Challenge Fic: Echoes (part 2 of 3)
Title: Echoes
Author: zea_taylor
‘Verse: G1, sequel to ‘Fall’
Rating: T/PG-13
Characters: Jazz/Prowl, Bluestreak
Warnings: angst, fluff
Part One: Remembering Times Past
Part Two
Prompt: secrets
If anyone else were around, Jazz would never have allowed his pensive frown to show. Alone on the control deck, he scowled in earnest. His visor stayed locked to Teletraan-1’s readouts, but his attention was elsewhere. Watching on his internal screen, he bit back a groan as Prowl’s status signal switched from “on duty” to “available if required” and then straight onwards to “not available”. The first of those transitions was usual for his companion, if rather prompter than normal. The second was less so.
This was the sixth time in under an orn that Prowl had absented himself from the Ark immediately after his shift ended. Bluestreak didn’t maintain the same online status as the officer corps, but Jazz knew without checking that the youngling he’d helped raise would be gone too.
The slagging thing was that he had no idea where they were going.
Secrets bothered the Ops mech on principle. Too often, playing the spy game, you could be the best there was and it would be the one thing you hadn’t figured out that killed you. Jazz was the best. He intended to keep that title, not to become an object lesson to the mechs under his command.
There was more than that though. Secrets bothered him, but it was the fact that this was Prowl and Bluestreak - the two mechs he was closest to on this planet or any other - that was really upsetting. He and Prowl had shared their quarters, their berths and a deep mutual affection for vorns - at least half that time with a very young Bluestreak in their mutual care. It wasn’t like either Prowler or Blue to be secretive, or to exclude Jazz from any aspect of their lives. He wasn’t sure what was more hurtful - the fact that Prowl was keeping him in the cold, or that his partner of vorns’ standing didn’t even seem to have noticed Jazz’s sense of rejection.
Meeting his own visor, reflected in the monitors, Jazz grimaced. He was being selfish. Prowl was focused on Bluestreak, that was all. It felt churlish to resent that focus. The young mech had come back from his excursion upset enough that Jazz was worried too. Bumblebee didn’t seem to know why, and had just shrugged under Jazz’s careful inquisition, reluctant to tell tales on his friend. He’d said enough for Jazz to fill in some of the gaps but by no means all.
Bee’s description of the cold dark spaces beneath the Ark rang uncomfortable bells for Jazz too. He still woke from recharge with nightmares, his processor conjuring images of Prowl and Bluestreak falling into the depths of Cybertron. He knew that both mechs shared his disrupted recharge, even if the disturbed orns were far less frequent than they had been in times past. Small wonder that the expedition with Bee had reminded Bluestreak of the traumatised mechling he’d once been.
It still frustrated the saboteur that even if had a fair idea about what caused the upset, he had no idea what Prowl was doing about it.
“Jazz.”
Jazz startled upright in his seat, his visor polarising to conceal the reaction. Man, he really was bothered if Optimus Prime could sneak up on him. The big mech always did move quietly for his size, but to find him stepping out from behind a stalagmite was still a bit of a shock.
“I am glad to have caught you alone, Jazz. I rather wanted to talk to you.”
Jazz grinned, covering his surprise, and swung the monitor chair idly from side to side.
“I’m all yours, boss.” He waved a hand to take in Teletraan’s terminal and the large screen that dominated it. “Not like I can run away from you. Monitor duty.” He cycled his visor in an equivalent to the human wink, shaping his faceplates in an exaggeratedly mournful expression. “Someone’s got to do the dirty jobs.”
Prime’s optics brightened a little, amusement showing behind his blast mask. He looked from side to side, checking their surroundings. Automatically, Jazz did his own quick recce.
The Ark’s control deck was empty apart from the two of them. The crashed ship wasn’t the most comfortable of homes at the best of time, and the control deck wasn’t somewhere a mech wanted to linger. The Ark would never lift off from this world, or return them to their distant home. The organic dust and carbonate rock columns littering the command deck were a reminder of that sometimes-painful fact. Jazz didn’t blame the crew for spending more time in the Rec Room, or their quarters, or even out exploring the mysteries of their new world. Truthfully, he’d rather be doing the same himself.
That or tracking down a different kind of mystery.
He forced that line of thought to one side. Raising a brow ridge, he adjusted his visor with one servo, and turned an inquisitive expression on Optimus Prime.
“So, what’s up, boss?”
