[G1] Amount to Nothing
Nov. 29th, 2021 07:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dracoqueen22Title: Amount to Nothing
Universe: Transformers G1, Null and Void
Characters: Jazz, Mirage, Bumblebee
Rating: M
Warnings: Mentions of canon-typical violence, character death, and implied rape
Description: The abandoned Outpost Seventeen had to be a trap, but not even Jazz was prepared for what he actually found.
It’s weird.
Weirder than weird actually.
The Decepticons didn’t leave assets behind. Abandoned bases were always summarily destroyed so that the Autobots couldn’t find so much as a cracked datapad in the wreckage. There was never anything to sift through, no clues to discover, no prisoners to rescue.
Nothing.
Which made the fact that finding Outpost Seventeen in the Gamma Quadrant still intact something of a rarity. No, worse than a rarity.
It smelled like a trap.
Jazz wouldn’t let anyone else join him. He ordered his team to stay outside until he’d personally cleared the base, and while Mirage tried to argue otherwise, Jazz trusted his second to obey.
This reeked of one of Megatron’s plots, and Jazz didn’t like it one bit.
Outpost Seventeen was as quiet as a mausoleum. Clearly, the Decepticons had left in a hurry. Empty crates lay tossed on their sides. Doors were open, showing shadowed rooms stripped of all belongings. Consoles sat silent and dark even to a few tentative key presses.
A cursory examination revealed that their hard drives had been removed, either taken with them or destroyed.
His comm crackled. “Jazz?”
“Hold tight, Mirage,” Jazz answered, his voice echoing eerily in the emptiness of the base. He moved on, room after room, abandoned and stripped clean, with no signs of worthwhile intel or life. “I’m only halfway cleared.”
“Yes, sir.” Mirage’s tone was tight, controlled, but Jazz could hear the irritation lurking beneath it. He thought Jazz took too many unnecessary risks.
It was the life of a mech in Special Operations, however. Risk came with the territory.
Jazz moved on.
He found the brig, which seemed to have doubled as a storage area as well. Gated cells stood on the same hall as rooms filled with empty crates. Other cells were enclosed with energy bars, long since deactivated, though the reek of the discharged plasma still hung in the air.
The cells were empty. Save one.
Jazz’s spark tightened into a narrow ball as he found the greying corpse. Two wounds -- one in the head, and one through the spark -- execution style. Evidence of welds and static mesh suggested the mech had been injured before his death, though attempts had been made to repair him.
Someone would have to tell Smokescreen.
“I’m sorry baby Blue,” Jazz murmured as he rested a palm on Bluestreak’s charcoal-grey chassis, as cold as the air of the base around him. “Shoulda got here sooner.”
He bowed his head, offlining his visor, a moment of silence for the indignity. If Bluestreak was here, then Ratchet was, too. Or had been at one point.
Jazz had not found Ratchet’s corpse in the prison.
He tapped his comm. “Mirage, I’m goin’ to need a retrieval team,” he said as he stood and pulled a folded tarp from his subspace. He covered Bluestreak with it and placed a tracker on top of his chassis. “Have them track my ping.”
“Is it…?” Mirage had switched to a private line.
Jazz worked his intake. “Stay with Smokescreen. Send Bee instead.”
“Slag,” Mirage breathed into the comm, a rare vulgarity from the usually uptight noble. “Yes, sir. I’ll send Bee your way with a stretcher. I assume you don’t need a medic?”
“No.”
“Understood.”
There was a knot at the base of Jazz’s spinal strut. There was fire wrapping around his spark, and his jaw twitched where he clenched his denta.
He pressed forward, out of the prison-slash-storage area, not deeper into the base, but toward the back exit. Toward what they presumed to be a docking station for ships capable of interstellar travel.
A smaller, adjacent hallway caught his attention, largely because it was unassuming, and there seemed no purpose for it. Jazz couldn’t think of any facilities in the base he hadn’t already found. He’d dug through the crew quarters, wash racks, training room, command center, and prison-slash-storage.
What was left?
He changed direction, eying deactivated cameras and motion sensors and alarm triggers. The corridor curved sharply to the left ahead for him, for all that it wasn’t very long, and it dead-ended at a single room with a large door. The locking mechanism was more complicated than any other Jazz had encountered in the base, not that it mattered, there wasn’t any power in the electrical lines.
Jazz stabbed a vibroblade into the control panel and activated the shock surge, causing a jolt of energy to cascade into the system long enough to trigger the door to open. It did so begrudgingly, stale air puffing out in its wake, and Jazz swept his headlights over the dim interior.
Megatron’s personal quarters. Of course they were.
Jazz’s tanks churned, and an unwelcome shiver clawed up his backstrut. He entered anyway, scanning the interior. It was more comfortable than the rest of the base’s accommodations, with a berth large enough for Megatron and a partner, a small sitting area, and a personal console against the nearest wall.
A small light blinked on said console. It was drawing power from somewhere.
Megatron had been thorough enough to wipe the databases of every console in the entirety of the base. Datapads were dark and empty. Megatron had destroyed every scrap of information to be found, and yanked memory cores from every console. Nothing had power in the base.
