sakon76

Summer Job: Just Breathe
by K. Stonham
released 31st January 2011

June 18th, 2010

The blackness seemed to stretch on forever, a void that rang in Glen's ears like the aftermath of an incredible concert. Stonehenge had been dark, but it had nothing on... here.

Gape-mouthed, he stared around him, at the faint glints of metal that revealed themselves as his eyes adjusted, at the softly glowing Autobot optics, at the alien stars so far above.

It was cool, he noticed absently, especially in comparison to the muggy English night they'd just left, but not as cold as a sunless, drifting alien planet might be expected to be. Gravity, he noticed, was about the same as Earth, which made sense. Cybertron was smaller but denser, metal to the core.

A faint "Wow..." drifted away into the alien air.

*

"What the hell was that?!" Lennox was yelling at Jetstorm somewhere across the way.

Holy. Fuck.

Cybertron, Mikaela thought, turning around to look, eyes searching out Bumblebee's shadowed form. He stood stock-still, looking at his homeworld.

Somehow she didn't think any of the Autobots had ever expected to go back home.

"Bumblebee," she whispered.

He jolted, blue optics blinking, then crossed to her and Sam, kneeling down by them with a inquiring noise.

"You okay?" she asked, touching a cheek flange.

"Good," he responded with his mashup of voices, "weird but good. You can't ever go home again." He touched her in return, looking back and forth between her and Sam. "You okay, honey?"

"Peachy," she replied, then noticed the way Sam was looking at Major Lennox. "Sam?"

Lennox swayed a little on his feet.

"Sir?" she heard Captain Graham's voice through the darkness.

"Just... a little dizzy," the major replied.

"Sam?" Mikaela asked again, but was cut off as he placed a gentle hand over her mouth.

"Ratchet," Sam called, his voice carrying, almost seeming to echo, "what, exactly, is the atmospheric percentage of oxygen on Cybertron?"

There were ripples of shadow movements, humans freezing as the implication hit.

"It's a trace element only," Ratchet replied. "Less than one percent."

"If we can't get back to Earth in less than three minutes, then," Sam said too calmly, "you're going to have a bunch of dead humans on your hands."

Now all the mechs froze.

Of course, Mikaela thought through a fast-rising panic. They had no problems with Earth's atmosphere, why would they think humans might have any problems with Cybertron's?

"--Reverse it!" Ironhide was demanding.

"I cannot!" Jetstorm was replying. "It requires time to reset--"

"Sam...."

His hand was back on her mouth, gaze boring into her through the darkness. "Don't talk."

*

No!

They couldn't die! He wouldn't let them! He'd lost too many already, friends and acquaintances and teammates--

Bumblebee had never really believed in the Unmaker, but he was beginning to wonder if the priests' stories were true, because suddenly it was seeming like his homeworld destroyed everything he loved. Even those beings that weren't part of it.

He had to focus.

What, exactly, did humans need to survive? Their lungs were adapted to breathe Earth's atmosphere, which was a dominant nitrogen-oxygen, with only traces of other elements, mostly argon, and a small percentage of random water molecules adding humidity.

Nitrogen Cyberton had in plenty. Oxygen... how to synthesize oxygen?!

Processor working faster than it ever had before, Bumblebee reconfigured his calculations. Then reconfigured them again. And again. And again. There had to be something that would work!

*

This, Sam was sure, was a mistake Jetstorm was never going to make again. One way or another.

Looking around him, at human faces only half-seen in Cybertron's darkness, his gaze caught on Simmons' expression. While everyone else was varying degrees of panicky, the ex-Sector Seven agent was calmly looking up at the foreign stars, peaceful wonder writ large on his face.

Like he didn't even care he was going to die.

Somehow, seeing that, Sam felt like he understood Simmons better than he ever had before. It helped calm his own spreading panic. Somehow, he decided, it was going to be all right. Even if they died... well, he'd been dead before, and what was on the other side really wasn't that bad.

"Bumblebee," he said, using up a little of his precious air, "it's okay." The Autobot's--his Autobot's--plating was warm to the touch, even here.

They had always been going to part ways sooner or later, either by the war or by Sam and Mikaela's human, and therefore much shorter, life expectancies.

This was... just a little bit sooner.

The Autobot looked at him. "No it's not," someone's voice said for him, and Bumblebee stood and dropped down into his car form, doors flicking wide in invitation.

The hiss of his aircon kicking on was loud in the sudden silence.

*

Insanity, Ratchet snapped over the comm line Bumblebee had used to chirp schematics.

Are their lives worth less than ours? Optimus replied, already folding into the shape of a Peterbilt.

Ratchet ignored the almost rhetorical question. Powering nuclear fission from our sparks is a short path to suicide!

