Chapter Text
The cockpit displays of Tenorok's shuttle resembled a dying firework. Sparks flew from the shattered consoles, while the warning lights blared rhythmically against his lenses in a mocking, garish red. A deep, ominous rumble shook the metal chassis—the engines coughed black smoke into the atmosphere. Tenorok gripped the control unit with his metallic fingers, but the resistance was futile; the hydraulics had long since failed.
Amidst this chaos, his onboard computer desperately searched for a lifeline. The sensors picked up a signal: Diego Garcia. A strategic base, occupied by organic units and, more importantly, by familiar signatures. Autobots.
Suddenly , an old stream of data flickered across the damaged screen. A message, months old, carried by a voice that sounded like grinding stone and profound wisdom.
“ I am Optimus Prime, and I send this message to all surviving Autobots seeking refuge among the stars. We are here. We are waiting.”
A brief pause rippled through Tenorok's circuitry. Hope was a dangerous commodity for a bot whose friends had been taken offline before his very eyes. He didn't know how they would react to a stranger like him—distrust was the only currency that still mattered in this war. But the universe made the decision for him. With a screeching tear, the left stabilizer snapped.
" Slag!" he cursed, as he forced the ship into a steep descent. He was looking for an opening, a remote area, so as not to take any innocent people with him to their deaths. A dark coastline was visible on the horizon. The shuttle glowed orange as it entered the lower atmosphere, flames licking greedily at its stern. Then came the impact.
A tremendous jolt ripped Tenorok from his seat. Metal bent like paper, glass shattered into a billion fragments, and he was hurled against the forward bulkhead like a lifeless rag doll. Then silence swallowed the roar.
The loneliness of the ruins
It took cycles for his processors to boot up again. As Tenorok crawled from the smoldering wreckage of the shuttle, every millimeter of his frame felt as if he had been run over by a Devastator. His joints creaked, and critical power warnings flickered in his field of vision.
“ Just a little further…”, he gasped, as he dragged himself through the swirling sand and debris.
Around him was nothing but desolation. Rocks, hills, and sparse vegetation. He activated his large tablet with trembling fingers. The scan confirmed his fears: the technology of this world was primitive. Carbon-based, weak. Without high-energy fuel, he was stranded here. A technological genius in a world of stone and wood.
His gaze fell upon the two improvised poles on his back—rough welds marking the spot where the Decepticons had once torn his wings. A phantom pain shot through his spine. He remembered the laughter of his tormentors, the chill of their betrayal. No one had been there to ease the pain. And now here he stood, a green behemoth adorned with yellow star symbols, laden with tools and chambers, but without a single spark of hope in his tank.
“ Ten signatures…” he murmured. The sensors detected the Autobots in close proximity. His uncertainty gnawed at his courage. Would they welcome him as a brother or identify him as a threat?
The shadow at the hangar
Dusk settled like a protective cloak over Diego Garcia as Tenorok approached the base. He wasn't a frontline fighter; his strength lay in building and repairing machines. But his massive stature made him an easy target.
He activated his cloaking device. His dark green armor began to shimmer, taking on the texture of the sandy soil and the pale rocks. Every movement had to be slow, deliberate, almost meditative, so that the optical illusion wouldn't be broken.
The massive hangars loomed before him. People swarmed like ants around helicopters and fighter jets. Tenorok pressed his back against the cool concrete wall of a building. He felt the nanomachines in his shell mimic the gray texture of the concrete. His spark hammered against his chest plate.
Step by step, he crept forward, his sensors trained on the Autobot signatures. He was a ghost in the machine, a lost son searching for an anchor. In the distance, he heard the heavy thumping of metal on asphalt. Someone was approaching. A large shadow fell across the ground before him—a presence so powerful it seemed to vibrate the air around it.
Tenorok held his breath. He was no longer alone.
The hall resembled a cathedral of cold steel and ancient knowledge, a place where human technology met the ancient architecture of Cybertron. Tenorok crept along the periphery, his spark tapping restlessly against his chestplate—a metallic echo that seemed far too loud in the hangar's silence. The air was heavy with the smell of lubricating oil, kerosene, and hot asphalt, but above it all, to his sensors, hovered the sweet, almost intoxicating scent of pure Energon. Only five hundred meters to go. A stone's throw for a bot of his size, but under the watchful eyes of the NEST units, every meter felt like a march through enemy territory.
Suddenly , the ground vibrated with the rhythm of human footsteps. Tenorok froze instantly, pressing his massive body so close to the wall that the metal creaked softly under his weight. He cranked the cloaking device up to its maximum setting, but felt the damaged relays behind him grow dangerously hot under the strain of the power feed. A sharp pain shot through his damaged wing bases as the electronics there sparked.
“ I received a signal and heard an impact, or maybe it was nothing,” echoed a soldier’s voice through the hall, amplified by the building’s natural reverberation.
Tenorok instantly activated his internal shield, an additional barrier to suppress any thermal signature. The electromagnetic signature flattened, becoming almost indistinguishable from the background hum of the base generators. He stopped breathing as the two humans passed within a few meters of him. If either of them had so much as turned their head or held their flashlight a degree further to the left, the masquerade would have been blown out in an instant. He watched the light sweep across his camouflaged armor like water over a stone.
“ I don’t see anything at all, maybe a malfunction,” replied the other man, adjusting his helmet. “It’s suddenly gone, as if it had never been there. We’d better not say anything more, otherwise Lennox will send us back for a dressing-down or we’ll have to work overtime with the mechanics.”
