Survival Statistic

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

PG-13
Bayverse, AU
Sledge, Barricade, Flatline
violence?
for tf_speedwriting  prompt "from hell" it's...kind of a loose interpretation of the prompt.  And it's set in my headcanon AU, where Barricade begins the war as a Combat Controller (see here: Control)

Sledge shifted in the shuttle, feeling the CC cable that snaked from the wall slap gently against his neck.  He hated CC.  Frag. Everyone hated CC. 

The voice was droning over internal audio chan, the first check, of course.  “My designation is Combat Control 26G643AB, personal designation Barricade, and I'll be your CC for the upcoming mayhem.”  The voice sounded bored, not tense, as though this were a walk through Iacon’s famous Latissium Park. Fraggin’ insult, it was, to hook up real warriors to some rear echelon controller.  And a droneling, no less, if what Sledge had heard was true.  Something with no real knowledge, just theory. 

And statistics.  Sledge muttered to drown out the statistics that CC rattled off. Garbage, anyway. False religion, putting your faith in the larger number. Making it out of battle alive shouldn’t be the goal anyway.  Accomplishing the mission objectives should be.  Everything else was…weakness.  Stuff dronelings and office mechs who fretted about numbers instead of victory.

“Three,” CC said to him. “Mission designation.”

Sledge said nothing.

“Confirm, Three.”

Nothing.

“Three. Confirm or abort mission.”

Sledge’s mouthplate curled. “Here,” he said, surly. “As you fraggin’ well know.” 

“Going to be one of those, are you, Three?” the voice muttered.

“Shove it, droneling.”

“Might want to be nice to the mech who’s got reason to keep you alive…or not.”

“Is that a threat?”

“Is it?” The CC’s voice was bland.  “If you fight my control, I won’t be able to guarantee your survival statistics.”

“Guarantee my own,” Sledge snarled.

The comm chan clicked off. Sledge hoped the slaggin’ droneling learned a little respect. Not your puppets.  Not just numbers.

[***]

CC droneling 26G643AB, personal designation Barricade, moved silkily in his harness.  The battlefield was spread out in front of him, thanks to his sat-veil, in four-dimensional hyperreality—data overlaid crisply onto other data, rectifying, sharpening, making each boundary measurable in time and space with the kind of precision he needed.

Well, not needed. He could work with less. He could work with nothing than the optical feed of his controlled mechs.  But this was…almost like music. Or what little he knew of music, playing the landscape like a melody, artillery from Fray’s CC team setting a stable bass line around which his own light-assault team wove a skirling tune.

The Autobots had never been able to build a stable defense against the strategy, against the exquisite synchronization of a CC’d unit. Not in the past, and definitely, Barricade thought, his small arms tapping at invisible code screens, not now. 

His team slid faultlessly through the defensive line, Barricade freezing one of them—Four—just as the Autobot patrol swept by.  Four had protested—he’d had the sense, at least, to use internal comm, but once he’d seen the heavy ground team the Autobots had sent, he’d subsided in his protests, meekly waiting for Barricade’s okay to move forward again.

Three had been…a problem.  But Barricade was used to that sort by now.  He’d kept his forced hack code ready, just in case.  More than once he’d saved the obnoxious ones against their will.  Not because he cared, not even to gloat.  But because it boosted his stats.  He would not let their resistance mar his stats. 

“Data,” he said, over mission commnet. He’d checked his chrono. It was time. “There’s a secure-room in the HQ there.  They just set it up so, thought is,” he used that hedge—not his thought, someone else’s, “they might not have put their security/decrypt protocols in place just yet.”   Rules forbade full mission briefs on CC prior to the mission. Why brief when someone could back out, abort?

Curt acknowledgements across the line. Even Three.  They headed toward the building, moving with trained stealth. Barricade eased off his control a bit, just dropping back to first firewalls, monitoring them from his satveil. All well. 

They breached the building’s defenses without his help, dodging the perimeter defenses before they could fully activate.  They knew the warmup time for Autobot passive defenses as well as he did.  A good team, he thought, pleased.  Four of the team laid a semicircle of covering fire while the demo mech, Two, placed his charges to blow the door.  Barricade had to swipe a few shots, altering aim, jerking an arm or a trigger to fire above their usual firing line.  One problem with grounders, he’d learned—they only looked for optic-level threats. Anything above or below…didn’t register.

Which is why they needed him, he thought, as he diverted and boosted one of One’s shots to blow an inbound grenade in midair. 

They spun down, choreographed, at a signal from Two, kliks before the force of the door breach’s explosion burst outward.  The door itself crumpled, tearing out of its track.

“In,” he heard one yell, and they filed in. He switched one set of his optics to exterior monitoring, the other flipping to interior, mapping the floorplan, measuring heat anomalies.  He pinged them all with the location of the S-1 shop.  Intel. 

Two of the team dropped back, flanking the door, optics alert for threats, audio tuned, tilting toward the ceiling. “Plascrete underneath,” Barricade supplied. “So no one’ll come through the floor without you knowing first.”  Which was why the Autobots put their intelligence office on top of it.  The two mechs gave silent acknowledgements.

The other three headed in, Three heading for the secure-safe.  Barriade reached for him. “Probing defenses,” he said.

