Transformers Fan Fiction ❯ TF War: Sorrow ❯ The Dark Homecoming ( Chapter 1 )

[ P - Pre-Teen ]

By: Darzoni

Transformers: War

The Dark Homecoming

By D. Park

"The sweet smell of a great sorrow lies over the land

Plumes of smoke rise and merge with the leaden sky

A man lies and dreams of green fields and rivers

But awakes to a morning with no reason for waking"

-`Sorrow', D. J. Gilmour

[December, 2483 AD. Year 3 of the Imperial Era. ]

"Welcome to Cybertron…" The computer voice droned in syrupy feminine tones. Obviously a commercial flight from Alteron to Cybertron had it's disadvantages, such as the incessant prattle of the computer pointing out the sights to tourists. Hidden behind holograms, the small cadre of Autobots looked through the viewing glass at their homeworld. The dark side of the world stood out against the stark empty void as it's own small galaxy of pinpoint lights. Cybertron hung there above the galaxy, a former rogue now simply eccentric around a star, surrounded by a faint blue haze recognizable to Transformers as a low-level energon field on a global scale.

"The population of Cybertron and it's satellites is approximately one-hundred million Transformers and twenty-three thousand Nebulans." continued the computer voice, "This is the highest population seen on Cybertron since the beginning of the First Great War…"

One of the Autobots turned to another and said in a whisper, "Prime, do you think this is such a good idea? It's swarming with Decepticons." His voice was a rusty drawl common to the region of Cybertron where he grew up.

The one who was on the receiving end glanced slowly at restless passengers eager for the voyage to be over. "We don't have any choice Ironhide. There are Autobots still on Cybertron, our friends and family. You know what Megatron is capable of, would you let innocents suffer his insanity?" He said in a hushed whisper.

Ironhide smiled and chuckled. "Well, I guess I'm behind you all the way then. You've always known what to do, with or without the fancy disco ball." He paused to scratch his head. "Though I don't know how you're going to get the resistance's support without it. Guess we'll think of something." A heavy hand from one of the bulkier Autobots came to rest on Ironhide's shoulder.

"We think of something. Always do." A clenched fist raised in anger at a thought. "Grimlock get Decepticons back for killing brothers too." Intimidating in any disguise, Grimlock wasn't so much dumb as lacking in vocabulary. His holographic cover resembled the kind of transformer one saw working as the bouncers for some of the rowdier bars in the red-light districts. Not so much a muscle-bound meat head as a slab of titanium in a humanoid shape.

The mood was grim for the group. They were returning to a Cybertron that was firmly in the grasp of a dark legion. It would be a very long and difficult battle to free Cybertron from the Decepticon regime. But then, what's another battle to warriors and soldiers who had been fighting for most of their epoch spanning lifetimes? Simply another battle in a war without end, peace was only a rest between battles.

Optimus Prime mulled this over, and he found that he was very tired of war. He was so very tired, as the old man who had seen every loved one die before his time was up. Prime had been a soldier since his Rite of the Autobrand at his 11th birthday. After battling the Decepticons for most of his adult life, he saw the coming battles as more of the same. Yet, somehow he knew that this would be the last war the Transformers would need to fight, and briefly wondered if he somehow still had a link to the Leadership Matrix. Oddly, he could sense the Leadership Matrix's presence somehow, as if it were on Cybertron instead of Earth. Despite that sense, Prime knew he would fight because he had to. Enslaved by his own destiny, Prime knew he would fight so that others may be free.

Ironhide sat down in the circular lounge booth that the group was to occupy during reentry. They had time to move about, the new bureaucracy created by the Deception Empire meant that there were a lot of documents that needed to be processed just for the ship to land. The rough and tumble `bot watched and listened as the two technical experts argued a point of engineering ethics.

"I understand what you're saying, but the data shows that the corpse of a Transformer is better all around for use as a Transector. It's near impossible to manufacture a humanoid system as big as us that can move and react like we do. Look, remember how the humans had organ donor programs on Earth? It's like that. Dead transformers are dead, and volunteered before they died to become Transectors. Medically speaking, it's also safer for the Nebulans since our shells can take a lot of abuse before becoming useless."

