Chapter Text
First Aid comes online still partially submerged in his cryostasis tube, the freezing fluid drained down to his knees. Beyond the transparent shell of his chamber, the interior of his shuttle is little more than a fractal blur. His processor sluggishly registers the flickering lights above.
He peels the protective face mask off and hits the emergency release handle, wiping at his fogging visor as the upper panel opens, his hands numb and clumsy.
His audials online a few seconds later. The klaxon blaring overhead cuts through the clouded, muddy feeling in his processor; his first thought is that it might be a boarding party and the prospect of fending off raiders induces a frantic, scrambling climb over the lower metal lip. Recharge cables spark and spit as he strains the connection, so he rips them out and nearly sprawls face first onto the deck, collapsing onto one knee before he catches himself.
First Aid pulls himself upright and feels his way forward mostly by memory, his extended hands trembling, actuators stiff, plating slicked down. His frame is uselessly trying to conserve heat he doesn't have after two months submerged in refrigerant; he has to force his seams open to admit warmer air, still too cold to engage his internal heater to assist.
Error messages crowd his visor's HUD too fast to dismiss, so he tears it off with shaking hands and drops it on the deck.
The blurred interior of his shuttle is a dim maze of electronics, but a familiar one.
He wipes the fog from his optics and a thousand twinkling lights resolve into gently glowing displays, some flashing critical orange and red alerts. The main flight controls are still halfway across the cockpit.
The distance seems insurmountable in his current state, but he only needs access to the monitoring systems. He reaches out to the nearest interface and plugs into the comms panel, fingers slipping on the cord twice before he makes a connection.
First Aid silences the audible alarm with a jab of a fingertip while he accesses the ship's logs. There's no crew other than him to scramble; all the mechs that made the outbound journey with him stayed on the colony. He enters his passkey and flicks to the latest warning message, locating the source of the alarm — a Cybertronian distress beacon.
Some of the tension dissolves, melting away. No boarding party. He pauses for three full ventilation cycles before bringing up the communications controls. He pings the attached emergency frequency with his credentials, but receives no answer. A repeat attempt yields the same result.
Nothing. Not even the spitting crackle of an errored-out transmission. Dead air.
He yanks his cable from the comms station and climbs past it into the captain's seat, cursing, then jams it into the navigation interface. The computer chimes, incongruously cheerful, informing him he's still en route between the colony and Cybertron. It's an unremarkable sector of space with nothing to recommend itself but a few uninhabitable rocks that barely qualify as planetoids.
First Aid calls up the location from the distress beacon's metadata and enters the vector, fingers flying over the controls. His shuttle is off its programmed course by a three hundred thousand kliks, a microscopic distance in the vastness of space. That alone isn't unusual; the autopilot's logs indicate it rerouted around a potential debris hazard.
The signal's origin point isn't far from his current location, but it's so weak it's at the functional edge of his shuttle's sensor suite. If he hadn't been pushed off course, he might have never caught the distress signal.
He freezes over the console when he notes the attached timestamp.
The nav computer spits out a cheerful time estimate: only twenty minutes at full speed until he's within full scanning range, then eleven more until rendezvous.
To a ship that apparently went missing only a few weeks before the war.
The rest of his emergency protocols fizzle almost immediately and his frame idles down. A little misery creeps through in its wake. It's not as if they haven't found a dozen derelicts since the war ended, ships abandoned or lost in combat. This one is likely no different, an empty husk. It's worth investigating if someone hasn't disabled the distress beacon, if only to confirm it's in decent enough shape to flag it for salvage.
First Aid's fuel pump roils abruptly, a gurgle of air in his fuel lines. Refueling jumps to the highest priority the instant his processor registers there's no imminent threat to his safety and no immediate emergency to attend to.
He detaches his cable and suppresses a queasy request to purge as he rises from the pilot's chair and staggers towards the medical station. He struggles forward, a shuffle-clank clamor of sluggish limbs.
First Aid trips, but his haptics aren't fully active yet, so he only feels it as a dull impact when he catches himself on the edge of the waste disposal basin. The solvent kicks on automatically, steaming in the chilly air as he hoists himself upright and empties the contents of his fuel tank into the swirling liquid.
There's no energon to expel, just the sludgy, disgusting antifreeze congealing in his lines since he went under. The taste is sweet and foul, coating the inside of his mouth, but he feels better almost immediately, some of the dull throbbing in his fuel lines receding. His readings are all over the place, power generation shaky. Normal after a quick thaw, if slagging unpleasant.
First Aid wipes his chin with the back of his hand and it comes away unpleasantly wet. Worse, his historical monitoring suggests he's been having bad fluxes again — Delphi, probably, though he can only call up a deep feeling of unease from his recharge data. Cryo suspension was supposed to be a reprieve from the fluxes. So much for that.
He dismisses the memory files with an irritated mental swipe, shoving the murky, unpleasant data down into the recesses of his processor.
He doesn't need to remember the specifics. They're are always the same: patients dissolving into rust in his hands; Pharma dying in front of him — murdered, murderer; and worst of all, Ambulon's frame beneath his hands, crumbling faster than he can weld it back together while Ambulon begs First Aid to save him.
First Aid grimly spits out the rest of the antifreeze and flushes his mouth out with solvent. Twenty minutes is just about the right amount of time for him to refuel, perform a self assessment, and take a turn under the heated dry cycle in the shuttle's tiny wet room. He stands in front of the basin for a moment scrubbing his hands over his face, a lingering malaise settling heavily over him.
Fuel, medical scan, sanitize. After that, First Aid can tackle the problem of what to actually do when he arrives at the abandoned Cybertronian craft. For now, he needs to focus on bite-sized, actionable tasks.
He closes his hands into fists and presses them hard into his thighs, triggering the haptic feedback, a feeling just short of pain. The sensation is grounding. One ventilation cycle follows without movement, then another, and another. At the count of five, he releases the pressure, leaving his external sensors active, awake, alert.