“I was wondering if Prowl has spoken to you about these frequent absences?”
So much for shaking off the thought. He kept his voice neutral, shrugging.
“The vorns we’ve spent trying to persuade the mech to take some real down-time, can’t really blame him for doing just that.”
The same chagrin Jazz felt showed in Prime’s optics.
“Prowl is, of course, free to spend his off-duty joors in any way he sees fit, but…”
“But…?”
“I must admit to a certain curiosity.”
Jazz hesitated, reluctant to make the same confession.
“I asked,” he admitted finally. “He said it’s a Praxian thing, Optimus.” He cycled his optics with exaggerated patience, trying to make light of the mystery. “Then changed the subject on me.”
The sudden upkick in his friend’s engine note spoke eloquently of Prime’s reaction to the comment. Praxus. Prowl and Bluestreak’s home city. The greatest failure in Autobot history. The city’s fall marked the moment that the uprising escalated, from a clash between well-defined factions, to a total war that would touch every spark on Cybertron.
Prowl had never made a big point of being Praxian, not since escaping the tragedy. He’d raised Bluestreak in what he could of their traditions, but Jazz had grieved with him at how little was left. Of course, it wasn’t as if any of the city-states had managed to save much of their ancient culture. Praxus had burned first, but it hadn’t been the only city to fall. Now their whole planet was gone, its war-ravaged surface lost to them entirely.
But … Praxus had died first, and that day would never stop haunting those who’d lived through it.
Prime vented a sigh. The big mech folded his arms across his chest-plate, his expression thoughtful.
“Nonetheless, Jazz, I know of at least three mechs who have attempted to follow Prowl or Bluestreak. All have failed.”
That, at least, got a smile out of the saboteur.
“Prowl ain’t big on hangers-on.”
“Prowl has been my lieutenant for vorns.” Prime hesitated. “This sudden secrecy is not like him. It… troubles me.”
There wasn’t much Jazz could say to that, short of echoing his Prime. Optimus seemed to be waiting for some kind of response, but Jazz had learned self-control over the vorns. He held his silence, forcing Prime to take this conversation wherever it was going without his help.
Prime’s hopeful expression faded, and Jazz would swear he saw embarrassment on his friend’s face.
“I was wondering if you might consider…?”
There was a long pause. Jazz knew the humour had drained from his faceplate, along with the relaxed mask he showed the world. His expression was utterly serious as he pushed out of the monitor chair and stood in front of his Prime.
“You’re asking me to check on them and report back?”
“Well…”
“Do you actually think Prowl and Bluestreak are doing anything against the rules? Anything wrong?”
“What? No!” Prime’s immediate, startled response earned him back a few points in Jazz’s book. It didn’t and couldn’t excuse the request.
Jazz held Prime’s optics for a long moment, his expression hard. He shook his helm with a firm, decisive motion.
“Then let’s get one thing slagging clear, Prime. I won’t spy on law-abiding Autobots - least of all Prowler and Blue - not for you, or anyone.”
If Optimus Prime was surprised by the rebuke, at least he had the grace to accept it. His engine grumbled uneasily, his servos spread in front of him, open in a show of acknowledgement and regret.
“I didn’t mean…”
Jazz snorted. “Yeah, you did.” He dropped back into his seat and sprawled casually across it, letting Optimus off the hook. The saboteur’s fingers drummed against Teletraan-1’s console, his expression still creased in a small frown. He pushed against the floor, his chair spinning through a full three-sixty, before glancing over his shoulder at his Prime. “Which isn’t to say I might not go take a look - just for my own peace of mind, you know? Prowl’s being pretty crafty though. He’s got us on swing shifts and by the time I’m free to go hunting, he and Blue are back.”
Optimus Prime’s optics brightened. His engine note was still a little coarser than usual, his processor stung by Jazz’s response. It calmed, a deliberately nonchalant expression crossing his faceplates.
“I have some paperwork to do this morning, Jazz,” he said in a voice so casual it screamed subterfuge. “I can do it here as well as anywhere else. I was wondering if you’d like me to take over the monitors a few hours early? To ‘kill two birds with one stone’ as our human companions say.”
Jazz cycled his optics, amused despite himself. There was more than one reason why Optimus had never trained for Special Ops.
Shaking his helm, in amusement rather than refusal, he stood. “You know what, Optimus, that sounds like a really neat idea. It’s all yours.”
The trail was almost three breems old.
