Pain

He entered the sanitization chamber and plugged in the sweeper cables mechanically, without hesitation. The procedures were of course unpleasant, but he had learned to far prefer the mere physical discomfort to the consequences of avoidance. In any case, the sanitization Soundwave initiated was perfunctory compared to the standard he had established during the Quintesson war. A standard, Cyclonus abruptly thought, set only after several attacks had slipped through their defenses.

“Soundwave,” he said, and Soundwave’s head came up from the monitors. “Your sweep is omitting the lower levels of the personality component system. My comrades and I recently discovered an infection which targeted those regions.”

“Describe the technique,” Soundwave said.

“I am not familiar with the technical details. Our specialist—” who had of course been Soundwave himself “—described it as a neural unraveller packaged in a nanoviral injector. The injector did not act upon the infected directly, but was transmitted to the central communications network and from there distributed to all connected mechs.”

Soundwave paused silently processing and said finally, “Vulnerability identified. Neural programming techniques required to instantiate such an attack: significantly beyond current Autobot or Decepticon capabilities. Describe source of attack.”

 “My comrades and I found the remains of considerably older Cybertronian lifeforms aboard a drifting vessel,” Cyclonus said, carefully modulating his audio processor and controlling the power flows to his logic centers, so that the monitors Soundwave had observing his brain activity would see nothing out of order; he was now very close to lying. He and Scourge and the Sweeps were considerably younger than nearly all the other Cybertronians, and they had once been on a drifting vessel with a group of dead Autobots, victims of the Quintesson attack—but they’d just finished killing all of them at the time. A mercy killing. “Analysis of their bodies revealed the neural attack. We never found the specific perpetrators.”

“Understood,” Soundwave said. “Instantiating deeper neural scan. Discomfort will increase.”

“I am prepared,” Cyclonus said, satisfied: he had managed to give the Decepticons additional defenses against the enemy they did not yet know to fear.

The full scan took some six hours. The surface-thought probe had required some slight effort to manage, but Cyclonus had simply manually loaded his usual mental routines for deep-space travel and lost himself in a simulated philosophical debate between three great masters of the Kohir Rangers, the Palladian Knights, and the Destroyers of Ytrymal. It fully occupied his processor and memory units for the duration of the scan and had the added benefit of further settling his disrupted circuitry. He felt calmer and steadier when he emerged, despite the lingering pain of his ruthlessly probed systems.

“Sanitization procedures complete,” Soundwave said. “You may report to infirmary for pain relief.”

“I require none,” Cyclonus said, stepping down.