First Aid calls up the data again and examines it carefully. There's no identifying information on the beacon, the kind of generic, last ditch emergency frequency that goes out during engine failure or major ship system collapses, but the crew protocol could include long term cryopod storage.
It's not entirely out of the realm of possibility, no matter how slim, the crew could've put themselves into long term stasis. It was protocol. And if the cryo system's power didn't fail —
First Aid raises his head and looks back into the shuttle.
His search and rescue tools are organized neatly in a set of storage lockers adjacent to the airlock. His medical supplies are topped off and he has several emergency berths that can be set up in the cargo hold. It'll be cramped and uncomfortable for survivors, but serviceable.
First Aid considers briefly it could be a baited trap, but his route is well outside the common merchant lanes and the message doesn't have any of the characteristic hallmarks of a pirate or raider — no piteous, glitching message begging for aid, no intentionally shoddy encoding, and no badly broken Neocybex cobbled together from salvaged linguistic dictionaries.
He pops the top on a cube of energon and plugs himself into the medical scanner, looking unseeing out of the narrow port-side window into the inky emptiness of space while the computer works its way through his vital readouts.
The process is even less pleasant when his neuromechanical sensors feel like someone's recently run a belt sander over them, but it's safer to validate his internal results.
The report returns some mineral deficits. Minor wiring damage in his right ankle joint, the actuator a little sticky. A damaged data port is flagged as negligible. He downs a second cube of medical grade energon to help with the first issue. His self-repair will take care of the rest. He's had worse early thaws.
First Aid returns to the pilot's chair to monitor the approach from the main console bank. He's barely seated when the computer chimes an alert he's within scanning range of the abandoned ship. Not for the first time he considers retrofitting the old shuttle with a new integrated system, but he's lucky to have his own shuttle at all; it was gifted by a returning neutral in exchange for spark chamber repairs.
The short range scanner instantly returns useful data from the docking access frequency, but no actual answer to his digital knock except for an automated acknowledgment.
First Aid presses the comms button with one hand and activates the recorder with his other. "This is First Aid aboard private vessel G-1392, medical transport shuttle, responding to your distress signal with emergency assistance. Requesting immediate boarding to supply medical aid. Please reply if able."
He waits a moment, no response forthcoming. An expected result.
He sets his hailing message to loop every five minutes on all frequencies and begins a deeper scan, then gets to work reviewing the data already he has available. He doubts conditions are going to appreciably worsen if he spends a little time digging around, not after four million years of sitting dead in space.
The stranded ship is the Acid Rain, a prison transport bound from Cybertron with a cargo of nine hundred and thirty eight prisoners against roughly a hundred crew and half as many guards. The ship is far too big for him to tow with far too many mechs for him to save even if they are still alive. At best, he can fit sixty mid-sized frames in the cargo hold if they're stacked end to end like bricks.
He flips through his shuttle's database to see if any of the data the Autobots skimmed from the Functionists has any better information.
It does, in fact: the Acid Rain was last spotted at the Luna 2 fueling hub, on schedule for delivery of prisoners to some mining planet near Black Block Consortia territory. It's a Class G prison transport, model 13-177T, rated for three hundred sparked prisoners, or up to two thousand in spark containment.
A queasy feeling of dread creeps back over First Aid. His spark sinks and his plating shivers, not from the cold but from the rising horror.
Spark containment. Spark containment. The containment facilities were always separately powered on ships like these; sustaining sparks in stasis was a simple business when there was little interest in their condition when they were reimplanted. Even worse than finding the crew suspended in cryo, the prisoners could still be alive in there, steeped in millions of years of blank sensory space, trapped with nothing but the noise of their own sparks.
The Autobots outlawed spark containment as a method of penal sentencing just after the war began. The only approved application is as an extraordinary lifesaving measure when a frame is too damaged to support a guttering spark and no replacement is available. He's reimplanted sparks in containment after only a few months and the emotional fallout for the patient had been nothing short of catastrophic.
Four million years.
He has no idea what that could do to a mech; there's no research available on the subject, because even the Functionist government didn't dump sparks into containment units indefinitely. The prisoners were slated for parole review in just over three centuries, the maximum allowable time in containment before temporary depersonalization starts looking worryingly permanent.
First Aid doesn't know if there will even be anything of them left to save, but he's never given up on a patient without trying.
He looks at the schematic of the ship and punches in an adjusted approach vector. The rear crew airlock looks like the most likely attachment point for his cargo shuttle. Even if the outer door is unresponsive, he can engage the external grav tractors and cut his way through with a little determination.
Like he suspected, the engine itself is offline, but when he accesses the public alerts there aren't any showing fire or explosive damage. These old pre-war transports were built around massive fusion reactors that could run for millions of years on low power if there were no manufacturing defects.
Downside is they exploded spectacularly when they did blow. He still remembers taking in overflow patients from the commercial shipyard outside of Staniz when an experimental model went up back in vorn 1312.7.
That ship had been a fifth this size.
"Sure," he says to himself out loud, his vocal synthesizer scratchy with disuse. He taps a stylus against the screen, agitated by his lack of intel. "Climb aboard the giant bomb to rescue mechs that are probably already so attenuated they won't know real from fake."
Except that's what First Aid is for. Emergency medical. Built to be able to keep trying, even when everything feels hopeless.
He pings the Acid Rain's comms suite and requests access to the crew and prisoner rosters.
The screen flashes: ACCESS DENIED: INSUFFICIENT CLEARANCE
First Aid skims through a few menus with ease of long practice. He has a bank of access codes and passkeys lifted from dead mechs and defunct ships during the war, a grisly little collection of stolen permissions collected over the length of the war. The ship is ancient, so there's no guarantee any of the Functionist security slag will actually work, but that's his most likely starting point.