Nothing.
Jazz gritted his denta and examined the console from every angle, throwing every scan in his arsenal at it. But as far as he could tell, it was not a trap. There were no incendiary devices attached to it, no triggers. The air lacked explosive particles.
“Fine,” Jazz growled. “Let’s see what gift you left for us, Megatron.”
He tapped the monitor and the console blinked to life. There was one item on the screen labeled “For Optimus,” but Jazz ignored it, accessing the system memory instead. Unsurprisingly, there was nothing. The only data on the console was the file on the main screen.
A video file.
Jazz cycled a ventilation and braced himself for anything.
He clicked on the video.
He watched it through once before he transferred it to a datapad and destroyed the console. He took great pleasure in tearing the computer system to pieces, shattering the monitor against the wall and leaving the processor itself in ruins.
His tanks were a tangled knot, threatening to purge the energon he’d consumed this morning. He was shaking, and he had to stop before he could call in the rest of the team. He couldn’t let them see him out of control.
Jazz bowed his head and tried to manage his ventilations, to find calm somewhere within the storm.
He didn’t want to let anyone see the video, save that he knew he could not keep it a secret. It was, best he could figure, proof of life.
Megatron, after all, would not kill Ratchet after bragging so thoroughly about how he’d made Ratchet his. Their medic was a trophy. His possession of Ratchet was a weapon against their morale, their resolve to see the Decepticons defeated.
“Jazz?”
His comm crackled.
Jazz worked his intake and pressed a hand to the receiver. “Bumblebee,” he acknowledged. “I still have to clear the dock, but I’m pretty sure there’re no nasty surprises waitin’ for us.”
None but the one on his datapad -- the three minute long clip of Ratchet in Megatron’s berth, and the many ways Megatron had broken him.
“You got the retrieval team?” Jazz finished.
Bumblebee’s hesitation spoke volumes. “I do, but--”
“We only need one,” Jazz said, and pushed himself into motion, out of Megatron’s quarters, away from a place that was surely soaked in Ratchet’s pain and misery. He turned to the dock instead. “Ratchet’s not here.”
Ratchet was still in Megatron’s possession, and Jazz had no idea where to find the Decepticons. Locating this base had been difficult enough. Megatron had slipped away in the shadows, without his usual flair for the dramatic, and wherever he’d taken himself and his flagship, no Autobots had spotted him thus far.
Jazz had been right from the beginning.
Outpost Seventeen was a trap.
And there was no escaping the repercussions of what Megatron had done.
***
Universe: Transformers G1, Null and Void
Characters: Jazz, Mirage, Bumblebee
Rating: M
Warnings: Mentions of canon-typical violence, character death, and implied rape
Description: The abandoned Outpost Seventeen had to be a trap, but not even Jazz was prepared for what he actually found.
It’s weird.
Weirder than weird actually.
The Decepticons didn’t leave assets behind. Abandoned bases were always summarily destroyed so that the Autobots couldn’t find so much as a cracked datapad in the wreckage. There was never anything to sift through, no clues to discover, no prisoners to rescue.
Nothing.
Which made the fact that finding Outpost Seventeen in the Gamma Quadrant still intact something of a rarity. No, worse than a rarity.
It smelled like a trap.
Jazz wouldn’t let anyone else join him. He ordered his team to stay outside until he’d personally cleared the base, and while Mirage tried to argue otherwise, Jazz trusted his second to obey.
This reeked of one of Megatron’s plots, and Jazz didn’t like it one bit.
Outpost Seventeen was as quiet as a mausoleum. Clearly, the Decepticons had left in a hurry. Empty crates lay tossed on their sides. Doors were open, showing shadowed rooms stripped of all belongings. Consoles sat silent and dark even to a few tentative key presses.
A cursory examination revealed that their hard drives had been removed, either taken with them or destroyed.
His comm crackled. “Jazz?”
“Hold tight, Mirage,” Jazz answered, his voice echoing eerily in the emptiness of the base. He moved on, room after room, abandoned and stripped clean, with no signs of worthwhile intel or life. “I’m only halfway cleared.”
“Yes, sir.” Mirage’s tone was tight, controlled, but Jazz could hear the irritation lurking beneath it. He thought Jazz took too many unnecessary risks.
It was the life of a mech in Special Operations, however. Risk came with the territory.
Jazz moved on.
He found the brig, which seemed to have doubled as a storage area as well. Gated cells stood on the same hall as rooms filled with empty crates. Other cells were enclosed with energy bars, long since deactivated, though the reek of the discharged plasma still hung in the air.
The cells were empty. Save one.
Jazz’s spark tightened into a narrow ball as he found the greying corpse. Two wounds -- one in the head, and one through the spark -- execution style. Evidence of welds and static mesh suggested the mech had been injured before his death, though attempts had been made to repair him.
Someone would have to tell Smokescreen.
“I’m sorry baby Blue,” Jazz murmured as he rested a palm on Bluestreak’s charcoal-grey chassis, as cold as the air of the base around him. “Shoulda got here sooner.”
