hellkitty

Sunrise was an hour away, at least, the sky just beginning to lighten in the East, that nearly imperceptible gradation toward light, where indigo fades to a thinner darkness.  Stand to, the time of night any soldier knew, instinct and rote jerking him awake.  It was in the thin hours of morning that the enemy attacked, using the shifting darkness as a cover. 

It was easy to imagine it happening here, as well, Barricade thought; that human wars had happened the same way, humans creeping across artillery-churned soil, tense, their breath frosting in the air, sour with tension as they writhed, bellyfirst, toward their enemies. 

It was strange to think of humans like that: that they had anything in common, much less that. Much less that they too—some of them—knew the tension of stand-to, the desperate crawl forward, the dreadful wait for the first shot to be fired.

Barricade shrugged.  Didn’t mean anything. They were still worthless vermin.  They were still the enemy. 

He got a ping on his private comm channel.  He raised his pulse gun, just in case.  There were times you didn’t take any chances, and a U-Haul full of hatchlings was one of those times.

Barricade felt his dentae bare in the cool night air, snarling soundlessly, waiting. 

There. The distinctive fwhooom of Starscream’s engines, a sound made ineradicable in his memory from countless megacycles of hearing them.  It didn’t matter: he tracked the sound with his weapon, until Starscream coasted above, cutting his engines, and then unfolding himself, his barbed feet gouging into the soft soil by the road’s shoulder. Conspicuous, but Starscream wouldn’t have risked it if there were any witnesses. He knew caution, as well. He knew there were times you didn’t take risks. 

Barricade stepped out of the treeline.  “Back here,” he said, gesturing with one thumb, to the woodline.  In daylight the tracks where he’d hauled the trailer would be visible, a long chain of broken brush, snapped saplings. But by daylight he’d be long gone. 

Starscream followed him, tree branches snapping as he passed, his broad, wedge-shaped chassis  angling between the taller trunks.  He squatted down in the impromptu clearing, branches whisking back into place over his head as his long claws caught at the latch of the trailer. “They are well?” His red optics gleamed in the darkness, over his shoulder.

“Best I can do,” Barricade said, shrugging, noncommittal.  He had been doing his best, but there were no training facilities out here, no safe space with simple, repetitive tasks that were the first roads to sentience.  If they ever developed, their view of the world would be much different than his, than Starscream’s—a world of chaos and bumping and constant flight, of demands for obedience black edged with worry.

Starscream nodded, lifting and twisting the locking bar, swinging it open.

Hatchlings spilled out, optics glowing and eager, chittering and clicking as they rolled off the trailer’s lip, bouncing unharmed onto the pine-needle fragrant ground.  They uncoiled, turning and twisting, taking in as much as they could—the dark-dampened color, the smell of pine and wood and dew, the sounds  of stirring birds, the ping of Starscream’s cooling engines. To them, dawn wasn’t fear of attack; to them dawn was moments like this: the deep saturation of experience, sight and sound and smell and touch.

And taste—Starscream pulled the energon rations from his storage compartment, dispensing them with quick, elegant movements—one ration per hatchling. This, they knew what to do with—squealing, small, razor talons clutching at the hard plastic, mouths tearing at the opening.  

Starscream turned on his foreknee, holding one last ration out to Barricade. “You look tired.  I can watch the hatchlings for a while.” 

Barricade grunted, lower optics focused on the task of opening the ration. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was until he’d seen it, but now it seemed to sweep over him like a wildfire. “Air Commander probably has better things to do than hatchling duty.” His upper optics flicked up, studying the jet, who had bent back over the hatchlings, who had rolled around his feet, slurping noisily on their rations, humming with an innocent contentment. Barricade didn’t want to think about how fragile that innocence was.

“You forget, Barricade,” Starscream said, quietly, “before the war, my duties included hatchlings.”  His bronze mouth calipers quirked in a strange smile. “I find it…nostalgic.” He shifted, his mass lowering, wedging a tree between the powerful turbines on his back.  He waggled his long fingers over the hatchlings, bemused, as their short limbs flailed, trying to capture the lethal blades, entirely unafraid. “I can think of no better thing to do than remember why we fight.”

Leaning against another tree, feeling the bark, earthy and rough against his shoulder tire, watching the jet bend to play with the hatchlings…he couldn’t either. There was time for them to learn the harder lessons.

 I find myself unable to tag this entry?