"Eeeh! There's a dead jet in here!"

Useless jumped up at the shout; he hadn't realised there was anyone else in the base. Before he could decide whether to flee, look for a weapon or just hide behind the console cluster in the middle of the room, the shouter stumbled out of the back rooms and into the barrack-room.

"Who the - where did you come from?" Useless yelped. The big Mayhem who'd dragged him here and told him to stay put hadn't mentioned anything about other Seekers. Come to think of it, he hadn't mentioned anything about the place at all.

"Err..." The other didn't seem to want to reply.

"Oh, I get it. You're a reject."

"I am not!"

"Then why're you all faded out?"

"What, like you?"

"Yeah." Useless shrugged. He thought to lower his weapons, then remembered he didn't have any, which was probably a good thing, since he was too low on fuel to power them anyway. "I'm a reject. Everyone calls me Useless."

"They call me that too."

"No, I mean as a name."

"Oh. I'm Pariah - and there's a dead body back there! Did you put it there?"

"No, I only just got here." That wasn't entirely true; he'd been standing around for at least three breems.

"What're you doing here?"

"No idea. You?"

Pariah shrugged. "This huge Mayhem dragged me out of the base yesterday and hauled me all the way over here. I was looking around and there it - there you are."

"Me too. Except for the dead body."

"Yeah," Pariah said, looking around a bit helplessly. "I was looking for the recharge berths - or a refuelling station. Have you seen any? Or just some fuel? Anywhere?"

"Nah. I just got dragged in here and told to sit down and wait."

"What for?"

"How am I supposed to know? Nobody told me. I don't even know where this place is." Useless sat down. It had been a long flight from his last base, all the night and most of the evening before. "You don't suppose they've dumped us out here to starve, do you? I hear they do things like that to Decepticons like us."

"Decepticons like you maybe. I'm different."

Useless could only look bemused at that. Pariah was, apart from clumps of thin, shiny, iridescent wires sprouting from helm-sides, completely identical to him. They were both standard-model Seekers, scuffed, dented, dingy and almost completely grey, although his armour was of a lighter shade. He could just make out the last remains of chipped, shakily applied decorative paint on Pariah's face. "Err ... different?" He wasn't seeing it, well, apart from the helm-wire and the face-paint.

"I'm a female."

"Oh ... but ... you're a jet."

"I'm a female jet!"

"What, like - oh, you're a triple-changer? You can turn into a female Autobot, for a disguise?" Useless hadn't heard of anyone doing that before, but it sounded like a good idea. Then again, so did getting overcharged the day before unit inspection, so he was never certain of the soundness of his own ideas.

"No!" Pariah snapped. "I'm a female jet!"

Useless was still trying to work out what that meant when the barrack-room door opened, and more Seekers came in - more grey, sheepicron-faced, confused reject Seekers, herded by yet another huge, horrible, Pretender-shelled Mayhem. It occurred to Useless that he could ask the Mayhem what was going on, and why they were there, but before he got half-way through putting together a question that wasn't that likely to get his face dented, the Mayhem had snorted contemptuously, shouldered his long-pronged spear and left. The barrack-room door shut behind him with a distinctly locked sound. Then there was just a throng of voices and whining and hands raised in question. Useless stood, afraid he'd be buried in the movement of bodies.

Then the door opened again, and a Seeker who wasn't grey came in. He was royal blue, with bright green trim and highlights so yellow they were almost painful to look at.

"Hey there," he said with a broad smile, in a voice so confident that everyone stopped talking and turned to him. "Well, good to see so many have arrived. I'm your new commander here, and I'm absolutely certain you're going to be the greatest crew I've commanded. I'm sure you're all wondering what's going on and, let me tell you, I won't leave you wondering for long. Let me introduce myself, I'm AAAARGH!"

"That's a funny name," someone said, before the confident Seeker toppled forwards with an agonised expression on his face. The door, which Useless now realised hadn't closed, did so behind the most enormous Hunter he'd ever seen: a huge rust and singe-coloured brute who stood so tall in the low barrack-room that the top of his coned head was barely two hand-spans from the ceiling. Useless was, for a rare moment, in no doubt - this towering Decepticon was the cause of their new commander's collapse.

"Get up, you waste of hybridised xenotech!"

The speaker wasn't the giant. Useless tracked down from the impassive char-black face, past shoulders broader than his own wingspan and wings broader than he was tall, down the scorch-dark cockpit to another head, a new head with a gloss-black and featureless face. The speaker was half the height of the Hunter, barely vents-high to a standard-build, sharp-edged and compact, all non-standard angles and antique outline. Its finish was gleaming black, like oil without the sheen, slashed with the purple of the imperial blazon. The head was smooth - no sensors on the sides, no mouth, no nose, no moving parts - just a monoptic band, a smooth sensor-crest on the crown of the head and a vertical groove running up the forehead to connect the two. The stance was ungiving, feet planted in unyielding authority, the wings spread full wide, one hand firmly gripping the handle of a powerful shock-baton.

"Blast me, it's a little Windling," someone in the crowd giggled.

"Who said that?" The Windling's voice was sharp and focused. Useless felt himself standing a little more to attention at the sound of it, drawing his wings back in submission, preparing to flinch. "Started already, Trippin'?" There wasn't any doubt. The Windling became a blur of oil and blazon and there was a crash and a squawk and a tumbling motion. Then the Windling was on the other side of the room, standing over a fallen reject who was flapping his hands ineffectively and, Useless was amazed to hear, still giggling. The Windling grabbed the reject firmly by the throat, hauling him into a sitting position, and then struck him soundly around the head a few times with the baton. Useless winced at the sound. That baton sounded heavy, and the dents it left looked painful. He wondered how long it would take for him to end up on the receiving end.

Useless heard something behind him, turned to see the giant hauling the confident Seeker upright and shoving him back into the crowd, then turned back to see the giggler being pushed in the same direction. He pulled his wings in and waited for the crash. Someone banged into him from one side, another from the front, then, like ball bearings in a shaken crate, the crowd of rejects settled.

"Now, you shiftless sons of semaphore signals can stand to, shut up and listen to me," the Windling ... well, Useless knew an order when he heard one. "I am your commander. I am Base Commander Misdemeanour. You will address me as Sir, and you will salute when you are spoken to. You are the biggest collection of wastrels, layabouts and flat-out drains on the resources of the Empire that I have had the bad luck to set my targeting sensors on. You are all here for one reason. Do any of you know what that is?"

There was a silence of exchanged glances and reluctant head shaking.

"You are all here because you are hopeless. You cannot fight. You cannot shoot. Some of you, I am informed, cannot fly. You are the laughing-stocks of your units! You are a gaggle of 'bot-brained washouts! You are the slag from the junk off the scrapheap! You are here because the Empire has decided that the unique gift Vector Sigma gave each of you is worth enough for you to get one final chance.

"This is it."

Useless felt a sensation not unlike the fuel curdling in his main tank. I was expecting to be shot, he realised. I knew they'd do me in soon now, but I thought they'd at least take the trouble to shoot me.

"Despite the time and resources that have been wasted on your pathetic existences, despite the training you didn't pay attention to, despite the punishment details and the attempts at deserting and the utterly laughable attempts at hiding from the Mayhems, you all have a shred of value left. Someone has calculated your remaining value down to the last drop of energon - and it will be your last drop of energon."

We're going to starve, Useless thought. That explained the lack of recharge berths.

"There is one energon dispenser in this base. It is the only source of energon here. Today you will be installed with a device. It will let you use the dispenser. It will count how much energon you get from the dispenser. It knows how much energon you have left. When you have had it all, there will be no more. You will starve. Unless you can prove yourselves, you will die."

Someone whimpered.

"Shut up, Faintheart," Misdemeanour ordered. The whimper stopped with a frightened eek! "You will stay here until Brickhouse here takes you to the technician. After that, you will be allotted detail. The control room is off--limits to you. This base is in the middle of nowhere. The nearest habitation is the City of Lanterns and it is out of your flight-range now. You have nowhere to go. Are there any questions?"

There was a murmur of fear, rising into a babble of fright. The blue Seeker's loud, confident voice cut through the racket, asking, "What the hail-and-high-wind am I doing here?"