Knowing Prowl as well as Jazz did, that meant a breem to leave his office, stop by their quarters and collect Bluestreak, and most of a second to ensure he weren’t followed before leaving the Ark. That left Jazz maybe ten minutes behind. Not a bad gap. He could work with it.
He moved through the Ark quickly but without letting his haste show. The smiles and greetings he exchanged with Hound and then with Sunny and Sides were brief, Jazz’s demeanour giving the impression that he was heading off to meet someone else without his ever having to commit to the lie.
It wasn’t until he hit the lower decks that he slipped properly into a Special Ops mind-set. He started to move cautiously, his senses alert for any hint of monitors or laser trip-wires. He wouldn’t put it past Prowl to set them. The tactician had been around Jazz long enough to pick up more than a few unconventional habits, and that was on top of his own Praxian enforcer training.
The bottom decks of the Ark were a mess. They’d borne the brunt of the ship’s impact so long before, and taken most of the strain as the ground heaved and shifted through four million years of volcanic activity. The result was a folded, corrugated maze. Some corridors were twisted like the walkways in a fairground crooked house. Others seemed perfectly normal until you realised that their ceiling and floor grew steadily closer, creating a false perspective you didn’t notice until your helm brushed the metal plates above.
It didn’t help that this part of the ship was well below ground level. Okay, it was still enclosed, for the most part, by the outer hull, but it still felt like the deep and empty places of Cybertron. No one ventured below the surface of their home planet by choice. Theirs was a world of towers, reaching for the perpetual darkness of the skies, and of aerial bridges flying high above a gnarled maze of abandoned structures. The depths were a place of nightmares, the denizen of desperate empties or the setting for cautionary tales for infants.
The Ark’s own depths were just a mirror of their homeworld’s. A few of the rooms down here were used for storage, but most were abandoned as uninhabitable. It must have been months since anyone came down here on a legitimate errand. The all-pervasive dust of their adoptive world lay thick on the floor, and rained down from ledges and doorframes if knocked… which made the trail of pede-scuffs and compacted dirt something of a dead giveaway.
Relatively few of the pede-marks were Praxian in form, and most of those probably came from Bluestreak. Jazz’s sharp visor identified and cross-matched signs of Bumblebee too, and of the Twins and even Tracks - the last three on fruitless attempts to follow their second in command.
Bumblebee had told him enough about his first trip for Jazz to be unsurprised when the dust-trail led through a rent in the hull and into the cave network that honeycombed Mount St Hillary’s volcanic flanks. He was equally unsurprised when it petered out a few yards later amidst hard natural floors and the scatter of rock shards that littered them.
Now the real work began. It was a while since Jazz had tracked a target in earnest. He dialled up his sensory network and muted his own vents, doing all he could to soak in information from his surroundings without adding to it.
His helm horns vibrated, picking up wisps of disturbed air and the faintest traces of heat. His audials picked out sound after sound - the breath of the living rock. He could hear the trickle of water, still percolating through the slopes after rainfall two weeks earlier. He felt the thumping movement of mechs in the Ark above and, deep below, the rumble of magma refilling the vast chamber at the volcano’s heart.
There was another whisper of sound in the caves too, echoing and distorted until impossible to decipher. Jazz followed it, blending it in his processor with the input from his other sensor systems.
Something had passed this way: something warm and alive, and large enough to disturb the air around it. The ghosts of fading echoes carried a familiar note.
For vorns, Prowl’s voice had been the first thing Jazz heard on waking from recharge. As often as not, Bluestreak’s was the second. Jazz’s sensitive audials would recognise those two voices against the thunder of battle or the howl of an acid storm. He followed them now, as best he could, tracing the faintest of reflected sound, doubling back when he needed to, keeping his sensors alert for the heat traces left where one mech or the other had brushed against a stalagmite or even against the low ceiling overhead.
He was perhaps half an hour out of the Ark when he paused, tilting his helm. His visor flared and then readjusted, a frown forming as he tried to interpret the new sensation. His horn helms were reacting to… something. There was a vibration in the air unlike any Jazz had ever felt. It rose and fell in pitch, the different notes blending and combining in a manner that could only be under intelligent direction. The sound was still quiet, but Jazz could feel it swelling, the individual notes becoming more distinct as he listened.
He rubbed his helm with one servo, trying to ease the pressure in the nearest sensory horn. It wasn’t that the sound was uncomfortable as such. Just so very, very different from anything he’d heard before.