On a hunch, he batches a few of the oldest Iaconian enforcer files and transmits the security key in each, one after the other. On the third attempt, the whole system rolls over for him, granting him basic crew access. He smiles grimly to himself.
He'll board the ship and do what he can. A plan begins to form.
If he finds the sparks in containment still viable, he can transport them back to Cybertron and figure out what to do with them from there. If there are crew still alive or in cryo, he can do what he can to fuel and repair them, then come back with a real search and rescue effort. At minimum, there will be plenty of Cybertronian salvage outfits interested in scraping the ship itself for technology.
Parts are hard to come by these days. It's difficult to find an extinguished frame with functioning parts and leave it undisturbed when your own fuel pump is failing with no replacement in sight.
The nav computer offers an update: nine minutes until rendezvous. Pain shoots through his frame and he grimaces, withdrawing from the console.
He blinks his optics clear again, pressing the heel of his palm into his brow to try to banish the lingering throb of being kept on ice for a few months. Reality still feels slightly oily, his thoughts muffled by the influx of data. He's still exhausted; cryostasis isn't anything comparable to good recharge and it certainly doesn't recommend itself next to a proper defrag cycle.
He unplugs, stands up, and goes to handle the scraping, empty feeling still lingering in his lines, picking up his discarded visor along the way. He still has his secondary and tertiary fuel holding tanks to refill and he's badly in need of coolant.
Full tanks means no returning straight to cryo for the remaining six day leg back to Cybertron, but he has an uneasy hunch he'll probably need them by the time he's sorted out this mess and gets back on course.
*
The Acid Rain first comes into view through the central cockpit window as a small blot of shadow against a background of faded starlight, a black patch rendered between the stars well before the shuttle's exterior cameras pick up any useful detail. Slowly, the hulk of metal resolves into a monument to Functionist hubris, the flat side emblazoned with the same gilded sigil of Primus the old Senate used to plaster on churches and bombs alike.
The massive, beetle black ship is nearly two kilometers long, the rectangular nose filling the viewscreen and stretching away into a cloud of accreted dust. The fore floodlights of his shuttle do almost nothing to illuminate the vessel, rays muddied and refracted by space debris. A sheen of ice coats the surface of the ship in irregular patches.
First Aid pings the Acid Rain's docking hub and receives an immediate reject even with his valid passkey. He frowns and digs around in the system notifications, dismissing error messages one after another as quickly as they surface.
He scans the return databurst, drumming his fingers on the console as he tries to make sense of the readouts. Quarantine protocols are firmly in place, but when he queries for the source of the lockdown, the prison ship returns ERROR in flashing yellow glyphs. No additional information forthcoming.
The Acid Rain's emergency life support systems are surprisingly close to nominal for the age of the ship and the level of deterioration — which is to say, not great, but tolerable.
Damage reports roll in one after another when he queries monitoring logs. Small hits by space debris over a long enough period of time inevitably mean pinhole punctures everywhere in the outer hull, but the main transit corridors and core facilities seem to have missed the worst of it. At least two major sections are missing along a transverse plane, suggesting larger impacts at some point, but the adjoining corridors are sealed off with functioning blast doors. Interior positive pressure appears to be intact in sixty seven percent of the ship.
There are a few alerts for emergency power protocols, but the grav and life support are still working at minimal safe operating standards. Even most of the elevators work, according to the ship's internal monitoring, and if he needs between-deck transit without taking a freight lift, there's ample cabling and anchor hooks in the shuttle's supplies.
None of the data solves for why the quarantine is in effect.
First Aid twiddles his stylus, processor grinding away at the mystery.
He stares at the flashing warning message with a sense of mild consternation. As much as most mechs don't like to compare themselves to non-sapient machines, fixing a ship is a lot like fixing a mech: diagnosis first.
"What are you hiding?" he mutters, tapping his stylus impatiently on the console.
He rises restlessly and rouses on each station with a touch — astrogation, communications, engineering, medical — leaning over the empty stations to attach each of the controller programs with the Acid Rain's data banks. There are four million and more years of sensor and security data to scrape through. Dividing it up is only practical. First Aid isn't rated for that kind of information intake, but the shuttle's computers can handle it without compromising primary functions.
Back at the main console, First Aid slots his filtration mask on, engaging his personal medical protocols, and runs a manual comparison against all known contaminants, calibrating for a range of atmospheric conditions. It takes a few minutes to get through every potential match he has in his personal memory banks.
The results pop up on his visor HUD, a single line bounded by an error label: NO KNOWN MATCHES.
No dangerous gasses, no corrosives, no known harmful biologics. Not even any false positives. Just silence and the discomfiting glow of the text on the main console. He runs the sweep a second time, half speed, but the root cause of the quarantine remains stubbornly inconclusive.
The structure of the ship itself interferes with anything other than short range scanning, limited to the outermost passageways. The Acid Rain's systems themselves are of dubious efficacy. Most likely, he won't be able to get a completely accurate reading until he's already swimming in whatever atmospheric concoction has been brewing inside the ship that may have triggered the lockdown.
A ship this old, it could be a bad sensor reading kicking the whole system into high alert. Passive radiation, damage to the hull, decaying wiring. From the ice cloud it's floating in, a breach in the wrong sensitive sector might easily play havoc with the ship's entire environmental monitoring suite. The Acid Rain's onboard atmospheric control could very well be functioning so poorly it's hallucinating some carcinogen.
Delphi springs back to the forefront of his processes without warning.
He pushes the memory away irritably, a little too late to avoid triggering the accompanying mechanical reaction. His spark contracts and he can feel his fluid pressure drop, a swooping anxiety, before he manages to shunt the aching resentment and rising anger into the background.
Delphi isn't relevant. There's slim to no chance there's some engineered affliction on board an abandoned prison transport; the Functionists were making mechs into weapons as covert projects, not weaponizing substances. Whatever triggered the lockdown is probably incidental or accidental. There's even a missing evac jumper, which makes him suspect the guards might have all successfully abandoned the ship.