The secondary firewalls slammed down before he could reach them. “Got it,” Three huffed. “Cracked a safe before.”

Yeah, Barricade thought, how long ago? You read up on the latest traps they put on those things? ‘Cause I have.

He hovered over the ‘jack code. No. Not yet. But he had the dread feeling he was going to have to, and it wouldn’t be pretty.

Three squatted down, tugging a hack tool from his storage.  The others watched, warily, one moving to the window. “Got our defensive?” Four asked.

“External and internal,” Barricade replied.  “Let you know if anything’s coming.”  Four was the kind of mech he liked.  Didn’t fight it now, beginning, in fact, to rely, to trust Barricade.  Barricade didn’t do this to be liked—he had no choice, it was what he was made to do—but when they didn’t fight him it made things…so much easier.

“Been, uh, been doing this a long time?” Four asked. 

“All my life,” Barricade said, coolly. “Droneling.”

“Oh. I-I didn’t mean…,” Four faltered.

“Never mind,” Barricade said, amused.  He switched back to Three. 

Three felt the channel click on. “I’ve got it,” he said, irked.  The hack tool was wheeling through encryption numbers, trying to break the first level of security.

“Didn’t say anything. Just be careful.”

“Shove it, CC.”

“Consider it shoved.”  Seriously. Ridiculous.  They had an enemy. Barricade liked to call them ‘Autobots’.  But Three? His biggest enemy was his own stupid self.

With a triumphant click, the hack tool cracked the first encryption.  “Ha!” Three crowed, looking at the readout. “Only one level. Stupid rear-ech-mechs and your stupid precautions.” He boldly reached for the handle.

One of Barricade’s five vid feeds went white, then black, then dead.  Through the others he heard echoes of the explosion, light blasts from two of them.  Vid down, he still had a link to Three.  Right. No time like the present, he thought, and hit the hack code. 

All of Three’s firewalls fell in front of him. He rushed in, his shells popping open around him, blocking pain, blocking external awareness, diverting all power to locomotion.  The hands grabbed at the safe, the ungovernored strength denting the metal, tearing at the blast-weakened hatch.

“Got it!”  Four cried out, stooping to shove handfuls of data tracks into his storage. 

“Four,” Barricade announced on commnet, “gets full priority. He gets out.”  He was the one with value, with data.  Barricade was not in the least upset that he had become the number one priority.

Meanwhile, though, he wasn’t going to let Three ruin his stats.  He shoved into motor control, deeper, twisting the mech, grabbing for a weapon.  Without video, Barricade could only aim by echolocation, but it would be enough.  “Let’s go,” he said, his voice over commnet and rasping through the damaged, shorting vocalizer. Three's face was ruined, dripping, slagging down onto his chassis.  Barricade could sense the horror rising in the sensors of the rest of the team as Three kicked out the door.  He pushed Three to point, letting him take lead, a shambling wreck from the worst depths of hell the vanguard of their escape.

[***]

Sledge awoke…in hell. Not just in pain, not just from a nightmare of bomb bursts—explosive sound buzzing out his audio, his face melting into slag at the phosphorous contact. He rolled to one side, optics onlining slowly.  He still, he thought, with a sense of dark relief, could see. He thought for a time that he couldn’t. Thought he had finally run into something bigger and more brutal than he was.

Instead, he was in repair bay, repairbots clicking and squeaking over him.  And in a shadow space beyond that, that his feeble optics could not yet penetrate…Flatline. 

“You,” he croaked.  His hands clutched at the cradle’s mesh. 

“I needed you online for this,” Flatline said, turning from the monitor, and Sledge realized, awfully, numbly, that even his waking up had been controlled by someone else. Like waking into CC. 

“For what?”

Flatline grinned. “You suffered extensive cortical trauma.  We cannot, yet, repair it all.” 

“Cortical…what areas?”

“Most of them. Visual cortex, destroyed. Auditory, barely functional, the circuits to look up and syntactic functions below normal parameters.”

“Frag you,” Sledge said. “Talking, ain’t I?”

Flatline tilted his head. “You are.  But with…help.” The medic’s smaller set of hands made a gesture to one side. Sledge rolled his head, his neck servos protesting. How long had he been out? 

Oh. Frag.  Beside him, attached by a network of cables, a droneling. “This,” Flatline said. “Is Throttler. He’ll control your combat functions, and serve as your visual and auditory supplement.” 

“For how long?”

Flatline gave a wry shrug. “Until one of you dies? However that…combat thing works,” he said, waggling his fingers in distaste. 

Sledge sank back against the mesh. To be saddled, forever, with a droneling. Dependent on it, needing it.  “Should have let me die,” he murmured. 

“Well,” Flatline said, grinning.  “Barricade takes his survival statistics very, very seriously.”

 

Comments

[oni-gil.livejournal.com]

HHHHNNNNK YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW EXCITED I AM TO SEE THIS~

I think that somewhere along the line I may have left a spazzing review on "Control" about how TOTALLY AWESOME I find this concept? So I had a minor flail and decided this was much more interesting than my psych homework. MMMNNNF.

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

Geep! Go do your homework! :D

I'm glad you liked it--it's one of the sort of AU ideas that just pokes at me every now and again. There are definitely more stories to tell there, I'm sure!