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Water was running, children were running
We found you hiding, we found you lying
Your city lies in dust, my friend
Ohh, oh, your city lies in dust, my friend
— Siouxsie & The Banshees, “Cities in Dust”
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As Soundwave expected, Teletraan was the first person to respond to the attack.
All mechs could sense and respond to each others’ electromagnetic fields. In that sense, all Cybertronians were empaths and to those senses the line between person and not-person was clearly drawn at the spark. Drones, AIs, and unsparked equipment had EM fields of course, but they fluctuated in precise accordance with energy usage. Off. On. Stand by. They were flat. Sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker, there was no emotion, no will, no spark behind those changes in magnetic resonance. Put a spark into play and all that changes; all of a sudden you’re dealing with a complex, feeling person whose EM field arced and shifted and flared with sometimes readable sometimes opaque layers of emotion.
To a telepath, with the ability to wirelessly uplink to the processors of anything with processors, the distinction was much fuzzier.
Teletraan may not have a spark, but his programmers had instilled in him a tireless sense of duty to protect those Autobots’ data networks he was responsible for and he used it with a will that no telepath could mistake for simple programming akin to that of a scraplet.
That will fell against Soundwave’s wireless attack on Praxus’ systems with all the force of an angry metrotitan.
NO, appeared on Soundwave’s HUD as newly constructed firewalls burned against his own processors. Nothing else, no dramatics, no threats or promises as a sparked mech might have offered. Just that flat, emotionless determination. By convention and law Teletraan wan’t even a person, and that restriction became his door. He wasn’t going to let something as insignificant to his programming directives as the Autobots’ Council and Prime’s commands to withdraw protection from the “Neutral” city stop him from trying to shred Soundwave’s malicious code. And Soundwave’s very thoughts, if his own firewalls fell to the AI’s attacks. He released Laserbeak and she sped off with the message for the real attack to begin.
Decepticons moved in. The city was surrounded. Warp cannons that had crawled into place over the last decaorn unfolded and started bombarding the city. Glittering casino towers and the spires of the grand temples to Cybertron’s false gods crumbled and precious crystal gardens shattered beneath the onslaught. Soundwave saw it all, felt it all, though his connections to the city’s systems as he fought Teletraan for control of the disintegrating networks.
Each time a part of Praxus died, Soundwave’s spark flared dangerously in distress as he lived the destruction.
Each time a part of Praxus died, more and more of Teletraan’s code corrupted as data that had been spread out over circuits and wires disappeared when the physical computers were destroyed.
Together they died, one piece at a time, alongside the city they fought over. Still they both grappled through the battlefield of Praxus’ crumbling datanet.
A sparked hacker might have buffeted Soundwave with pain or horror or denial but every time he met the AI in the battle of code vs code, each time they collided after another explosion ripped them apart and left both their code bleeding data across the deteriorating net, all Soundwave felt was that same code-driven will. Teletraan literally didn’t care that this battlefield was being lost in the realm of the physical where, without the city’s access codes, he didn’t even have the power to open a door much less fight. He didn’t care that he couldn’t keep the Praxans from dying. He didn’t even care that the datanet he fought over was literally fragmenting around, through, in him. He had decided that Praxus was an Autobot city and he would not yield it to the enemy. His purpose was to protect Autobot datanets from Decepticon hackers; he would do it until the last byte of his code no longer existed.
Not even Soundwave could match that sort of will for long. Eventually the needs of frame and spark would cause his mind and intrusion code to falter.
Hence the warp cannons.
Soundwave wasn’t trying to take the city, just to take what he could before there was nothing left to take.
Via split-second views through the millions of cameras and scanners of the casinos he could manage before Teletraan firewalled them, chasing each other, camera to camera each one offering only a tiny glimpse before his access was denied, he saw Praxans, glittering and bloated on the wealth their city stole from all of Cybertron, fall to the weapons of loyal Decepticons. Brutes waded through the streets, slaughtering as they went. Tanks bombarded the buildings that mattered: the small Peacekeepers’ armory, the ineffectual government buildings, the mines.
It was beautiful, the destruction of a corrupt regime. Grinding the rust from an infected wound.
Until something changed.
“Autobots! - Where’d they - Look out!”
Soundwave and Teletraan shredded their way through the networks as he turned his attention to the cameras in the area from which the distress calls were coming. With a surge of need he took control long enough to see the Autobots before he was forced to retreat from the cameras by the AI dogging his heels.