"You, Gloryhog, are all mouth and no thrusters," Misdemeanour replied. "You have talked yourself into so many holes I can only believe someone replaced your glossa with a shovel. You have attempted to pass yourself off as a High Commander to a base sergeant who had known you since creation. You have deserted five times. You refused the right to trial by combat. You chose to beg for your life rather than to fight for it. That is why you are here. You are a coward and a fool and a failure. You are the same as everyone here."

"But - but - but," Gloryhog started to protest. Looking at him again, Useless saw that his colour was washed-out and fading, that his fine finish was the last gasp before the grey came, and with the grey, the same fear and bewilderment that marked them all as rejects. Useless felt no sympathy, not even a shred of joy at seeing someone lingering on the brink of the fall down to his own level, only a dull sense of likeness; you and I, we are very much the same.

"Silence." It was an order, and it was obeyed. It was an easy order; it was ones like charge and hit the target and attack that Guardian that mechanisms like him and Gloryhog and all the others had a problem with. "Are there any questions?" There was silence. Misdemeanour glowered at them all, stabbing each with a long glare that seemed to pierce through the armour and into the core, to say I know you; you're a failure. "Dismissed!"

Where to? Useless wondered, and then Pariah, whom he'd forgotten, suddenly exclaimed "Sir!"

She forgot to salute. Misdemeanour pointed the baton at her, a bright arc split the room, there was a smell of ozone, and Pariah folded over with a scream. Misdemeanour strode over, parting the reject crowd like a turbofox splitting a herd of sheepicrons, and kicked the fallen jet hard enough to dent her side.

"Yes, Pariah?"

"The-the ... there's a dead jet in one of the back rooms. Sir." She hauled herself upright enough to manage a wobbly salute. Useless saw Misdemeanour shake her head in exasperation. Brickhouse broke his silence and coughed out three hard, barking sounds, probably a laugh, although Useless wasn't sure.

"A dead jet? Well, show me where he is," Misdemeanour ordered. "Faintheart, Scapegoat, Dullwretch, with me. Brickhouse, take batch one for installation. The rest of you - I said dismissed."

Useless stood, his mouth a little open, watching Misdemeanour and Pariah go. He had enough time to wonder what he was going to do now before Brickhouse spoke.

"Gloryhog, Sunbeam, Useless, Trippin', Whineswift, with me." His voice was deep and harsh, like lead going through a grating machine.

"But I don't know where repair bay is! I don't have a map, nobody told me to get one! I don't know..."

That must be Whineswift, Useless thought, trying to keep step with a glum-faced yellowish Seeker who fell in beside him. Worry turned into a lead weight that settled in his fuel tank as he followed the unheeded complaints out of the barrack-room and downwards, into the deeper dark of a reject's terminal station of failure.

The repair bay was enormous after the low-ceilinged barrack-room, and although the only light came from small spot-lamps on cable hangers, it seemed a bright relief from the underworld gloom of the junction-punctured, directionless tunnels. The bright-lance beams of faintly greenish light illuminated repair plinths edged with equipment banking and a Seeker of non-standard build, olive drab with 'bot-blue optics and the disassociated smile of the breaker-technician. The lamps deluminated any far wall, so that the rejects stood within a cavernous dark.

"How many arrived?" the butcher-smiling jet asked Brickhouse immediately. "Have we got them all this time?"

"No. Mayhems said four resisted. Three dead. One promoted."

"Oh, good. It is pleasant when they get away like that."

Brickhouse turned to the five rejects. "This is Overhaul. Chief technician here. Only one. Do what he says." Useless admitted to himself he would have done anyway. Overhaul looked the type to keep laser-scalpels up his gauntlets.

"Yes, I'm Overhaul. You five lie on these plinths. Just a quick system scan and then we'll fit you up and you can get lost." Useless did as he was told, lying on the nearest plinth. The silent yellowy Seeker immediately took the one on his left, the middle one. He saw Trippin' - he could just make out the remains of orange and green colouration - further off. When he turned to his right, he saw Gloryhog. The liar who still had his colours caught his gaze and gave him a confident, self-assured smile. For some reason, Useless felt a surge of queasy fear and uncertainty.

The bright beams of the overhead scanners passed back and forth across their bodies. Useless remained as still as he could, but every time he tried to stay perfectly still, he suddenly felt a terribly urge to move, just twitch a finger or shift a gear system. The first time he did that, Overhaul pushed a button and Useless got a nasty shock. He managed to stay still after that.

After an interminable pause of dark ceilings and wheeling lights, the scanners retreated into the upper shadows.

"Gloryhog, turn your power-cell off," Overhaul commanded from behind his console. "Useless, stop twitching. Trippin', stop giggling. Whineswift, if I hear another peep out of you, I'll press that button again." Whineswift protested, and got a shock for his trouble. He subsided sullenly. "Trippin', shut up. Gloryhog, power-cell, off!"

Useless turned to look at Gloryhog, and heard the yellowish Seeker sitting up to take a look too. Gloryhog's expression had turned to discomfort, like someone who had their wing stuck in a door.

"Gloryhog!" Overhaul was shouting now. On the other side of the room, Brickhouse shifted with imminent brutality.

"I can't!" Gloryhog exclaimed suddenly. "I can't turn it off!"

Overhaul simmered down immediately, and rechecked his console. "Can't? Connectors are fine."

"Plug this lot. Fix him later," Brickhouse opined as Overhaul came out from behind the hook-curve of the equipment bank to examine Gloryhog more closely.

"Won't take a breem, Brick," Overhaul replied. Useless looked over at the Hunter, then saw the yellowish Seeker, sitting upright with a sad, tense look on his face. Somewhere behind him, Trippin' giggled. Useless looked back at Gloryhog, now staring rigidly at the ceiling with the expression of one deeply embarrassed, as Overhaul prodded around inside his cockpit. Strangely, Useless felt a surge of that same embarrassment. He looked back between his air-vents to see if Brickhouse had moved, and saw the yellow Seeker wincing, his dim energy-field cringing into a violent blush.

"Projector!" Useless exclaimed, turning back to Gloryhog so fast his neck-struts made unhappy cracking sounds. The word almost jumped out of his vocaliser with the realisation. "You're projecting your emotions!"

"That he is," Overhaul replied, blue optics peering at him from under the brim of his helm. "Course, he hasn't got any control over what he does, so he just projects whatever he's feeling, and constantly, which is why you're feeling so embarrassed. Hmm." The technician poked and prodded around a bit more, before there was an audible snap and Gloryhog flinched. Useless' sense of embarrassment vanished immediately. "Sunbeam, Useless, do you feel embarrassed now?"

"No," the yellowish Seeker replied.

What a name, Useless thought. "Not now."

"Ah, that's got it then. Reset it. Nothing wrong with it, just been running too long. You need to do regular calibration drills, Gloryhog."

"Yes sir," Gloryhog replied dully, trying to mask an embarrassment all too clear from his wrinkling, squirming aura.

And after he tried to convince us he was commander here, too! Useless thought, indignant. Then Overhaul was advancing on him with a filter-shaped thing and an intent look on his face, and Useless just tried to keep still.

The corpse was exactly where she'd last seen it, lying flat on its back on the floor. It was a standard-build Hunter: not quite as big as Brickhouse but close, with outsized engines built into its down-position wings - stonking great turbofans that ran from shoulder to heel-nozzle that had to provide more kick that a blast from the High Commander's cannon - a noseconed head, unchamfered lines and heavy armour.

"He must've been dead for some time," she said, more to herself than anyone else. Rust-spots were forming on the corpse's torso and veins of verdigris ran up the outside of a thigh, rotting flecks of colour into the char-dark grey of dead metal.

"It wasn't me! I didn't kill him!" one of the other rejects protested. "I didn't do it! I wasn't here!"

That must be Scapegoat, Pariah thought. That meant the darker standard-build with the sullen, stupid expression was probably Dullwretch, and the pallid, flinching Hunter was Faintheart. He shifted from foot to foot, whimpering at the sight of his darker double dead on the floor. Definitely Faintheart. Well, they certainly fit the names they've been given.