A report from engine monitoring supports the theory. Main propulsion is offline, source of shutdown unknown. No one bothered to log a repair request before the Acid Rain was abandoned.
He cycles through the comms frequencies again, flicking rapidly through channel after channel to repeat his broadcast. Still nothing, no response. He leaves the monitoring on, tapping into the Acid Rain's security systems. Swiping through the cameras in common areas — low sec, low res monitoring units positioned in transit corridors and living spaces — doesn't turn up much. All he sees are dim, empty rooms if he's lucky enough to get a working video feed, less than one out of a hundred displaying anything more than an error code.
There are thousands, not all of them on the main circuit. First Aid doesn't have time to try them all, so he downloads the Acid Rain's schematics to his main memory and locates his target: spark containment and the adjacent frame storage facility.
He expands the internal map in three dimensional processing space, flicking it from side to side in his mind, and then runs a few routing operations through the replicated corridors.
There's a promising corridor routing from the crew airlock, passing through the unoccupied brig cells, and joins another near the climate control hub. From there it's down four decks to the spark containment facility, which sits adjacent to medbay.
He marks secondary and tertiary routes for egress and tilts the layers back and forth a few times, triple checking he didn't miss anything critical. No amount of planning will guarantee he won't have to go climbing over piles of debris or collapsed walkways, but having alternates might mean he won't get stuck in some dark pit with no hope of a quick rescue.
First Aid pauses over the displays. Sparks in containment were often shipped with the frames they were sentenced in. There was no guarantee those frames were the ones they'd get when their sentence was served. Functionists had a bad habit of prematurely recycling prisoner frames with military or mining capabilities.
The war did a lot of harm. There are a few bright spots. Not tossing sparks directly into frames already calibrated to someone else's spark frequency was one of them.
His shuttle's cargo space is mostly empty now, aside from a few crates of personal effects brought back from the fledgling colony on Polaris. Almost all of the equipment he brought with him on the trip was left behind — medical supplies, tools, digital media, supplements nearly impossible to source on the colony in decent quantity.
First Aid still has his search and rescue supplies. For once, he's glad old wartime habits die hard. There's hardly a need for pulling POWs out of Decepticon labor camps or downed craft in active war zones these days, but it still pays to be prepared in an emergency.
He pulls open the equipment locker and takes stock of the supplies on hand. The shuttle is stocked for any standard rescue operation, even if he's missing a few of his preferred tools. A heavy duty plasma cutter sits front and center and he removes it and sets it aside on the work bench after double checking fuel canisters are seated correctly and the ignition mechanism is functional.
First Aid doesn't anticipate needing it. It'd be useful to pop the hull or clear debris, but it's too unwieldy to carry in his standard kit. He'll leave it prepped in case he runs into a collapsed sector he can't safely route around.
He hefts a utility carrier out and slings the harness over both shoulders, adjusting the straps so they sit evenly across his plating. The material chafes unpleasantly across a transformation seam, but it'll have to do in place of a proper search and rescue kit.
The heavy duty coil of belay cable, each end hung with heavy duty maglocks, sits in the fore of the supplies locker. The attachment points can be activated to secure fifty tons of weight.
With a twinge of regret, he thinks of his search and rescue efforts after the space engagement near Luna 2, early in the war, when most of his assigned battalion had been blasted out of an airlock by a Decepticon warship. He'd barely known them, but he'd liked them well enough to mourn the casualties longer than the average slagged Cybertronian.
It's been long enough he'd have to dredge his memory banks to remember what they looked like. Even the mechs he'd managed to save during their EVA rescue are long extinguished.
First Aid isn't sure when he grew numb to the losses. It seemed like he'd never get used to it, but at some point they touched him less and less. The raw memory files are still there, aching, but the feeling only crops up in moments like these, rising like trapped oil surfacing from deep water.
An abundance of caution prompts First Aid to attach the cable. He clips on several carabiners beside it, followed by a wide, braided tow strap, sturdy enough he could haul two mechs at once in a pinch. After that, a few standard pieces of equipment: his personal trauma kit, medical grade energon quick fuel packs, tubes of coolant, and a heavy duty pry bar.
First Aid hefts it in his hand. The weight is comforting; old fashioned, but reliable. He's used a thousand exactly like it.
He hooks a lantern onto a carabiner near his waist and a handheld spotlight gets tucked into one of the shoulder mounted tool loops. The blaster feels heavy in his hand when he pulls it out of the small munitions locker. He racks it alongside two backup energy cartridges on his hip, just in case.
First Aid makes his way back to the front of the ship and settles into the captain's chair. One more precaution to take.
He presses the recording button a second time. "This is First Aid, captain and sole occupant of medical transport shuttle G-1392. I'm responding to a distress beacon transmitted by a derelict Cybertronian ship found at my location, coordinates attached. In the event I'm unable to return safely to my shuttle, this message is set to auto-send thirty hours after boarding. Please route any assistance."
He confirms the recording and schedules it to broadcast to the Luna 2 space station. Any aid coming direct from Cybertron would take a week or more to arrive, but planetary dispatch would more likely reroute a ship from a local transit lane.
First Aid checks the shuttle's status panel, more out of habit than real concern, and toggles the autopilot off. He's hanging stationary some three kilometers away from the Acid Rain, close enough for manual flight, so he eases the controls forward, maintaining minimum speed. There's some debris in the field, but it's all small enough it skates off the shuttle's hull without so much as scuffing the meteor shielding.
At one klik, he kills the primary thrusters and swings the shuttle parallel to the Acid Rain's crew airlock, coasting the remaining distance on momentum.
A proximity warning appears on his visor HUD, but proximity is exactly what he's looking for. He dismisses the alert and taps the port-side impulse thrusters twice, adjusting his tilt to compensate for the slope of the Acid Rain's hull relative to his current position.