Orion Pax. He should have anticipated that that particular Autobot commander would disobey Zeta’s orders in so as to defend the “innocents” of the city.
No matter. He sent Buzzsaw with orders to redirect on of the warp cannons to fire on the Autobots’ position. Then he ruthlessly turned his attention back to the networks. By the end of the orn, Praxus would be nothing but a ruin and he needed to get something from its soon-to-be-corpse.
Praxus was a city built on exploitation and greed. It’s banks and casinos drained shanix from Cybertron like the parasites they were. When true war had broken, greedy to take advantage and stupidly certain that money could shield them from any fallout, Praxus had declared itself neutral. They would lend money to both sides and entertain mechs from all over Cybertron as it always had, and there would be no fighting anywhere near the city. In response the Autobots had withdrawn their military protection and Megatron had declared that he would have the city, that Praxus would submit, or it would be destroyed. Of course Praxus had its own defenders, but they were proving to be nothing against the might of the Decepticon armies.
Megatron kept his promises.
But there was still value in the city. All that shanix could turn the tide of the war, to say nothing of the fighting drones, the energon mines, and the Praxus Well of Sparks.
Through Laserbeak he issued orders for the Decepticons to concentrate on the Well and the mines. Let Orion save a few hundred — a few thousand even — of Praxus’ citizens. Manipulators and bargainers, rule makers, lawbreakers and gamblers, they were weak and lazy. They were worthless and the refugees would only drain the Autobots’ resources fasters.
And Autobots or no Autobots, the warp cannons would leave only scrap metal and slag.
With Teletraan proving as formidable as he was, there was no way Soundwave was getting into Praxus’ banks so he turned his attention to the drones.
Teletraan fought him every step of the way, but he finally started breaking open the passwords he needed. Leapers and snipers and tank-drones and other more exotic creatures built for this city’s versions of the gladiator Pits responded to his will by the hundreds.
NO! Sounwave couldn’t help but flinch as another will joined Teletraan’s defense of the frayed data networks. A sparked will, he thought, as he was buffeted by refusal-mine!-SUBMIT! so strong he almost knelt as he did in the presence of Lord Megatron. The EM field of the entire city surged with it and some of the Decepticons faltered under its weight. PRAXUS IS MINE!
Not anymore. If it ever was. This was not the will of one of those weak corporate overlords that ruled the city; this was the will of the sort of warrior that Praxus had never valued. A fine Decepticon, if he weren’t so obviously already an enemy. He clenched his hands and went back to his task. “Decepticons will continue attack,” he commanded and Laserbeak carried his orders to the physical battlefield.
The drones continued to fall to his will, but, to his horror, this newcomer to the digital battleground had at least some of the passwords he lacked. He wasn’t as good a hacker as Soundwave or as good a programmer as Teletraan, but passwords. Spydrones disconnected from their parent systems and vanished from Soundwave’s senses. Fighting drones were snatched from him before he could hack them and racing drones sped away in every direction. Mining equipment tagged Decepticon warriors as rich deposits and shredded them. Casino doors opened and closed, herding civilians toward the protection of Orion Pax and the other Autobots and trapped Decepticons as the warp cannons obliterated the buildings they were in.
Teletraan continued to throw viruses at Soundwave and construct firewalls against his intrusive code; this new combatant — mine-submit!-KNEEL TO ME! — took Praxus from him and it was all he could do to continue snatching drones without allowing the AI to breach his own firewalls. It wasn’t enough to save the city. Between the three of them, everything Praxus was or ever could have been was torn apart and Soundwave gave his final command to the Decepticon forces.
A breem later the energon mines exploded.
Great plumes of blue fire mushroomed into the sky and the shockwaves tore outwards from the epicenters, leveling everything in their paths. The towers, the hotels, the casinos, Praxus fell.
All hail Lord Megatron.
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A decaorn later, Blaster City disappeared beneath the fiery tides of war. No attack. No warning. The great Decepticon munitions plants were catastrophically sabotaged, exploding with enough force to crush the surface plates of Cybertron itself beneath the city. Everyone, it was said afterwards, felt the tremor, from Kaon to Iacon.
It was a heavy blow to the Decepticon Cause. Lord Megatron was furious.
And Soundwave received a message. A simple, unsigned line of text that nevertheless dripped with familiar fury-mine-submit! to his telepathic senses:
YOU TAKE MINE; I TAKE YOURS.
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End
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