Scapegoat was still protesting. Misdemeanour jabbed him in the costa with the baton, and he curled up on the floor making pained noises. Pariah didn't blame him.

Misdemeanour looked down at the dead jet for a few moments, then strode towards it and raised her baton. "Get up, dead jet," she said, swinging the baton down and shocking the corpse in its chest.

The corpse sat up screaming.

Pariah jumped back in surprise. Faintheart wailed, wobbled at the knees and tried to stuff his hands in his mouth. Scapegoat made a sickly gurgling sound. Dullwretch just stood sullenly still. As quickly as life seemed to have come, it seemed gone again: the corpse moved no more.

"I said up," Misdemeanour repeated, giving the baton a light swing. Slowly and with a strange deliberateness of movement, the dead jet got to his feet and then stopped in perfect stillness again. "Tell them who you are."

The dead jet turned its head just enough to look at her, and at the baton. Pariah saw his optics weren't quite black, but that there was just the faintest hint of a red glow, so dim it was little more than a suggestion. She wondered how he could see, or if he even needed to.

"I'm Deadjet. I've been here four diuns." Every word was deliberate, that same considered precision. "I've survived by conserving fuel. I advise you to do the same." Then, off: the optics returned to black, no more suggestion of life.

"What he didn't say is that he's been lying deactivated on the floor for three of those four diuns," Misdemeanour continued. "He's not dead, but he's not far off. Pariah, check on him every day. If he won't move when you hurt him then report to me."

"Why me, sir?" She saluted. It seemed the safest way.

"Because I say so, you over-decorated trinket. Now, dismissed!"

Faintheart almost ran, Scapegoat scuttling after him still hunched over in pain. Dullwretch stared blankly at Deadjet for a few moments, then left, bumping into Misdemeanour and getting a whack to the thigh for not paying attention. Pariah looked back at Deadjet, standing perfectly still.

"How am I supposed to know if you're dead or not?" she asked, more to herself than to him. She got no reply, so she went back into the barrack-room.

Misdemeanour was gone, no doubt to prepare whatever details they were going to have to work themselves to death with. Mood hanging glum at the thought, Pariah wondered whether there'd be anything useful for them to do - target shooting or drills - or whether it would be one long slog of punishment detail after punishment detail until they dropped dead from starvation, one after another. She looked at her new comrades. Faintheart, the only one she recognised, was sitting in a corner between the door and the wall to her right with his hands drawn up to his chin, fingers almost knotted together. Guess he doesn't deal with dead bodies very well. No wonder he's here. She couldn't pick out Dullwretch. He could have been any of three standard-builds sitting together around the central console, all staring at blank screens with blanker expressions. The rest of the rejects stood or sat, staring with boredom or despair at the consoles around the wider left side of the room. One, a pale standard Seeker with his wings down-position against his thighs, was rocking back and forwards in his chair and whimpering softly. The sight alarmed her, stirring up a feeling of revulsion and terror deep in her internals - a fear, perhaps, of becoming like him, and perhaps of the vicious beating from Brickhouse or someone else that such a sound had to herald.

She sat down at a terminal at the wall on her right, midway between the door and the backrooms were Deadjet was. Faintheart crawled over to her, apparently too wobbly on his feet to stand. Up close, he was the dirty grey of tarnished pale metal, excepting his dark face and hands and drab, toneless trim. He folded up at her feet, still whimpering, and looked at her pleadingly. What does he want? What is he doing? Does he think I'm going to help him? Eeeh, what a wimp!

"Get lost," she snapped, and turned away to stare at the inactive console.

Useless' ingestion conduit hurt, which wasn't surprising. He'd twitched three times when Overhaul was putting the filter-thing in, causing the technician to poke him with his laser-scalpel. I am so useless, I can't even lie still, he thought glumly. No wonder I ended up here. Brickhouse was ostensibly leading them back to the barrack-room, but he'd walked off with such long strides they'd all fallen behind. Gloryhog was somewhere behind him, probably wallowing in his embarrassment. He didn't know where the others were and didn't care - it was a frank relief to get away from them. A chemical odour clung to Trippin', an unpleasant one, and Whineswift was just plain aggravating. Useless had to wonder how he'd avoided being beaten to death by better Decepticons.

"C-can we go back, please?" a soft voice asked behind his wing.

Useless found Sunbeam had crept up behind him, looking at him pleadingly. "I'm not stopping you from going anywhere."

"Well, I - I don't know my way around here, and if I go off on my own I'll never find anywhere." He hung his head and wings. "I'm sorry."

It had never occurred to Useless that someone might get really lost here, lost underground in the dark. He considered his options. Well, what else am I going to do? Go back and watch someone get thumped, or get thumped myself? Wander around and get lost? "Fine. We'll go back. But why do you want to?"

They turned and headed back down the darkened corridors, unlit passages only defined by the single lights at the junctions and the warning scrape of wall on wing-edge. The only sense of direction was from the line of lights rising back to the barrack-room and the unlit passageway down to the repair bay. There was no difference between the main corridor and its offshoots. Blue and purple and off-white lights shafted into the darkness ahead and behind and on either side, all corridors sloping up or down, all ceilings low, all walls barely far enough apart for the two rejects to walk wingtip-to-wingtip. Useless wondered how Brickhouse could get around without smashing into things.

"I - I have a little glitch."

"So do I. His name's Gundeck," Useless quipped, then realised Sunbeam had no idea who Gundeck, the latest sergeant to make his life misery, actually was. Sunbeam's gloomy expression and dejection-slumped wings didn't flicker. "All right, all right, what's your malfunction?"

"I can't turn my power on. It just comes on sometimes, when I ... when it does."

"Huh. Mine won't come on either, and when it does, I can't turn it off. I've got the worst of you and the worst of Gloryhog at the same time." Useless tried to laugh at himself, but couldn't. There wasn't much funny about the situation. All he felt was a dull, heavy, trapped sensation of his life being measured in energon, and shortening, drop by drop. Each step down, he thought, is another step closer to death. Each step up takes me in the same direction.

"Oh dear! I am sorry!" Sunbeam looked at him with an expression of such pathos Useless was taken aback. Surprised, he laughed out loud for what felt like the first time in a vorn.

This jet is such an Autobot! He's sorry for every little thing. I hope I'm not like that, Useless thought. By this time the dark corridors had narrowed to the near-black tunnel that led to the repair bay, the last light the pale pool at final junction, and then the faint greenish shimmer from the control panel by the door. They walked without speaking through the black place, Useless wondering if there were other passages opening beside them, open spaces they couldn't see or feel. The only sound was the clank of their pedes, the quieter tang of their heel-nozzles, and the dim, distant rumble of the ancient machines far below. The nearest lights were their optics shimmering a faint red on the edges of each other's vision.

"You're early, Brick," Overhaul said as they went in. He had his back to them. It occurred to Useless that real Decepticons would probably shoot him in the back or something, but, well, they weren't real Decepticons and by the time he'd finished thinking that Overhaul had turned around. "Oh. What do you want?"

"I've got a little glitch," Sunbeam said, almost wringing his hands.

"I know, I've seen your record," Overhaul replied dismissively, setting out a tray of five new filter-things. "Calibration drills, that's what you need. But do it outside, in case you get it wrong."

"C-can't you do anything? I've asked and asked and nobody can help me!" Sunbeam's voice wobbled, almost reaching a sob.

"I told you, calibration drills. You can't expect something like a Sigma-gifted power cell to work without careful calibration and practice." Overhaul looked sternly at Sunbeam from under the brim of his helm, then sent the same look at Useless. "Same goes for you."

"Please?" Sunbeam wavered. "I - I promise, I won't do it again."

"Do what?" Useless asked, a breath of worry tickling his wings.

"Do - it," Sunbeam replied weakly.

"Overhaul ... " Useless didn't really know what he was asking, other than that the senior officer must have some way of stopping Sunbeam before he started sobbing openly, even it was throwing a sharp object at him. Useless wasn't sure he could stand the sight of another Seeker crying without a few good Decepticons to kick him in the head until he shut up.

Overhaul gestured with a scalpel. The light-blade was screamingly bright in the dimness, edge-sharp reflections flicking over the equipment. "Out."