It was light, ethereal, and somehow grounded at the same time. Jazz was following it now, rather than the faint traces he’d been tracking before. He felt drawn towards the source, and knew instinctively that he’d find what he was looking for there.
The vibrations rose through the floor of a large cavern. Jazz wandered through the space, between columns where stalagmite and stalactite had met and merged. In places, gaps and hollows in the rock formed natural dishes, amplifying the sound. In others, the vibrations were softer but clearer, each note ringing with precise clarity. He paused, his helm tilted to one side and the breath catching in his vents.
There was nothing random about this melody. The individual chimes followed a sequence, and it was one Jazz knew. He found himself humming along, his thigh speakers throbbing gently, almost too soft to be heard.
The sudden, jarring discord came as a shock. He shuddered, a small cry of distress escaping him as the complex blend of sound collapsed into chaos. He wasn’t alone in his dismay.
“I’ll never get it!” Bluestreak’s vocalisor was staticky with frustration. Jazz didn’t have to see the youngling to know his expressive door-wings would be spread wide and his optics bright. “I’m never going to be any good at this.”
“Never say ‘never’.” Prowl’s voice was calm, amused, and Jazz heard the warm affection there. “You will be perfect. But perfection takes time, Bluestreak. Be patient with yourself.”
“Perfect?” Blue didn’t sound convinced. “I hope so, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be as good as you are, Prowl. I really just want to be good enough, you know, before we do this for Jazz. I want it to be just right for him, because he’d love this, and he really ought to hear it done right, and I really want to do it well for his sake.”
Jazz stifled his gasp before it could escape. He shook his helm, not sure whether he was more bemused or touched by the unexpected sentiment.
“I know.” Was that amusement in Prowl’s voice? “Although I suspect we have less time than you would prefer.”
There was a faint chiming noise. A mech had taken a careful step, his pede striking some form of crystal as he moved. Jazz drifted forward, intrigued by the echoes, searching for the entrance that would take him to the small chamber that must lie below.
Prowl vented, the sound a little deeper than Bluestreak’s systems. Jazz heard a rising hum, shaped as he listened into a deep and resonant chord, and wondered just what the Praxian was doing to produce it.
“Now,” Prowl said, voice patient, “let’s go through this once more.”
... go to part three
Author: zea_taylor
‘Verse: G1, sequel to ‘Fall’
Rating: T/PG-13
Characters: Jazz/Prowl, Bluestreak
Warnings: angst, fluff
Part One: Remembering Times Past
Part Two
Prompt: secrets
If anyone else were around, Jazz would never have allowed his pensive frown to show. Alone on the control deck, he scowled in earnest. His visor stayed locked to Teletraan-1’s readouts, but his attention was elsewhere. Watching on his internal screen, he bit back a groan as Prowl’s status signal switched from “on duty” to “available if required” and then straight onwards to “not available”. The first of those transitions was usual for his companion, if rather prompter than normal. The second was less so.
This was the sixth time in under an orn that Prowl had absented himself from the Ark immediately after his shift ended. Bluestreak didn’t maintain the same online status as the officer corps, but Jazz knew without checking that the youngling he’d helped raise would be gone too.
The slagging thing was that he had no idea where they were going.
Secrets bothered the Ops mech on principle. Too often, playing the spy game, you could be the best there was and it would be the one thing you hadn’t figured out that killed you. Jazz was the best. He intended to keep that title, not to become an object lesson to the mechs under his command.
There was more than that though. Secrets bothered him, but it was the fact that this was Prowl and Bluestreak - the two mechs he was closest to on this planet or any other - that was really upsetting. He and Prowl had shared their quarters, their berths and a deep mutual affection for vorns - at least half that time with a very young Bluestreak in their mutual care. It wasn’t like either Prowler or Blue to be secretive, or to exclude Jazz from any aspect of their lives. He wasn’t sure what was more hurtful - the fact that Prowl was keeping him in the cold, or that his partner of vorns’ standing didn’t even seem to have noticed Jazz’s sense of rejection.
Meeting his own visor, reflected in the monitors, Jazz grimaced. He was being selfish. Prowl was focused on Bluestreak, that was all. It felt churlish to resent that focus. The young mech had come back from his excursion upset enough that Jazz was worried too. Bumblebee didn’t seem to know why, and had just shrugged under Jazz’s careful inquisition, reluctant to tell tales on his friend. He’d said enough for Jazz to fill in some of the gaps but by no means all.