Everything aligns, a careful, delicate dance, like splicing sensory lines. He skims his fingers quickly over the controls, doing the work of three mechs to set the autopilot to maintain a precise distance and initiate the remainder of the docking sequence. His shuttle isn't made to connect to the aperture of the old, freighter style airlocks, so he extends grav lock cabling, latching on to the side of the Acid Rain like a barnacle.
As the gangway tunnel slowly extends along the connection and makes a seal over the Acid Rain's airlock, First Aid thinks about Cybertron. If there's anyone left alive on the ship, it'll be an entirely alien world to them when they return.
His modest hab back in Iacon seems so distant to him, even though it's been years since the rebuilding began in earnest. The clinic is more familiar, comforting. He started it with nothing more than an emergency medical tent and grew it quickly into a sagging, badly-stocked building.
Most of his early patients had been Decepticons, creeping in cautiously from the fringes of the planet to visit him by virtue of his good reputation alone.
It's a little funny, he thinks, how it seems to have worked itself out. His small repair stop had been more of a comfort to the downtrodden than the polished facilities Ratchet set up under the auspices of the old Autobot Command. He left Ratchet to the unnavigable mire of funding and appropriations and went where there was a need.
Except, when he left on the outbound leg of his trip to the colonies, an entire medical complex was slowly rising out of the dirt, surrounded by paved roads and shops selling detailing services and consumer imports from the spaceport. When he returns, he'll have a proper treatment facility to open, staff, and stock. All of it on his own means, from paying patients or private funding.
First Aid should be looking forward to it, but it still seems somehow insufficient.
The computer chimes to let him know the docking sequence is complete. He brings up the status on his HUD and initiates atmospheric pressurization of the tunnel.
The indicator light flickers a few times and then solidifies, holding steady. First Aid hits the internal airlock controls and rises from the pilot's chair.
*
First Aid steps into the tunnel, keeping his filtration mask tightly sealed. His visor is slotted into place and feeding him real time data about his own vitals and the ambient atmospheric conditions. He doesn't need to look at the readouts; the air is uncomfortably humid, dark liquid already trickling down the metal ribbing on the tunnel walls and puddling beneath the grating of the gangway.
The artificial gravity weakens halfway through.
First Aid's gait turns slippery and he loses purchase in the few seconds it takes the mag attachments on his feet to engage. He bobs forward in near zero-g and comes down gracelessly on one foot, catching the railing to keep his balance, and then lands securely on the other side of the gap. His fuel pump gurgles as the atmospheric pressure shifts, but he's done spacewalks hundreds of times, so he squeezes his plating down and compresses the hydraulics in his legs until the feeling dissipates.
He can't shake the feeling he shouldn't be boarding alone, which means his basic sense of self-preservation is still healthily intact, but time and entropy are working against him. His feet carry him forward with a sense of growing urgency, a sudden, anxious sense he needs to hurry or something terrible will happen.
A few more steps brings him right up to the outer hull of the Acid Rain. The heavy metal around the airlock is pitted, dull grey where the exterior has worn away with time and the debris cloud. Frost curls in thick swirls on the outer viewport.
Not knowing what's on the other side of the airlock is always his least favorite part of search and rescue. Even good plans fall apart when they meet the unknown and his plan is less than solid.
The outer airlock door opens with the authorization code he skimmed, stale atmosphere flooding the tunnel. He waits for the pressure to equalize, the initial blast of air so cold he's puffing steam out of his vents even though he's still running below his baseline temperature.
His sensors don't detect any kind of contaminants, but the scent of water is so strong he can detect it even through his filtration mask. First Aid steps inside the airlock door closes automatically behind him, sealing him into the damp and dark. For a moment, nothing happens, and he tries not to allow the feeling of being sealed into a tomb encroach on his rational thinking.
First Aid waits, cycling fuel slowly, measured. The control console blinks dimly through security routines, errors out, and then automatically reinitiates.
It's not the first time First Aid's been in derelict like this and he doubts it'll be the last someone finds. The war left detritus like this scattered far and wide across Cybertronian space, ships that disappeared en route, marked as Missing in Action, the risk too high to mount a rescue without solid positional intel.
He wonders how much of pre-war Cybertron is entombed in those lost ships. If there are holovids and personal items and little pieces of a life long lost to someone who abandoned ship or died, all floating in an abyss, frozen in a time capsule.
The outer control panel light turns a friendly green, the door healing with a hiss, and he hurries forward to the interior door's console, punching in a medical override that'll allow him to board even with the quarantine. It asks him to confirm twice. There's a soft beep and the sound of a lock unlatching deep in the mechanics.
The interior airlock door stays stubbornly shut. First Aid suppresses a sigh.
He examines the panel with his spotlight. The wiring is still intact and powered, so there must be some sort of internal problem with the mechanism, a flaw with the door motor. He peers through the interior viewport, shining his light through it, but can't see anything obstructing it on the opposite side. He flips open the emergency access and plugs in a short data cable, entering his medical override a second time.
The panel beeps and flashes orange with an error message, confirming the door is unlocked but the mechanics are jammed.
"Right. The old fashioned way it is," First Aid says, sweeping his light over the door. Dust swirls in the beam of light.
First Aid feels along the seam of the airlock door, considering, and then wedges the flat end of his pry bar between the connector seam where the maglock is disengaged. It's the weight of the door still holding it closed, but when technology fails, brute force usually does the trick.
He braces his shoulder against the door housing and pulls, his hydraulics engaging at full strength with a deep mechanical whine. The cables in his hands and arms start to feel the strain, metal groaning with the effort as his plating shifts, interlocking to reinforce the underlying struts. The door resists, but he's twenty tons of pure towing strength, so there's a long moment of nothing and then a sudden, deep grinding in the airlock's internal mechanics.
