Warp

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. Megatron climbed out. Cyclonus managed with an effort to transform. False sparks were skittering over his vision despite the dark, and he was light-headed: the old familiar signs of complete energon depletion. His systems were going to stall out. He tried to tell Megatron, but his vocal unit was already shutting down: noncritical systems were going.

“I suppose it’s my own damn fault for ordering you to be flawless,” Megatron was growling at him. “But what the hell am I going to do with you?”

Cyclonus had no opportunity to offer a suggestion; his optics shut down, and he fell to the ground, and unconsciousness claimed him.

#

“Megatron, you wouldn’t believe the complexity of his circuitry,” Hook was saying in passionate fervor. “Are you sure I can’t dissect just a little piece—a finger, even—”

“Shut up! If you so much as scrape a micrometer of coating off his chassis, I’ll take you to pieces,” Megatron snarled, “and I won’t dissect you neatly, either! I ordered you to get him functional again, not give me a technical analysis!”

“I would put it back afterwards,” Hook muttered sulkily. “Anyway, the repairs are already done! The worst thing wrong with him was he’d run out of energon. His engines—ohh, his engines, what I could do with his engines—his engines are gloriously efficient, but even he can’t go to warp in a planetary well on seven percent capacity, even with a forty astroliter tank.”

“He was at seven percent?”