Useless knew what he was supposed to do now. He was supposed to crumple up and crawl away, like he always did. He was supposed to go back to the barrack-room and wait for whatever was going to happen to them to happen. A claustrophobic sort of feeling closed around him, the way it always did just before he did something stupid, like trying to desert, or hide under the floor-panelling. He looked at Sunbeam, who looked back at him with an expression of quite pathetic helplessness, still wringing his hands. Oh, what the smelter. I'm about to die anyway, I might as well do something interesting to deserve it. Perhaps they'll even shoot me.

"I'll sort something out," he heard himself say to Sunbeam.

He walked over to Overhaul and put a hand on his shoulder, pulling him around. Overhaul looked at him in complete surprise, and he just had time to hear Sunbeam say, "Oh, thank you!" before Overhaul tackled him to the floor and a blinding flash of light and heat turned the dark bay into bright day.

There was a light like the midday sun shining on his unshielded optics, a heat like noon on the equatorial barrens. It crisped his sensors, made the crystals of his optics swim in shimmers. Useless felt delicate wiring fry, his wings spasming in the sudden heat. Light so strong it felt like a solid wave moved through the room. Everything glowed scalding orange and the ceiling was a copper mirror filling the air with flaring, blasting brightness. Then there were only the phantom lights of afterimage and an overloaded visual sensor array.

"Oh! Oh, I'm so sorry!" Sunbeam wailed. "I didn't mean to do it! I'm sorry!"

Useless felt something sharp slice across his cheek, and yelped. He couldn't see what Overhaul was doing, but he felt the technician climb off him.

"That was extremely stupid, and I'm talking to both of you," the technician replied. "If this were any other place, I'd have sliced your throats for it. However, this is a remedial facility and you did actually try to do something, rather than sitting around like corpses waiting to be broken, so all I'm going to do is dock a quarter-cube from your energon ration. Both of you."

A numb feeling clamped onto Useless as Sunbeam helped him up. He didn't really hear the other reject's wittering apologies. All that was in his mind was that dull, heavy, trapped sensation of his life being measured in energon and shortening, step by step. He stumbled along, leaning on Sunbeam a little, until his vision cleared.

"Hey," he said, "what the smelt did you do back there?"

"I ... I have a little glitch," Sunbeam winced.

"You mean your power went off."

"Yes?" Sunbeam sounded as if he hoped to be contradicted.

"And that's what that flash was?"

"Yes."

"Can you do all the time?"

"No. It just goes off ... sometimes. When I smile." His voice was mournful.

"Oh. How much energon did you burn?"

"I'm not sure."

"Oh." He looked around. There was darkness, and lit junctions ahead and behind and to either side. "Where are we?"

"I'm not sure."

"Smelt!"

Trippin' watched his pedes as he walked. He had tricky feet, or so he told them, since whenever he took his optics off them for a microbreem they decided to do the air-waltz and down he went, flat on his cockpit.

"You," he told his right pede, "are a dis-o-bee-dee-ansh no-good smoke-vent-in-dragging ... whatever it was Bombjack said ... an' you," he told his left pede, "are gonna be smel-el-elted into make shell cash-cas-cus ... whatever Powerstab said." Insomuch as he was focused on anything, he was looking for a place, a quiet place to sit. "Someone always interrupts us," he told his pedes, not really noticing when his right wingtip dragged along the wall. Metal screeched and sparks flew, sensor-tips were scraped raw, but Trippin' was too busy concentrating putting one foot in front of the other to notice.

"Someone always interrupts," he said again, waving a finger in the air. That caught his attention, and he stopped, leaning backwards to stare at his finger, and then up at the junction-light above him. "Ooh. Purple." The edge of the light was almost ultraviolet, which showed up on his scrambled sensorium as a winking, smiling glow. Trippin' stared at the purple light until he was sure he could see the back of his optics. "There weren' any purple lights in Kzng ... Kzne ... where'er I was this morning." Then, vision swimming with phantom smiling ceiling-lights, he ambled on, deeper into the corridors.

As he watched his walking feet, he began to stumble upon bits of scrap on the floor. First they were tiny pieces, no more than the odd loose panel, then broken plates and tangles of cabling, and then whole segments of wall and ceiling. "'s a right mess down here. Nobody's been clee-clur-taking the mess away. Bad! Bad! 's gonna be double detail for someone. Hah. No' me this time. Not gonna do no more detail." He shook his finger at his left pede as he stepped over a fallen wall-support. "I'm not gonna do no more detail. I've had ennu-enf-too much. I'm gonna siddown for a while, an' nobody gonna find me."

In the gloom, he kicked something, and it skittered away into the darkness. "Blast me, 's a cleaning drone. Whassat doing lying around? 's supposed to get taken away by the others. Hnh. Bye-bye, little drone. Nobody cares 'bout you. Nobody cares now you're dead. Hah! No computer sees you're dead, so no computer gonna see me here too. 's good."

His pedes encountered things that did not move. He looked up. The dim light of the nearest junction showed a cave-in, a heap of panels and beams and junk that had spilled in through a hole and settled. "Hah! Some base. 's falling apart. Still, nobody's come here for a while. 's a good place to stop and siddown."

He parked his aft on a girder, leant back against a hawser of cables thicker than his waist, and propped his feet up on another dead cleaning drone. "King of the hill, 's me. Hah! King of the junk heap. Commander Junk! Heh."

Comfortable atop his pile of scrap, Trippin' held a hand out in front of himself and frowned at it. "Siddown, yeah, in-drag-vent..." he muttered. His mind and voice ceased rambling as he concentrated on the only thing that could catch his attention any more. A gleam formed in his palm, and rose, grew to become a sphere. The ball of light began to dim, hardening into a sphere from which a thin wisp of gas was starting to escape. Trippin' rattled his wings, mentally fatigued by the simple exertion of his Sigma power. "Smoke for Commander Junk, hah. 's too good for Autoshmurbles." He raised the sphere towards his face and snuffed eagerly, shivering his wings as the scent sent his mind off on strange eddies of thoughtlessness, away from the dark and the junk and the failure.

There were footsteps in the dark.

"'s not my feet," Trippin' muttered, checking that his pedes hadn't in fact wandered off when he wasn't looking. They were still there. "Who's walking in the dark?" he called, but there was no reply.

The steps picked up, quicker, closer.

Trippin' peered into the dim light, vision awash with smiling crinkling shapes, and saw a soft-edged silhouette.

The figure came closer, sharp wing-edges cutting the dim light away to make a crisp shape. Trippin' looked up at the Seeker, all coloured in warmth and light, all amber and ivory, glowing like an autumn sunset over white hills. A feeling like acceptance swept over him, a soft warm feeling like standing in a sunbeam.

He looked up into a friendly smile and was utterly lost.

"This way?"

"Uh ... maybe..." Useless, much as he hated to admit it, was completely lost. Sunbeam had given up right from the start, and they had been wandering the darkened corridors without any sense of direction for what felt like joors. Useless discovered his internal chronometer, neglected, had turned prophet and died from lack of fuel.

They stood at a junction beneath an evening-blue light, trying to decide which way to go. They'd turned around so many times that neither of them was sure which corridor was the one they'd come from in the first place. The blue light soaked them, as constant and unbreaking as the darkness of the corridors. It had turned Sunbeam temporarily green. Useless looked down at himself, at the azure gleaming in the dimness. He'd been a colour somewhat like this, until the grey came and pulled him down into this dark place. He'd had wings so blue he merged with the cloudless sky, so handsome and so clean a colour, so proud to carry the sky on his skin. In the remembering light, the enamel-rich colour and sheen lived again on his scraped-raw armour. He held his hands up to the light, dipping them in teal radiance, and watching as the light dripped down the etchings on his forearms, little tongues of gas-blue light licking his elbows.

He snatched his hands away from the light, thrusting his arms out into the darkness and staring until he was quite certain they were still grey - the same drab, dingy grey as all the other rejects - which was a disappointing relief.

There were footsteps, several feet coming. Useless looked up. Sunbeam looked at him. Useless wondered why he'd ended up saddled with a hanger-on. Usually he was the one doing the hanging. The footsteps approached, resolved, and the walkers came into view. It was Brickhouse and another batch of rejects.

