings while his diagnostics ran. They began to flash strange warnings of inconsistency even before his mind came fully back online, and an impossible and familiar voice said, “Looks like our sleepin’ beauty’s finally decided to wake up. Maybe now we can get some answers.”

Cyclonus turned his head slowly, in wary disbelief: Ironhide was standing beside the repair table, looking down at him, his mouth hard with suspicion. Cyclonus stared at him. “All right, you old hardnose, back off my patient,” another voice said; Cyclonus slowly turned the other way: another Autobot, unfamiliar—that was strange enough; he knew every last surviving Cybertronian—was leaning over him with a medical scanner. “Hey there. Got a designation?”

“I am called Cyclonus,” he said slowly, trying to grasp what was happening: had he suffered core injury? Was his mind substituting the dead for people around him? But the other was unfamiliar, and they did not seem to know him—

“How are you feeling?” the medic asked. “Wherever you came from, looks like it was getting pretty toasty before you left. And like you’d been hit by a couple of asteroids to boot.”

“I am functioning within acceptable parameters,” Cyclonus said, although he felt dubious about the claim. His diagnostics were insisting all his systems were functioning correctly. And then his archival databases abruptly served up a name for the other Autobot: Ratchet, medic, killed in the opening attack of the Battle of Autobot City.

[...]

“I can understand that sentiment,” Optimus Prime said. “But unfortunately, you’ve landed right back in the middle of it here. You’re in our base on Earth. We picked up your distress beacon a couple of days ago, and Cosmos was able to retrieve you—but he just barely beat out Astrotrain to your location. So the Decepticons know we got you, and they’ll probably assume that you’re one of us, now.”

[...]

“Welcome, Cyclonus,” Prime said, coming to stand before him. “Glad to see you functioning again. We weren’t sure we could get you jumpstarted—were you drifting a long time?”

[...]

He swung his legs over the table and stood. The Autobots had even refueled him to capacity, and what damage their medic had overlooked, to the nanotech-level circuitry he had most likely not even noticed, Cyclonus’s self-repair systems were already busily mending. He rotated his arms and flexed his knees; he would have liked to do a few kata to loosen his joints up more thoroughly and flush his system, but he did not think it prudent to give the Autobots any significant demonstration of his capabilities.