"But if you don't give engineers a chance to improve the technology, how is anything supposed to go forward?" They kept bickering about the minor points, and Ironhide covered his face with his hand to hide his big grin. Ratchet and Wheeljack had been arguing about modern Cybertronian science since they left Alteron.

A tone signaled that the ship had finally completed the paperwork and was preparing to land. Optimus Prime and Grimlock joined them. All of the passengers strapped in. As the roar of the retro rockets blared, Optimus Prime looked around at his brothers in arms.

"Once we land, we meet with Maximus and take a look at the new Cybertron. Recon only." He gave Ironhide and Grimlock warning looks. "For now, let's rest."

No re-entry heat meant no discernible atmosphere, and so the shuttle landed smoothly on the thruster-charred landing pad. The passengers disembarked one by one, satisfied that the voyage was over and done with Some were going home to family, others were tourists from the outer colonies, and a small few had come to Cybertron for patriotic reasons. As Optimus stepped off, a greeter clad in Decepticon purple looked at his identification and smiled pleasantly.

The transformer simply stated, "Welcome home, sir. I hope your trip was enjoyable." Prime simply nodded enthusiastically, to give no hint as to his identity. He looked around at the Farside spaceport. This area was cosmopolitan. Clean buildings and streets shone under the hovering street lights. Civilians walked the streets unafraid of random violence, and everywhere Optimus looked, he saw Decepticons. Non-combatants, but still Decepticons. Not a single Autobot could be seen in the throngs of Transformers that milled about their business. Optimus felt a dark chill blow through his spark. Could the Decepticons have killed the Autobots off?

He kept walking, leading the other four with him. Monuments of metal made the landscape into mountains and valleys of buildings and highways. Some, he suspected, had been built from mountains. It reminded him of the Golden Age before the First Great War, when Cybertron wasn't constant battleground. Circular streets stacked around standing stones of buildings, with webs of pathways between them, creating composite mountains from urban rocks. Mesa and canyon, mountain and ravine, Cybertron had all the desolate beauty of desert and the commanding majesty of towering mountain. Above the streets, linear formations of flying Transformers crisscrossed the naked void, on their way to some important place. A quiet cacophonic din of pedestrian voices swirled about them, accompanying the dull wavering sounds of those airborne dots far above. Prime could taste the sweet nectar of energon in the very air, and wondered how that was possible. He knew that if there wasn't a real and lurking danger, here was a Cybertron that he would settle down and start a family with Elita.

The memory stung sharp and suddenly, the pang of sorrow. Optimus remembered how they had tried to bring a child into the world, and… Optimus' only regret was that he was not there with Elita during the birth to comfort her. He was far far away, slumbering deeply on Earth. It would have been a boy. Elita told him later, when he and the crew of the Ark returned to Cybertron. Such grief he had never felt before, over fallen comrades or the loss of a friend.

He brought himself back to the present as Grimlock tapped his shoulder and pointed at a building under construction. Optimus had to scrutinize the scene to figure out what Grimlock was so agitated about. And then he saw them, dozens of what once had been a major threat to the Autobots once. Dozens of Constructicons building a new shopping center. Prime chuckled despite himself.

"Looks like the great and mighty Devastator was demoted to laborer." That cheered them up some.

They continued southward, relatively. Here and there were clusters of ominous looking black boxes that Transformers would enter for awhile, that had the label "CIN Access Terminal", with "Manufactured by Cybertron Global Products" in smaller letters underneath. Eventually they reached the edge of the pit. It seemed that the Decepticons chose to leave this natural formation alone. A haze of smoke clouded the view of below, contained by the sheer walls of the Sink. Prime saw that the layers and layers of substructure that used to be visible because of the Sink were now covered over by slabs of steelcrete. Patrolling above was a network of defense drones, with fierce laser guns rotating on their turrets. The Decepticons were keeping something in. And yet this is the place Maximus was in.

"Wheeljack, what've you got for us?" He turned to the resident engineering wizard, who he swore was grinning under that faceplate of his.

Wheeljack held up a grapple-gun. "I've got this, Prime, and a kilometer of line which… "

He was cut off by Ironhide. "What's that gonna do? It looks like a plain old ordinary grapple gun." The rusty bot snorted derisively.

