Speed

Megatron stood a moment with his own face hard as well. Then he said, “I’m delighted with all this newfound enthusiasm. In fact, I’m finding it inspirational.” He turned and barked out, “We’re going on the Autobot City sabotage raid now. Departure time thirty minutes. Starscream, send out the plan and scramble all aerial fighters. You’re in charge in the air. I’ll command ground forces. Onslaught, Motormaster, Scrapper, assemble your teams.”

[...]

Cyclonus hit the flat metal foundations of the city and transformed, pushing off it. He still had the dorium-plated nosecone Wheeljack had made him: every single molecule formed painstakingly one after another over the course of a month, the strongest material known to Cybertronian science—and as yet unknown, here. He aimed straight for the back of Defensor’s knee, and fired his thrusters at full power.

Defensor cried out in his deep harmonic voice as Cyclonus came plunging into his knee. As he crumpled, his full massive weight began to come down upon Cyclonus’s back with crushing force, but the nosecone had done massive piercing damage; Cyclonus blasted his launch thrusters again and forced his way completely through, ripping Streetwise entirely off the rest of the body, metal screaming around him as it gouged deep furrows into his hull. As Defensor came apart and the rest of the Protectobots collapsed into a heap behind him, Cyclonus burst through and skidded nearly into the dirt at Megatron’s side and opened his cockpit.

Megatron fired three massive blasts at the Autobots still pouring fire down on his head, and leaped inside. Prime was leading a charge directly at them, the Dinobots alongside him, and the aerial escape was still blocked. Cyclonus checked his fuel capacity: he was at 7%. It would be enough; barely, but enough. “Hold on!” he told Megatron, and ignited his warp sequence.

The entire world stretched around them like elastic for a single agonizingly long moment, a high thin whine emitted as his warp engines fought off Earth’s gravity: going into warp in the gravity well of a planet was brutally expensive and brutally unpleasant. But he ignored the howling of his pain circuitry and fed every last drop of his energon reserves into the engine, and abruptly gravity lost the battle: he snapped forward and dived out of the universe, skimming the oceanic dazzle of raw spacetime like a rock skipping over water, only the barest single hop, and plunged back into it not even one fuel pump cycle later, emerging over the Pacific.

His visual sensors had difficulty processing the location. His fuel was nearly entirely expended. Megatron was transmitting the code to the base himself; Cyclonus flopped gracelessly into the opening as the sea tower raised for them. It was blessedly quiet inside: everyone else was still on the other side of the planet.