All at once it pops open. The monitoring sensors in his filtration mask beep with a particulate warning, the air so thick with humidity his hands come away damp where he touches the metal. He steps inside, strapping the pry bar back onto hip. Emergency power is still on at the monitoring station, a dim amber pool of light, but the darkness is oppressive, so he flips his spotlight back on and scans left and right before he enters.
There's always something eerie about derelict ships, husks of a space once lively and lived-in, but the bare metal grating and utilitarian construction give the Acid Rain a particularly grim air. The shipwrights didn't consider crew comfort in the design.
Standard Functionist fare — strip down everything to minimal, utilitarian components, a brutal approach to design informed only by points of absolute failure.
Long hallways stretch away into an encompassing gloom. The dim emergency lights only illuminate small circular patches that make it nearly impossible to see if the walkways have been damaged. First Aid picks his way down the corridor carefully, testing the metal underfoot, his spotlight casting a raft of light in an ocean of darkness.
In some places the blackness is so thick it almost seems to move. He shines his light into the corners and it melts away, revealing nothing more ominous than some dripping pipe or aging, corroded span of metal. His optical sensors play tricks on him and he fruitlessly chases empty shadows before giving up on the effort.
First Aid wonders briefly if this is what a mecharat feels like being pursued through a warren by a wireviper. His latest scans are free of any sort of spark signatures or organic life signs in this sector, but it doesn't help him shake the feeling something might slither out of a broken pipe or duct.
Spark containment is six levels down and half a klik's walk towards the belly of the ship, so he picks up his pace as much as he dares. The closest passenger lifts he checks are all unresponsive, despite being marked as functional on the Acid Rain's internal network — burnt out machine drives, maybe.
His luck doesn't run dry that quickly: the freight lift he flagged on his internal map is working for the low price of some slight backtracking and a detour around a section of collapsed walkway through the general inmate holding facility.
He makes it to the prisoner cells without encountering any obstructions. They're all open and empty; if this particular ward ever had inhabitants, they're long gone by now. He pauses next to one and lays his hand on the broken control panel, peering inside curiously. The berth inside is collapsed at one end, but the cell is otherwise untouched.
There's another guard station at the end of the corridor, nothing more than a low check-in counter barred off with wide trithyllium bars. The inactive hardlight projectors ringing the opening would've provided an additional layer of security. The air is thick with silica dust disturbed by his passage, swirling through the beam of light as he swings it across the junction, the suspended debris glittering like tiny crystals.
The effect plays optical tricks on his sensors; the darkness seems to oscillate at the very edges of the light.
First Aid shines his spotlight inside. There's a data pad left unsecured on the workstation just out of easy reach. From his vantage point, he can't tell if it's a personal device or work equipment abandoned in haste in an effort to make it to the missing escape pod.
He maneuvers up against the bars, flattening his plating down as tightly as he can so his forearm fits through the gap. It's a near thing, the rusting metal scraping at his paint, and he has to brace himself on the outer lip of the window to squeeze the extra decimeter of reach out of his overextended shoulder joint.
His fingers graze the corner of the data pad but he can't quite get a grip on it.
First Aid repositions one more time, pushing hard, the bars straining against his weight. The aging metal gives a single centimeter, and then another, and he snags the lip of the data pad with the very tip of one finger, dragging it closer.
A surge of triumph goes through him when he closes his hand firmly around it and liberates it from the locked guard post.
There's a sudden cacophony of sound, crashing metal, as loud as blaster fire in the enclosed space.
First Aid yanks his hand back, data pad securely gripped, and backpedals with a hiss of escaping air. When he finally realizes nothing is leaping out at him, his plating is already flared in surprise, fuel pump pounding double time. He shines his spotlight back into the guard booth and only finds one end of the desk collapsed, the bracket anchoring the legs corroded away. It must have been ready to crumble at the slightest disturbance.
He chuffs a laugh, some of the terror dissolving into a tense uneasiness. At least there's no one here to see him looking foolish.
First Aid flips the data pad over and attempts to power it on — the internal power source long dead, the charging connector corroded with age. Maybe he can extract the data from it using his shuttle equipment. He hopes it's worth keeping for the mild embarrassment it took to obtain it.
He tucks it into his subspace and smooths down his plating and, if only to satisfy himself nothing is there, looks behind him, spotlight raised.
Nothing. Meters and meters of nothing and darkness. A low, insidious dread encroaches: He has a terrible feeling he's going to get down to the spark containment facility and discover there's nothing worth finding after all.
It's not worth speculating about. There'll be something to find or there won't. He rubs a layer of particulate off the outer intake of his filtration mask, blowing out dust from the exhaust, and continues down the corridor.
As he takes the freight elevator down and approaches the spark containment facility, the overhead lighting grows brighter, better lit and in significantly better repair. These facilities usually run off an independent power source; the problems plaguing the rest of the ship aren't as evident here. No rusty condensation dripping from the walls, no pooling patches of fluid, no temperature control issues.
The door to the secure medical ward slides open soundlessly when he approaches. He pauses, skimming his light across the entrance, but there's nothing out of the ordinary to suggest someone's forced entry. The security keypad is still intact. It's simply unlocked, the entire facility unsecured.
A glitch, maybe, or bad wiring. A tension settles over his dorsal plating, drawing them tight, along with the strange feeling someone has been here before. He checks the access logs and finds nothing out of the ordinary.
He passes through and is greeted by the familiar sight of medbay signage. This, at least, is familiar ground. Unusually so — he doesn't recall that the old Functionist prison ships were ever outfitted with anything quite so expensive as this. The directory sign indicates there's a science facility on board, further down the hallway, but it's unlabeled on the main map.
He dismisses his unease. Ships were often retrofitted. Schematics weren't always updated.