“ But maybe something else. Since we started working with the Transformers, anything is possible here. The sensors constantly go haywire when the big players calibrate their systems.”
“ Yes, but if there had been anything, Lennox would have let us know – or Optimus himself. It was coming from back here, but there’s only dead air here.”
Tenorok pressed himself even harder against the cold concrete, until his frame almost merged with the wall.
Optimus Prime. The name alone triggered a resonance in his systems, a deep hum ingrained in his programming. He was here. Very close. When the soldiers finally withdrew and the heavy gate slammed shut behind them, a hissing burst of hot air escaped from Tenorok's cooling systems. He was safe—for now.
Inside the Beast
The hangar stretched out before him, an abyss of shadows and mechanical giants. In the relative stillness of twilight, the scene seemed almost peaceful, almost like the old days before the great war. Few people were still up, and the fleet of vehicles stood in neat rows, as if asleep. But to Tenorok, these were not mere machines. He recognized the pulsating power slumbering beneath their hoods, the quiet hum of the sparks vibrating at idle.
His gaze fell first on the massive semi-trailer truck. The red and blue gleamed majestically even in the pale light of the emergency lighting. The chrome-plated chimneys rose like silver horns, ready to pierce the sky. This was no ordinary truck; this was Prime, the legend the newsreels spoke of in the stars.
Next to it stood a black GMC Topkick pickup, bulky, angular, a walking fortress made of matte black armored steel and concealed heavy weapons.
And finally, the emergency vehicle – a yellow-green Hummer H2, whose paintwork looked almost neon yellow in the shade.
Tenorok couldn't resist. His identity as an engineer, his insatiable thirst for knowledge, overcame his last vestige of caution. He sent out a weak, high-frequency scan pulse, a fine blade of data to capture the bots' specifications. He wanted to understand the alloys, the energy circuits, how they had survived the battle.
Everything remained quiet with the truck and the black pickup. They were in standby mode, their systems deep in sleep mode. But when its scan touched the hull of the yellow emergency vehicle, it happened.
A sharp, metallic clack cut through the silence, followed by the unmistakable sound of interlocking gears, hydraulic hissing, and rotating joints. Within fractions of a second, the Hummer unfolded. Tires became joints, the body a solid breastplate.
“ Ratchet, what’s going on?” Ironhide’s deep, gruff voice growled. The black pickup truck transformed almost simultaneously, a perfectly rehearsed wartime maneuver. Its massive cannons on the forearms were already rotating, charging with a menacing hum, and aimed at the dark corners of the hall. “You jumped up so alarmed, like a damn Decepticon ambush was about to attack us right in the living room!”
Ratchet , the paramedic, paused, his bluish optics feverishly scanning the room, the medical scanners on his arm rotating nervously. “I sensed the precision of another bot, Ironhide. No scatter signal, no human echo. A focused, technical scan. There’s someone here, right under our noses, but my optics are only picking up empty space.”
Tenorok froze mid-stride, one foot still slightly off the ground. He cursed his own arrogance. He'd forgotten that a medic didn't just see with their eyes. Ratchet's sensors were designed to hear the faintest whisper of a dying spark, to isolate the subtlest frequency of a distress signal. He was as conspicuous to Ratchet as a burning torch in a dark cave.
“ A Cybertronic signal,” Ratchet continued, recalibrating his internal filters at a speed that Tenorok admired. “Slightly deformed by a cloaking device. A very good... military standard, but it’s unstable. It’s flickering. Probably damaged by a hard impact.”
“ Then we’d better find whoever it is before I use my cannons as a greeting,” Ironhide growled, stepping forward with a heavy stride that shook the concrete. He swung his weapons in a wide arc. “We don’t want some Decepticon spy hiding in here, making our lives difficult. I don’t like ghosts in my hangar.”
“ No, not a Decepticon,” Ratchet stated firmly, analyzing the data streams on his forearm display. “The signature is linked to an old Autobot encryption channel. A survivor. Someone doesn’t want us to find him. But I’ll have him isolated as soon as I adjust the frequency shift of my sensors.”
Tenorok felt Ratchet's scanners literally shudder at his camouflage, like invisible fingers tugging at a curtain. The medic sent a counter-pulse that caused Tenorok's systems to overheat.
“ Does that mean we have a bot on our side here?” Ironhide asked, his voice now slightly less aggressive, but still skeptical. “Then why the hell is it hiding like a thief in the night? If it’s a friend, it has no reason to play hide-and-seek. We don’t bite—most of the time.”
Ratchet slowly shook his head, his sensors now pinpointing almost exactly where Tenorok stood. "There were those, Ironhide. The Neutrals. The researchers and engineers who refused to side, seeing war as the death of reason. They were hunted by Megatron and often overlooked by us. That could fit him. He's not afraid of us—he's afraid of what we represent." He paused briefly and activated the long-range radio. "Better tell Optimus. We have a guest who's too afraid to knock."
Ironhide placed two metallic fingers on the side of his helmet. His voice was now deep and serious, filled with the authority of a weapons master: "Optimus, we have a situation in Sector 4. It seems we've received an unexpected visitor. An alien bot is roaming our base, cloaked and cautious. Ratchet has it in his sights, but our guest is still playing the Phantom of the Opera."
In the distance, at the end of the long corridor, the massive armored doors of headquarters opened with a thunderous roar. A heavy, rhythmic thumping announced the leader's arrival. Each footstep made the dust on the floor dance. Tenorok knew he could no longer run. The light of truth would soon dispel his shadows.
What would Optimus Prime see in a bot that had had its wings torn off?