Uluru – At the foot of Ayers Rock, whilst avoiding the feet of Devastator.The instructions were coming in thick and fast. The bossbot clearly had an idea of what was going on, and
Mal Practice had learned decades ago that when that cassette had a plan, it was best to just trust him and shut up. Landgrab had clearly worked this out as well, and Mal was confident that the combination of his skill and Landgrab’s facilities would put them at the forefront of any medical unit on the field, especially now they were both working together.
Landgrab wrote:"Mission accomplished, I thinks!" ... "Jump on. You can tell me the best place to set up shop."
The vital scans of Devastator collected, Mal filed them away safely for later analysis, but right now he had a job to do, and that was to prove how good he was... and maybe even fix a few ‘cons that the team needed to owe them favours, and there was a trio of garishly-coloured almost perfect examples laying a mere hundred yards away from them.
“Who in the pit decided yellow and bright red were good colours for a team of
hunters?” Mal joked to
Langrab. “Seriously, these three were just asking to get shot!” He prodded the still forms of
Headstrong,
Rampage and
Tantrum. None of them were moving, but Tantrum at least showed signs that he was still functioning, even if not conscious.
Mal jumped off Landgrab and quickly but clumsily hefted Headstrong onto the surgical platform whilst he was still moving.
Devastator had
finally begun to attack the forcefield, and he did not want them to be under that thing if it went up. Or down for that matter. Not caring if the cataleptic rhino was comfortable or not, he evaluated the Predacons wounds and quickly moved across to its unconscious animalistic comrade Rampage.
Same injuries he thought.
Functioning but very definitely offline. Rampage took up the last of the available space on Landgrabs surgical dock in transport mode so Mal quickly tied a cable between Tantum’s leg and Landgrab’s tailpipe and elected to drag him behind whilst he guided the large repair station to a safe enclosure, far enough away from the Autobot’s shuttle that they wouldn’t be disturbed by anything believing in nonsense such as ‘ethics’ or ‘patient comfort’, but close enough to the command bunker that they could all see who was making the difference here.
Allowing Landgrab to slowly move into their new position, Mal performed an initial triage on his patients and began work immediately on Rampage, who was by far the worst damaged of the three. He hastily plugged him into Landgrab’s sensor array and began to interpret the readings. The tiger Predacon had sustained considerable trauma to the upper right shoulder and chest cavity from the weapon
The Fallen was using, and it was obvious that much of the circuitry in that region had been extensively damaged but, bizarrely, the outer casing was almost completely intact. Barring a few scuffmarks and a ton of denting from his 2000-foot plunge off of Ayers rock, there was almost no exterior signs of damage, meaning that whatever the Fallen was using to attack these beast-brained idiots was tech he had never seen before.
“Aha! A medical mystery, my favourite!!”
His patient already unconscious, he demonstrated why the word ‘Mal’ has been added to his name since his faction change and, not stopping to worry about minor things such ‘pain relief’ or ‘consent’ he primed his laser scalpel array and grinned evilly. Even when moving his surgical accuracy was still near flawless, and he began to expertly slice away at Rampages hyperdermal armour and into the complex hydraulics, muscular structure, and arterial lines and linkages required by a lithe hunter-class mech such as Rampage. Like an artisan sculptor, ‘Practice trimmed away at the lifeless metal fragments with precision and flair, burrowing down past its metallic skeletal framework, past the shoulder linkages and stopped suddenly - inhaling sharply.
Whatever weapon had struck Rampage, it had damaged him on a subdermal level, ignoring the outer-laying automated systems, and targeting his active core circuitry, essentially disrupting his primary functions.
No wonder he dropped like a dumb-coloured rock, he's been switched off! This weapon of the Fallen targets live
circuitry. How is that possible? his first instinct was to assume that this was an EMP attack, but he had seen thousands of them in his career and those
never left scarring of this magnitude. This weapon had just 'infected' its way in through anything not consciously controlled, then played havoc with this kitties core components like ball bearings in a blender.
He threaded a few strands of micron-thin bonding wire and bridged Rampage’s cardio-relay to ensure that he could bypass any catastrophically damaged systems as he continued to carve away at the necrotic and decaying metals that peppered the extensive trauma zone to access the patients central processor and nerve-relay circuitry. He stopped for a second to admire this weapons work, these wounds were
amazing. He’d never seen a anything so flawlessly destructive before, it was almost as if... nah, that can’t be right... paradox-transference inertia prevented this degree of dimensional-energon conversion and besides,
true dark matter was a still only a hypothetical construct... but this was, after all, the work of the ‘Fallen’.
The realisation hit him like a falling stupid-coloured rhino. “Thats it!!” He cried, and banged loudly on Landrab’s plating to stop him on the spot. “Necrotic enervation in a sub-dermal particle disruption scope! It targets the ‘living’ circuitry within a Cybertronian’s physiology, stripping it of its access to energon, thus – literally – starving the life out of anything it hits whilst ignoring the automated systems not controlled by the central nerve-routines! Rampage here, poor little moggy that he is, has been hit with a classic ‘Death Ray’. If we hadn't got to him he would evetually have been less use to us than that stupid throne Thunderwing has parked his aft on up on the Thanantos!”
He gave up trying to hide his excitement, and transmitted his immediate findings to Psychout whilst enthusiastically calling to his newest colleague.
“Woo!
Landgrab, isn't this awesome? Transmit these findings to Commander
Shockwave; Anyone hit by this ‘Dark Matter’ weapon of the Fallen’s should be treated as an urgent priority, as it is
highly necrotic. Tell the surgeons that the patient will require a full sub-thoraxic bonding web exclusion procedure, followed by removal of
all infected fibrous alloy tissue to prevent further spreading. Once the metallo-degeneration has been arrested, the surgeon must administer 5.45 millijoules of an epsilon-grade Energon substitute - give or take a 3.4% variance in purity per generational cycle - injected directly into the neural-microcardial array which will trigger a reboot of the self repair routines. You got that? Good.
“Oh, and also tell him I’ll have the Predacons back into their standard self-repair routines in an hour or two, or for an extra three thousand I can fix them here and now...”
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