He bowed his head, offlining his visor, a moment of silence for the indignity. If Bluestreak was here, then Ratchet was, too. Or had been at one point.
Jazz had not found Ratchet’s corpse in the prison.
He tapped his comm. “Mirage, I’m goin’ to need a retrieval team,” he said as he stood and pulled a folded tarp from his subspace. He covered Bluestreak with it and placed a tracker on top of his chassis. “Have them track my ping.”
“Is it…?” Mirage had switched to a private line.
Jazz worked his intake. “Stay with Smokescreen. Send Bee instead.”
“Slag,” Mirage breathed into the comm, a rare vulgarity from the usually uptight noble. “Yes, sir. I’ll send Bee your way with a stretcher. I assume you don’t need a medic?”
“No.”
“Understood.”
There was a knot at the base of Jazz’s spinal strut. There was fire wrapping around his spark, and his jaw twitched where he clenched his denta.
He pressed forward, out of the prison-slash-storage area, not deeper into the base, but toward the back exit. Toward what they presumed to be a docking station for ships capable of interstellar travel.
A smaller, adjacent hallway caught his attention, largely because it was unassuming, and there seemed no purpose for it. Jazz couldn’t think of any facilities in the base he hadn’t already found. He’d dug through the crew quarters, wash racks, training room, command center, and prison-slash-storage.
What was left?
He changed direction, eying deactivated cameras and motion sensors and alarm triggers. The corridor curved sharply to the left ahead for him, for all that it wasn’t very long, and it dead-ended at a single room with a large door. The locking mechanism was more complicated than any other Jazz had encountered in the base, not that it mattered, there wasn’t any power in the electrical lines.
Jazz stabbed a vibroblade into the control panel and activated the shock surge, causing a jolt of energy to cascade into the system long enough to trigger the door to open. It did so begrudgingly, stale air puffing out in its wake, and Jazz swept his headlights over the dim interior.
Megatron’s personal quarters. Of course they were.
Jazz’s tanks churned, and an unwelcome shiver clawed up his backstrut. He entered anyway, scanning the interior. It was more comfortable than the rest of the base’s accommodations, with a berth large enough for Megatron and a partner, a small sitting area, and a personal console against the nearest wall.
A small light blinked on said console. It was drawing power from somewhere.
Megatron had been thorough enough to wipe the databases of every console in the entirety of the base. Datapads were dark and empty. Megatron had destroyed every scrap of information to be found, and yanked memory cores from every console. Nothing had power in the base.
Nothing.
Jazz gritted his denta and examined the console from every angle, throwing every scan in his arsenal at it. But as far as he could tell, it was not a trap. There were no incendiary devices attached to it, no triggers. The air lacked explosive particles.
“Fine,” Jazz growled. “Let’s see what gift you left for us, Megatron.”
He tapped the monitor and the console blinked to life. There was one item on the screen labeled “For Optimus,” but Jazz ignored it, accessing the system memory instead. Unsurprisingly, there was nothing. The only data on the console was the file on the main screen.
A video file.
Jazz cycled a ventilation and braced himself for anything.
He clicked on the video.
He watched it through once before he transferred it to a datapad and destroyed the console. He took great pleasure in tearing the computer system to pieces, shattering the monitor against the wall and leaving the processor itself in ruins.
His tanks were a tangled knot, threatening to purge the energon he’d consumed this morning. He was shaking, and he had to stop before he could call in the rest of the team. He couldn’t let them see him out of control.
Jazz bowed his head and tried to manage his ventilations, to find calm somewhere within the storm.
He didn’t want to let anyone see the video, save that he knew he could not keep it a secret. It was, best he could figure, proof of life.
Megatron, after all, would not kill Ratchet after bragging so thoroughly about how he’d made Ratchet his. Their medic was a trophy. His possession of Ratchet was a weapon against their morale, their resolve to see the Decepticons defeated.
“Jazz?”
His comm crackled.
Jazz worked his intake and pressed a hand to the receiver. “Bumblebee,” he acknowledged. “I still have to clear the dock, but I’m pretty sure there’re no nasty surprises waitin’ for us.”
None but the one on his datapad -- the three minute long clip of Ratchet in Megatron’s berth, and the many ways Megatron had broken him.
“You got the retrieval team?” Jazz finished.
Bumblebee’s hesitation spoke volumes. “I do, but--”
“We only need one,” Jazz said, and pushed himself into motion, out of Megatron’s quarters, away from a place that was surely soaked in Ratchet’s pain and misery. He turned to the dock instead. “Ratchet’s not here.”
Ratchet was still in Megatron’s possession, and Jazz had no idea where to find the Decepticons. Locating this base had been difficult enough. Megatron had slipped away in the shadows, without his usual flair for the dramatic, and wherever he’d taken himself and his flagship, no Autobots had spotted him thus far.
Jazz had been right from the beginning.
Outpost Seventeen was a trap.
And there was no escaping the repercussions of what Megatron had done.