First Aid slows as he approaches his destination, the sound of his footfalls hollow and metallic in the empty corridors. A swell of trepidation fills him, an unpleasant clenching around his spark. His spotlight dips towards the floor and then angles up towards the signage above the door.
SPARK CONTAINMENT is printed above the entrance in heavy black glyphs. The main door is stuck half-open, jammed when he tries the controls, the gap barely wide enough for a mech roughly his size to make it through sideways. The prickling feeling of being watched intensifies and he swings his light from side to side down the hallway, trying to banish the feeling he's being followed.
It's just jitters. He doesn't want to go in, because that means the chance of survivors is finally going to come down one way or the other. Dead or alive. At some point his speculation module started churning out possibilities instead of probabilities.
He has no idea what he's actually going to find inside after this long, but not knowing is the worst part. Best to get it over with quickly. He lingers at the threshold for a moment, steeling himself for the worst case scenario, and then squeezes inside.
*
First Aid unclips the lantern from his harness, activates it, and sets it on the closest workbench. The glow refracts through the thick haze of moisture filling the room, diffusing so even the air seems to glow. The atmospheric handler groans overhead, a sickly noise that’s probably also the source of the cloying humidity.
He wipes his plating and his fingers come away unpleasantly damp.
The room is large enough he can't make out the rear wall. Secure storage shelves line either side of a long, narrow walkway leading back to several repair stations.
First Aid finds he's nearly forgotten how spark containment used to be handled. He'd only been to a facility once during his Academy rotation, shadowing a blacksmith using spark containment prisoners to study the effects of frame deintegration. The results had been grisly.
He'd wanted to purge his tanks after seeing the readouts and a queasy feeling had lingered in his fuel pump during the monthlong rotation. That hasn't changed. First Aid dismisses the query, smothering the urge.
The metal doors rise with a hydraulic hiss, punctuated by a grating rattle at the apex. He waits, tense, then takes a step forward, uncertain at first if what he's seeing is real.
The spark containment canisters are all present in their housings, powered, the indicators a steady green. Hope surges through him, a blaze of feeling that eclipses and cracks his carefully constructed pragmatism — until it all comes crashing down, the wrongness of it evident the moment he realizes the canisters aren't opaque.
They're empty. One after the other, all gone dark.
He turns his light on the row closest to him; the seals are popped, lights extinguished, the sparks that were once inside long ago guttered. Some of the acrylic is blackened with smoke from the last, dying blazes of energy.
First Aid reaches out and picks up an empty container, soot darkening his fingertips, and stares down at it as a wave of horror passes over him. The emergency power is on, but it might not have been maintained the entire time. He scans the data chip on the housing. The mech inside was put away for theft turned assault. Nothing warranting a death sentence.
With great care, he returns each canister to its housing.
He stands there looking and then moves on to the next row of shelves, then the next. A hundred empty canisters line each cabinet, a floor-to-ceiling testament to Functionist negligence. The Acid Rain isn't a derelict: it's a wartime tomb.
All of these sparks could have been saved by someone thinking to check the flight logs on both ends and noticing the Acid Rain had never made it to its destination. Between the prisoners and crew, a thousand odd lives snuffed out in what amounted to nothing more than equipment failure and an accounting error.
A heavy grief descends on him. Even now, with the colonists and neutrals returning, refugees from a thousand worlds, Cybertron isn't so well populated it would miss the absence of this many sparks.
Criminals or not, their sentences were served tenfold.
First Aid braces himself against the nearest shelf and thinks unwillingly about Ambulon laying cold and dark on a repair table, frame finally whole again but still sparkless. Despair hits him before he can push the memory away and the loss here magnifies it. His intake constricts and he scrubs a hand over his face; a tight knot of sorrow takes root in his chassis and he can't seem to be rid of it.
He's come to understand Cybertronians are built badly for grief. They're long-lived, death slow-coming and difficult. First Aid has made enough study of organics to understand some of the complex fluid-bound electrical functioning of their bodies. Emotion felt in current, passed through water and carbon instead of metal and wire.
Right now, First Aid envies them their tears. Even though the war is over, the well of sorrow in him is still so deep it's like standing knee deep in a lake of tar. If he allows it to pull him in, he might never be free again.
He rubs along the edge of his filtration mask, wiping away condensation collecting on his plating. First Aid can't stay here with the dead with the living still relying on him.
If there's no one here for him to save, he might as well check cold storage and see if the frames are intact. Returning with a load of medical salvage will improve at least as many lives as were lost here. The thought finally loosens the tight feeling around his spark and he pushes the rest of his melancholy away. An abandoned, dangerous ship isn't the place to grieve. He has work to do.
First Aid walks slowly down the line of shelves towards the connecting door leading into the frame storage facility. A flicker in his visor's HUD gives him pause.
There's a blip on his scanner, a fluttering energy signature.
First Aid freezes at the doorway. He checks the display and watches carefully, not daring to hope. There — a second time, a soft signal that scatters through the room and diffuses between rows and rows of cold metal and hard acrylic. First Aid can't pinpoint the precise location; it only grows more chaotic and scattered the deeper he moves into the room.
He cuts his spotlight and waits for his optics to recalibrate. The faint shimmer of his own biolights illuminate only the smallest space around him, but he dims them as much as he can manage. Every sound feels louder and more scraping in the absence of light, the darkness almost crushing. He waits, his intake flexing as he swallows.
First Aid catches a glimmer at the peripheral of his optical input: there. A faint blue glow near the back of the far row, a shimmering light obscured by a dozen other empty canisters. A single prisoner still alive, a dim little star in the murk. His own spark leaps, his fuel pump racing. The sound of his own ventilations grow ragged and he can't stop himself from staggering forward a single step.
He reaches up and removes his filtration mask, the cloying smell of old standing water instantly encroaching his olfactory sensors. First Aid cycles cold atmosphere through his tertiary vents, sucking it in through his mouth and blowing it across his processor.