Bee’s description of the cold dark spaces beneath the Ark rang uncomfortable bells for Jazz too. He still woke from recharge with nightmares, his processor conjuring images of Prowl and Bluestreak falling into the depths of Cybertron. He knew that both mechs shared his disrupted recharge, even if the disturbed orns were far less frequent than they had been in times past. Small wonder that the expedition with Bee had reminded Bluestreak of the traumatised mechling he’d once been.
It still frustrated the saboteur that even if had a fair idea about what caused the upset, he had no idea what Prowl was doing about it.
“Jazz.”
Jazz startled upright in his seat, his visor polarising to conceal the reaction. Man, he really was bothered if Optimus Prime could sneak up on him. The big mech always did move quietly for his size, but to find him stepping out from behind a stalagmite was still a bit of a shock.
“I am glad to have caught you alone, Jazz. I rather wanted to talk to you.”
Jazz grinned, covering his surprise, and swung the monitor chair idly from side to side.
“I’m all yours, boss.” He waved a hand to take in Teletraan’s terminal and the large screen that dominated it. “Not like I can run away from you. Monitor duty.” He cycled his visor in an equivalent to the human wink, shaping his faceplates in an exaggeratedly mournful expression. “Someone’s got to do the dirty jobs.”
Prime’s optics brightened a little, amusement showing behind his blast mask. He looked from side to side, checking their surroundings. Automatically, Jazz did his own quick recce.
The Ark’s control deck was empty apart from the two of them. The crashed ship wasn’t the most comfortable of homes at the best of time, and the control deck wasn’t somewhere a mech wanted to linger. The Ark would never lift off from this world, or return them to their distant home. The organic dust and carbonate rock columns littering the command deck were a reminder of that sometimes-painful fact. Jazz didn’t blame the crew for spending more time in the Rec Room, or their quarters, or even out exploring the mysteries of their new world. Truthfully, he’d rather be doing the same himself.
That or tracking down a different kind of mystery.
He forced that line of thought to one side. Raising a brow ridge, he adjusted his visor with one servo, and turned an inquisitive expression on Optimus Prime.
“So, what’s up, boss?”
“I was wondering if Prowl has spoken to you about these frequent absences?”
So much for shaking off the thought. He kept his voice neutral, shrugging.
“The vorns we’ve spent trying to persuade the mech to take some real down-time, can’t really blame him for doing just that.”
The same chagrin Jazz felt showed in Prime’s optics.
“Prowl is, of course, free to spend his off-duty joors in any way he sees fit, but…”
“But…?”
“I must admit to a certain curiosity.”
Jazz hesitated, reluctant to make the same confession.
“I asked,” he admitted finally. “He said it’s a Praxian thing, Optimus.” He cycled his optics with exaggerated patience, trying to make light of the mystery. “Then changed the subject on me.”
The sudden upkick in his friend’s engine note spoke eloquently of Prime’s reaction to the comment. Praxus. Prowl and Bluestreak’s home city. The greatest failure in Autobot history. The city’s fall marked the moment that the uprising escalated, from a clash between well-defined factions, to a total war that would touch every spark on Cybertron.
Prowl had never made a big point of being Praxian, not since escaping the tragedy. He’d raised Bluestreak in what he could of their traditions, but Jazz had grieved with him at how little was left. Of course, it wasn’t as if any of the city-states had managed to save much of their ancient culture. Praxus had burned first, but it hadn’t been the only city to fall. Now their whole planet was gone, its war-ravaged surface lost to them entirely.
But … Praxus had died first, and that day would never stop haunting those who’d lived through it.
Prime vented a sigh. The big mech folded his arms across his chest-plate, his expression thoughtful.
“Nonetheless, Jazz, I know of at least three mechs who have attempted to follow Prowl or Bluestreak. All have failed.”
That, at least, got a smile out of the saboteur.
“Prowl ain’t big on hangers-on.”
“Prowl has been my lieutenant for vorns.” Prime hesitated. “This sudden secrecy is not like him. It… troubles me.”
There wasn’t much Jazz could say to that, short of echoing his Prime. Optimus seemed to be waiting for some kind of response, but Jazz had learned self-control over the vorns. He held his silence, forcing Prime to take this conversation wherever it was going without his help.
Prime’s hopeful expression faded, and Jazz would swear he saw embarrassment on his friend’s face.
“I was wondering if you might consider…?”