Wheeljack showed his typical patience. "Ironhide, it is a regular grapple gun. But the pay line isn't your store-bought variety. It's about as thick and light as cyberspider wire, and the nanites in it produce loops to put your hands and feet in. And the stuff can carry Jetfire's mass, so don't worry about the strength."

"Very good, let's get down there." Optimus said. Wheeljack shot the spearhead of the grapple into the lip of the sheer cliff, where it buried itself deep. Then the mad science `bot flicked the reel's pay-out on, and rappelled down the cliff. Loops unfolded from the line, and his brilliant white form disappeared into the smoky mists below.

After a few minutes of tense waiting, Wheeljack radioed back up to the rest of them. "I've reached the bottom, Prime. You're not going to like this." They looked at each other, wondering what was distasteful enough besides Decepticons to make Wheeljack uncomfortable. Then Grimlock, being the hard-headed Autobot he was, snarled something about checking it out, then started climbing the loops down.

"I'm going too." Ironhide grumbled, and began the descent. Optimus looked at the rope, then at Ratchet, who shrugged as if to say `Let's go boss.' So Optimus began climbing downwards into the unknown depths of the Sink, followed by Ratchet. The illusion of depth was reduced to nothing when Optimus reached the blanket of smoke. It was if he were about to step out onto clouds, but this he knew was the real illusion.

Once below the layer of smoke, Optimus spared a glance outward across what had once been a plain of technograss and wildlife. A preserve of life that had escaped the Quintesson purge, it was now a slum, with fires burning to keep the populace warm. He finished his descent, and looked around in greater detail. He saw that Grimlock was enraged at the sight, fists clenched, and a low growl issuing from his throat. Ironhide had simply sat on the ground and had his hands covering his face. Optimus had never seen Ironhide grieve in all the time they had fought side by side, but this sight was too much.

It was Wheeljack who said the first thing. "Primus, what have they done?" Optimus himself was looking around at the scene before him. Filth, crude huts made from rubble, Autobots in disrepair, misery everywhere. They realized that perhaps waiting a decade after the news of Megatron's return reached Charr was too late. Here was a ghetto in the classical sense of the word. Walled in, the Autobot population of Cybertron was forced to live in poverty. Escape was a faint hope, and then only for those the Decepticons deemed useful. This homecoming held no joy for the five veterans, for few sights in their millions of years had prepared them for this new reality of Cybertron. The dark grip of despair clutched at Optimus' spark for the first time in his life, and a trickle of oily tears made it's way from his optics down his facemask.

`What did Megatron do to break their spirits? They seem to accept this fate.' Optimus thought. Despair began to spread over his spark, threatening to extinguish it, as if despair had substance and reality. Grief choked him as well, worse than the grieving for the son he never knew. His vision began to gray and darken as the despair grew. He was drowning in the sorrow, and then some fierce resolve pierced the cloying darkness, throwing it into emptiness.

"No." He murmured. The blackest rage, like the one that fueled him in the battle that had meant his death in 2005, surged and crested. His fist connected steel scrap, going through the seemingly sudden paperiness of the steel. "I will not let this continue!"

Wheeljack sounded very sober, the sight of such suffering taking all hints of merriment from his voice. "We agree Prime, but we'll need the help of everybody to free Cybertron. Without the Matrix, what hope is there? If the Maximals were still on Cybertron, we could enlist their help, but the report said they fled the conflict rather than face extinction. So did the Predacons."

Optimus was very silent for a moment, fighting the urge to kill every Decepticon he could lay hands on. He sighed. "What we do for now is find Maximus."

It took some getting used to, the condition of things here. They trudged for hours and hours, not resembling a march of soldiers so much as a funeral procession. Finally they reached the coordinates that Maximus had given. Maximus was a shadow of his former self, they quickly saw. Maximus was once the mighty Fortress Maximus, and to be reduced to a normal size was humiliating.

Maximus wore a wry smile as they turned off the holograms. "Ah, hello Optimus. Sorry about the mess, it's been awhile since I've had guests. As you could guess from your trip down here, everything's changed. Well, if you haven't heard it enough times by now, welcome to Cybertron."

[End Transmission]