"Sir!" Useless saluted, mindful of what happened to those didn't.

"Don't salute. I'm a sergeant," Brickhouse replied.

"Sorry sir. We got lost. Which way is the barrack-room from here?"

"Fall in."

So Useless fell in, and Sunbeam tagged behind, walking so close his pedes kept stubbing on Useless' heel-nozzles. Useless found himself wingtip-to-wingtip with Pariah.

"Hello again."

"Oh, it's you." She didn't sound impressed.

"What happened with the dead jet?"

"He's not dead," she replied.

"He is," wailed a voice from behind.

"Oh, shut up Faintheart," Pariah grumbled. She turned to Useless again. "I've acquired a tagalong. He won't leave me alone."

"Me too," Useless said, jabbing a thumb over his wing at Sunbeam. They passed through a pool of light, this one green, unusually. Useless was starting to feel like there was something he'd missed - besides the usual half of everything that went past his wingtips - something about the lights he should have noticed. He looked up at the light as they went under it. It was a round lamp, set right into the ceiling. When it shone straight into his optics, he felt almost like he was looking up a deep, green-filtered tunnel, up at Homestar itself.

"What happened to your face?" Pariah asked. "You're dripping."

"I know. I upset Overhaul," Useless said, wiping trickling internal fluids from his cheek. Already the scalpel-cut was encrusted with a mixture of drying fluids and busy picomeds. "He docked me and Sunbeam a quart-cube."

"Eeeh!" Pariah suddenly looked scared. "The-they can take our energon away?"

"Yeah, seems so." He tried to check the internal filter, but found he didn't know how to access it. "How much do you have?"

"Probably not much. You?"

"Probably not much either. Less now."

"Me neither," said Sunbeam from behind them, eager to join in the conversation. Then there was a pool of white light, and the door to the barrack-room. Useless was glad to be inside. Despite the low ceilings and the inward-slanting walls, it was the best-lit room on the base so far, and it was starting to feel a little like home to him.

Brickhouse called out five more, and then he was gone again.

Pariah looked at Useless, then at Faintheart, who was lingering at her wingtip. She looked back to Useless and asked, "You want to see a dead jet?"

The base computer interrupted Misdemeanour in the middle of fine-tuning the detail roster.

"Sluggish brute of an idiot box," she muttered as the machine informed her it thought it has lost a reject. ['Haul?]

[Missy?]

[Check our new intake and see if there's anyone whose brain can go into this moronic failure of technology we have to rely on.]

[Soon as I'm done with the filters, Missy.]

By the time she closed radio contact, the computer had finished re-checking its logs and decided that, yes, there were only twenty-one rejects instead of twenty-two. She commanded it to bring up the omni-level readout with reject and staff transponder markers, and sat back, tapping her fingers on the chair-arms, to wait.

As the computer worked, its tiny brain sweltering with overload, she stared impatiently around the dim control room, held in a constant bluish twilight she found the most comfortable of lights. It reminded her of battlefield haze, back then, when the big guns had been solid-state machines with barrels like city towers, and the city towers turned in greenish spirals through the hazy skies of the hive-cities. Back then, when the night sky was this smoky blue lingering always on the edge of real darkness, and smog shrouded out the stars. Back then, yes, when the day sky was a flat sheet of grimy brass that turned stinking and yellow when the rains came. Back then, when the battles were between hordes, not armies, and the enemy was without name or number, and the sky belonged to the twisted ships.

The computer nudged her with sigils, changing the layout projected over the blank keys to show her that it had compiled its display.

She found Brickhouse and Overhaul first, crisp bright markers in main corridor and bay. That's Brick with batch three ... Deadjet where he always is ... Gloryhog on level one-down, apparently lost. When are these idiots going to learn to synch a map? That's batch two in the barrack-room, and there's Useless and Sunbeam with them, plus the batch four, plus Clodpole from batch five. We're four down, so yes, that's twenty-two with Deadjet ... who's missing? Whineswift's on level plus-two ... Trippin'. It had to be him.

A demand to the computer to locate Trippin's transponder was met with an apology that he was not to be seen.

"I know that, you carbon-hulled lump of organic technology!" She kicked it in Just That Spot, and the display fritzed for a moment. She demanded the computer recall Trippin's last recorded position, and sat back to wait with even less patience.

[Brick, you're shedding rejects all over the place.]

[They're slow.]

[We've lost the chem-head.]

[He was in batch one.]

[He's not answering transponder signal.]

[Dark Zone?]

The system records finally brought up Trippin's last known position. Yes, the little gas-addled fool had wandered outside the covered corridors. [Where else? He couldn't have gotten far enough outside to be out of transponder trace.]

[Want me to dump batch three and look for him?]

[Negative,] Misdemeanour ordered. On one wing, the base was designed to chew up rejects and swallow them whole. On the other wing, Trippin' was a chemical addict with an in-built supply. Ailerons said level flying, but nosecone-instinct said going down. What was wrong about it all? She checked the display again. [Transponder signal cut off before he got out of range, Brick. You get batch three to 'Haul. I'll go see which ceiling fell on the nitwit.]

[Nitwit's in batch three.]

[Oh, get on with it, Brick.]

"Hey, just checking - everyone knows where the energon dispenser is, right?"

Useless looked around. Gloryhog had just come in, apparently recovered from his mortification. He didn't reply to the liar, not knowing the answer, but he waited to see if anyone else did.

Nobody replied. One of the sullen-faced wretches sitting around the central console looked up at Gloryhog, then down at the blank screen in front of him. The standard-build with the down-position wings started sobbing. Useless felt a stirring of unsettlement at the sound. He was used to hearing sounds like that broken off under the fists and pedes of the good Decepticons, and to hear it continue unhalted, unshouted-at, unbludgeoned, was like waiting for a blow to come.

"I could use a refuel too," Pariah said. Gloryhog, attention caught, came over. Useless felt a rising sense of infuriation just looking at the liar's confident swagger, the totally lack of worry in his optics, the schmoozing smirk.

"Well, you stick with me and I'll see you right," Gloryhog said, nodding to them and smiling broadly at Pariah. "I may not know where the dispenser is now but rest assured, as soon as I find out, you'll be the first person I tell." Useless wanted to say something, to do something, to bring Gloryhog back down to the same level as him or even lower, if that was possible, but didn't know what.

"Oh really?" Pariah cocked her head at Gloryhog, the shiny wires on her helm flopping about as she did. "On the other thruster, you could go back to polishing your nosecone and leave me alone, you over-chromed ornament." Gloryhog looked like he'd been punched in the face, and Useless got a wicked thrill to see that confident mask crack open over the same troubled, fretting gaze as the rest of them.

"Yeah, sling your skyhook, 'hog," he said, sneering as superiorly as he could manage. He didn't dare poke Gloryhog, although he wanted to badly.

"What're you, reinforcements?" Pariah snapped, rounding on him.

"Hey, you were the one who invited me to look at a corpse," Useless replied stroppily. Out of the corner of his optic, he saw Sunbeam nodding in agreement.

"What corpse? Oh, the dead jet," Gloryhog said, words sounding forced as he tried to keep himself in the conversation. Useless ignored him, but Faintheart whimpered at the mention of the dead body.

"Yeah, the not-so-Deadjet." Pariah smirked a little as Faintheart drew his hands up over his chest. He was a full noseconed head taller than them, and big as an Iaconic. Useless felt a little smile tugging at his mouth. "Deadjet! Deadjet!" Faintheart flinched. "Oh, for Sigma's sake! Why don't you glide off hangarwards and stop leaking in our formation?"

"It-it's dark out there," Faintheart said in a trembling voice. He was as soft-spoken as Sunbeam, and almost teary on top of it. "I don't want to be alone in the dark."

"You're afraid of the dark?" Gloryhog exclaimed, recoiling in mocking shock. "A big skyfreighter like you, afraid of the dark? Well, what a surprise!"

"'hog, shut up," Useless said with a near-snap in his voice. He was surprised when Gloryhog flinched, and even more surprised by the little thrill that followed his cowed glance. "Yeah, let's take a look at this Deadjet."

"He's out the back. Come on."

