Addicted! - Chapter 8A massive rumbling, rending roar shook the walls of the Guaifenesis centre then left them in abyssal silence.
Hot Shot stood ready. He grit his teeth and waited.
The silence was soon smashed again; “I’M COMING FOR YOU!”
The cry rang around each metallic surface, echoing off every corner and reverberating along each corridor until it met Hot Shot’s ears.
This was it. A reunion with a friend long dead, now an enemy very much alive. Hot Shot didn’t think he could grit his teeth much harder. He thought he was ready for whatever might happen next, whatever rage or violence he’d be met with wouldn’t be any different to any of the other fights he’d been in over the millennia of war; except this fight would be with a friend… Could Hot Shot do what needed to be done? It felt like a small age of emptiness, waiting there in the corridor for something, anything to happen,but what Hot Shot was met with was nothing.
And then another thundering cacophony. What was holding Wheeljack up?
***
Blades and Rampart came hurtling into the Guaifenesis atmosphere in a tiny shuttlecraft. It wouldn’t have been so cramped if they hadn’t brought so many guns with them. Rocket launchers, photon rifles, a few good old fashioned miniguns and the rest clogged up almost all of the space that wasn’t taken up by Rampart’s hulking frame hunched in the pilot’s seat and Blades clanking around amongst the weapons behind him.
“Can’t this thing go any faster?” Blades asked irritably from under a tangle of firearms.
“We’ve just hit terminal velocity! You’re a helicopter for Primus’ sake, you know how flying works!” came the reply from over Rampart’s shoulder.
“How far are we from landfall then?” asked Blades, checking the scope on a smart rocket launcher.
“About 10,000 feet I guess.” said Rampart noncommittally.
“That’s enough.” said Blades more to himself than anyone else.
“What?! I can’t hear you over the sound of the… Engines? Wind? What is that?”
Blades knew just what it was, “That’s my battlecry.”
A light whoosh, then a larger roar filled the cabin as Blades opened the door and jumped out. The sensation of falling, the air over his vents; that was what it was all about. He could of course transform and fly most of the way down, but where was the fun in that? If anyone could have heard it, they’d have known Blades was laughing all the way down.
Rampart looked out of the shuttle viewport in astonishment, “YOU DAMN FOOL, ALL THE GUNS ARE FALLING OUT!” he bellowed in rage.
Blades had forgotten to close the door on his way out. But all this gung-ho jumping out of falling spacecraft got Rampart’s mind going. He hadn’t had a real idea in centuries.
“Heh, I think he might be onto something there…” Rampart introspected as he gathered up some firearms and moved for the howling void of the open door himself. Lacking the level of sheer bravado Blades possessed however, he paused by the port as it screamed at him.
“I don’t remember ever jumping out of anything before…” he thought as he put his hand to his chin and summoned his courage, which out of 10 would have been about a 6.
“Whatever… LET’S HAVE IT!” he thundered as he fell out of the doorway into view of the quickly encroaching ground.
Meanwhile, Blades was still enjoying his vertical joyride and had spotted the smoking crater left in the roof of the facility below. That would be his way in, after all this bot he was after was pretty good at making entrances. Why waste such an opportunity? He let himself fall for a few more hundred feet then shifted his cog into gear and set his rotors spinning. Rampart wouldn’t be far behind and maybe it would help to have a slightly more subtle entrance than one he might have offered.
Coming into land Blades stretched his legs and drew a couple of swords. Stabby and Swooshy would be good for this situation. Warily scanning his optics over the immediate vicinity, he could tell the bot he was after was already gone. A droning whistle then greeted his audio receptors as he looked up to see something about to fall on him. It wasn’t the shuttle so…
“Ah.” Mused Blades as he kicked in as much power to his leg servos as possible to lunge away from the spot where he stood.
A large tracked plough was falling from the sky and wasted no time in embedding its tip in the floor where Blades had stood, and then the next four floors beneath. After floor number two, Rampart shifted back to robot mode and made the least graceful landing ever to occur in the history of the surrounding solar system. He looked up, half dazed and regarded the startled form of the bot before him with rightful suspicion.
While Rampart’s landing was the singular most destructive event ever to happen to the facility, it was also the most pinpoint accurate. Lying on his front, he extended a hand to the bot he’d very nearly landed on instead of next to and almost managed to exclaim “You’re under arrest.”
Except to Wheeljack it sounded a lot more like “Yerrfunndah hurresss.”