There was a long pause. Jazz knew the humour had drained from his faceplate, along with the relaxed mask he showed the world. His expression was utterly serious as he pushed out of the monitor chair and stood in front of his Prime.
“You’re asking me to check on them and report back?”
“Well…”
“Do you actually think Prowl and Bluestreak are doing anything against the rules? Anything wrong?”
“What? No!” Prime’s immediate, startled response earned him back a few points in Jazz’s book. It didn’t and couldn’t excuse the request.
Jazz held Prime’s optics for a long moment, his expression hard. He shook his helm with a firm, decisive motion.
“Then let’s get one thing slagging clear, Prime. I won’t spy on law-abiding Autobots - least of all Prowler and Blue - not for you, or anyone.”
If Optimus Prime was surprised by the rebuke, at least he had the grace to accept it. His engine grumbled uneasily, his servos spread in front of him, open in a show of acknowledgement and regret.
“I didn’t mean…”
Jazz snorted. “Yeah, you did.” He dropped back into his seat and sprawled casually across it, letting Optimus off the hook. The saboteur’s fingers drummed against Teletraan-1’s console, his expression still creased in a small frown. He pushed against the floor, his chair spinning through a full three-sixty, before glancing over his shoulder at his Prime. “Which isn’t to say I might not go take a look - just for my own peace of mind, you know? Prowl’s being pretty crafty though. He’s got us on swing shifts and by the time I’m free to go hunting, he and Blue are back.”
Optimus Prime’s optics brightened. His engine note was still a little coarser than usual, his processor stung by Jazz’s response. It calmed, a deliberately nonchalant expression crossing his faceplates.
“I have some paperwork to do this morning, Jazz,” he said in a voice so casual it screamed subterfuge. “I can do it here as well as anywhere else. I was wondering if you’d like me to take over the monitors a few hours early? To ‘kill two birds with one stone’ as our human companions say.”
Jazz cycled his optics, amused despite himself. There was more than one reason why Optimus had never trained for Special Ops.
Shaking his helm, in amusement rather than refusal, he stood. “You know what, Optimus, that sounds like a really neat idea. It’s all yours.”
The trail was almost three breems old.
Knowing Prowl as well as Jazz did, that meant a breem to leave his office, stop by their quarters and collect Bluestreak, and most of a second to ensure he weren’t followed before leaving the Ark. That left Jazz maybe ten minutes behind. Not a bad gap. He could work with it.
He moved through the Ark quickly but without letting his haste show. The smiles and greetings he exchanged with Hound and then with Sunny and Sides were brief, Jazz’s demeanour giving the impression that he was heading off to meet someone else without his ever having to commit to the lie.
It wasn’t until he hit the lower decks that he slipped properly into a Special Ops mind-set. He started to move cautiously, his senses alert for any hint of monitors or laser trip-wires. He wouldn’t put it past Prowl to set them. The tactician had been around Jazz long enough to pick up more than a few unconventional habits, and that was on top of his own Praxian enforcer training.
The bottom decks of the Ark were a mess. They’d borne the brunt of the ship’s impact so long before, and taken most of the strain as the ground heaved and shifted through four million years of volcanic activity. The result was a folded, corrugated maze. Some corridors were twisted like the walkways in a fairground crooked house. Others seemed perfectly normal until you realised that their ceiling and floor grew steadily closer, creating a false perspective you didn’t notice until your helm brushed the metal plates above.
It didn’t help that this part of the ship was well below ground level. Okay, it was still enclosed, for the most part, by the outer hull, but it still felt like the deep and empty places of Cybertron. No one ventured below the surface of their home planet by choice. Theirs was a world of towers, reaching for the perpetual darkness of the skies, and of aerial bridges flying high above a gnarled maze of abandoned structures. The depths were a place of nightmares, the denizen of desperate empties or the setting for cautionary tales for infants.
The Ark’s own depths were just a mirror of their homeworld’s. A few of the rooms down here were used for storage, but most were abandoned as uninhabitable. It must have been months since anyone came down here on a legitimate errand. The all-pervasive dust of their adoptive world lay thick on the floor, and rained down from ledges and doorframes if knocked… which made the trail of pede-scuffs and compacted dirt something of a dead giveaway.
Relatively few of the pede-marks were Praxian in form, and most of those probably came from Bluestreak. Jazz’s sharp visor identified and cross-matched signs of Bumblebee too, and of the Twins and even Tracks - the last three on fruitless attempts to follow their second in command.