First Aid feels momentarily rooted. So many terrible things can be wrong with a spark left in containment this long. His processor occupies itself with all of the worst case scenarios: total personality attenuation, intense and unresolvable frame dysphoria, violent impulses, psychotic episodes, critical memory loss, even outright frame rejection.
There's a chance. There's a chance whoever's in the containment canister is simply dormant, fallen into a long recharge, an endless cycle of rest and flux. If there's even a flicker of hope, he has to make the attempt.
His feet carry him to the spark without conscious instruction from his processor. It floats between two of the four remaining power conductors, spinning and flickering with a sedate, almost sleepy pulse. He closes his hands around the canister and lifts it from the cradle, the tiny green power source light flicking over to hazard orange. Even through the thick acrylic, little crackles of static lick towards his fingertips, trying to conduct.
His internal temperature monitor gives a warning beep and he sucks in a ventilation he didn't realize he'd been suppressing. Wisps of steam curl out from his exhaust vents while he rubs his thumb across the dusty face of the containment canister. Beneath, it's so bright it cuts the darkness around it.
It looks perfect. Medically, he couldn't ask for a healthier-looking spark — a beautiful, luminous blue, the shade right out of an anatomical diagram. He flicks on his spotlight and casts about for the door to frame storage. He spots it on the opposite side of the room; a swinging double door big enough to admit a heavy combat frame.
He'll do the implantation here. The Acid Rain's medical facilities are much larger than his own ship's, and he isn't exactly keen on hauling an empty frame all the way back up through aging, hazardous walkways.
And if the prisoner wakes too far gone, well — a few clipped wires and the right amount of pressure on the fuel pump would be a mercy.
First Aid swiftly sets the grim thought aside.
"All right," he says, scanning the ident chip embedded into the canister. A little prompt pops up on his visor HUD: Prisoner ID: 135-19717.G. Vortex. A cold constructed mech built in Altihex and last arrested in Rodion, originally framed as a rotary.
Vortex's criminal record is attached. The file size isn't small.
He skims it, then saves it and Vortex's medical records to main memory to look over while he works. With a practiced optimism he doesn't quite feel, he says to the spark containment unit, "Vortex. Let's see if we get you up and running."
First Aid presses his thumbs to the tube. The spark inside crackles sedately. The implantation process is fairly straightforward. The first step is finding a frame for Vortex to inhabit, ideally his original. First Aid cradles the canister securely against his chest plating, ignoring the buzzing tingle of static that occasionally pops against his fingertips even through the heavy canister, and steps through the door into the frame storage.
Rows of cryopods line wide service corridors; old fashioned pre-war relics, meant for deep storage, flooded with hyper-cooled gasses instead of liquid antifreeze. They work far better than the small shuttle tubes, but their compressors make them huge and unwieldy to transport. There are a handful of heavy duty transport carts strapped against the nearby bulkhead, but half of the wheels look like they rusted through hundreds of thousands of years ago.
As he passes, he shines his light inside, the shapes of empty frames like dark shadows in their pods. Six rows down, he finds Vortex.
He swipes his hand across the foggy acrylic, exposing a slice of Vortex's frame. Wide shoulders, constructed for combat, folded blades, and a face rendered stark in the shadows.
First Aid matches the serial number to the dormant frame and kneels on the floor in front of the cloudy stasis pod, the canister braced between his knees as he examines the criminal charges from the Acid Rain’s prisoner records.
Public intoxication, solicitation, interface deviance, arson, booster use, booster trafficking, siphoning, assault, aggravated battery, smuggling, bribery. First Aid flips past several pages of individual counts of fraud and theft, each more absurd and elaborate than the last. Politically motivated property damage.
Two recorded counts of murder; one an enforcer.
Not a law abiding citizen, but First Aid knew that from the outset. Pulling up his sentencing data makes First Aid's plating itch. He's overdue for release by about three point eight million years.
First Aid touches the top of the containment canister with the tips of his fingers. The spark is bright, the blue glow strong and steady, oscillating at a frequency that feels correct to First Aid.
He begins the thawing sequence. Atmosphere hisses through the tube, evacuating through some exhaust pipe, and the heavy pod folds open vertically, leaving Vortex's frame exposed for inspection.
The frame itself is in good repair at first glance; kept in uninterrupted cryostasis, bathed in hyper-cooled gasses, an undamaged Cybertronian frame can last nearly indefinitely. There's no surface damage or evidence of rust. The readouts on the control panel are a steady green. First Aid climbs to his feet, setting the spark containment canister carefully aside, and reaches into the open chamber.
He does a quick manual exam, lifting and articulating limbs, testing for weak spots, checking ports and maintenance hatches. The transformation seams move normally when he puts weight on them, offering a healthy amount of flex and give. The frame is in as perfect condition as First Aid could hope for.
First Aid lifts one hand in his, the metal painfully cold against his sensitive fingers, and runs a thumb across the tips of the claws, considering. He decides he'll do the implantation here rather than haul twenty odd tons of unwieldy, dormant metal back up through the corridors.
The whole situation is increasingly strange. A solitary spark, the missing escape shuttle, the unexplained quarantine. None of it seems to quite add up.
He steps back and shines his light down the line of frames, frowning. There are rows and rows of hulking war machines, all with combat alt modes. This wasn’t some labor colony shipment with a few military spec mechs sprinkled in — most likely, these were all mechs meant to go die on some war front.
First Aid tries to access the Acid Rain's high security files again and gets the same blunt, immediate reject. He suppresses a sigh. Looks like if he wants to know more about what happened here, he'll have to brute force his way into some kind of upper level security clearance. He's not sure he has the time or interest in doing so right now, but a few attempts won't slow him down much. If he fails, he can always request the data from whatever salvage team gets the contract.
He looks down at Vortex, frame and spark, then shunts his worry down into the queue as a task with moderate priority. Vortex first, and then the rest of the mystery.