"Perhaps we can look into altering the computer's code at some time in the future. For the moment, I'm satisfied that it isn't actively working against us."
"I agree Skitter, having our own home kill us would not be for the best.
I am truly ready for whatever needs to be done next. I am afraid that most of what needs to be done here is not what I am skilled at but I'll help in any way you all need.
Were it not for the timely arrival of both your groups, my spark would have gone out long ago".
Ula cocks her head at Redshift's response, "Well, we gotta do it sometime big guy..."
"Absolutely," Redshift nods. "But I learned the hard way on Graveyard that not everyone is going to respond to an unannounced Cybertronian with open arms and a fresh pack of Energon Goodies."
"Perhaps we can look into altering the computer's code at some time in the future. For the moment, I'm satisfied that it isn't actively working against us."
"That we know of," Redshift whispers, uncertain if the computer can hear them in the hall and through a closed door. He didn't remember reconnecting comms in the hallway, but that didn't mean it hadn't been done. "This thing is... old... Older than me. The way it's talking, we can't be sure it's a simple servitor device. It feels like it is, but... For Sigma's Sake, it's talking about Unicron like he's real. I for one think we should tread carefully."
Redshift pauses, looking at all of his compatriots.
"What do the rest of you think? What is our consensus?"
"I think it thinks Unicron is real and maybe I think Unicron is real and maybe we landed on Unicron only it's Unicron cleverly disguising itself as an organic world until it strikes and eats us all and we scream and OH WHY DIDN'T WE LISTEN TO CHATTERBOX THAT GUY TRIED TO WARN US but if you want to ignore all the warnings and keep on then I guess I'm going to too because our sparks have to go out sometime and better they all go out together than I go out watching you all you get chewed on by organics while I watch from the safety of the ship..."
Warhawk has heard rumors of a mercenary who shifted sides during the war repeatedly, from Autobot to Decepticon and back as the winds blew. The bot's name was Ulastron, although it went by several aliases. Ula's vehicle modes, while local, seem consistent with the minicon's descriptions.
March 23rd, 2018 - Anchorage, AK : 02:13
With a fresh load of energon from the ship's tanks, and using the cover of darkness, Ula and Warhawk (with Chatterbox in his passenger compartment) fly Northeast to the larger of the Earth cities nearby, Anchorage Alaska.
Dropping Chatterbox off in the wilderness east of town, and Ula joining the other microbot, the two begin heading into town.
March 23rd, 2018 - Achorage Bay, off the cost of Alaska : 02:13
Warhawk and the others are off, leaving Skitter and Red at the ship. Without sensors, any search for salvage on the sea floor will need to be done by sight, requiring the use of the ship's floodlights. This will, however, make them visible for miles underwater.
Chatterbox transforms and activates his Local Intelligence Entity module, which creates a holographic rider for his vehicular form.
Both Ula and CB begin to make sense of the local road rules. The red signs that say STOP mean stop, the solid lines mean do not cross, the broken lines mean may cross, the arrows indicate which directions you are allowed to turn at intersections. The more confusing one is the Red means stop, Green means go, and Yellow means either Go Faster or Slam on the Brakes as Hard as Possible, the two can't agree on which is which for Yellow.
They find the city has organics moving near constantly, and as long as the two don't break the rules too badly, nobody pays much attention to them. They do get some horn blasts from irate drivers on occasion, but nobody fires on them with lasers or anything.
Warhawk will cruise north, maybe check out Denali, maybe stumble across some fossil fuels.
"We may have to resign ourselves to checking deep water areas. Or at the very least, very depopulated areas. I'd hate for us to draw unwanted attention."
"We may have to resign ourselves to checking deep water areas. Or at the very least, very depopulated areas. I'd hate for us to draw unwanted attention."
"I wonder if this planet has valuable ores at great depth," Redshift ponders. "Cybertron once had vast undersea energon fissures. They were a favorite spawning site for Retro Sharks."
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CB, being paranoid about Unicron, see's evidence of Unicron infestation everywhere. Chaos, Violence, and while driving past some sort of organic shop, he notices miniature Cybertronian's, no more than a hand span tall, all being held in some sort of phase field! There's images on the glass store front with obviously wanted Cybertronians! Apparently the locals call Cybertronian's 'Gundams' and then sell the capture super-microbot corpses as keepsakes!
Warhawk continues north, and finds a massive area without any signs of technology, just trees, quadrupedal organics, rocks, and frozen H20 scattered everywhere. The air is cold enough that he's having to burn more energon to keep his control surfaces from freezing over. While the cold itself doesn't bother his Cybertronian components, it is cold enough to induce stasis lock if one were to run low on energon. This planet is insanely cold.