Pariah led. Useless followed, Sunbeam still tagging along at his wing. Faintheart followed timidly, trying to sidle up to Pariah but being barged aside by Gloryhog, who eased up against Useless' other wing.

"I thought I told you to go away?" Useless asked.

"Actually, I outrank you. I'm a corporal of the Fleet." He spoke with such confidence, such a flickerless expression, that Useless was convinced. Then he remembered what had happened earlier.

"Smelt-bins you are. If you were a corporal, you wouldn't be here. You're the scrapings under the bottom rung, same as the rest of us." Useless had to speak between his shoulder-vents as he walked through the door and caught a glimpse of Sunbeam nodding in sad agreement behind Gloryhog.

Bitter-mouthed and frowning, the blue-tinged liar shoved past Useless to stand, fists on hips and feet planted wide apart to suggest a semblance of power even if his aura couldn't. "He looks dead enough to me."

Behind them, lingering in the doorway, Faintheart moaned.

"He's alive," Pariah replied, kicking the corpse. It twitched. Faintheart shrieked, a high, thin sound. Sunbeam squeaked, jumping behind Useless, and Gloryhog took a sudden step backwards. "Get up, Deadjet."

"His name is Deadjet?" Gloryhog had to ask.

"Suits him," Useless said. "It's no more his real name than, well, any of us is really called what we're called here."

"I've always been Sunbeam," the yellowish Seeker admitted timidly, looking over Useless' wing. Pariah kicked Deadjet again, this time inflicting a small dent in his hip.

"Ow." The voice was low, flat and deliberate. He didn't exclaim in pain, Useless noted, he actually said 'ow', as if he only did it because he had to.

"Get up, Deadjet," Pariah insisted, kicking him a couple of times more. Useless joined in, and Sunbeam followed his example. Deadjet tried to ignore the kicking, but finally uttered another slow 'ow' and sat up.

"Misdemeanour said he's been here for four diuns," Pariah said, poking Deadjet's shoulder-vent with a finger. "Apparently he's survived by conserving his fuel."

Useful, Useless thought. If we knew how to do that, we ... could ... end up like him. Um. "How did you do it, Deadjet? How come you've survived so long?"

There was a long pause, but Useless could see a very faint glow to the darkened optics now. "Use no fuel unnecessarily. Armour, internal repairs, sight and hearing - not necessary. Rest constantly. Never move."

"So that's the secret," Gloryhog said. "Well, now we know that, all we need is to find the energon dispenser and find a place to sit it out."

"Sit what out?" Useless asked, turning on him. "He's starving, you idiot. It's just taking longer than for whoever else he was here with because he's deactivated most of the time."

"He's right," Pariah said, surprising Useless again. "Deadjet's just going to starve to death on the floor."

"Sooner dead on the floor than dead in the dark," Deadjet replied, and lay down to his near-death dreamlessness.

The Dark Zone ran in a ragged ring around the base's functional core. Misdemeanour stood on the edge, performing a last quick synch with the main computer, before opening her right chest-compartment and activating the powerful arc lamp inside. So much for the latest technology, she thought. The lamp was one of Overhaul's installations. She'd never had modern enough systems for the chest-mounted missile launchers the rejects had.

With light, the edge of the Dark Zone appeared as a dividing line between the clean floor, where the computer still guided the cleaning drones, and the dust-littered floor ahead, which the computer was entirely ignorant of. At least it made tracing lost rejects easy enough. Trippin's footprints were clear in the dust, a meandering trail of block-and-ring marks wavering from side to side across the corridor, turning at junctions without aim or pattern.

Lost, addled chemical fool, Misdemeanour thought.

There were two sets of tracks now.

One set of wobbling prints that stumbled from side to side, and one set of footprints that said steady pace, firm gait, not a touch of confusion or uncertainty. Oho. Who is this who has come? They weren't hers - too big. They weren't Brick's - too small. Overhaul's? Too wide. Another reject? Too steady.

A reject trap? Had two of them agreed to gang up on her, perhaps actually try to put up a fight? The thought brightened her laser-core. Great Megatron bless 'em, the little fools! As if they'd stand a chance. But a try was a good sign. They'd get extra energon for that, along with dented heads and bent pride.

She proceeded with more caution, dimming the arc light until it illuminated only the ground ahead of her. Her senses prickled on high activation, wings stretched out to catch any sound or movement of air, sensor-crest seeking any flicker in background radio and magnetism.

The second set of tracks returned.

Misdemeanour quickly stepped back, widening the beam. The second set of tracks turned off down another corridor.

There were little purple spots on the floor, little glowing speckles pattering along beside the returning tracks.

Misdemeanour activated her guns, killed the arc light, and pressed back against the wall. The twilight returned, the flecks of energon on the floor barely showing in the dark.

More than two cycles old, she realised. Whoever it was must've been and gone. Still, she followed the trail of energon with all the caution she knew, followed it to a place where the spatters thinned out and stopped. Allowing herself a glint of light, Misdemeanour found she was back in the core with no tracks to follow.

By Great Megatron's back-strut! Misdemeanour cursed silently. Vanished! This isn't reject style... She synched with the base computer, demanding transponder logs for that section of the base, then turned back the way she'd come. Ceiling collapse? I doubt it... She had read the rejects' records, knew them, understood them from long experience. This was not the way things happened.

Back where the tracks returned, she followed the energon trail, now thicker-spotted, down to a place choked with debris, where a bright splash of purple illuminated something in the dark. Misdemeanour approached with no fear - nothing could leak this much energon and still be a threat. She roused the arc light.

Trippin' sat comfortably on the rubble that blocked the corridor, his limbs draped loosely over the broken joists and wall-panels. His head was tipped too far backwards, his throat yawning blackly where his energon had poured out to paint his chest, trickle between his thighs and pool at his pedes.

He was smiling.

There was no sign of a struggle, just one of Trippin's gas-bombs lying abandoned and empty on the ground. Misdemeanour reached over and touched the reject. He was quite dead, and had been so for long enough for his aura to fade completely.

At least a two cycles, perhaps more. This is too soon, and too violent. Far, far too soon for this, and the energon left to run away... Misdemeanour knew neither Brickhouse nor Overhaul had done this, and if one of the rejects were such a swift killer they wouldn't be here.

Who is this who has come?

They went back into the barrack-room. It was too depressing to stand around Deadjet and watch him wait to die. I hope, when the end comes, it isn't like that, Pariah thought, tugging worriedly at her hair. It was tangled and matted. She hadn't been able to attend to it for a while now, and that blasted Mayhem had helped matters none by dragging her out of the base by it. At least none of the idiots she was stuck with had made comments about it ...

"Pariah, what is that stuff on your head?"

... until now.

"It's hair, you idiot," she told Useless.

"Oh yeah, hair," Gloryhog immediately agreed. "I knew a fellow lieutenant of the Fleet, he had hair. It's a microfilament sensor array, it's really useful for picking up energy signatures -"

"Shut up, 'hog," Useless said. He seemed to be getting a liking for the phrase.

Pariah didn't want to agree with Useless, but it was better than having to listen to Gloryhog carry on ignorantly. "It's hair, not a sensor array. Females have it." That should explain it, shouldn't it?

"What's a female?" Sunbeam asked Useless.

Sucky little wing-ornament, Pariah thought nastily. "I am a female!"

"So the lieutenant was a female too?" Sunbeam asked, again addressing Useless.

"No, you idiot!" Pariah snapped. "Gloryhog was lying again. There is no lieutenant with hair."

"Yes there is, I knew him," Gloryhog insisted. "We were at Kolkullis together last summer."

"Err ... " Faintheart started. Everyone turned to face him in sheer surprise that he'd found the courage to speak. "I-I've been stationed in Kolkullis for seven vorns, and you weren't there." He shuffled a little, hands held meekly to his chest, and in a sorry little tone told Gloryhog, "You're lying."

"Eh - but – I ..." Gloryhog trailed off hopelessly. "Nobody ever believes me," he muttered sulkily.

"Oh, shut up, 'hog," Useless said again.

"You really like saying that, don't you?" Pariah snapped at him. "Eeeh, do you know any other sentences? Perhaps something along the lines of 'thanks'?"