Then we die together! Ironhide snapped.

It will take the better part of two hours for the space bridge to be resetting, Jetstorm said, watching the humans scramble for the promise of air within the Cybertronians. He rearranged himself into the Blackbird form he had taken, a mirror of his twin's. A ladder folded down, allowing two humans--one of whom was Master Sergeant Epps--to climb into his cockpit. His canopy sealed with a hiss, the atmosphere within matching Earth's in a matter of seconds.

Our sparks won't last that long, Ratchet knew, finishing transforming into his H2 altform even as he warned the others.

Better find an alternative quick, then, Jolt responded, snapping his doors shut on the heels of his passengers.

...I know someplace.

*

"Masks," Glenn gasped from the front passenger seat. "We need breathing masks for here, like from Avatar or something." He hugged his laptop bag to his chest, pale beneath his dark skin.

Sam looked steadily at the Camaro's dash. "Bumblebee--"

"That's what friends are for~" crooned Linda Rondstadt.

Manufacturing oxygen. Sam had a pretty good idea of the kind of power that was taking. And even Cybertronians had limited resources for something like that. "'Bee, you can't--"

"The needs of the many," Leonard Nimoy's voice informed him, "outweigh the good of the few, or the one."

"Bumblebee...."

"Follow me, I've got the map!" another voice insisted.

Sam's phone rang. He pulled it out, then stopped.

"Why," he asked suspiciously, "do I have four bars in another galaxy?"

The Autobot's only response was the classic Star Trek transporter chime.

Sam sighed and flipped the phone open.

"Ratchet knows a place with atmospheric control," Optimus' rich voice informed him.

"Good by me," Sam replied.

"If it's still intact," Optimus cautioned.

"Great, fill me with confidence," Sam groused. A gentle chuckle was his reply, then the line went dead.

Glenn stared at the phone, then dug his own out of his pocket, examining its screen for signs of alien tampering. "Can you do that to mine too?" he asked Bumblebee.

Sam put his hand on the other man's phone. It was an Optimus; Glenn had gotten it just for the name, which admittedly made Sam snicker too, and the hacker had already heavily modified it. "Later," he told Glenn. "After we're not in danger of asphxyiation."

There were mechanical sounds coming from within Bumblebee's body, and the cabin gave a slight shudder. Looking out the window, Sam saw the other Autobots' tires folding up and away. The vehicle exteriors changed slightly too, lines shifting into something smoother, unearthly.

"What the--" Lieutenant Casey started to ask.

"A metal planet," Glenn didn't quite squeak in delight, his eyes wide. "Magnetic repulsion!"

Hovering above the surface of their world, five cars and two bikes skimmed away as behind them an old, alien jet took to the sky.

*

Cybertron wasn't completely dark, Mikaela decided. Here and there glowing crystals, mostly blue, broke through the surface, shedding faint light on the debris piled up around them. Glenn and Lieutenant Casey were practically plastered to the windows. So was Sam, she noticed, though his expression was very different.

"Sam?" she asked as they passed rubble that spilled further into the darkness than she could see.

"Bumblebee," he said, quiet and sober, "where are we?"

For a minute, there was only the sound of the engine and the A/C, then Bumblebee's speakers reluctantly crackled to life. In the voice of a 1960s documentary, he said "...this iconic figure...."

Sam lost what little color the blue lights of Cybertron allowed him. "Iacon?" he asked in a harsh whisper.

"Iacon?" Mikaela asked him.

"What's Iacon?" Lieutenant Casey echoed her, his voice quiet.

Sam swallowed. He looked sick, and Mikaela really hoped he wouldn't need an airsickness bag, because she didn't think Bumblebee came with any. "The capital city," he replied. "Of the entire planet. Shining Iacon...." His voice trailed off. "God," he whispered almost to himself, "I know what it should look like and I've never been here before. Fucked-up Cube deja vu."

Mikaela rubbed his back slowly, carefully.

"You should have seen it," he said after a minute, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, head bowed, no longer looking out the window. "It was so beautiful. All silver and gold and crystal... spires and towers reaching to the sky, mechs everywhere going about their business, all colors...."

"Must've made ancient Rome look like a trailer park," Casey remarked.

Sam laughed hollowly. "You have no idea."

*

"So tell me," Seymour invited eventually, "why on a metal planet everything looks soft and round."

Something very like a sigh sounded through the Hummer's speakers. "Acid rain," Ratchet replied.

"Bit stronger than the stuff back home?"

"You have no idea."

A few minutes of silence, then Ratchet spoke again. "You would never believe it, Agent Simmons, but this was once a beautiful world, and we were a great, united people."