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CB heads back to base, rattled and freaked out by the obvious Unicronian connections on this wretched planet. He's starting at any noise and totally expects attack. He... he may have shot a tree that waved at him...
Red and Skitter, skulking about the ocean floor near Kodiak Island, find two sunken vessels at the bottom of a deep strait between Kodiak and Raspberry islands. The two vessels are coated with much coral and sea life, but they are apparently unsalvaged.
While there's no fuel left in the tanks of either ship, there is plenty of metal and wire aboard the destroyer, which can be use as raw material to fabricate replacement parts for the ship, including likely the radio system.
Taking what they can from the shipwrecks, Skitter gets to work setting up a fabrication foundry. If they couldn't find the materials they needed directly, they'd just have to build their own from raw materials.
Ula finds a plethora of electronics shops all over the place, television (vid-screen receivers), computers (laptops, desktops), and other sources of primitive electronics.
She also finds that the locals store energy in primarily two ways. The first is in tanks in the ground that hold hydrocarbons, which they apparently burn in the least efficient way possible in ground vehicles to generate power. The second is via heavy conduits that are strung either underground or on tall wooden poles about the city, sending electrical current to distant places.
Before Ula returns she will attempt to follow the source of these electrical wires as she is not sure how they are transporting the hydrocarbons for storage in the ground and she risks detection by transforming right now to try and figure it out.
It takes Ula another day of looking before she realizes that the two methods of energy are not related. The hydrocarbons are stored in the tanks in the ground and delivered by large 'tanker' trucks. The electricity seems to be coming from a power plant that, again, inefficiently burns naturally occurring hydrocarbon gas that's mostly methane (the locals call it 'natural gas').
All in all, the locals appear to be primitives when it comes to energy conversion, storage, and usage.
Sufficient intel gathered, Ula returns to her companions on the ship to relay what she has learned.
"Perhaps we can trade knowhow with these organics. Teach them a better method to get more out of their natural resources in exchange for said resources. The question is, who to approach about such a proposal".
Warhawk is fascinated by the many organics, but knows it isn't reasonable to spend too much time in the cold. He will take a moment to land and transform, spending a few minutes in a meadow just watching.
If nothing interesting turns up, he will turn around and head back to pick up his pals.
April 14th, 2018 - Achorage Bay, Alaska
After several weeks heavy work stripping out copper, iron, and steel from sunken ships and reforging it into makeshift components in order to make more makeshift components, often mixing in some rare earths taken from the filters of the energon converter's liquid intake, the crew finally get the comm systems for the ship back online. Sort of. While they can receive any comm burst, they can only transmit about 300 km currently. However, this does allow them to float offshore at night and link into the planetary data net by hacking the local cell phone towers.
They also manage to get the ship's sensors back online, sort of. They can only pick up energy signals or scan for mass signatures, but not both, simultaneously. It takes them 5 minutes to switch from one mode to another, as they have to physically pull components from one section of the ship and walk them over to the other section to enable the other sensors. However, they can passively pick up energy signals or actively scan for mass objects now, making it much easier to navigate underwater.
Fortunately, the local bay is not a routine submarine area, given the shallowness of the bay, and the lack of submarine ports in Anchorage Bay. The nearest submarine port is in King's Bay.
With access to the organic's data net, the crew begins to amass more information about the locals, or 'Humans' as they call themselves. However, per the ship's AI, much of the data is poorly indexed, and often contradictory.
CB of course, takes this as more proof the locals are somehow associated with Unicron, as they are too chaotic to make sense of.
"Well, that's a start.
Maybe we should seek out energy sources below the water? These organics, sorry humans, don't seem that skillful at traversing deep areas of their natural waters. These are resources that we can utilize which they cannot reach and as a result we won't run into conflict with the locals.
Thoughts?"
April 13th, 2018 20:45 EST - Anchorage, AK
"Sir, this might be something." The female human brings a table to the man behind his desk, and shows it to him. "The passive sonar buoys that the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration have in the Bay have been picking up some odd rumblings the last few weeks, and they started about the same time as the sightings of ET052."
The man looks at the tablet's screen, and nods. "I see them, but what do the experts think it is?"
"NOAA's marked them down as geological rumblings, probably due to the aftershocks of the earthquake that occurred in that area. But Winton in R&D thinks it's more likely it's some sort of reactionless drive, interacting with the water as something moves under the surface." She taps the tablet for him, and brings up two sets of readings. "These are the soundwaves generated by ET048's ship, cleaned up as best we can."