"How about 'why the smelt do you have hair, Pariah'?" Useless replied, sounding as sulky as Gloryhog.

"Because - because it's what females have!" Pariah could only say, waving her hands.

"I thought females were little and weak and followed the Autobots around," Sunbeam said, sounding as if he was apologising for it.

"I'm a female Decepticon! I am exactly the same as you lot except I'm female! I have hair! I like looking pretty!"

"Oh, I get it," Useless said, picking at the black crust on his cheek and making it leak again. "You're one of those weirdoes who paints their faces because they think it'll make them stronger or something."

"No! I ... oh, I give up." Pariah folded her arms and sulked with the rest of them. "You're all idiots."

"Um..." Sunbeam looked around. "I think you're right. We're all idiots."

"We're a bunch of total losers," Useless agreed glumly. Faintheart whimpered, which was about as close to a definitive agreement as he got. "We're all going to die. Die, or end up like Deadjet, which just means it'll take longer for us to die."

"I'm not going to die," Gloryhog said suddenly, rising out of his funk. "I'm on my way out of this place, back to the officers' towers, back home. I'm going to drink refined oils and fly around the second ring of Vos."

Pariah had to grin. "'hog, they'd shoot you before you got anywhere near the fifth ring." Faintheart whimpered, apparently at the thought of being shot, but Useless and Sunbeam snickered along with her at the ridiculousness of Gloryhog's boast.

"Well, I am!" Gloryhog insisted. "The Air Marshal of the Second Fleet is a close personal friend of mine and as soon as my carrier condorcon reaches him, he'll send a squad of Mayhems to free me." Pariah wasn't sure if he was trying to make them laugh or not now, but laughter was what he got. Even Faintheart smiled. "I am! I'm leaving! Any breem now!"

"Main door isn't locked," said Brickhouse, causing them all to jump and turn to face him. "Who here is Hangdog?" One of the wretched-faced standard-types sitting at the central console shoved a hand up. "Turn your jammer off." There was a pause, apparently as Hangdog turned off whatever jamming device he had and Brickhouse tested his radio. "Right. Don't turn it back on." Then he looked around as if counting heads. "Gloryhog, fetch Deadjet. Where are Hystericon and Clodpole?"

"They went to the energon dispenser, sir! They went six breems ago, sir, sir, they haven't come back, sir! Trippin' isn't here either, sir, he didn't come back, sir."

"Shut up, Tattletale." The big Hunter frowned. Pariah heard the crackle of a radio transmission, but she didn't have access codes to the channel. "Everyone stay here. Don't do anything." He left.

"How can we do anything? He's locked the door behind him!" Useless protested, well, uselessly.

"What's going on?" Sunbeam asked Useless.

Why does he hang onto him so? Pariah wondered, and then felt someone softly plucking at her elbow. "No, Faintheart, I don't know what's going on," she sighed. Why does he hang onto me?

[Hystericon and Clodpole are missing,] Brickhouse reported. [Went to the energon dispenser six breems ago. Checked it. Nobody there, not been accessed today.]

[By Great Megatron's trigger!] Misdemeanour swore, commanding the base computer to find them and kicking it in Just That Spot whenever it stalled. The transponder check on the energon trail had produced nothing. Whoever killed Trippin' was neither a reject nor one of staff. Someone's come here, someone got in when we weren't looking, blast this idiot computer! [Hystericon's on level plus-three, forward wing, junction seven. He's sitting in one of the window bays, probably having a crying fit. Give him a thumping. The stupid machine can't find Clodpole.] She called up Clodpole's last position and hammered her fingertips on the keyboard frame as she waited. ['Haul? Can you hear me now?]

[I hear you fine, Missy, and it's always fine to hear you.]

[Now is not the time. What about Trippin'?]

[Knife-work. A three-span blade with a cryoceramic edge by the looks of it. It sliced through his intakes as well as his throat.] A pause. [Missy, none of the rejects could have a blade like that. That's Mayhem-quality equipment.]

[Is a Mayhem using it? Why would a Mayhem want to kill a reject like Trippin'?]

[Bad dose?]

[Nothing on record to indicate Trippin' ever passed his gas on. If he had, he might not have been here.]

[Whoever did this did it with a single cut. Through the inner wall of the right intake, through the gorget, through the fuel-lines and intake conduits, cut the central and secondary neurochords, severed both forward neck-struts, out through the other intake vent. The wound itself isn't fatal but the system shock from severing the neurochords was. One smooth, single motion. A steady hand and a fast one, although not necessarily a strong arm.]

[Veteran.]

[This is someone who knows what he's doing. He's done it before. He's going to do it again.]

[I know, 'Haul.]

[I'm afraid, Missy.]

Misdemeanour looked over her shoulder. Her wings did not so much as quiver. [Don't fear, 'Haul. Brick and I'll find whoever it is.]

The computer finally remembered where it had last seen Clodpole. [Brick, Clodpole's signal cut off in the middle of the main corridor, three sections down from the barrack-room. I'll meet you there.]

"What's happening?" Deadjet asked when Gloryhog finally extracted him from the back room.

"Brickho - oh, he's gone again." Gloryhog looked stumped. "Useless, Pariah, what's going on?"

"Brickhouse came in and went away again. We're locked in," Pariah summed up before Useless could reply.

"Brickhouse went to find Clodpole and Hystericon, whoever they are." Looking around, Useless couldn't see anyone missing.

"No, wait. The downwing who was crying over there," Pariah said, pointing to an empty seat. "He's gone. I guess he's Hystericon."

"Brickhouse must have wanted to tell us something. All of us." Useless said.

"So he'll be back with the other two?" Sunbeam asked.

"I guess," Pariah said.

"What does he want with Deadjet?" Useless asked.

"Make an example?" Pariah shrugged. Deadjet didn't react; he'd gone dead again. Other rejects were edging away from him, gibbering at his dead, rotten metal. "Show us what'll happen to us soon? Stop whimpering, Faintheart."

"But I'm scared," Faintheart snivelled.

"Does it make you lot nervous?" Gloryhog asked rather suddenly. Useless could only look at him, bemused, and saw Pariah doing the same. "When they cry. Faintheart and everyone. Does it make any of you nervous?" He was trying to pull his confident face together, but it wasn't working. There were stark rips of nervous fear in his aura, blaring tremors of uncertainty. This was the real Gloryhog.

Useless suddenly realised the five of them had pulled into a little circle, wingtip to wingtip, closing all the others out.

"I don't do it on purpose," Faintheart protested weakly, wringing his hands. "It just happens when I'm afraid."

"You're always afraid," Pariah said bluntly.

"It's not my fault," Faintheart mumbled, looking away. "World's scary."

"Oh, install a back-strut," Pariah snapped, rolling her head theatrically. "No wonder you're in a place like this."

"You're here too," Sunbeam said in a tone of apology. Pariah shut her mouth with a clank, lip modules pressed together in a perfectly straight line. Perhaps unaware she was doing it, she tugged at her hair, winding the thin wires around her finger and tugging on them until they came out, one at a time.

Useless looked around, scanning the room a few times. The grey-faced wretches were still sitting around the central console, still blank-opticced over blank screens. The handful of others were sitting at the consoles around the walls, just waiting ... waiting. Waiting like Deadjet, waiting to starve and die.

"I won't wait," Useless said firmly, speaking before he realised he'd thought it.

"What? Brickhouse'll be back soon, surely," Pariah said, looking from Useless to the door and back again.

"No. Forget Brickhouse for a moment."

"He's a bit big to forget," Sunbeam said sorryly, sounding as if he was trying to make a joke.

"No! Look - we've been brought here to die, right?" Useless insisted.

"Yeah. Work and starve or sit around like Deadjet and starve." Pariah folded her arms and frowned at the thought.

"So - so - I don't want to die!" He waved his hands, almost frantic at the prospect. "Either we do what they say and sooner or later we starve and we die or we don't do what they say and they dock our energon and then we die sooner or we just sit around like Deadjet and die later. I don't want to die!"

"I'm not going to die," Gloryhog said firmly. "I'm going to walk out of here and fly away."

"Yes! We'll get outside and fly away. Misdemeanour said the City of Lanterns wasn't far away, we'll go there." Useless was about ready to run out of the room and go, just to be moving, to be away from the dark corridors and the close ceilings and the grey-faced half-dead waiting to die.