*

It had been a very long time since Optimus had last set foot on his own world.

He was now remembering why so many of them had left.

Beyond the need to find the Allspark before Megatron and his Decepticons did, there was the simple fact that their world had been dying, initially from the damage the war had done to Cybertron, and then finally from the lack of its life-giving force.

I did this. It was a simple statement of fact: he had had to choose from a very short list of options. Doom his people, his planet... or the universe.

It had been an easy decision. He knew it had been the right one.

It just didn't always feel like it.

*

He's guilt-tripping again, Ironhide commed Ratchet.

Perfect, the medic responded, his tone biting. As if I didn't have enough to worry about right now.

*

"Holy Mary, mother of God. Look at that," Will Lennox breathed from inside Ironhide, watching wide-eyed as a bridge literally unfolded before them, silvery metal stretching out into the darkness across a chasm so deep he couldn't see the bottom. "No wonder you guys think our world's primitive."

Ironhide snorted. "Not primitive. Much," he amended himself. "Organic worlds are built different than mechanical ones."

"You can say that again." Sarah would never believe this.

On the other hand, given that if they got back and he was allowed to tell her, the story would involve his nearly running out of air on an alien planet... maybe Will would just skip this particular story. He liked his balls where they were.

*

The outside of the structure looked melted half to slag. But above the door, and more importantly the access pad, there was an overhang that hadn't existed the last time Ratchet had visited this place, hundreds of vorns ago. It was half-slagged too by now, but seemed to have done its job in keeping the acid rain from melting the pad.

"Deep breaths," he instructed the human soldiers in him. "You need to get out because I need to transform to get us inside." If the door still functioned. If his access codes still worked.

If the climate controls inside were still viable.

The men obeyed and each took a couple of deep breaths, then scrambled out when Ratchet opened his doors. He waited only as long as it took them to get clear before transforming and stepping toward the access panel. A cable extended from his wrist and plugged in; hoping, he spoke his password.

*

"...I take it Ratchet knows this guy pretty well?" Sam asked his car.

"Why, what'd he say?" Lieutenant Casey asked.

"Roughly? 'It's me. Open up, you hack'," Sam translated.

*

The doors to the lab slid almost silently open. Ratchet went through first, transmitting codes for lighting in human-visible spectrums. The glow panels flickered slowly on, then something popped and the place fell into darkness. Growling, he strode forward and hit the room's back wall.

The lights flared back to life.

The NEST soldiers crept in cautiously after him, followed by a quintet of vehicles and one jet that taxied into the room. The moment the door sealed behind them, Ratchet released the codes he'd been holding in stock, changing the atmospheric composition of the lab to something more like Earth's.

Fortunately, it seemed Wheeljack's store of compressed elements were still intact. It took less than thirty seconds of watching the NEST team's hair blow about their faces before they were taking tentative breaths of the new air.

Watching their grins, directed at one another and him, Ratchet felt one small weight lift off his shoulder servos.

They could keep the humans alive. At least for now.

The others poured out of Optimus and Ironhide, climbing out of Bumblebee and Jolt and jumping down from Jetstorm, allowing the Autobots to stretch themselves out as they returned to their root modes.

"So, like, where are we?" Glen Whitmann asked, still holding onto his laptop and turning in a circle to look all around the giant (to him) room.

"Lab of a friend of Ratchet's," Ironhide replied. "His name was Wheeljack."

"It still may be," Ratchet retorted. Ironhide shrugged.

Sam stepped closer to one of the stacks of chemical tanks that lined the walls. His head tilted to one side, reading the Cybertronian labeling as Ratchet watched.

Then the boy looked at the next.

And the next.

He backed up so rapidly that he fell over his own feet, eyes wide. "Ratchet," he said, his voice just a shade off of outright panic, "what the hell did this Wheeljack guy do?!" Half of the humans in the room were staring at Sam.

Ratchet snorted. "Before the war? He was a pyrotechnician."

"So he did fireworks," Master Sergeant Epps said. "Big deal."

"Yeah, fireworks," Agent Simmons agreed, as calm as Sam was not. "Big fireworks. On a planet whose atmosphere is made up of...?" He raised a brow at Ratchet.

"Ninety-eight percent noble gases," Ratchet replied, knowing well where the agent was leading.

"Imagine that," Simmons said. He glared at the men around him. "Do the math."

"Right," said Major Lennox a moment later, his voice just a shade shaken. "Nobody touch anything."

*~*~*

Author's Notes: Thanks to

okami_myrrhibis for beta'ing for me. And congrats to a biiiig portion of my commenters here on LJ for deducing what evil, nasty thing I was planning... and had been planning for long before the movie Avatar came out. ^_^