Bumblebee had told him enough about his first trip for Jazz to be unsurprised when the dust-trail led through a rent in the hull and into the cave network that honeycombed Mount St Hillary’s volcanic flanks. He was equally unsurprised when it petered out a few yards later amidst hard natural floors and the scatter of rock shards that littered them.
Now the real work began. It was a while since Jazz had tracked a target in earnest. He dialled up his sensory network and muted his own vents, doing all he could to soak in information from his surroundings without adding to it.
His helm horns vibrated, picking up wisps of disturbed air and the faintest traces of heat. His audials picked out sound after sound - the breath of the living rock. He could hear the trickle of water, still percolating through the slopes after rainfall two weeks earlier. He felt the thumping movement of mechs in the Ark above and, deep below, the rumble of magma refilling the vast chamber at the volcano’s heart.
There was another whisper of sound in the caves too, echoing and distorted until impossible to decipher. Jazz followed it, blending it in his processor with the input from his other sensor systems.
Something had passed this way: something warm and alive, and large enough to disturb the air around it. The ghosts of fading echoes carried a familiar note.
For vorns, Prowl’s voice had been the first thing Jazz heard on waking from recharge. As often as not, Bluestreak’s was the second. Jazz’s sensitive audials would recognise those two voices against the thunder of battle or the howl of an acid storm. He followed them now, as best he could, tracing the faintest of reflected sound, doubling back when he needed to, keeping his sensors alert for the heat traces left where one mech or the other had brushed against a stalagmite or even against the low ceiling overhead.
He was perhaps half an hour out of the Ark when he paused, tilting his helm. His visor flared and then readjusted, a frown forming as he tried to interpret the new sensation. His horn helms were reacting to… something. There was a vibration in the air unlike any Jazz had ever felt. It rose and fell in pitch, the different notes blending and combining in a manner that could only be under intelligent direction. The sound was still quiet, but Jazz could feel it swelling, the individual notes becoming more distinct as he listened.
He rubbed his helm with one servo, trying to ease the pressure in the nearest sensory horn. It wasn’t that the sound was uncomfortable as such. Just so very, very different from anything he’d heard before.
It was light, ethereal, and somehow grounded at the same time. Jazz was following it now, rather than the faint traces he’d been tracking before. He felt drawn towards the source, and knew instinctively that he’d find what he was looking for there.
The vibrations rose through the floor of a large cavern. Jazz wandered through the space, between columns where stalagmite and stalactite had met and merged. In places, gaps and hollows in the rock formed natural dishes, amplifying the sound. In others, the vibrations were softer but clearer, each note ringing with precise clarity. He paused, his helm tilted to one side and the breath catching in his vents.
There was nothing random about this melody. The individual chimes followed a sequence, and it was one Jazz knew. He found himself humming along, his thigh speakers throbbing gently, almost too soft to be heard.
The sudden, jarring discord came as a shock. He shuddered, a small cry of distress escaping him as the complex blend of sound collapsed into chaos. He wasn’t alone in his dismay.
“I’ll never get it!” Bluestreak’s vocalisor was staticky with frustration. Jazz didn’t have to see the youngling to know his expressive door-wings would be spread wide and his optics bright. “I’m never going to be any good at this.”
“Never say ‘never’.” Prowl’s voice was calm, amused, and Jazz heard the warm affection there. “You will be perfect. But perfection takes time, Bluestreak. Be patient with yourself.”
“Perfect?” Blue didn’t sound convinced. “I hope so, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be as good as you are, Prowl. I really just want to be good enough, you know, before we do this for Jazz. I want it to be just right for him, because he’d love this, and he really ought to hear it done right, and I really want to do it well for his sake.”
Jazz stifled his gasp before it could escape. He shook his helm, not sure whether he was more bemused or touched by the unexpected sentiment.
“I know.” Was that amusement in Prowl’s voice? “Although I suspect we have less time than you would prefer.”
There was a faint chiming noise. A mech had taken a careful step, his pede striking some form of crystal as he moved. Jazz drifted forward, intrigued by the echoes, searching for the entrance that would take him to the small chamber that must lie below.
Prowl vented, the sound a little deeper than Bluestreak’s systems. Jazz heard a rising hum, shaped as he listened into a deep and resonant chord, and wondered just what the Praxian was doing to produce it.
“Now,” Prowl said, voice patient, “let’s go through this once more.”
... go to part three