The man frowns. "They don't look anything alike."
The woman grins. "Because ones' in the air, which is much easier to move, and the other is liquid, which is harder." She taps a couple of controls, and the two wave forms match up 93%. "This is with a filter to modify the sound for how it would be under water. We get similar results moving the water sound into air."
The man smiles widely. "Excellent, looks like our quarry is stooging around in Anchorage Bay for some reason. I wonder if they had anything to do with the earthquake? Mining for something maybe? Get some people with some better sonar out there looking, passive only, I want to try to track them down without them knowing it."
The woman nods. "Yes sir! I already started the process, we'll have dozens of passive acoustic receivers in the bay within the week."
April 16th, 2018 08:18 EST - Elsewhere
A screen is lit in an alien ship. The purple colored screen fills with alien symbols, and little dots move on a wire-diagram view of Anchorage Bay. As it does so, a metal cable snakes out to interface with the console, and four stassis chambers begin to hiss and open as the entities in them are awakened.
April 16th, 2018 12:45 EST - Elsewhere
A hand, recently awakened by an automated console, and consisting of flesh and blood, taps out commands on a console filled with odd script. A feminine voice gives a small chuckle. "Well now, what are the odds of that? I guess it's true, if you live long enough, you see everything. Now, what should I do about it..."
"Well, that's a start.
Maybe we should seek out energy sources below the water? These organics, sorry humans, don't seem that skillful at traversing deep areas of their natural waters. These are resources that we can utilize which they cannot reach and as a result we won't run into conflict with the locals.
Thoughts?"
"Based on what we've gathered, Earth has plentiful undersea resources waiting for the Humans to figure out how to exploit," Redshift agrees. "And apparently I was right about high-scarcity materials at greater depths. Their cloud-based information repository... Chatterbox, what was that called again... No, never mind I remember. Wikipedia... Indicates that they have gold, iron, and several trans-uranics on the sea floor, if we can get to them. We could easily synthesize Durillium alloy with those."
"I'm not against trading with the humans, Ula. But you are correct: who do we approach? I was reading information about several very interesting humans that might be appropriate or useful: Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking. But it seems their spark has gone out. Apparently these creatures have very short life spans."
"It might be best to stick with undersea. It would seem the easiest way to avoid detection until we can determine if there is a human or group of humans that we would want to trade with. We should, however, keep an eye out. There seem to be reports of fish-human hybrid creatures that live in the water... and like to sing."
"Fish human hybrids? Organics that can interspecies breed? Pretty versatile for Organics!
I am fine to assist in any way I can Cityspeaker, I will leave the technical analysis to the rest of you".
"Attention, Intruder Redshift. As the Coordinator for the Intruders, I would like to bring to your attention the repair log for this ship, which is both quite long and of high importance. While the organics Data Net is horribly designed and implemented, I have been able to make some progress toward identifying materials that may be worth salvaging."
A list comes up on the main viewscreen.
Pan Nova - 40 mi NE of Dutch Harbor, near Unimak Pass (Freighter, fully loaded)
Athena - 650 mi S of Adak, in North Pacific Ocean (Freighter, fully loaded)
Dan Prince - 330 mi SE of Dutch Harbor, 1500 barrels of fuel onboard (46 million dollar rig)
Prinsendam - 80 mi SW of Sitka, and 130 mi S of Yakutat (Freighter, fully loaded)
Chandragupta - 1500 mi SSW of Kodiak (Freighter, fully loaded)
Dona Anita - N Pacific Ocean (near Vancouver Island or Helm Bay). Freighter, fully loaded
Panoceanic Faith - 870 mi SW of Kodiak. Freighter, fully loaded
"These are primitive organic vessels that sank within the last 50 Local Solar Cycles. Based on the primitive technology, I have discounted anything older as being worthless for salvage."
"Well done, Del'Tor. That will truly simplify our search for resources. Can you correlate likely ship traffic patterns to locate the sites that are least likely to result in human interaction?"
"I suggest we use a randomized pattern," Redshift says. "Humans may be primitive, but they understand statistics and have excellent pattern recognition. We don't want to have any surprise guests."
"All lost ships are on shipping lines. The downed oil rig, however, is not on a standard shipping lane. However, it is in deeper water, where there may be submarines." There is a pause. "If you intend for this unit to stay under the liquid/gas phase zone, it is suggested you equip sonar detection."