"You'll die."

They all turned to look at Deadjet.

"What?" Pariah asked sharply. Without thinking, they moved to encircle the corpse-like Hunter. "What do you mean?"

"You'll die. You haven't got enough energon to reach Lantern City. You'll crash and die halfway."

"Is he right?" Sunbeam asked Useless.

"Seen it," Deadjet continued. "Someone always tries to fly. They crash."

"And you'd know!" Pariah's words of scorn turned to realisation as she spoke them. "You've seen it all here, haven't you? You can tell us what to avoid."

"No."

"Why not?" Useless demanded. His cheek itched where the picomeds were knitting his armour up, and he wanted to peel the sealing crust off it.

"Waste of energon."

"You're talking now," Sunbeam pointed out. Deadjet didn't respond.

"We'll take you with us," Gloryhog said, treating Deadjet to his broadest smile, his most confident look, holding out his hands in friendly gesture. "We're going to get out of here and we'll let you to come with us. You can have a place on my team! Come on, I'll even buy you a drink."

"If you tell us how to get out of here," Useless added, frowning as sternly as he could. From the flicker of a smile on Pariah's face, he must've looked silly.

"Go up the main corridor. Front door's there." Deadjet's optics ceased to glow.

"But we can't get out," Faintheart said softly, his first contribution to the discussion. Useless realised he'd forgotten the pale Hunter again.

"Fine, we wait until Brickhouse comes back, listen to whatever he says. Then we're going outside. Even if we don't leave immediately, we'll still be out in the open." For once, he didn't need to explain his reasoning. The room was claustrophying, the low ceiling and the slanting walls looming downwards as if the room was slowly getting smaller and smaller. All six looked up as one to eye the ceiling with suspicion, as if it were waiting until they weren't paying attention to fall.

"Look at that," Sunbeam said. "There's an Autobot symbol on that panel." He pointed.

"Blast me, so there is," Gloryhog exclaimed.

"Why would someone..." Pariah stopped in mid-sentence and laughed. "Deadjet, did this place used to be an Autobot base?"

"Yes. Why else send Decepticons here to die?"

The repair bay was almost totally silent, a night hangar for a half-dozen little stars on cables, all clustered around Overhaul. They looked over his shoulder as he scraped Trippin's slit throat with a microparticle scoop. The dead Seeker's head sat in a tray behind Overhaul, cable-hooked into the instrument bank on which it stood. Overhaul wished he had more up-to-date equipment. The repair bay's systems would take a cycle or more to reactivate Trippin's memory module, and even then there was no guarantee he'd seen whoever killed him.

Then again, there was that expression on his face - that look of pleasant surprise. He'd seen something.

Something ... nice?

"Blast it, nothing," Overhaul muttered, straightening up. He flicked the empty scoop over his shoulder and listened as it bounced off the edge of the equipment tray instead of landing in it and then clattered to the floor. "Blast again." He walked around the console, his little pale-lit island in the silent sea of darkness. The repair bay seemed quite vast in its darkness, as if it extended on endlessly down into the depths of the planet. Sometimes, when he had nothing to do, Overhaul would lie flat on the floor with one audio-sensor pressed to the panelling, listening to the rumble of ancient machinery in the uttermost depths.

Trippin's head looked past him, dark-opticced, mouth slightly open in a limpid smile. Overhaul lifted the lower jaw with a finger, hearing the quiet click as the mandenta locked together, but when he took his finger away, the mouth fell open again.

"You'll catch an insecticon that way," he told the dead head, wagging a finger at it as he looked around for the scoop. There was no answer except the slight creak of seized jaw-tensors settling back into their death-configuration and the dull buzz from the computer as it decompiled Trippin's last minutes. Overhaul spotted the glimmer of the scoop. It had rolled under the bank of instruments behind his console. Getting down on his knees, he stuck an arm underneath the bank and groped around, stretching for the little sparkle just beyond his fingertips. He stretched - Got it!

The door opened.

Overhaul didn't move. The footsteps that came in were not Misdemeanour's firm, small-footed tread. They were not Brickhouse's huge clonking thump-steps. They were too light for Hunter footsteps. They were standard-sized Seeker feet. A firm tread, a confident tread - not the tread of an uncertain, shuffling reject.

Who is this who has come?

He was chest-down on the floor, knees hunched up underneath him, one arm under an instrument desk, wings and fundament stuck up in the air, aft to the newcomer. His scalpels were in the instrument tray next to the console, well out of reach. He couldn't remember where his guns were. Overhaul switched his optics off. If I stay still, he won't see me. If I'm quiet, he won't hear me. If I don't radio, he won't know where I am. I'm not here, I'm not here, I'm not here...

The footsteps strolled across to the plinth that bore Trippin's corpse. Overhaul could feel each footstep vibrating up through his cockpit. He didn't dare power his optics. He barely dared to keep his audio sensors active.

If that's a reject, I'm going to feel like such an idiot.

Still he did not dare look up. His back tingled as if he had no armour there, as if the one with the knife was leaning over the console and tickling him, waiting for him to look up. An itch ran up his back as his sensors strained to feel a knifepoint that wasn't there, at least not yet.

The footsteps were coming towards him. Past the second of the five plinths ... past the first...

I should radio Brickhouse ... Missy... His outstretched arm ached, the tensors in his elbow beginning to quiver. His hands wanted to shake but he couldn't let them.

The footsteps crossed the little space and turned the corner of the console.

He could no longer look away. Overhaul activated his optics and turned over, sitting on his aft with the microparticle scoop raised as if it could provide some defence.

"Oh no," he said thickly, "it's you."

The Seeker smiled.

Author's Notes & Addenda:

This story is an entry for Wayward's "Choose Your Own" Competition [under Mystery and Non-Show Characters]. Well, actually it was intended to be an entry for the "Write a Female Character" Competition last year, but I didn't start it until April, which was a tad late.

Ailerons: A hinged flap on the trailing edge of an aircraft wing, used to control banking or rolling movements.
Breem: Cybertronian time unit roughly equivalent to a minute. 1 breem is 8.3 minutes, Earth time.
Costa: Armour covering the region analogous to the human rib-area [i.e. the area of venting on a Seeker].
Cycle: Cybertronian time unit, in Earth equivalent somewhere between a minute and an hour. 1 cycle is 10 breems or 10,000 astroseconds long. In Earth time, this is 83 minutes.
Deluminate: To shed no light upon.
Diun: Cybertronian "long month", equivalent to something between a month and a year. 1 diun is about 8 and a half years, Earth time.
Glossa: The airborne particle sensor array located in the lower jaw assembly of the standard Cybertronian head, analogous in position to the human tongue, and primary scent-sensor.
Hunter: A subtype of Seeker, approximately a head taller than the standard type, equipped with heavier armour, more munitions and more fuel.
Joor: Cybertronian time unit, roughly equivalent to an hour. 1 joor is 5 cycles or 50 breems long. In Earth time, this is almost seven hours. Also megacycle.
Kolkullis: [trans. "city retaining work-heat"] Decepticon city, capital of Sector 3.
Mandenta: The interlocking extensions of the upper mandibulary plate and lower mandible ridge, analogous in position to human teeth.
Mayhem: Decepticon military police.
Mede: [trans. "under many houses"] Decepticon remedial training station.
Microbreem: A Cybertron time-unit. One astrosecond is 1/1000th of a breem, or 0.498 seconds Earth-time. Also called a decicyle or astrosecond.
Neurochord: Main neural wiring lines connecting the head to the body.
Pedes: Supporting/balancing structure attached by hinges to the base of the leg of a Cybertronian, analogous in location to the human foot.
Picomeds: Nanite-like mechanisms of subatomic size used for internal repairs.
Stonking: Massive, huge, extremely large. From 'stonk' meaning 'artillery barrage'.
Unchamfered: Having edges where two or more planes meet at right-angles, without chamfering cuts.
Verdigris: Corroded copper.
Windling: A type of Seeker, slightly more than half the size of the normal type. Windlings are designed to be primarily gunners and air-to-ground strafing attackers.

On to Chapter Two