"Let's try this Panoceanic Faith. That sounds good. Not too close to land. Hopefully we'll avoid detection." Skitter shrugs not knowing what all each freighter has loaded, nor how deep the water is in which they are found. "If we can get a sonar rig together from the scavenged parts, we can go after the oil rig."
Redshift looks to the rest of the group. "It's as good a place as any to start. Do we have other input? What is our consensus?"
"I am in agreement with Skitter".
"All of this cold water and cold air must be dulling my circuits. I'm afraid I'm an old warrior, not a scavenger-engineer-survivalist. I've always trusted others to handle these logistics. You have all done an excellent job of keeping us going. Keep doing what you are doing."
April 21st, 2018 : Anchorage Bay, Alaska 23:48
The crew spend a day or two searching for the sunken ship, and finally find it, using their new sensors. The ship is sunken partially into the mud at the bottom of the bay. The cargo containers are scattered over a 3 square kilometer area, having come off the ship during it's capsizing.
They spend the first day figuring out how to salvage, and begin hauling cargo containers into the ship's cargo bay, flooding it, running cables, hauling up, emptying the bay, and opening two containers at a time. It's slow work, but not difficult.
The first two pods, are unfortunately, loaded with clothing for the organics. Saltwater soaked and ruined clothing. The cargo containers themselves are useful for raw materials, and are quickly emptied and cut up into strips of metal for later smelting.
The next two pods are both much better, and much worse. One pod contains thousands of 'laptops', small weak computers built by the organics. However, the raw materials and rare earths are a small treasure trove, and can be recycled for much needed repair parts!
The fourth pod, however, is gruesome, as it contains the skeletal remains of over a dozen organics. It appears they were travelling inside it when the ship sank...
The group is just discovering this when the ship's alert begins to sound. "WARNING! WARNING! Multiple organic craft detected!" The ship begins transmitting, and stating for those in the cargo bay. "WARNING! Multiple craft detected entering overhead airspace!"
Elsewhere, April 18th, 2018
A man in a precise and well maintained uniform enters the office. "Sir." He salutes, followed in by the woman with the red hair.
"At ease, Chief. Have you read the briefing?"
The man stands at ease and nods. "Yes sir, seems straight forward, find them, capture or destroy them."
The man behind the desk nods. "Exactly, any concerns?"
The man at ease gives a pained look. "Do I have to take Delgado? Can I at least leave the bird behind?"
The woman with red hair laughs softly. "Why would you do that, it's the smarter of the pair."
The man at ease tries not to laugh. "I had not considered that."
The man behind the desk nods. "You'll need him, Chief Leialoha." He stands and salutes. "I'll be coordinating from the Flagg. You'll be coordinating the submarine operations from the Freedom."
The at ease man stands back at attention and salutes. "Yes sir, Commander. I just hope those specialty weapons work the way R&D says they should."
The man puts on his hat, indicating his rank, and nods. "So do we all."
April 21st, 2018 : Anchorage Bay, Alaska 23:49
Almost immediately after the Del'Tor breaks radio silence, radio waves are inundating the area around it, pushed by a massive directional broadcast from the surface. "ATTENTION ALIEN CONSTRUCTS! This is Commander Cutter, aboard the U.S.S. Flagg aircraft carrier! You are surrounded by our submarines, and this ship has launched three full flights of heavy assault fighters for air cover. Surrender immediately and you will not be damaged. Fight and we'll blow you to alien scrap metal. You have 2 minutes to comply."
"UNICRON HAS COME FOR US!" Chatterbox begins freaking out, running back and forth looking for weaponry to fight back against the horror of organic mechanovores.
Ula contacts the others through her comm, "Impressive, who knew they could detect us out here? Or arrive so fast as to disturb us, So we parley? They seem awfully hostile".
Skitter mentally kicks himself for not installing sonar sooner. "Del'Tor: can we outrun them? How many submarines are you detecting?" He leaves the cargo bay and heads for the bridge. "Red, do you think they can do us any significant damage? Does anyone know what kind of weaponry they have?"
"A cycle ago, if you'd asked me that," Redshift replies to Skitter. "I'd have laughed. Now? I'm not so sure."
"I doubt they could penetrate the ship's hull," he continues. "But we're still wounded. Too many open points in the armor. And... For my own reasons, I'd rather not find out how good their sharpshooters are. We know they have nuclear capabilities. Their history shows they're willing to use them within an atmosphere and on their own people."
"If consensus is to parley, I will volunteer. If consensus is to flee, then let us flee. They may be able to find us, but they cannot catch us."